Growing a Farmer

by Kurt Timmermeister

  They grab my box of chicks; the chirping through the small holes in the box is always a welcome sound. Hopefully they will all be full of life when I open the box back at the house. Although there was a time when the dogs would have gone crazy at the notion of small birds in a tight little box chirping audibly, after many years my dogs are nonchalant. Having to share the front seat of the pickup is a greater annoyance than what is going on in the box.

  As the chicks were ordered weeks prior, I have hopefully gotten ready for their delivery. Baby chicks are fully alive and not needing of motherly attention, but they are fragile at this point in their lives. They are not covered in feathers of any kind but rather a light fuzz that has little if any warming qualities. The greatest worry is that the chicks will die from the cold.

  A box needs to be readied to raise the chicks in for the six weeks needed for them to grow enough feathers to withstand the cold. On day one, they are terribly vulnerable to every predator or temperature fluctuation. Heat must be added immediately to the box—the brooder—to keep them alive, usually by means of an overhead heat lamp.

  I always look into the brooder coop and watch these day-old, two-day-old, three-day-old chicks and wonder about their existence. They have never met their parents; have actually never even seen an adult chicken. They were hatched in a large incubator in Iowa and now they are sitting in my barn a few days later. When they arrived from the post office, I picked them up one by one and dipped their beaks into the water trough. Without this little bit of assistance, they might never learn to drink water and would quickly die. With the exception of this bit of a head start on life skills, these chicks divine the skills necessary to be chickens on their own. Looking down at them pecking at the ground, sipping water, chasing the others around the tight, warm coop, I wistfully conclude that they are just fine. They don’t appear to have any problems in life. There is no nurture, it is all nature. They never even see a mother hen. I fear a Lord of the Flies scenario—that I will lift the lid of the brooder coop and there will be Piggy, the fat chick, and Ralph, the bolder head chick, running the coop. As there is occasionally a dead chick found in the morning at one of the far corners of the coop, I imagine murderous anarchy among the birds, but the reality is more likely that the smallest of the flock strayed too far from the warmth of the lamp during the coldest part of the evening and died of exposure. They don’t need a mother, but they do need a heat lamp.

  Chickens, I am convinced, have had a great public relations firm working on their behalf ever since we domesticated them for eggs and meat. The popular vision of the chicken as chipper, kind, tidy and social, plus eager to graciously donate eggs, is nearly the opposite of reality.

  In comparison to other farm livestock—cows, sheep, pigs—chickens are by far the cruelest and most antisocial. Not too tidy either. Their cleanliness, or lack thereof, pales, though, in comparison to their greatest personality fault: cannibalism. I wish I could say that this was a rare occurrence, but no, it is a common trait.

  The wonderful fowl term pecking order has become a part of our human lexicon and actually refers to chickens’ barbarous sense of order. Those on the top of the social heap keep their standing by pecking. Not pecking at the ground, but rather at each other; frequently to the death.

  When introducing one bird, or a whole flock, to another previously established flock, the result is often the total destruction of the new members, and possibly of the entire population at large. The flock that grows together from day-old chicks establishes their hierarchy early on. All the birds know their place and stick to it. Occasionally you hear an odd squawking that sounds like someone is trying to move up, but it is short-lived and order is restored, usually without blood.

  When the order is tremendously upended by adding other mature birds, then the pecking order asserts itself. To find several birds pecked to death at the bottom of the coop the next morning is not unheard-of. This can go on for days. Chickens are said to get a taste for blood and refuse to let it go.

  Commercial chicken farms have a couple of methods to combat this tendency. One is to keep the birds living in a red-lit coop. The blood-colored light makes the birds unable to see the blood of their fellow chickens and if there is a deathly fight, the other birds don’t notice. Never having tried this, I find it very hard to believe, although I love the idea: chickens seeing life through rose-colored glasses.

