The world is full of earnestly stated and widely repeated advice that doesn’t work. At all. There are different reasons for this, but the main thing is that I’ve worked out a system that can separate the wheat from the chaff. Not always, but often.
We used these practices on our free-range egg farm, and it’s the reason why we became bona fide experts instead of increasingly broke and unsuccessful enthusiasts. For example, it’s how I zeroed in on the techniques I wrote about in my book, Success With Baby Chicks.
Believers and Practitioners
“Neither a sucker nor a charlatan be.” —Polonius, probably.
Suppose we divide the world into two camps: the believers and the practitioners. There’s overlap, of course, but my main insight is this:
When they talk about things they’ve done themselves, practitioners know what they’re talking about, especially when they’ve done them repeatedly. The believers are more of a mixed bag.
Those who are more believers than practitioners can be dead wrong and not even know it. The same is true of journalists. Worse, when they put their beliefs into practice and it blows up in their faces, their devotion to orthodoxy can tempt them into minimize or even conceal their failures instead of earnestly warning others.
Some examples:
- Over the decades, a high percentage of people who write enthusiastically about their plunge into keeping chickens go silent after three years. That’s how long it takes for problems (and pathogens) to accumulate and reverse their early successes.
- People constantly confuse prevention with cure. Exercise helps prevent heart attacks, but once you’re in the middle of a heart attack, jogging makes it worse! You see this mistake everywhere. For example, once your chickens have come down with coccidiosis, “not believing in medication” is equivalent to believing in animal suffering. (It’s fine if you suffer, but you have a duty to your critters.) Amprolium will clear it right up.
The Historical Sweet Spot
People who are experts in some things aren’t experts in others in the same field. For example, the investigations of agricultural extension services and university researchers are centered on mainstream practices because that’s where the improvements they develop can be adopted at scale. Niche, small-scale, and alternative practices can’t command the same level of attention or expertise.
But sometimes there’s a sweet spot where you get a twofer. For example, before the widespread use of chemicals in agriculture, organic farming was pretty much just farming. The rise of chemical agriculture was fast enough that farmers and agricultural scientists who started their careers with organic practices ended it with chemical farming. They had endless hands-on experiences of both, including the good, the bad, and the ugly. This perspective makes them uniquely worth listening to.
Chemical nitrogen fertilizer (in tons of nutrients) went from 0.5 million tons in the 1940s, 7.5 million tons in the 1970s, and 11 million tons in the 1990s. Farm antibiotic use went from zero before 1949, hundreds of tons in the 1950s, and thousands of tons in the 1970s.
The same happened with poultrykeeping:
- The average size of a US farm flock used to be tiny: 50 hens in 1910 and just 81 in 1950. These flocks were on diversified farms. Some farms had larger flocks, with chickens and eggs as their sole income, but most didn’t. The focus of poultry scientists was at least as much on the average farms as the larger ones.
- But by the 1997 this had risen to an average of over 5,000 hens, on farms where poultry was everything. The farmers and scientists with expertise from the small-flock era were retiring.
- Similarly, the gradual pace of nutritional research meant that feeding chickens entirely on prepared feeds was hit-or-miss until after the isolation of methionine and vitamin B-12 in the 1950s. Green feed and foraging on pasture gave the best results, especially for the flocks laying hatching eggs. Material published before this showed a wide knowledge of green feed and pasture, knowledge that had time to be forgotten before the surge in interest in free-range poultry in the 1990s.
A Digression About Mythology
(Courtesy of J.J. at the English-language Wikipedia. Subject to the license.)
Alternative agriculture has a myth that takes the form of a melodrama: the honest, innocent, ignorant, stupid farmers were duped by mustache-twirling corporations into adopting chemical agriculture.
This appeals to our sense of smug superiority, I suppose, but there’s no truth in it. Farmers aren’t as dumb as some people want to believe, and in fact a surprising number were university-educated and had a scientific mindset they applied to their own farms. If something didn’t pay, or not for long, they knew it. The corporations were far tinier and less impressive than today. The farmers drifted into the new techniques one step at a time, for their own reasons, often going back and forth according to circumstances.
The true situation is handy for our purposes, because if we look, we can find publications from the transition period that are deeply thoughtful and trustworthy. (Plus others that are nonsense, of course. There’s never that much of a golden age.)
The Methods
There are several variations of my methods.
