Just as I was getting over my last lingering cold, I’ve come down with another one. Which reminds me of one of the first rules of country living: don’t load yourself down with chores. Stuff happens, and the more unavoidable, non-deferrable chores you’ve loaded yourself down with, the less time is left over for emergencies,projects, or recovering from a cold.
In a regular job, you can take a sick day, but you can’t tell that to the chickens. And, anyway, no one moves to the country just to trade the rat race for a chore treadmill. (Actually, some people do, but you don’t want to be like them.) Keep your burden light, and you’ll have time live your life, or at least take a nap.
Back before people had nutritional science figured out, the key to success was to let livestock (and people) pick and choose from a wide variety of foodstuffs. Confined animals (and people) fared poorly. Sailors suffered from scurvy at sea, and people in institutions suffered from pellagra, but the same people never had these problems when given a little freedom, even though they knew nothing about nutrition. They just listened to their cravings.
Nutritional science means that you can get away with giving livestock (and people) a balanced diet without any food choices, but that doesn’t mean it’s always the right thing to do.
The most time-honored method of feeding chickens a balanced diet is cafeteria-style feeding. The original method included “chicken mash” (a mix of grains, steamed beef scrap, and other ingredients) in one trough, grain in another trough, oyster shell in a third, and pasture or hand-fed green feed on the side. The chickens were left to figure out how much of each ingredient to eat. This works quite well.
You can take advantage of the fact that the chickens won’t starve in the midst of plenty in the following way: always provide a feeder full of a quality, balanced chicken feed, and offer anything else you’ve got on the side. If the chickens like the side offering, great. If they don’t, they’ll just ignore it and eat the balanced ration. This method leverages the fact that the chickens are better judges of chicken feed than we are. Practically the only way to poison or starve your chickens is to force them to eat an inappropriate feed by offering them nothing else. If you give them at least one decent alternative, they’ll be okay.
I feed a high-protein layer ration in one feeder and whatever grain is cheapest in another. I feed a second grain as scratch feed, scattering it in the grass. Hand-feeding keeps the hens friendly. Oyster shell goes into yet another feeder. Grain is usually cheaper than a balanced ration, so you can save a little money by feeding it on the side.
For some reason, lots of people don’t like the idea of separate feeders, and want to mix everything up. Don’t do that. It wastes your time and annoys the chickens. Other people prefer superstition to science, and go out of their way to find a hippie-dippy feed formula, or feed nothing but grain. Don’t do that, either. When humans adopt ludicrous diets, they minimize the damage they do to themselves through the miracle of cheating. Your livestock have no such option, so their diets need to live up to a higher standard than ours.
So now you know the secret: a feeder full of high-quality chicken feed gives you the freedom to try anything else on the side and see what happens.
What is it about March and mud, anyway? It rains all winter long and there’s no problem, then March comes along and the ground turns to soppy, soupy mud wherever the turf isn’t super-thick. Why is that? I’m mystified.
It’s so bad this year that some of the hens actually have dirty feathers. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this before. Normally they look sharp in all weather.
This, too, shall pass, as the weather warms up, the rain slackens, and the grass suddenly leaps into insane rates of growth. In a month I’ll probably be complaining that I can’t keep up with the mowing, even though I use a tractor.
Helpful hint: Wear an old pair of overalls over your other clothes when it’s muddy, even if your other clothes are another pair of overalls. That mud gets everywhere!
We discovered years ago that our best chance of keeping our record-keeping and advance orders straight was to have a laptop with us at the farmer’s market. But most laptops can’t be used in bright daylight, let lone rain. What to do?
One solution we hit upon was to take the record-keeping PC with us to the market. For this, we turned to the Panasonic ToughBook. These are ruggedized PCs that can be tossed around, rained on, and generally treated like farm equipment. Spill-resistant, dust-proof, with shock-mounted disk drives and daylight-readable screens, they’re the bee’s knees for outdoor use.
We’ve been using a ToughBook CF-27 for years, but are upgrading to a faster and more modern (but used) ToughBook 29. Used ToughBooks are plentiful, since just about every cop car in the country has one, and the military uses tons of them, too.
Our CF-27 was slow but not too bad with QuickBooks 2005, and can run Web browsers and Microsoft Word and so on adequately. It only has an 800×600 screen, which is a nuisance, but livable. I forget what I paid for the CF-27, but they’re practically giving them away on eBay — most going for less than $100.
Putting Microsoft Live Mesh on the CF-27 (in a possibly-vain attempt to make all our computers sync their data effortlessly) was the final straw. It’s now so slow that we avoid using it, which is bad. Hence the ToughBook 29. These are going for $600 or so. (New ToughBooks cost a couple of grand, which is not something I can afford to bankroll out of farmer’s market sales.)
If you want to play around with the concept, you might consider blowing $100 on a nice CF-27 and seeing if it’s perfect except for being slow and having a low-resolution screen. You might discover that you never use it, or that its seven-pound weight is a turn-off, or that ruggedized PCs just aren’t your cup of tea, at which point you’ll be glad you didn’t spend more money. When you don’t need the CF-27 anymore, sell it on eBay, which will cut your total cost of ownership to almost nothing.
You have to be careful when selecting a model, because Panasonic has allowed their product line to become bloated, with many semi-rugged models that aren’t outdoor-rated. You want a model that says it has a daylight-readable screen and is moisture-resistant.
If you buy a used ToughBook, get one that has all its part, port covers, etc. Lots of these units have various pieces missing, including both the hard drive and the shock-mounted hard-drive carrier. Get one with the correct operating system already installed (almost always Windows XP Professional). You can ignore this advice if you want — parts and driver disks and such are readily available on eBay — but you’ll be happier if this doesn’t balloon into a big project.
[Update, 3/22/2009: My CF-29 has arrived, and it’s even nicer than I expected in every way — screen brightness and clarity, speed,weather-tightness, and overall condition. Though its 1.2 GHz processor isn’t up to modern standards, I maxed it out on memory (1.5 GB), and it seems very snappy. Highly recommended]
The aftermath of my cold has slowed me down, but I’ve made my final pass through my science fiction novel, One Survivor. Karen will go over it one more time, and then I can upload it to Lightning Source. It should be available in a week or so.
And it’s about time, too, considering I started this project in 1987!
After that, we’ll finish up the third book in the Tom Slade series. And there are plenty more books where these came from — chicken books, farm books, novels, you name it — all stacked up waiting for us to find some time.
