Got eggs?

Last week, I read an article that an egg-production facility in Cokato, Minnesota, went up in flames. The facility produces upwards of six million eggs a day. Tragically, tens of thousands of hens died.

This fire is yet another nail in the coffin of egg availability. Bird flu panic has caused millions upon millions of chickens to be culled, creating shortages and price increases like crazy.

Additionally, the state of Georgia has halted all poultry-related activities due to bird flu concerns. This means all "in-state poultry exhibitions, shows, swaps, meets, and sales are suspended until further notice," with a corresponding massive ripple effect over multiple industries.

Now the prognosis is that egg prices will stay elevated forever. Seems a little pessimistic, but there you go.

The shortages (and elevated prices) have hit locally as well. A couple weeks ago while in our local grocery store, I saw this:

The less expensive eggs were cleaned out, while the pricier ones remained.

We seldom buy eggs, since we keep them on hand mostly for baking. But for those who depend on eggs for an inexpensive source of protein, these prices and shortages must be hitting hard.

We're hoping to get a coop built and start a flock of chickens this summer. In the meantime, when we need eggs, I'm grateful we can buy them from the nice older couple down the road who usually charges $3.50 a dozen.

For the love of eggs...

With the current shortage and price spike of eggs, the memes have started. Here are a few:

(Is it just me, or does this look like a rooster to you?)

Or, as one headline put it, "Americans may need to reprioritize what is attractive in a good partner: Does he or she have chickens?"

We have neighbors with chickens. They sell eggs periodically. They had a sign by their driveway last summer that eggs were available for $3/dozen. The sign came down after a couple weeks. Last week the sign was back, this time advertising eggs for $4/dozen. The sign came down after a couple of days. I have a feeling they're being besieged with demand, especially at those prices, and their hens can't keep up.

Feeding the chickens

I have a cyber-friend in Maine who has a small flock of chickens. "How do we feed chickens if no commercial food is available?" she asked. "I've been doing some research on it, but I'm discouraged as I don't grown grain or corn."

I thought this was a legitimate concern, and one that could become increasingly pressing as threats of grain shortages loom.

I'm big on providing chickens with "biota" – insects, worms, grubs, and other goodies via compost piles where they can scratch to their heart's content.

However in northern climates (such as Maine), compost piles aren't a practical source of biota for the six months of the year when snow is on the ground.

Kitchen scraps, garden scraps, hard-boiled eggs, stale bread crumbs, and even meat scraps are all popular choices to feed the ladies. Garden produce such as squashes, cabbage, and lettuce are also common. Mangel beets (which can grow huge – more than 20 lbs.) were a frequent choice to feed chickens a century ago. Another common method was to boil up a mishmash of fruits and veggies such as small potatoes, apples, turnips, carrots, beets, parsnips, beans, peas, squashes, pumpkins, celery tops, etc., then mash the results and feed it to the birds.

In short, in years past people often fed the chickens anything they had on hand, in a manner that was digestible. The best combination is grains, greens, and proteins. Ground-up eggshells are also used as a calcium source. Additionally, chickens are more carnivorous than most people give them credit for.

During warmer months, free-range chickens which have access to a compost pile often do quite well on this kind of diet, but it takes some planning for winter months. A future project I'd like to try is raising larvae – black soldier flies or mealworms – for chicken treats and a protein source, but this requires an indoor setup (at least during the winter) and I'm not sure we have the room.

Anyway, I thought this would be an interesting topic to open up for discussion. What advice, experience, or recommendations do you have for feeding chickens (in both summer and winter conditions) without commercial feed?

It's miiiiiighty quiet around here

Sunday morning, as usual, I released the chickens from their coop.

All day long, I watched them and took a few photos.

It's a nice flock, though we have way too many roosters (six!).

On Sunday evening, I taped up a bunch of boxes outside the chicken coop.

The birds watched me with interest but no alarm. After all, they had no reason to be suspicious.

But as it turns out, they should have been suspicious -- because those boxes were meant for them.

