LivingSmall

Chicken feed has been a problem lately. When I first got chickens, I bought regular commercial feed from the feed store where I bought the chickens — they carry the Nutrena brand (which is Cargill) and Purina. Regular layer feed runs about $16 for a 50lb sack, and scratch is about the same.

Then a new feed store opened in town, and they carried a local organic feed and scratch milled just north of here in Fort Benton called Big Sky Feeds. This is a photo of their scratch mix — and here’s the label:
— wheat, sunflower seeds and flax  (although there seems to be some corn in there too, but that’s probably because I poured the dregs of the regular feed into the scratch when I ran out of feed).

Here’s what their mash looks like — what I like about this stuff isn’t necessarily that it’s organic, although that’s nice, but it’s that it looks like actual food. The label for this one looks like this: One reason I went into something of a tailspin about chicken feed last week, is because this company actually tells you what the ingredients are. You can’t find a list of actual ingredients on the commercial feed bags — you can find the “Guaranteed Analysis” but not what’s actually in the stuff.

Where the “lifestyle” part comes in is in the cost differential. “Lifestyle chickens” is the term my Sweetheart uses when I try to argue that backyard chickens are cost effective. That’s when the Man-with-no-affinity-for-livestock points out that you can buy ranch eggs for about three bucks a dozen all over town. Backyard chickens, he argues, with some validity have become a sort of status symbol, a marker of lifestyle. Since one of my other gigs is reviewing cooking and sustainability books for Bookslut, I’ve also got two or three years worth of evidence on that front in the form of various guides to urban and suburban homesteading (a term which alone is a sort of marker of class. Drive around Montana and you can see what homesteads actually were — dry, barren chunks of 120 acres where people, mostly unsucessfully, attempted to eke out a living). Most of these glossy books, filled with illustrations of largely white, largely professional folks seem as concerned with the aesthetics of one’s backyard setup as they are with the practical issues. I won’t even go into the holier-and-more-organic-than-thou tone of a couple of recent books, because they just pissed me off and what’s the point of giving them more  publicity?

This all came to a head for me last week when I ran out of chicken feed and discovered my local feed store had as well. The girl here told me she thought the feed stores in Bozeman carried the Big Sky Feed, and when I wound up at the fancy feed store over there, I found myself buying a 28 dollar bag of organic crumbles. As I drove away, I thought “I can’t spend $28 on chicken feed!?!” so I went to the nearby regular feed store to see what they had. They only had the regular Nutrena and Purina feeds, which don’t actually list what’s in them (nor can you find a list of ingredients on their websites). I knew I had some scratch left, and that my local feed store had the good feed on order, and although I felt ridiculous and precious about it, I just couldn’t bring myself to buy the processed commercial feed. So I get back in the car feeling pissed off and ridiculous and like some character from Portlandia with my first-world, organic chicken feed problems. I decide to return the too-expensive bag of feed, because although it’s organic, it’s just as processed as the non-organic ones, and what I really like about the Big Sky stuff is that it’s just grains. You can see what’s in it. I figure that I’ve got enough scratch to get through the week, and if the Big Sky stuff doesn’t come in, I’ll just buy the regular feed from my local feed store (which is Payback, another commercial brand).

So the long and the short of it is, that by the time I’d convinced myself that I was being precious, and that I was spending far too much money on chicken feed, the good chicken feed came back in, and I wound up spending $23 bucks on feed, and $22 bucks on scratch. Not really much less expensive than the $28 dollar bag that sent me into a tailspin, and, as someone I live with has pointed out, not any kind of economy. Especially with only 5 chickens in the yard, which really does put me smack in the middle of the least economical end of the spectrum. I’m not getting enough eggs to make selling them worthwhile, and yet, I’m getting more than Himself and I can eat. I’ve been waiting  until I have about 4 dozen in the fridge, then taking them to our local food pantry (if nothing else, I figure this is good karma in a bad economy). I get about 3 dozen eggs a week, and lets say I stretch these bags of feed and scratch to last 6 weeks, that means I’m spending just under $3.00 a dozen to grow my own eggs. Which is, as Someone will be happy to point out, no economy.

Yes, I know, I’m supporting a really good local company (in Montana, 190 miles is local), who are milling and marketing organic products whose food value is apparent just from looking at them. My chickens are healthy, and lay gorgeous eggs. I like my chickens, and the chicken-shitty-straw and compost is great for my garden. But as much as it pains me to admit it, what I have are indeed “lifestyle chickens.” On the other hand, if the revolution comes, I now know how to raise (and slaughter) chickens, which is a useful skill. But for now, I guess I have to accept it. I’m raising lifestyle chickens. Expensive, organic, lifestyle chickens.

Farewell, Delaware from Charlotte Freeman on Vimeo.

