Months later, a farmer would sell us a few hundred older hens with trimmed beaks and while the fighting was less, these chickens were also less adept at grooming. I now know it’s vital for a bird to be able to nibble mites off her feathers.
I also know that chickens are hardwired to peck—the ground, grasses, and, when anxious, each other. When they do, they expose blood, and where chickens see blood, they are compelled to peck more.
Partially, it’s the pecking order at play. A flock is a social system with a hierarchy. There are top birds, which get the all-access-pass to fresh feed, the coziest roosts and nesting boxes, even the softest spot in the yard to kick up a dirt bath. This social system also keeps a flock physically strong. If chickens detect an illness in a sister bird, they will put her down. If they’re stressed, their small poultry brain determines that having fewer chickens around might alleviate that pressure.
This problem of bird-on-bird violence is not a new one and, in fact, is responsible for the term rose-colored glasses. In the early 1900s, tiny eyeglasses were invented, even patented, for hens to wear to diminish peer damage. The December 1938 issue of Popular Mechanics had a sidebar about these red-tinted aluminum spectacles. The article claimed that they “stopped the fighting instantly” because they cut the chickens’ ability to see blood.
Chickens, for all the bucolic imagery of pecking corn thrown by gingham-aproned farm women, are not vegetarians. Left to their own doing, they’ll completely void a hapless frog into a change purse in a matter of minutes. The glasses sold by the millions, though they were later deemed ineffective.
However, standing as I was with a badly injured hen in my hand, I understood the temptation to try anything to prevent such violence, colored eyewear included. Almost all the birds in this crate had significant wounds, and all but one had had her tail feathers ripped out, leaving only bloody backsides.
The bird I held was alive but sported a gaping cut on her back so deep and wide I could have easily worked my thumbs in and, it occurred to me, break her apart like a deli chicken. It was hard to imagine a scenario in which she would live.
I scooped up others and brought them to their hoop coop, leaving the wounded one in the shade for Abbie to collect. She’d already set up an infirmary in a coop that wouldn’t be used until the second batch of birds arrived next month. Gathering up the piles of bloodied birds, she brought them to this quiet space where she’d assembled water, feed, and handpicked clover. Our medical expertise was limited to cleaning wounds with water and a light mix of hydrogen peroxide, then slathering essential oils on their lacerations.
When all the chickens were in their prairie coops, we stopped, exhaled, and took in the scene. They moved about, pecked at bits of straw, and made some furtive contact with humans.
Though battered, they seemed all right. Now, to keep them that way.
ACT 2
Cluck!
INTERJECTION: expression of surprise, extreme displeasure
Chapter 6
Tension soaked into the grass as we took in the sight of hundreds of hens in their new coops and out of immediate peril. I even risked the thought that they would have better lives on our farm. This was a desperate hope of mine, that for all the work and risk we were taking on, we’d at least be freeing chickens to better lives. Ones with prairie access and room to completely open their wings into the wind. I momentarily thought that they might even be grateful for this stressful day that brought them here, but then again, that would be a pretty complex thought for a chicken.
As the afternoon was turning into evening, Jason took me aside and asked me if I’d go home tonight via Superior, Wisconsin, and pick up packets of a restorative water additive to bring back to the farm the next morning. Annette, a local hobby farmer, had recommended it for our stressed birds.
“I know Dan’s Feed Bin has it,” he said.
Checking the time on my cell phone, I saw I’d have to move to get there before it closed. I turned my head to find the children but saw their slumped little bodies walking toward their grandmother’s car. They’d head directly to our house with her, and really that was best.
“Okay, chicken Gatorade, got it,” I said, and headed for my minivan.
With all the wounded and dehydrated birds, Jason had decided to sleep at the farm, which meant he’d bunk down in the wooden structure built to be our future egg-washing house. This was where all the state-mandated processes regarding the readying of eggs for market would take place—the washing, the weighing, the packing. But that was a few weeks away. The structure back then was essentially an unfinished shell that provided shelter and a pleasant woody, just-built smell. He also had a Porta-Potty out there, so I guess, in theory, he was set up.
As I pulled on to the county road, I couldn’t have been happier to leave on this errand and head back home. Our Duluth house, while not a fancy one, held distinct amenity advantages of indoor plumbing and soft places to sit.
I settled in for the ride. This thirty-five-minute commute from Wrenshall was certainly one of our farm’s disadvantages, but this spot had been chosen as a balance of zoning laws to price. We had also chosen to rent because, well, that was what we could afford, and before we bought anything we had to be sure this new business model would work—had wings, so to speak. But another of the deciding factors was me. I did not want to move to the country and even more so, I didn’t want to move my children to the country.
In just a few months, Abbie would enter middle school, that formidable experience formerly known as junior high. I knew it would not be a good cultural fit to jam her into a rural locale, population 306, where the classes had literally grown up together. Of course, Milo was steaming up right behind her with his own established social circle to protect. I couldn’t tear them away from the place they called home, again. And even Jason understood that when it came to the children, I would be unwavering.
