It's not winter in Harmony until ...

… someone big slides off the driveway into the south pasture.

Our old oil supplier is no longer providing this service, so I warned the new guy that the driveway, though plowed, can be tricky for larger rigs. He figured that since the old driver could manage it, he would too.

As he left, I went into the house to secure the beasties. I looked out the window a minute or so later, and didn't see the truck. Gee, he got out already, good deal.

Went back to work inside.

An hour later the dogs start going apeshit. Because the tow truck had arrived. The special pull out an oil truck with 1500 gallons of fuel in the tank before it tips over in my pasture tow truck.

Poor guy had been starting his second attempt up the hill when I looked out, just as he was blocked from view by the barn.

The tow vehicle had to be secured first. That's where the lone hemlock comes in.

The cherry tree at the curve can never come down; it provides the anchor for the redirect. This is all the same as our mountain rescue rigging, except winch instead of manpower for hauling, no real use of mechanical advantage systems, and if the steel cable snaps, it doesn't just drop its load, it whips around and removes the heads of every person in range. Also, the tow operator had a lot more faith in the power of gravity for progress capture than I did. I figure gravity is what got him in that spot in the first place.

Good times.

If a vehicle is pickup-sized or smaller, I can generally get it out with our manual come-alongs and tow straps.

This was the second oil truck the pasture has bagged in five winters, and here's the thing -- it always takes at least two tow trucks, with winches and anchoring to trees, to get one large truck out.

It's all about the angles, man.

Everyone stayed cheerful about it. No gateposts harmed in this production.

The boss needs to buy some chains for the truck.

From all of us at Brandywine Farm

Snapshot Sunday: Chickies Have Two Mommies

These two hens went broody within about five days of one another. I gave each of them a private nest box filled with eggs in a large unused stall in the barn. I knew that I'd have to move the first clutch to hatch quickly, as the still-setting hen was likely to try to kill them when they started running around.

The morning after they hatched, Broody Prima was in the nest box with Broody Dos, setting on those eggs, while the chicks ran around the stall and popped under either hen indiscriminately.

Sigh. Buff Orpingtons. The golden retrievers of chickendom.

The two ladies raised their clutches communally; within a couple weeks, it wasn't even possible to tell the older chicks from the younger ones. They were very successful, bringing up 19 chicks together. They lost two to a barn rat that grabbed them at night, before the cats took care of him. The two Mommas were seldom more than ten feet apart. I never saw them quarrel.

They have, of course, both earned blue broody leg bands, which exempts them from the crock pot. I'm eager to see whether they sync up their broodiness next year.

Broodiness is a genetic trait, not a learned one, so I am saving eggs from each of them come spring.

Macro Monday: Hornworms' Lament

“Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly. Insects, it seems, gotta do one horrible thing after another.”

-- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Our friend Andy spotted these two critters on the currant tomato that is growing rampantly in the washtub by the grape arbor.






They are larvae of Manduca quinquemaculata -- the five-spotted hawk moth -- aka tomato hornworms.

And they have munched their last nightshade leaves.

The stuff that looks like a a threadbare white shag carpet are parasitoids -- the pupae of a braconid wasp. As larvae, they already ate most of the insides of the hornworms, which maintain just enough life to cling to the branch where they stopped. (I took these photos on Saturday, and the worms are still where we left them.) Soon they will hatch out into adults and go hunting other hornworms on which to lay their eggs. I've never seen a hornworm with this heavy a parasitoid infestation. I guess they aren't any more doomed / dead than one with a few pupae.

I'm ambivalent about this particular horrible thing. The hornworms can really play hell with the tomatoes, and the little wasps are very effective at controlling them. But the adult moths are magnificent -- easy to mistake for hummingbirds when one first sees one -- and we have lots of tomato foliage. When I find a healthy hornworm, I tend to just stick it on a robust volunteer tomato somewhere away from the garden, or else on some wild nightshade.

The life cycle of parasitic wasps is the stuff of nightmares and the inspiration for some viscerally horrifying speculative fiction.

