by Gene Logsdon
My animals notice more about me than I do. They can tell when I am happy, sad, angry, amused, impatient, or too tired to care. They know especially when I'm in a hurry to get the chores done and when I am in a loafing mood. In the latter case, they stand in my way, butt me, rub against me, stick their heads up to be scratched. In the former case, they stay out of the way and reflect the same nervous tension that I am unintentionally showing. Only by studied concentration have I learned to move slowly among them, and to confront them first with my nose, as they do me, not with my hands. Reaching out at an animal not yet wholly tamed, will frighten it. Perhaps because they have none, animals are edgy about hands.
They even notice changes in my appearance. One morning the chickens acted like idiots when I entered the coop, flapping themselves into the far corners. "What in the world is the matter with you?" I asked. They continued to cower even while I poured wheat into their trough. Then I remembered. I had on a different jacket and hat than I usually wear.
And how jealous of each other animals can be, especially the bovines. Our cow will butt the smaller steer away if I scratch his ears. I am supposed to scratch her ears.
I can distinguish different moods in the animals too. A sick cow gets an opaque glaze over her eyes that is unmistakable. A cow in heat is possessed of a nervous intensity that alters her usual calm personality dramatically. I can tell the change in our cow the moment I enter the barn, whether or not she is trying to ride the steer or one of the sheep. The drive to reproduce is a powerful force. A pregnant cow or a cow with a calf at her side is far more contented than one with an empty womb. Similarly, a ram penned away from the ewe flock bellows and raves and runs back and forth along the fence, reminding me of male fans at professional football games. When the ram is with the flock, he settles down, full of contentment, even during the many months when there is no mating, and so no "outlet" for his assumed sexual energy. Do animals know something we don't?
Animals are more literate than humans in reading body language. If I try to stop them from going where they've made up their minds to go, they can anticipate the direction of my lunges before I lunge. A human possessed of this skill would make the greatest basketball or football player of all time. Our pigs know if they try to nip the back of my leg, that I will slap them, but they see the slap coming before I execute it and squeal mischievously as they easily avoid it. I think leg-nipping is a game with them. Ewes warn intruders away from their lambs by stamping their feet. Turned out on pasture that first day of spring grazing, the calves articulate their delight by kicking up their heels and the lambs by bouncing stiff-legged across the pasture. When they have eaten their fill of grass on a breezy summer day, sheep lay down on the brow of a hill where they can catch the full force of the wind to blow the flies away and snooze with their heads tilted up in the air, their faces silently telling the world how happy they are.
The ultimate example of body language literacy takes place between a flock of sheep and a sheep dog. The first time I saw a dog load a flock of sheep I was convinced the sheep had been trained to hop up in the truck whenever the dog came into sight. To the human eye, the body language between the sheep and dog is not fully observable. Dog and sheep anticipate the movements of each other before these movements actually occur, giving the impression that the sheep understand beforehand what they must do when the dog approaches. I know of one dog so talented that it will drive a whole flock of sheep to a fence corner and hold them there for hours, while the shearers remove their fleeces one after another. I have watched a shepherd turn his dog loose in a large valley pasture, and by certain whistling commands, direct the dog to bring an entire flock right tip around him. That dog could even single out any specific ewe and hold her by eye contact next to a fence for the shepherd to catch and examine.
Animals have distinct personalities. Some are friendlier than others, some much less trusting, some more adventurous or curious than others. One Plymouth Rock pullet likes to sidle up to me and peck me on the leg ever so gently. I have no idea why. None of the others do that. No chicken I ever raised before did that. Another, a Rhode Island Red hen, always accompanies me as I fork manure into the spreader. She eats bugs and worms I uncover with the fork. The other hens wait until I leave before moving in to join her.
