Including Practical Poultry Tips
My July Newsletter has just been emailed. If you’re not a subscriber, you might consider joining (near the top right corner of the page here). Topics include quality in produce and pastured pigs.
It’s raining here today — unusual in an Oregon summer. But the chickens don’t mind very much. It’ll help keep the grass green, which is good, because the chickens won’t eat it once it starts to brown off.
It’s tempting to fill your day with farm chores, but the fact is that farming (and rural living in general) is filled with projects that have to get done, projects that happen once in a while but not every day. If you fill up your time with daily chores, you won’t be able to get anything done!
This is doubly true if you have a day job, as I do (in the WAN acceleration group at Citrix Systems). There’s been a big deadline crunch that’s kept me from getting my newsletter out on time or even respond to email properly. But I get my daily chores done because (a) I’ve purposely kept a lid on how many I accept, and (b) There are limits to how much I’m willing to let things slide in a crisis.
I figure that 2-3 hours of daily chores are about all a full-time farmer can afford. For a part-time farmer, it’s much less. Too many things come up that require large blocks of time — some planned, some not. The chicken houses have to get built, escaped livestock have to be coralled, failed machinery has to be repaired — it all takes time, and lots of it.
So keep that chore load low!
It’s an article of faith these days that selling your farm products directly to the consumer is the only way to go. Ah, if it were only that simple!
The nice thing about selling direct is that face-to-face sales build trust and loyalty, provides direct feedback, and eliminates the middleman, allowing you to keep all the money. All well and good, but it’s awfully labor-intensive, especially if you live a long way from your customers. Farms, you have probably noticed, are way out in the country, and you’re a long way from your neighbors, let alone your customers.
We started with direct sales of free-range eggs at the farmer’s market, then added a couple of local supermarkets. A farmer’s market takes about seven hours, including travel time. To deliver to three local stores takes us about two hours. Each channel gets about half our output.
Obviously, it would be a lot easier to add a couple more stores than farmer’s markets, and stores are open year-round, while farmer’s markets aren’t.
Wholesale prices in our neck of the woods run about 2/3 to 3/4 of retail prices, so eggs that retail for $4.00 bring $2.67 – $3.00. Because it takes less time to stock a supermarket than attend a farmer’s market, selling to stores often give you a higher hourly return in spite of the lower prices.
I’ve never sold through distribution, but I knew a guy who did. He had 1,200 free-range hens and sold all his output to high-class restaurants in Portland, 90 minutes away. After a while, he signed up a distributor to handle his eggs, picking them up at the farm and delivering them to his customers. Because the distributor was already headed that way and already handled most of these accounts with their other products, they could do this very cheaply. Time-consuming trips to Portland were thus eliminated, freeing up time for farming and living.
The fact is that high-grade produce grown in small quantities simply doesn’t make it into big cities. It’s all snapped up by gourmets in the nearest large town. It doesn’t start spilling over into big cities until production exceeds what the closer towns can handle.
Of course, big cities are where most of the money is, so overcoming distribution issues is one path to higher profits. Distribution is nothing to sneeze at. Another possibility is direct sales via mail-order. This is a problem with eggs, since they’re fragile, but is practical with other products. The main issue is that the product needs to have a high value per pound (so shipping doesn’t dominate the costs) and be of extremely high quality, so gourmets will make it worth your while. And the gourmets have to find out that it exists, too, one way or another.
Classics never go out of style. I still use the same type of programmable calculator today that I did thirty years ago.
It seems hard to believe, but thirty years ago I plunked down $299 for an HP-41C calculator, which had just been released by Hewlett-Packard. I was a penniless college student at the time, and for the life of me I can’t remember where I got the money.
I was living in Corvallis at the time, attending Oregon State University. The HP-41C had been designed across town at the Hewlett-Packard campus, and many of my classmates were HP employees.
The 41C was seriously programmable, had the then-revolutionary ability to display text, was indestructible, and had a nearly infinite battery life. Friend used its alpha display functions to create cheat sheets, but I never bothered. Setting up handy programs before midterms was a lifesaver, though.