Detail

Photo Phriday: Commensal

She hops up onto the back deck -- three steps up -- nearly every night, and stations herself by the glass door. There she picks off the bugs that hit the window and drop. I leave a light on in the kitchen for her, and try to remember to close the door so that she has maximum dinner-collection area, and also so I don't step in toad shit in the kitchen.

I bring her stinkbugs and Junebugs -- but never fireflies -- and she now hops towards me when she sees me coming out.

She's the only being I've ever seen who will eat a second stink bug.

The dogs have been lounging on the deck late nights in the heat. They politely give her a couple feet of space near the door, and she pays them no mind.

Everyone should have a porch toad.

Photo Phriday: Cow. Dogs.

More later; Blogger is crawling along tonight.

Brandywine Briar Rose and Caledonia Danny Boy. I do not remember the name uf da cow.

Bucked Over

Guess what Edina produced today?

Now, Eddie, Patsy, I want you to attend to the weather this week. Not the wether -- there are going to be three more of those here soon enough. You know, the stuff coming out of the sky and sideways on the wind that you have been screaming at me about?


What did Noah bring onto the ark?

Was it all the animals after their kinds, in large male-only herds?

Work it out, ladies.

Photo Good Phriday: Eoster Greetings

This weekend we will search the farm for hidden nests of eggs, and the leporaria for more nests of new rabbits.

We will eat flesh and candy and drink wine.

There will be fire.

There will likely be some new additions to our herds and flocks.

The pear tree will burst into flower.

Nothing to see here. No Goddess arising. Move along, return to your churches, have a cracker, and feel sorry for all the sins you've done while all around you Nature is flowering, fucking, hatching, kindling, kidding and generally bursting forth without apologies, restraint, or any sense of decency. Remind yourself relentlessly that it's a Very Solemn Father and Son thing. No Girls Allowed.

I feel compassion around now for browbeaten "Christians" who work so hard to avoid being Pagan that they forbid themselves to be Human.

But She is there for you, anyway.

Oh Hell

My name is little Bongo*
I sing my little song-0 ...

________________

*No ears were eaten in the making of this post.
It appears that there never was but the one.
Apparently these things happen.

Snapshot Sunday: Monolith

Spring or not, the asparagus is coming.

Sneaky Kidder

My best guess last fall about the goatgirls' due date was today. I suggested to PC last week that he schedule the monthly AMRG training for the farm, so I could possibly participate in training while on birthwatch.

Yesterday I put the girls in the birthing stall and checked for signs of imminent kidding. Edina lost her mucus plug (I know, lovely image, eh?), but that can happen days or a week before labor starts. I felt their tailheads and pelvic tendons; Patsy's was looser. First in line.

Last night Cole and I slept on a cot in the barn, with barn kitty Smeagol. Other than the discovery that ducks never sleep, and a closer-than-normal experience of Son of Domingo's 0330 daily crow, it was a quiet night.

This morning it was clear that Patsy was imminent. Her udder was "strutted" -- not just bagged up, but shiny, tight, and with her teats pointing outwards.

Patsy, left -- strutted. Edina, right -- not yet strutted.

All day long I hung around the barn while teammates and their human kids came and went, sure that earnest labor was going to start any minute. Zilch. No hard contractions, water hadn't broken.

Around six, we zipped out to our favorite local little rib joint, just up the road, because clearly nothing was going to happen in the next few hours.

One hour later I came home to a very smug Patsy. Despite the fact that she had spent the day bleating and complaining whenever I left her stall, she vanted to be alone.


The yellowish-tannish-white kid is a buck. The pure white one is, finally, a little doe. Both have had a nice drink of colostrum and are doing well. She's accepted them both and, contrary to a common pattern, seems to be favoring the doeling a bit. I was particularly anxious to monitor Patsy's kidding because last year, her first kids, she would have rejected her second-born if not forced. No problems this year.

Cleaned up the placentas, tied off the kids' umbilicals and dipped 'em in iodine, made sure everybody was dry, gave Mom a bucket of grain, made some introductions


And put the little family to bed.

Now the Edina vigil begins.