Sunday night after dark, when all the chickens had gone to roost, Don and I started stuffing them into the boxes -- one rooster, and either two or three hens per box. We flapped the boxes closed and stacked them next to our pickup truck. When all the chickens were crammed, squawking, into boxes, we loaded the boxes into the truck and carefully drove to a neighbor's house about a mile and a half away. There the whole family poured out, all seven kids very excited, to watch and help unload their new livestock into the brand-new coop the oldest boy had built. Instant farm.

Unlike the difficulty in seeing the cows go to their reward in the freezer, at least our flock has an excellent home with wonderful people and happy children. If you're going to get rid of animals, it's always a comfort to give them to people who treat their animals well.

But my goodness -- if we thought things were quiet without the cows, it's nothing compared to now. No more crowing competitions among six lusty boys. No more clucks, cackles, and scratching from a flock of prolific hens. The coop door stays open day and night.

Just one more step on the road to moving.

Tons of manure

By happy coincidence, one of the things we need to clean up on our farm is something in high demand: Manure. You might say we're spreading a lot of it around.

For years, we took the science of composting fairly casually. Don would scoop out the underside of the awning each year (sometimes more often, depending on how much it needed it) in late summer or early fall. He piled the manure just outside the feedlot, where over the course of a couple of years it broke down into beautiful compost, which we then heaped on the garden tires when needed.

And since we have tons -- literally -- of this black gold, we're able to spread it around among neighbor who needed it for their gardens.

We have no problem leaving these fertile mounds for whomever buys our place (and hopefully they'll recognize the value of a good pile of poop), but nor do we have any problem handing out compost to anyone who wants some.

So when a neighbor fired up his ancient 1950s dump truck and brought it over for a load, Don happily filled it up. Twice.

He started by scooping out under the awning until he couldn't scoop anymore (the rest will have to be hand-raked out).

Then he turned his attention to the compost pile that is the favorite hangout for the chickens.

God bless tractors. Can you imagine moving this much stuff with a shovel or pitchfork?

The only problem is every time Don scooped up some compost, the chickens would descend en masse to gobble up worms.

They're fearless in the face of a tractor and refuse to move. No one ever said chickens were bright. (On the other hand, I'm convinced the compost pile and its inhabitants is what helps keep our birds as healthy as they are.)

This neighbor was able to help us clean out probably an entire ton of compost. Benefits for both sides!

The Case of the Disappearing Chickens

Yesterday was a wildly busy day.

In addition to normal tasks around the homestead, I had my WND column due as well as some other writing deadlines. Plus we were expecting 30+ people for the neighborhood potluck, so we had to clean the house and grounds, and prepare dinner.

In the midst of this, Mr. Darcy disappeared. He had been in the yard, and the first hint he wasn't where he was supposed to be was when I stepped outside for a moment and heard him barking from a strange direction.

Because we had a howling wind (making acoustics tricky), it was hard to determine where the barks were originating. Don and I walked up and down the driveway, trying to find our missing dog -- and finally turned around to see him in the woods, on the other side of this gate.

Huh? How on earth did he get there? He was without his collar and seemed wildly relieved when Don opened the gate and let him out. He came into the house and collapsed into a nap.

Okay, next question, how did he get out of the yard? Further investigation revealed the tie on a back gate had come undone. Don re-fastened the gate and made it secure.

Our next concern was the chickens. Darcy, given his druthers, would happily chase down and kill every chicken he could, so we braced ourselves to find a slaughter. We have about 27 birds at the moment, and after Darcy's little excursion, we would not have been surprised to find that number greatly diminished.

How did he get into the woods in the first place? There are gates and fences everywhere. The most likely answer is the gate into the feedlot, designed to keep cows in but not (necessarily) dogs out. The chickens often hang around the feedlot, so Darcy probably went chasing after them and slid under the gate.

Grimly we went about searching the usual chicken haunts, such as the compost pile where a dozen or more birds are normally found.

But the compost pile was deserted.

We checked the coop. There were a few birds in there, but they were unruffled and unharmed.

We walked all around the barn, feed lot, corral, and the gate where we found Darcy -- and saw no chicken carcasses or injured birds. No piles of feathers. No chickens at all, in fact. And -- this is critical -- Mr. Darcy didn't have the least drop of blood on him. So maybe he didn't kill any chickens after all...?