  The other method is to debeak the birds. The birds’ beaks are cut back with an electric debeaker—a quick, sharp knife than blunts the beak. The birds cannot peck each other and their wrestling for dominance becomes noisy and disruptive but not deadly.

  This is often cited as a case of animal cruelty. I must admit that it isn’t a picnic for the birds, but on the cruelty meter it ranks low. Pig farmers do a similar act when they cut the tails off pigs so that their fellow pen mates don’t bite their tails due to the tension over cramped pigpens.

  Debeaking and tail-cutting are both acts against animals that I have trouble endorsing. Here at my farm neither occurs, but I can see the result of my failure to use the commercial controls. I have pulled many birds out of the coop over the years, massively bloodied and most certainly dead.

  Chickens also face risks outside the coop. The weak link in the design of the chicken is their great love of sleep. During the daylight hours, chickens are full of life, extremely difficult to catch and quite observant. They jaunt around the yard, through the pasture, ever nervous—jerking this way and that. There is no way to surprise them; they are nervous to a fault. It keeps them alive while the sun shines. Then the raccoons come out.

  At dusk, chickens head back to their coop. Like feathered zombies, they waddle back to the small door that leads into their home, unaware of the threats of the night. Their sense of security is wholly false.

  Chickens sleep, or roost, on horizontal bars generally made of wood, their small talons gripping the stick, cheek by jowl with their coop mates. As night sets in, they physically shut down, their senses dulled by the lack of light. Where they were impossible to catch an hour earlier, it is now possible to walk into the coop and pick one up with no resistance; they are clumps of clay, cooing, feathered clumps, but clumps nonetheless.

  This knowledge is useful for catching birds that otherwise might be difficult to subdue. Sadly, raccoons are in on the secret. By night raccoons take advantage of chickens’ vulnerability and sneak into the coop. Wily and intelligent, they are often successful at opening doors, avoiding electric fences and reaching through wire barriers. And the next night? They’ll do it again. Their self-preservation is based on realizing the most food possible.

  The telltale signs of a compromised chicken coop vary. The stealthiest coons remove their prey and leave no evidence. Each morning one member of the flock is missing. As chickens look alike and move constantly, ascertaining that the flock has been diminished from, say, thirty-six members to thirty-five is tricky. Even thirty-three or thirty-four birds pecking about at the ground can look similar to thirty-six. Each night the thief will enter the coop and remove one tasty bird. When one morning my favorite bird—the tall ruby-red-feathered cock with the sharp ebony talons and the commanding personality—is missing, it all becomes clear. Short of camping out in the coop, the raccoons are hard to thwart, even though you know they’re coming. By the end of the next fortnight, most of the flock will have been abducted, the last few birds looking forlorn and confused as they stand alone in the once-full house.

  Raccoons have no shame; self-preservation is everything. In addition to their superior intelligence over most animals, raccoons also have a most humanlike hand. Not a true opposable thumb, but close. This paw, this claw, this hand, has the ability to reach into tight spaces to extricate a chicken from its confines. The half-awake chicken is pulled through the opening by the raccoon, squawking and losing feathers along the way. Sometimes the paw can grab the bird, but can’t remove it from the coop. The gruesome result is the discovery of a footless bird in the morni
ng, stunned but frequently alive hours later.

  A quick primer in avian and mammalian biology: Females, chicken or human, ovulate on a cycle. A human female will produce eggs and expel them no matter if they are fertilized or not. If they are fertilized, they will divide and become a baby, but if they are not fertilized, they will continue on as an egg. In a chicken, the same is true. The chicken produces eggs and expels them. If they are fertilized, the eggs can produce chicks, but if they are not fertilized, there are still eggs.

  On the farmyard level, a flock of chickens has no need for a rooster. Without a rooster the eggs will not be fertilized, yet eggs will still be produced. A rooster adds a certain charm with his morning wake-up call, but his role is most limited.