Rural Gods III: The Empire of Bubbahotep

The Emperor Bubba-Hotep

His historic empire* stretched from Maryland to Missouri. Some say it still does.

He and his sons and brothers and nephew-sons and cousin-daughters took to their legions of gravesites and sacred groves an assortment and volume of grave goods and offerings seen nowhere else.

Any attempt to sink a fence post, trench an asparagus bed, bury an ex-sheep, cut firewood, clear brush or delve an ancient manure pile becomes an archaeological investigation nearly guaranteed to be stopped dead by Bubba-Hotep's barely-submerged treasures. Every ravine of Appalachia is replete with his sacred tithes, the mystical middens into which sacrifices were tipped in the conviction that they'd "go away" if dumped "down the crick."

His artifacts are glass shards, bedsprings, steel roofing, mysterious and shapeless chunks of corroded sheet metal, ominous and rusted steel drums, bricks, shingles, angle-iron and machine parts, whole implements, rotting timbers, blasted fragments of clay pigeons, cat skeletons, tractor tires, broken cinder blocks, the occasional near-complete vehicle, and wire.

Fence wire -- smooth, barbed, woven, welded -- was the signature medium of his court craftsmen. Embedded in tree trunks, sagging from tree to post to ground, stretched at tripwire height through the woods, heaped and tangled amid the brambles and vines at the edge of pastures waiting to ensnare any mower deck or horse's hoof that dares profane the sacred site.

Our farm woodlot is privileged to host an especially hallowed monument, the Convertible of Bubba-Hotep's Favorite Nephew.

Teams make new discoveries every day; most recently, a wire hoard that rivals the Sutton Hoo treasure.

Being the third in a series of revelations concerning the powerful deities who govern rural life. Iconography by the inimitable Kelly Bahmer-Brouse.

___________

* Many thanks to Friend o' the Blog Linda Kaim for introducing us to the Empire of Bubba-Hotep and its artifacts.

Photo Phriday: Another Fine Pickle

Secundus is an idiot.

This is how I found him this afternoon, at least 50' from the shed where this panel had been propped up overnight during renovations.

There was nothing on the other side of it that he needed to get at.

As I was packing up my tools this evening, I caught his brother trying the same trick.

Rural Gods II: The Sex-Change Fairy

The Sex-Change Fairy and her peeps Y-Gor and The Mighty ZedWu

Y-Gor and his sister The Mighty ZedWu determine the biological sex, and sometimes socially-constructed gender, of livestock, governing mammals and poultry, respectively.

If the farmer is raising Thanksgiving turkeys for a customer pool who mostly want giant celebratory tom birds to wow the inlaws, ZedWu will arrange for 80% of the "straight-run" poults she bought to be dainty little hens. Y-Gor will will do the same for the beef producer hoping for steer calves from his cows.

But if the farmer is working to build a dairy herd of goats or cattle, or a productive laying flock of chickens, these gender daemons will bless her with a neverending bounty of male offspring.


The farmer who has pinned his herd improvement hopes on a fine and expensive purebred ram or bull or buck may find that he's gone and bought a gay stud. Y-Gor is nothing if not playful.

ZedWu and Y-Gor always aim for balance. If they have blessed your henhouse with an entire hatch of leghorn roosters, you can be sure that your next litter of production pigs will all be gilts. They are nothing if not fair.

If their efforts fail to to impose this balance, the Sex-Change Fairy will step in. Her powers are mostly limited to rabbits (as well as pet rodents) and all poultry.

Save the four does from a litter of meat rabbits, make hassenpfeffer of the bucks, and one month later you are sure to find three of the "does" fighting amongst themselves, trying to bite one another in the ... testicles? Where the hell did those come from? The fourth bunny will be underaged-pregnant by one or all of her new brothers.

Noticing that your hens are looking bedraggled and put-upon, you eat or sell most of your date-raping roosters, drakes, and toms.

Look into the poultry yard a week later. When did that hen turkey start strutti ... is that a beard? Goddammit. Did that pullet just crow? What the ...