The animals likewise have different food preferences: two ewes show little interest in even the best hay if there is oats to eat, others given a choice of oats when good hay is available react to the oats the way a child reacts to broccoli when candy is the other choice. The steer I am raising for our next year's beef supply would not at first eat his milled feed unless I dribbled a little oats on it and he definitely preferred high quality clover hay to any kind of grain.
Whenever I switch from one mixture of milled feed to another, our cow is furious because the new stuff tastes differently. She will sniff at it, shake her head, stare at me malevolently, knock her feed bucket around with her nose. In four different ways she is distinctly telling me that she doesn't like this new stuff.
"That's all there is," I say, running my hands through the feed and licking my lips to show how good it really is if she just takes a mouthful.
Again she shakes her head and stares at me so irritably that I have to laugh. That makes her angrier yet and she shoves the bucket away with her nose. "So there," she is saying, plain as day. "Take this crap back to the kitchen."
Not until I walk into another part of the barn and she realizes that I am not going to give her anything else, does she sample the new feed. Sniffs disgustedly and shakes her head again. Finally takes a little mouthful. Chews. "Hmmm, not so bad after all." Then having come to terms with the new smell of the feed, she dives in and gobbles it all down. If the younger steer even thinks about approaching, she gives a signal I cannot catch, and he backs away to his own stanchion and waits patiently for his own ground corn-topped with whole oats of course.
My mother once said that she preferred the company of cows to that of most humans. I thought she was joking, but as I grow older, I'm not so sure. The intellectual stimulation of conversing with animals is very low, granted, but there are other satisfactions especially for the husbandman whose other job batters him with long hours of human babble. Farm animals, if not hungry or separated from their usual companions, are quiet.
There is a deep satisfaction in scattering clean yellow straw knee deep for the animals to sleep on and then feeding them in the still of a wintry eve. Sheep give the most contented little sighs when they nose into their food. Horses snuffle in their hay, and the soft munching sound of cows chewing their cuds rises serenely to the hay mow where I sit and listen. The mother ewe with coaxing grunts encourages the new lamb to nurse and finally the smacking sound of the lamb sucking vigorously reaches my ears. All is well. It is no surprise to me that a god might choose a stable to be born in; only the ignorant think such a birthplace would be below a god's dignity.
A summer day in the barnyard is equally as tranquil except for the pesky flies. Trees cast shade over the henhouse and the pig house, blunt ing the swelter of the sun. A breeze sifts through the open barn doors, cooling me as I pitch forkfuls of manure into the spreader. My little red hen stands practically between my legs, head cocked for worms and fly eggs that my forking turns up. The other hens fluff their feathers contentedly in the dust holes they have made near the machine shed, stirring so much air into the dirt that it has, in its fine, silken-silty dryness, almost the quality of water. Human expertise believes the hens dust themselves to avoid lice. I think dust bathing just feels good to them.
The pigs awake from their almost continuous snooze, and while one of them plays with a piece of wood I have put in the pen for that purpose, the other tries to hunker into its water trough for relief from the heat. Pigs like nothing more than to wallow in mud, and I am perhaps a little insensitive to pig natures by keeping ours imprisoned in a pen raised two feet off the ground with slatted planks for a floor (see page 76). But it is either that or put ring
s in their noses to keep them from rooting under the fence of a lot, or rooting up the pasture or wrecking the fragile balance of life in the creek by churning it into a muddy mess.
The sheep and cow have come from the hot pasture into the woods, where they lay or stand in the shade, shaking heads, stamping feet, swishing tails, trying to avoid the eternal flies. They watch me closely from a distance. If I would open the door that gives them access to the barn, they would quickly pile inside, where the cool darkness discourages flies better than any fly spray. But I am not about to let them in now-bothersome enough stumbling over a chicken as I fork.
The two cats, my defense against rats and mice, have crawled up on the fender of the tractor, which is hitched to the spreader. They think they are very clever to have found a new place from which to watch me work. One of them lunges playfully at a horsefly buzzing by, misses, and unused to the hard, slippery surface of metal, slips and topples to the ground. Embarrassed, she walks away, pretending, I think, that she fell on purpose.