Miss Delaware is the bigger of the two Delaware chicks I raised this year, and although I hesitate to say it, she’s my favorite chicken. I never thought I’d be a person who could tell the chickens apart, much less the kind of person who has a favorite. But she’s kind of hilarious — for one thing, she’s very very vocal. And curious. Even when she was a little chick, she’d come over to see what you were doing, or rather, would come over to supervise whatever you were doing.

She’s also pretty funny with Raymond, who she torments. He knows he’s not allowed to kill the chickens, so she’ll come right up and peck him. Or follow him around the yard. Or charge him just to see him flinch. Poor boy, he’s so good, and he never attacks them anymore — now he just comes and hides under my legs.

One of my Wyandottes was definitely a rooster, and so I arranged for my commercial chicken rancher friend to take him — for real, not euphemistically. But Miss Delaware was getting so bossy, and so vocal, and even starting to crow to the extent that I was beginning to wonder if the bucket I’d pulled her out of was actually sexed at all, or perhaps she’d snuck through somehow. I was very sad at the prospect of Miss Delaware being a Mister, and having to go away.

So my rancher friend shows up and while it’s clear that the Wyandotte is a boy, we decide that Miss Delaware is just a very aggressive hen. She’ll flare her neck feathers at you, and come up and peck you, and is really noisy — but her shanks weren’t elongated like the Wyandotte’s, and most telling, if you went to pick her up she’d do that hen-frozen-in-terror crouch. And roosters, apparently, never do that.

Which means that Miss Delaware is still here, and without the Wyandotte rooster, she’s become a little calmer and quieter. Although she still thinks she needs to hop up on the backyard table edge to see what I’m eating for breakfast no matter how often I shoo her off, and tell her No! Not allowed!

A couple of weeks ago a post from Daily Yonder came up on my RSS feed about chicken waterers. It promised a way to water chickens without them wallowing in their own filth. Chickens will shit on anything, including the open water lip of their water container — which has always grossed me out. Plus, you waste a lot of water dumping out the dirty stuff for them and then they just make it all dirty again.

The Daily Yonder article was about a couple, Mark Hamilton and Anna Hess who came up with a way to economically and hygenically water their chickens, as well as make some off-farm money by selling the kits. The product is called the Avian Aqua Miser Chicken Waterer. I ordered a kit, which consisted of the little red nipple device you can see on the bottom of the Clorox bottle, and a drill bit of the correct size (plus directions, a piece of wire for a hanger, and an instructional DVD). You can get just the nipple for $15 or for $20 they put the drill bit in there to save you a trip to the store (unless you’re my Sweetheart, the contractor, who has every drill bit in the universe, but I didn’t feel like making a trip to his house either).

This took two seconds to put together. I drilled a hole in the bottom of the bottle, screwed in the red nipple, drilled a couple of tiny holes at the top so there’s no vaccuum, filled the bottle, and hung it using the coathook I already had on the outside of the coop. The chickens figured it out right away (my iPhone couldn’t catch this one pecking at it for water, but she did just seconds after this snapped, and just seconds before).

And there’s no more disgusting poopy water in the chicken coop! And, I got to repurpose one of the Clorox bottles I’ve been accumulating (I know, I know, bleach isn’t good for the environment, but I love bleach.)I’m going to have to figure out something for winter, but Anna and Mark’s site has a bunch of DIY suggestions for heaters, and I figure I’ll just go to the ranch store and see what they have.

It’s hard to see but this is Raymond, and the new chickens inside a wire pen. Everyone’s outside today because it’s sunny and warm, and both the dogs and the big chickens need to get used to the babies.

I’m hoping to get the babies out of the cold frame soon (in part, because I need it) but for now, everyone’s just kind of hanging out out there, separated by a little wire.

Raymond has the most trouble — he really really wants those chickens. For a while this morning he was lying down next to the pen, as if he was guarding them. Then the big chickens came by and sort of pecked around for a while. I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to handle two different foods when I integrate them, but I guess I’ll figure that out when I get there.

Chicken Movie2 from Charlotte Freeman on Vimeo.

I’ve been meaning to post a chicken update, but I was a little behind the curve on the whole video thing. So here’s a short clip of the chickens, in their new, expanded nursery which is, as you can see, made from recycled cardboard. Eventually I want to just let them run around inside the cold frame, but they’re still so small, and there are some crannies in which I think a panicky baby chicken could get stuck.

The cold frame has worked out splendidly. It’s less drafty than the dog crate/tarp setup I used the last time, and when it gets too warm, I just crack the lid. So far, too warm has not been the problem. I hope these little guys can handle Montana, because so far they seem to have the temperament of sorority girls on spring break someplace warm. They like it hot in there. I’ve gone out in a panic when the thermometer has read 110 or even 112 thinking I had McNuggets, and they’re just basking out there.

On sunny days I’ve been taking the lid off altogether and covering them with a couple of heavy pieces of mesh that I found in my shed. That gives them all a little air, and keeps curious dogs out.

So far, so good. They’re growing like weeds, and even starting to try to fly a little bit!