The Historical Comparison Method
The historical comparison method goes like this:
- See if your area of interest used to be more mainstream, but gave way to something else, leaving the area of interest as a neglected or forgotten backwater.
- Read the works of practitioners who spanned both its glory years and its decline. They had the best and most detailed perspective. If they wrote a book and shepherded it through several editions, these will provide snapshots of their evolving thinking, but a later edition that hasn’t dropped the earlier material will do.
- University professors with practical field experience often write textbooks like this.
- Examples that I’ve reprinted under my Norton Creek Press label include:
- Poultry Production, 9th Edition, by Leslie E. Card (1961).
- Turkey Management, 6th Edition, by J. Holmes Martin and Stanley J. Marsden (1955).
Another way of doing historical comparisons is to look at two related situations, one of which may be unfolding right now, and compare them side by side. This is especially handy when one of them is highly hyped and politicized and the other isn’t. It’s amazing how often even the experts are freaking out and spouting nonsense about one thing when another similar one is handled more professionally.
The Quirky Expert Method
Sometimes an author who is deeply practical and quirky compared to their peers provides insights you can’t get any other way. Their quirkiness ensures that they won’t bother uttering the conventional stuff everyone says whether it’s true or not.
To qualify, their works have to be based on extensive hands-on experience. (Anyone can be quirky if they don’t know what they’re talking about.)
I’ve published several such books under my Norton Creek Press label:
- Success With Baby Chicks by Robert Plamondon (hey, that’s me!). This gives the techniques we actually used on Norton Creek Farm to raise tens of thousands of baby chicks over the years.
- Fresh-Air Poultry Houses by Prince T. Woods, M.D. This 1924 book on the (very real) advantages of high levels of ventilation in chicken coops is my most unusual offering, being a mix of Dr. Woods’ experiences, things he witnessed on other farms, and letters people sent to him. He allows himself to drift from his topic in interesting ways. For example, he talks about his experiences with a flock of hens that spent their New England winters in a stand of pine trees instead of a perfectly good chicken coop. Useful and entertaining.
- The Dollar Hen by Milo Hastings. This 1909 book is a survey of the poultry industry as it actually was, including how the distribution system worked, plus Hastings’ plan for running a poultry farm that leans heavily on the most proven and effective techniques of the day. Hastings is the only poultry scientist that I know of who also wrote a classic work of early science fiction (City of Endless Night, 1919).
When hunting around, just be careful that your quirky expert is a real expert with plenty of hands-on (and preferably profitable) experience doing what they’re writing about. Triangulate between several of them if you can find them.
Prescientific Sources
For every field, there’s a period before anyone looked at it with a practical scientific mindset, or wrote about it with a hard-headed accounting mindset. There are nuggets of wisdom from these earlier periods, plenty of them, but there’s plenty of dross, too, and they haven’t been separated.
This same caution applies to new field that haven’t been subject to much scrutiny yet, not just old ones before the guys in the lab coats showed up.
Poultry science as a branch of agricultural science didn’t exist until 1896. Sure, scientists classified and described poultry (and their parasites), just as they did with everything else, but the serious business of getting consistent, money-making results with poultry on the farm hadn’t been subjected to rigorous experimental and accounting scrutiny.
Things picked up pretty quickly after 1896. Milo Hastings’ The Dollar Hen (1909) and James Dryden’s Poultry Breeding and Management (1916) are the earliest scientific poultry books I’m aware of, and I republished both of them.
Of course, some sciences run ahead of others. In the two older poultry books above, vitamins weren’t yet understood at all. We knew about proteins in general but had trouble analyzing feedstuffs for individual amino acids, so we didn’t know how much of which ones were needed. In practice, the feeding advice is all rule-of-thumb. Effective, but with no theoretical basis. (I’ve republished Feeding Poultry by G. F. Heuser, which has an essentially modern view of nutrition but focuses more on getting the nutrients from actual feedstuff rather than vitamin/mineral premixes.)
Modern medicines and pesticides were also nonexistent, and we need to be cautious, even paranoid, about old recipes. The truly nontoxic ones are worth a try, I suppose, but scary things like arsenic and fluoride compounds were recommended like they were nothing. A few drops of nicotine sulfide concentrate were enough to kill you, and it was used to kill mites. Let’s all be careful out there.
What I usually get from the more old-timey sources are things that are worth thinking about but rarely worth adopting directly. The Agricultural Experiment Stations separated the wheat from the chaff so we don’t have to.
I Publish Books! Norton Creek Press
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