Karen also had a 41C, which died about ten years later when her backpack fell off the luggage rack of her motorcycle and was run over by a motorist. Much later, my original 41C developed a crack in its display and became generally flaky. So we bought several of the slightly newer model, the 41CV. We got them used on eBay. They’re still going strong in spite of being around 20 years old. They stopped making the calculators in 1990, sad to say.
I use these calculators at the farmer’s markets, and people are constantly noticing. “Hey, I worked on that project!”
To commemorate these durable bits of local history, I’ve created a T-shirt, available through Zazzle.com below. Keep those 41C’s running!
I’ve been meditating on the ideal roof for a chicken coop. It ought to have the following properties:
Also, if you live in the suburbs, it should be gorgeous enough to keep your uptight neighbors from deciding that the world is ending.
Most of my houses have shed roofs made of galvanized steel roofing. The configuration is a “shed roof,” which just means that it’s higher and the front than at the back, so rainwater pours off at the back of the house where is causes less trouble.
I prefer using the cheapest corrugated roofing, which is readily available from lumber stores like Home Depot, but you can get metal roofing in all the colors of the rainbow, with baked-enamel coatings that last forever, and in shapes that are less industrial than the corrugated ripple.
My roofs are just metal, with no plywood decking underneath, and no insulation. This is appropriate for highly ventilated houses with enough airflow that the inside temperature and humidity are about the same as outside. You don’t have to worry about condensation in such a house.
In the old days, corrugated metal roofing was held on by nails banged through the high points of the ripple and into purlins. These don’t hold very well, and were replaced by roofing nails with rubber washerss. The nails are hammered through the low points of the ripple and the washers keep them from leaking. These have more holding power.
But all these are going the way of the dodo, because roofing screws have three times the holding power of roofing nails. So use roofing screws and get yourself a good, powerful electric drill or screwdriver for installing them.
In a tightly closed chicken house, you’d want an insulated roof, but you’d have to be nuts to build a tightly closed house. Ventilation is the magic bullet for chicken health. (You’ll want to read Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, one of the classic poultry books I’ve reprinted, for complete information.)
My houses have purlins but no rafters. The sheet metal is nailed directly to the purlins with roofing nails or roofing screws, meaning that they are supported only every four feet. This has worked well for me.
The purlins should be up on edge for stiffness, not laid flat, and bolted to the studs with ¼-inch carriage bolts, not nailed. (Some of my early houses with nailed-on purlins had their roof torn off by high winds.)
One thing I’ve learned, though, is that if the metal roofing sticks out very far in front of or behind the house, it’ll flap in the wind and work itself loose. So when you have plenty of overhang (which is a good thing), you need to add a 2×4 at the very lip of the roof, under the roofing. Naling the roofing to this 2×4 keeps the sheet metal from flapping in high winds.
One problem I haven’t solved is that of keeping chickens from roosting on the roof. Chickens like sleeping as high in the air as they can, and that means the roof. My roofs have a shallow slope and they can sleep anywhere on the roof they want without sliding off. A steeper roof is clearly called for! I haven’t yet done any experiments to discover the critical angle where the chickens slide off.
Traditional shed roofs often call for a one-in-four slope. A house eight feet deep would have a roof that slopes down two feet front to back: perhaps with a seven-foot height in front and a five-foot height in back. But even my flattest roofs haven’t collapsed under moderate snow loads, in spite of my lightweight framing.
Any kind of real roofing will work fine in a chicken coop: asphalt shingles, cedar shakes, roll roofing, built-up roofing, etc. I’ve never built a structure using any of these, so I can’t provide details.
Before galvanized roofing became widely available, most coops seemed to have either fancy shingle roofs or lowly tar-paper roofs. I don’t recommend simple tar-paper roofs because they don’t last long enough to be worth the bother. Roll roofing, which is much heavier, is probably okay.
Lots of people use temporary roofing such as tarps for their chicken coops. This is fine for summer pasture houses, and in fact my wife Karen developed a tarp-covered cattle-panel hoop house for pastured broilers. But the tarps on these hoop-coop roofs tend to develop holes during the course of a single season and are iffy as winter housing even in our mild Oregon climate.