Since we had so much to do, we continued with our tasks for the day, but something kept nagging at me. No chickens. None. Not on the compost pile, not in the barn, not in the feedlot. Something was wrong.

Finally I put on my mud boots and walked down into the woods, looking a bit further afield in case we missed a scene of carnage somewhere.

I found Darcy's collar, wedged among the pile of logs we're gradually cutting up for firewood.

I searched carefully around the woodpile but didn't see any chickens, living or dead, wedged in among the debris. And so we had a mystery on our hands: The Case of the Disappearing Chickens. Where could they be?

Evening came and none of the missing birds appeared. We fed the cows and remaining chickens as usual. The house was cleaned and ready for guests. Dinner was prepared. But the coop remained sparse -- only 13 of the 27 birds showed up for bed.

Whatever happened to the remaining 14 birds was anyone's guess. But one thing was certain: If they were down in the woods during the night, they were highly likely to be picked off by owls and coyotes.

Don was more optimistic. "They're probably just hiding," he assured me. "They'll be back." I wasn't so sure.

People started arriving for the potluck -- more and more and more (our potlucks are growing). Over the chatter and happy conversation, I mentioned our Great Chicken Mystery, and everyone offered sympathy. There isn't one chicken owner who hasn't experienced a catastrophic loss of their flock through one means or another.

Late in the potluck, Don stepped outside for a few minutes. Then he came back in and made a general announcement: "The kids are home!" Everyone cheered.

He was right. After all the guests left, I took a flashlight and did a headcount: 27 birds, just as there should be.

So while we're grateful to have our flock restored, I'm still baffled where those missing 14 birds could have been hiding for so many hours. Nonetheless, it's comforting to know that even when he was unrestrained and free to kill all the chickens he could, Mr. Darcy didn't kill a single one.

Not that we're willing to take a chance on that. He stays on a leash while in the driveway.

Mother hen

Well, of the two broody hens who hatched out eggs, resulting in an unusual co-parenting arrangement with the resulting 13 chicks, one hen has flown the coop and abandoned all pretense of being a mother. This would be the Jersey Giant hen, who now blends in so well with the rest of the flock that I can't find her to chastise her.

Not that it matters to the chicks. They have happily grouped around the Buff Orpington hen, who continues to act motherly but now has an enormous brood to care for.

But she's done a good job. She hasn't lost a single chick. It's always funny to watch the whole brood try to cram under her feathers.

Like a good mother, she calls them over whenever it's lunch time.

The babies are approaching what we call the "velociraptor" stage, gangling awkward creatures who run with their necks stretched straight out, flapping as they go.

Yep, makes for a happy barnyard.

Co-mother hens

If you remember, about three weeks ago we had a Jersey Giant hen who stole a nest and hatched out eight chicks.

We also had a Buff hen setting on eggs as well.

Well, the Buff hatched out five chicks, so combined we have 13 peeping babies.

The funny thing is this: For the first 10 days or so, I kept both hens and all the chicks in an inner pen in the coop, for protection. After that we opened the pen door and let everybody venture out. But by that time, the chicks were making absolutely no distinction between hens regarding who their mama is. Essentially we have co-mother hens.

Sometimes I see the Jersey Giant hen with some of the chicks:

Other times the Buff seems to collect more:

At night the chicks will tuck themselves under whatever hen has room.

This unusual co-parenting arrangement seems to be working just fine for the chicks. There's always someone to hang with and show them the ropes of searching for food.

Oddly enough, the Buff mother is dominant over the Jersey Giant mother and likes the chicks to be with her. Notice who has all the babies?

And notice who's standing off by herself, watching her family gather around the other mother?

Still, I don't feel too sorry for the Jersey Giant mama. She gets her share. Besides, it's the chicks themselves who make the decision which hen to go to.

It's amazing how much a batch of chicks -- hatched by a hen rather than an incubator -- makes a barnyard seem more alive and "proper."

So the babies are thriving as they flow between one mother or the other, and we have two very happy hens co-parenting the chicks. Whatever works, I guess.