The only time the barnyard is not pleasant is in March. Mudtime. Then I am glad that I positioned the barn precisely at the highest location of the woodlot, so that water drains naturally away from it. Nevertheless the newly thawed ground around the barn is mushy. I keep the animals inside or they would churn their lot into a buffalo wallow. Where I walk my daily rounds, I lay down old boards so I don't have to slip and slosh in the mud. At the entrance to the barn that the animals use, I have put down gravel to fight the mud. But coming at the end of winter, mudtime is endurable. Warm weather is on the way, and the ground will soon turn solid and dry again.
Many books present complete manuals on how to raise domestic animals. I will give here only the kind of details from our own experiences that I don't much see in books.
Chickens: The First Choice of the Cottager
Chickens are the easiest farm animal to raise and the most economical. Some say their meat is one of the more healthful to eat. But if you don't eat meat and don't like to kill animals, chickens are still appropriate if you do eat eggs. You can let the hen live out her time as an egg layer (five years or more), and then bury her in the garden for fertilizer.
If you don't eat eggs either (believing in the modern superstition that they contain too much cholesterol), you can raise exotic fowl for the pet market. I sometimes wonder why I mess around with chickens worth only a couple of bucks apiece when I could raise emus worth a couple hundred bucks apiece.
There are literally hundreds of different kinds of fowl amenable to the cottager's barnyard, from ordinary Rhode Island Reds to exotic golden pheasants, from homing pigeons to peacocks, from guineas to turkeys, from ducks to geese. A neighbor (I use the word neighbor to refer to any cottager in our county that I know well) makes his living raising thousands of quail which he mostly sells to nature or hunting preserves. Catering to poultry fanciers with exotic fowl can be very profitable and is an example of the offbeat approach to farming that is characteristic of the inventive cottager.
But the main reasons that poultry should be the cottager's first choice are these: they convert feed to meat more efficiently than the other conventional farm animals, and they will eat all kinds of waste food except citrus rinds; furthermore, unlike cows and hogs, anybody can catch and carry a chicken, so handling and transporting them is not a problem as it is with large animals. To catch a chicken all you need is a six foot length of stiff wire with a tight crook at one end to hook its leg with.
Generally speaking, a broiler, a chicken raised for meat, will gain a pound for every two and a half pounds of feed, a little faster gain if the feed is mostly corn with a high protein (soybean meal) supplement added. A full grown layer will eat about a fourth of a pound of feed a day, maybe a little more, depending on its size and the nutrient value of what it eats. That equates roughly to ninety pounds or a bushel and a half of corn per year. An acre of corn at 140 bushels per acre would accordingly, rear ninety chickens. A free range hen would actually eat less corn than that because of other food she forages. The small Bantam breed will eat half that. In fact a banty running loose seldom needs to be fed at all. In most cottage farm situations it will find its own food.
My laying hens get about half their food from bugs, grass, weeds, and worms as they range over field and woods, and from eating the grain that falls through the slatted floor of the hog pen, and what the cows and sheep dribble out of their feed bunks. In fact our chickens are our in-house garbage collection service, scavenging up all our table scraps plus every bit of stray grain that might otherwise draw rats. One of the neatest ideas I've heard recently is to move chickens onto pasture plots behind sheep or cattle in a controlled grazing system. The chickens scratch and scatter the manure of the larger animals as they eat the bugs and worms drawn to the manure. They also eat the eggs of sheep and cattle worms, thus helping to solve internal parasite problems. The chickens can be kept in movable coops, and the whole coop moved from paddock to paddock. Chickens always (almost always) go back into their coop to roost as darkness falls, so there is no problem moving them.