  With a single rooster, no rooster at all or a lot of roosters, hens take their time producing eggs. The official time frame is between five months and seven months from the time that the chick pecks its way out of the egg at the hatchery until the adult hen will start laying eggs. It is an interminable wait for the farmer. Months of chicks eating feed and producing nothing in return. Months of waiting and waiting for eggs. And then one day a small egg will appear. The first ovoids will be smaller than anything seen in an egg carton at the supermarket. More like a robin’s egg than something you can imagine cracking and frying up for breakfast. In time, however, the first timid egg will give way to smallish eggs and then on to eggs of some repute.

  Chickens will produce nearly one egg per day for years. The longer days of summer will encourage the birds to produce more; the short, dark days of winter, much less. A common trick is to add an electric light to the chicken coop in the winter months and leave it on constantly. The light will persuade the pituitary gland of the birds to think it is summertime and their laying habits will remain generous. A bit strange for the hens, I would think, but they seem to be able to sleep through the incessant light. On the cruelty scale, I feel it ranks rather low, and we do so love our eggs.

  In my pursuit of producing the best-quality foods, I procured two chicken tractors. Chicken tractors are a glorious invention of the past few years. The essential idea is that instead of keeping hens in a traditional chicken coop they are kept in a movable chicken house. The traditional chicken abode is a free-standing, static building, generally built of wood, with a flock of hens, a corresponding number of nesting boxes and a few places for them to roost. As they sleep, locked in their coop to protect them from predators, they drop their manure. The combined manure of a flock of hens after a few days, weeks or months is substantial. If the farmer is on his game, he removes the chicken manure in a timely fashion. If he’s a slacker, he does not. I have been both farmers. Waiting to clean out the chicken coop is similar to waiting to go to the dentist to get a tooth filled. The longer you wait, the worse the prospect becomes, and soon you can’t bring yourself to do it at all.

  Chicken tractors solve this issue. The chickens live in an open-bottomed box, covered well on the sides and top to protect the birds from any unwanted visitors. Inside this box are feed troughs, a water supply and nesting boxes mounted on one side for the chickens to lay their eggs in. Each day the chicken tractor is moved a few feet so that the chickens living inside are always on fresh pasture. Each day the footprint under the tractor is fertilized with the chicken droppings. The pasture never gets too much chicken manure, the chickens always have a fresh bit of grass to peck around on and the farmer doesn’t end up wading ankle-deep into very old chicken droppings.

  The chicken tractor is a superb system. The chickens are essentially free-range. They get to peck about as if they were out on an open pasture, and yet are safe from hawks watching them from above, and raccoons trailing them at night. They get to eat fresh green grass on a daily basis year-round, contributing to a healthy diet. I feed them high-quality organic grain every morning after moving the chicken tractor, but with the tractor excess grain never builds up and attracts rats.

  The only limitation that I can see is that chicken tractors are intended for a fairly small operation. I have two here, each five feet wide, twelve feet long, two feet high and containing ten to twenty chickens. I certainly collect enough eggs each morning to supply the Cookhouse dinners. My two dogs get to enjoy fresh eggs each morning as well. If I were to attempt to keep hundreds of laying hens here with the goal of selling dozens of pastured farm eggs, I would have a traffic jam of shiny aluminum chicken tractors vying for space on the limited flat pasture.

  It is a welcome chore each morning, after the cows are milked and fed, and the pigs fed as well, to move the chickens to their new patch of grass, feed them and gather the waiting fresh eggs in the tidy nesting boxes. I have no regrets about tearing down the outmoded wooden chicken coops, with their floors thick with manure, errant feathers and bits of straw.

  Hens lay eggs daily in their most productive period. But there comes a point when the hens are simply not profitable. The quantity of eggs that they produce does not equal the feed that they consume. They cease to be an asset to the farm and cross over to the liability column. Their final gift, however, comes in their great worth as stewing hens. Hens wear their years in their flesh; young chickens may be tender, but their flavor comes with age.

