![\"Karen](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/plamondon.com\/sendy\/uploads\/1412911467.jpg?resize=640%2C433\")
<\/p>\nIf you’re delighted with this newsletter, share it with your friends!<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Mmm, bacon! Got room in your freezer? If not, it’s time to\u00a0buy another freezer, because we’re about a week away from converting our pigs into pork. These happy outdoor pigs have been moved to fresh patches of pasture as they wreck the one they’re on, and have been fed on high-quality feed, whole grain, and the many cracked and\u00a0stained eggs that are a yummy byproduct of our free-range egg operation.<\/p>\n
(By the way, we’ve been criticized for admitting that we know where meat comes from, on the grounds that “children might be reading this!” So send the kids off to bed if you want them to continue believing in the Pork Chop Fairy.)<\/p>\n
Our pigs are butchered by\u00a0The Farmer’s Helper\u00a0<\/a>in Harrisburg, Oregon, the best custom butcher in the area. They show up with their mobile slaughter truck and dispatch the animals on the spot, in their own familiar pen, and the animals are gone before they know what’s happening. Most livestock are caught and transported to an unfamiliar place first, which is scarier for them. I like this way better.<\/p>\n After a brief delay, the fresh meat is ready — pork chops and roasts and all that — wrapped and frozen. The ham and bacon need to be cured first and take a little longer. \u00a0Our pigs are consistently fairly lean, but not too lean. Good, firm, flavorful pork, with bacon that’s mostly meat.<\/p>\n We haven’t sold all the pigs yet, so if you’re in the area and are interested in half a pig, a whole pig, or even more, drop Karen a line at\u00a0nortoncreek.karen@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n Local farms have had a lot of livestock killed by cougars recently. You can see one prowling a sheepfold in\u00a0this video<\/a>.<\/p>\n Like many predators, cougars don’t have much of an “off” switch: they’ll keep killing until they run out of targets. In the wild, this doesn’t matter much: the targets scatter, and the predator has to settle for one or two kills. But penned livestock are another matter. The predators tend to keep killing until all the livestock are dead. “Take all you want, but eat all you take” has nothing to do with it: no “off” switch. So even the predator benefits very little.\u00a0And this is not just cougars, but dogs, foxes, coyotes … you name it.<\/p>\n This means that the type\u00a0of fencing can make a difference. A\u00a0simple one-wire or two-wire electric fence\u00a0<\/a>doesn’t really pen in chickens, who will burst right through it when being chased by a predator, allowing the flock to scatter in all directions if a predator manages to get\u00a0inside the fence. But chicken wire and relatively closed-mesh electronetting don’t allow the flock to escape, and losses can be very high (or total)\u00a0if a predator gets inside.<\/p>\n Most predators never acquire the livestock-eating habit, contenting themselves with wildlife, but when a predator becomes a livestock killer,\u00a0I think it’s good form to kill the livestock-eating predator and ignore all the others. No one really minds when the local cougars eat deer or the local bobcats eat rabbits, but when people’s sheep and chickens and\u00a0cats and dogs start vanishing, that’s different.<\/p>\n The cougar in the video was killed by a trapper from the\u00a0USDA Wildlife Service<\/a>. I’ve had good results with these folks in the past, when the predator du jour<\/i> was taking a toll on our chickens (and sometimes our barn cats), but I also learned how to do trapping on my own, which turns out not to be very difficult. (I learned both from the Federal trapper and from\u00a0Hal Sullivan’s<\/a> books and videos.)\u00a0When a bobcat, raccoon, or coyote is killing our chickens, they typically drag it away from the scene, and it doesn’t take a whole lot of woodcraft to identify a feather-lined game trail! A snare placed along this trail\u00a0will catch the offending predator. No need to declare war on predators in general. In Oregon, at least, snaring or shooting livestock-killing predators on your own property is perfectly legal.<\/p>\n I don’t enjoy snaring or shooting predators, but I have a responsibility to my livestock, one that’s inconsistent with allowing them to become\u00a0a 24-hour all-you-can-eat buffet for the local wildlife.<\/p>\n Until today, we’ve had a dry fall, and that means the emerald-green grass that our part of Oregon is famous for is pretty much absent. What effect does this have on free-range eggs?\u00a0\u00a0Karen recently\u00a0did a taste test of our eggs vs. a couple of other local free-range egg producers to find this out.<\/p>\n By our own estimation, we came in second. Judging by the taste, one of the other producers is not only\u00a0doing a nice job, but\u00a0also has a greener pasture than we do right now, giving them yolks that are a bit darker and eggs that are a bit more flavorful. That’s what we get for living in a place with no possibility of irrigation, and a climate where the dry season stretches into October once every 5-10 years. Come on, rain!<\/p>\n The other eggs used a no-corn, no-soy recipe, and they tasted a little odd. No surprise there: replacing these two main ingredients\u00a0in chicken feed seems like a pretty good idea until you try it. On paper, soybeans look far from ideal, but the situation reminds me of Winston Churchill’s comment about democracy: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms.”<\/p>\n Since we keep telling everyone the secret of flavorful eggs, (giving the chickens access to fresh green grass), we’ll be content if we’re tied for first place after the fall rains green up the pasture again.<\/p>\n Another thing about the dry weather is that we’ve delayed setting up lights for the hens, on the grounds that stretching hundreds and hundreds of feet of extension cords across the pasture is a little scary if there’s the slightest chance that it could start a grass fire. Not that this is very likely in the ordinary course of things (though I’ve mowed my share of extension cords with the tractor).\u00a0Production has been holding up nicely, so I doubt we’ve lost anything through being cautious.<\/p>\n These are my top-selling books from last month:<\/p>\nCougars Can be\u00a0Uneasy Neighbors!<\/h3>\n
Dry Fall Weather (and its Effect on Eggs)<\/h2>\n
<\/a>Norton Creek Press Best-Seller List<\/h1>\n