You can raise four hens in the backyard easier than you can keep a dog, although because of our weird zoning ordinances, dogs are okay and oftentimes hens are not. The only "secret" I know is to provide a lot more room for your chickens than the 1.5 square feet per bird that many expert manuals call for. Allow at least five times that much room per bird, and better ten times that amount. Space requirements in commercial poultry houses have to be kept at an absolute minimum because of the almighty dollar, but not in a cottage farm environment. Our 10by 20-foot henhouse is perfect for twenty hens, although for two months in the summer we also fatten thirty broilers in half of it. The somewhat crowded conditions at this time do not much matter because the chickens are outside most of the summertime anyway.
Sure, the cost per square foot of space is higher in an uncrowded coop but I am sure that when all the expenses are figured in, the cottager will eventually gain back the initial difference by subsequent savings. In a commercial poultry house, the cages that make such an "efficient" use of space are not cheap. Water and feed and medicines have to be delivered to the cages by costly automated means, expensive air circulation systems have to be installed, and getting rid of the manure requires tremendous investment in handling equipment. All this is unnecessary in a cottage coop where chickens roam outdoors much of the time. In an uncrowded coop, you can nail a two-by-four about two feet high across adjoining walls to provide plenty of roost for twenty to thirty hens. With two feet of sawdust or straw for bedding, the chickens by their constant scratching turn their manure into the bedding and transform both into a wonderful, granular compost dry and odorless enough to handle with bare hands. The chickens eat tiny specks of humus containing Vitamin E from this compost, thereby decreasing significantly the incidences of cannibalism. Mine have never become cannibalistic. I have never fed them any medicine of any kind for twenty-seven years.
A crowded coop becomes sodden with stinking manure. The chickens get manure on their feet and get it on the eggs when they go into the nest to lay and then you have to wash the eggs. Ideally eggs should not be washed (the shells are quite porous) and they rarely need washing in a coop with lots of room for the hens and with nests routinely replenished with clean straw. You will counter the costs of years and years of uncrowded poultry production in this manner by avoiding just one case of salmonella.
It is a good idea to divide your coop into two parts with a door between and an entrance/exit door to both sections. Such a division allows us to keep our young chicks separate from old hens until they are of laying age. We built three nests along one wall, enough for fifteen to twenty hens, each nest about fifteen inches square and roofed over so that the inside of the nest stays relatively dark. Darkness discourages egg eating. The roof over the nests should be very steep so the hens can't roost on it and cover it with manure.
In addition to our own whole corn and wheat, we feed the chickens oyster she
lls which are supposed to keep the eggshells strong and provide a little grit to help them digest their food. They can get more grit (tiny pieces of stone and sand) from the soil. Sometimes I feed milled corn to the broilers to make them grow fat faster, but the layers receive only whole grains. They all get fresh water daily. I put the water in receptacles made from the bottom halves of plastic detergent containers. These containers don't crack when water freezes in them, and by knocking them against a tree or wall you can break the ice out easily. Rubber containers also work well this way.
There is no electricity at our barn, no running water, and no water heaters. The water for the animals runs off the barn roof into two barrels, one of which is in-ground and covered with wooden boards and overlaid with an old piece of carpet and snow when available so water doesn't freeze in it in winter. I dip out water as needed. The cows and sheep usually go to the creek to drink, or eat snow. Very primitive. No pipes to freeze, no motors to burn out. Without "labor saving" technological gadgets to help me, I save a lot of time by not having to fix them.
We buy chicks in May after the weather has warmed up enough so we do not need heated brooder houses. The chicks stay in a large cardboard box in the garage the first week, with an electric bulb above them for a little extra heat, if necessary. Then they go to the coop, but separated from the old hens. We feed them ground feed until they are old enough to eat whole grains. The heavy White Mountain Cross broilers, bred to gain weight fast, eat much more than the finer-boned laying breeds and are ready to butcher in about two months. The layers are then gradually introduced into the layer flock and the door between the two parts of the coop is then left open. Three to five year old hens no longer laying we butcher for chicken soup.