It was still light on that drive. In June, there are fifteen hours of sun, but if you count the twilight hours of dawn and dusk, it pushes that number over seventeen. This was all cosmic makeup for the dark winter when that number dropped to a paltry eight and what sun there was often filtered through milky white skies. But all that seemed a long ways off that hot night.
Pulling into Dan’s Feed Bin, I parked near the sign. It’s an enormous 3-D acrylic black bull suspended a good fifteen feet above the parking lot with the austere message, If we can’t feed it, you don’t need it. Here was where my cell phone woke up from its rural doldrum. It beeped alerts for several messages; one was from our new Locally Laid Facebook page, and while I unbuckled my seat belt, I opened it.
The message was from a woman I didn’t know, which was a thrill in those days when someone not related to us acknowledged our new venture. Pushing my filthy hair out of my face with a hand of equally dubious cleanliness, I scanned her message. She claimed to really want to “like” our page but needed to know what would ultimately become of our birds.
Not even a full day with chickens on the field and we’d already hit the spent hens issue.
Spent hen is the cringeworthy term for a bird who no longer lays regularly as she reaches the end of peak fertility, or, as we’ve joked, henopause. In backyard chicken flocks, birds are often kept for years as they slowly taper production and may even come in and out of laying, much as human women do with their own fertility. But in the commercial egg industry, where a whole chain of people and organizations count on steady production, when a hen starts to flag off somewhere from ten to thirteen months after beginning to lay, she’s considered spent.
If chickens aren’t slaughtered in a season, there’s an industry practice called forced molting. Raised naturally, chickens will molt all on their own, losing and growing fresh feathers during the fall as days shorten and temperatures drop. Production stops (or greatly wanes) for a few weeks and when it returns, the chickens surge with a new peak of egg production, laying larger eggs.
This response must be prompted in confi
nement setups by altering lighting and feed. In both caged and cage-free operations, chickens are kept at controlled temperatures in windowless warehouses. And as if they were living in a casino, they have nothing to signal the passing of time. With no change in light, there’s no seasonal trigger to start a bird molting. As our birds would not only see the out-of-doors but live in it, they would certainly molt, allowing them to lay longer—though we were unsure if these chickens would lay at the same production rate postmolt, or even how long they would keep laying. It seemed that determining when a hen is spent was more art than science.
Fortunately, at that point, our spent hen decisions were likely a couple of years out, though we had started exploring ideas of having the birds processed at a state facility and donating them to food shares when that time came. But when I’d approached these organizations, it seemed too much of a hassle on their end. For one thing, we no longer live in a society that knows what to do with an old bird. Most folks don’t understand that the chickens they see at the supermarket riding the rotisserie carousel are usually just a few weeks old, fifty-six days to be exact.
I’ll give you a second to process that.
Most chicken meat presented on a foam tray under plastic wrap is from a Cornish Cross hybrid. These birds have been bred to grow fast, like breakneck fast, and honestly, that’s not too far from the truth given all the health problems these chickens have from their rapid weight gain. The moment these chicks emerge from the egg, they’re eating, and that’s pretty much all they do until they’re slaughtered two months later. If the bird is not butchered, the weight of its own breast meat will eventually cause its heart to fail.
There are many reasons this breed is popular with chicken meat producers. For one, they’re half the price of other chicks and ready for profit-taking in a couple of months. That means something, if you care at all what the birds eat. Non-GMO corn, soy protein, and quality vitamin mix gets expensive fast, and if you’re feeding a chicken, one that was twice the price, for an extra six weeks, well, that’s going to make for a costly drumstick. And because Cornish Crosses are so young when butchered, they’re tender. And tender is what the American public has come to expect from their chicken meat.
A spent bird, in comparison, is ancient history. As a chicken ages, its meat gets tougher, but especially so in the case of a pasture-raised hen who has been sprinting around a field. She’s turned fat to muscle, which does not make for an appealing menu item unless one is willing to cook it for hours, even days. Hence another term from our collective foggy past: stew hens.
Stew hens (once a main ingredient in Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup) are made soft with long, slow cooking in liquid with the bonus payoff of a more flavorful meat. It does, however, require a hefty investment of time, which is tough to come by between rushing out of work at five o’clock and driving kids to the soccer field by six thirty.
After reading the Facebook message, I sighed a bit and typed a benign and truthful answer. I told her that we did not yet have concrete plans and were open to her suggestions. While this was true, we did have a few ideas. For one, there are always folks eager to have healthy backyard birds, on the cheap, even ones not in their laying prime. These older chickens will still give some eggs, just fewer, and this way one has avoided feeding a nonlaying pullet for four months.
Also, we have connections to an Asian community in the Twin Cities, and they’ve been known to buy birds live off a farm. Not for much, mind you, but given that these hens would be pasture-raised and eating an expensive feed, I’d like for them to have one more stop on the circle-of-life ride, so to speak. If it prevents someone from eating one less industry hen fed antibiotics and other dead chickens ground into feed meal, that would be a small victory. But as none of these options were fully realized, I didn’t think it fair of me to get into it with my would-be Facebook liker.