  When these hens emeritus are slaughtered, they yield an added bonus: eggs. As their imminent demise is unknown to them, the hens continue producing eggs. When the hens are slaughtered, those eggs are still inside them. What is absolutely fascinating is the quantity and quality of such eggs. The birth canal, if you will, is filled with a week’s worth of eggs in varied stages of creation. Closest to the vent is essentially a full-sized egg, with shell. The shell is terribly thin and easily broken during slaughter, but still a shell nonetheless. The next up the line has no shell at all, although the smaller yolk is surrounded by the white, sans shell: truly amazing to hold. It is the whole, raw egg without a shell, the surface of the white holding it all in. Just the hint of shell binds the white. Farther up the path are a series of yolks, each progressively smaller until the final one is the size of a pearl. Each can easily be taken from the body of the plucked and gutted hen. And then there appears the challenge. These yolks are beautiful to behold, but what to do with them?

  I have tried them out myself here at the farm kitchen, and the cooks that pass through have given them a shot, but little comes of the yolks. The most innovative use was by a friend who layered them in coarse salt to draw their moisture out. After a few days, the yolks had been adequately desiccated to use, but their taste was still not particularly interesting.

  Chickens, as well as ducks and geese, have two great uses: as meat birds or as layers. Although each bird serves both functions, endless breeding has produced birds that are superior either at egg-laying or at meat production.

  I find the meat birds are a sad lot. The most common breed is the Cornish X, or cross. As the mantra of raising chickens for meat commercially is “Time is money,” these birds have been bred to put on weight as quickly as possible. In a matter of six or eight weeks they are fully grown. To watch a day-old chick become a three-pound bird in less than two months is startling. Further, these Cornish birds have been bred to produce a great deal of breast meat at the expense of the rest of their frames. The result is often birds that are so chest-heavy that they have trouble standing erect.

  In my experience, it is very difficult to grow a bird as rapidly as the hatchery catalogues claim is possible. Perhaps I’m cheap on the grain, but my hens take twelve weeks, sixteen weeks to fully fill out to cooking size, which is fine by me. It seems more humane, more gracious. As I raise maybe two dozen of these birds at a time, the extra time and additional feed is inconsequential. When the large growers are raising ten thousand birds at a time, an extra day of feed has tremendous financial implications.

  Slaughtering chickens is not a party. Slaughtering pigs, sheep, calves is not a pleasure either, but the sheer size of them and the number of people involved gives those activities weight, gravitas and a purpose. Plucking chicken
s is more tedious and dirty than anything else. There is no gravitas involved.

  The meat chicks are delivered day-old to the farm in boxes of two dozen from the hatchery, just like chicks destined to be layers. With luck, most of the birds live through the transport and the first couple weeks of life in their brooder. Slaughtering two dozen birds at once is a task I would avoid; a few at a time makes much more sense. The justification is that the birds will be at different stages, different sizes for a variety of culinary uses. The first three or four will be very young, very tender and respond well to a quick sauté. A few weeks later, a bit bigger, a bit fuller: roast birds. A month later, big solid roasting birds will emerge from the coop. When the last few chickens are sent to slaughter, braised chicken is in order, full of flavor befitting their age.

  To begin the preparations, a large pot of water is put on to heat, preferably on a portable outdoor burner. The water is heated to 140 degrees to release the feathers. Too hot and the skin will cook; too cool and the feathers will stay put no matter how hard you tug.

  The chickens are removed; ideally those chosen are pulled earlier and set aside in a separate cage. One by one, I grab the birds, flip them upside down and hold them by their feet. This position will calm them, at least calm them a bit. Attached to a large tree near the heating water is a killing cone. Constructed of galvanized tin, it is of ample size at the top to hold a chicken tightly; the bottom is a small hole adequate for the head of the chicken to drop through. When the bird is placed in the cone, the head and a bit of neck show, the legs sticking straight up. Although the chicken is in a compromised position, it still has the physical ability to flip itself out of the cone, and will try to do so.