I pocketed the phone, walked into the feed store, and asked if they carried sports drinks for chickens. I voiced this like it was an ordinary request, like my whole life hadn’t just gone over the edge into the unknown.
When I got home, the company Facebook page popped up on my phone again. Apparently my spent hen nonanswer was not good enough, as the messenger unleashed a tirade on me.
You and others like you who CHOOSE to raise these animals these days really do have a choice on what to do with them when they are “spent.” Money triumphs, however. We need new computers and new patios, vacations, parties, private school for the kids and the list goes on, so we steel ourselves and close our emotions in order to kill the chickens. We tell ourselves it’s survival and look to the past for justification. Sorry, but I’m not buying it. We don’t live that way any longer, and to my mind it is no different than slavery. Kind masters you may be; but in the end you will sell for profit, pat yourselves on the back for your kind benevolence to the dumb creatures and buy more.
My heart squeezed and I felt the big muscles in my legs contract. After having spent the last year worrying over how to best provide great lives for birds, I was incensed. I wanted to immediately spew surly points regarding the irony of my spending my day actually working with chickens while she was home, likely clean and well fed, in front of a computer terminal possibly toggling between berating me and playing Farmville.
But I didn’t.
The gift of being in one’s forties is the occasional exercise of judgment. Instead of firing a tirade back, I turned off my phone and tended to our home flock, gathering eggs, refilling feeders and waterers. Then I ran a near-scalding bath, drinking a glass of wine. As I eased into the tub, I crafted impossibly rude responses in my head. How could someone with no skin in the game be so opinionated about our farm? We were so exposed in this venture; I was convinced that Jason and I didn’t have one ungamed follicle between us. I went to bed angry.
Getting to an okay place about comments such as these took years. It was (and sometimes still is) difficult not to take personally the angry agrarian demands of people who have never, not once in their lives, seen a real live chicken.
Early the next morning, in the predawn hours that others refer to as night, I fussed over a reply. I was as careful of what I didn’t tell her as what I did. I withheld the information that chickens regularly live more than ten years and that if every egg farmer kept their spent hens in perpetuity, as she’d implied, there would be a land and corn crisis in this country. Nor did I educate her on sustainable agriculture, which isn’t about natural end-of-life care for geriatric birds, but a quest to feed neighbors real food while treating the livestock and the planet better in the process.
Instead, I painted a picture of our chicken infirmary, Jason sleeping on a borrowed army cot and his careful stirring of electrolytes into their poultry waterers.
Later, when I read her ebullient reply, I was momentarily happy until the end of her message where she admitted this: As a vegan, she does not eat eggs.
Chapter 7
At daybreak that beautiful June morning, the day after The Day the Chickens Came, I called Jason. It was clear from the heaviness of his hello that things were not going well. Chickens in the background made low ca-cawing sounds, bubbling up over our conversation.
“The birds are so stressed, Lu.” The chickens had been running up and down the length of the coop and piling in the corners—two, three on top of each other. Jason’s voice caught. “I’ve been taking trash bags of dead hens out all morning.”
The words clenched my stomach. I swallowed a small gasp.
While we didn’t truly know these birds yet, we’d been excited for these sentient creatures to experience better lives, enjoy the hunt, scratch, peck, wind-in-the-wings full chicken-ness in our green field. We’d brought them here for better lives than the industry would give them. Did they really suffer all those weeks in Myron’s warehouse and that hot, blustery trip on an exposed truck only to die hours before we would open the coop door to pasture liberation? It was enough to make us throw our heads back and let out an ang
uished, tonsil-exposing Charlie Brown “Aaugh!”
Then I took another breath and allowed myself to think about the money involved. Real money.
From our business plan I knew that each hen, if we kept her some twenty months, laying an average of 86 percent of the time, would produce some 523 eggs over her nearly two years. Of course, I now understand how off those numbers were. It was these idealistic projections that had Jason believing that during our first month of sales, we’d nearly break even and that by month two, we’d actually be making money.
In fact, it wasn’t long afterward that our business plan was so off the rails that it reminded me of another fussed-over document that assumed the best outcome at every turn: my birth plan. Nowhere on that two-page, single-spaced memo was it written that I’d endure thirty-six hours of protracted labor, slap a nurse, demand drugs (street drugs, if necessary), and swear at a team of residents for “treating my stirruped legs like a scenic turnout.” This is all to say, things do not always go as we intend them—with either babies or birds.
And although our projected lay rate was based on poultry charts and not unusual for a caged operation, maybe even a bit low, I see now it’s pretty dang high for birds that would take months to fully acclimate to their new environment. Or really for pasture birds at all, chickens who simply endure more egg-withholding stress, from weather to brushes with predators. Of course, we couldn’t have dreamed up a transition as traumatic as the one they’d experienced during the Myron handoff, but even so, those egg projections were lofty.
While Jason talked on, I pictured him taking out the bags of birds, throwing away thousands of potential dollars, not to mention the actual six bucks per mature hen we’d paid Myron yesterday. I swallowed this fact and tried to just listen to his voice, the phone pressed against my ear.
Locally Laid Page 6