When the Sex-Change Fairy does not work her enchantment on the gonads (and combs, hackle-feathers, beards, spurs and attitudes) of your flock, she enlists the help of her corporeal minions, mobilizing the raccoons, owls, and Jack Russell terriers of the world to slaughter only female poultry, preferably those that are sitting on nests.

Being the second in a series of revelations concerning the powerful deities who govern rural life. Iconography by the inimitable Kelly Bahmer-Brouse.

Eclipse

I had thought that I'd be posting amateur photographs of the solstice eclipse yesterday.

Skies were winter-clarified and bright, and the news was abuzz about the blood-red moon that we could expect. I researched photography sites for hints on using my modest digital camera, got out the tripod, and played with the controls. Had some normally verboten dinnertime caffeine, and stayed up.

At midnight the moon burned cold and high, sharp-edged and brilliant. The landscape glowed back. I could read by the light.

By two, the shroud of clouds was so thick that I could not find the moon at all -- premature eclipsulation.

Sunday night I'd been possessed by the urgent thought that it was time for the last of the excess cockerels to convert -- convert from hen-harassing freeloading loud-mouthed date-rapists into coq a vin and mole. I'd caged them up then, and spent Monday afternoon killing, plucking, and butchering them. I am prone to procrastinate those chores that require me to kill someone, and this task goes faster if PC is here to help, so this positive urgency was curious. It just seemed as if it needed to get done now.

Much like the wood-splitting that calls me out back nearly every day while the light fades. As the stacked cordwood piles up, I feel a little less nervous urgency in my bowels.

I was not born a medieval peasant or stone-age pastoralist; winter has not meant especial hunger and risk for me. But somewhere in the last 10,000 years of re-twisting DNA, there must be a gene that, triggered in the proper context, tells me: Cold out, meat will keep, you can't afford to feed that guy all winter, now is the time.

So at Yule we celebrate with fire and flesh.

Barn chores kept me busy yesterday, and it was coming on 6:30 when I remembered the bowl of rooster heads and innards chilling on the porch.

The dogs get the necks, gizzards, feet, hearts, lungs, enormous testicles, and livers. But the heads and guts are the portion of the other canids, the family of red fox who den in the hollow log at the far east end of our south pasture.

The fox stump is a perhaps fifty feet from their favorite lookout spot. Because generations of lazy farmers have nailed their fence wire to the trunks of trees, any tree that expires near the pasture edges must be cut at least chest-high, leaving a tall stump. The fox stump is too tall for my dogs to steal the foxes' tithe. As the tree's formerly living layers rot away, nails and staples and bits of wire appear on the pasture-facing side, as if exposed by rain on stone.

I've been bringing the slaughter remnants and the occasional naturally-expired bird to the stump since we got our poultry. I've never lost a bird to a fox. It's a contract enforced by Moe's diligent patrols and the block walls of the barn. But still, the foxes have been good neighbors. Polite. Deferential. Their tracks in the snow take a hard turn when they encounter the tracks that record Moe's perimeter -- the canids have an ongoing and subtle conversation, though I doubt they have often seen one another. For a dog or fox, scent is thought and intention distilled in time. Moe's perimeter, and Rosie and Cole's profane late-night call-and-response sessions, are no doubt what keeps the local coyotes at arm's length -- and whatever pushes the coyotes away is good for the foxes.

So the dogs and I walked out to the end of the pasture and left an offering feast on the fox stump at just about the moment of the solstice. We had the moon and sky back; I had not even brought a headlamp, whose beam shuts out the world. As we neared the house and barn, warm lights making embers of each window, I felt the great horned owl.

One never hears an owl, unless the owl intends.

I turned just as she landed on the top of the big hemlock that guards the outside curve of the lane. The dogs felt her too; they rushed the tree -- but silently -- and must have been circling its trunk under the dark cave of its branches.

The owl said nothing, just made a silhouette. I watched her for several minutes. But goats were yelling in their stalls about dinner.

When I came out of the barn ten minutes later, she had silently dissolved.

In the small hours this morning, Rosie stood at the bedroom window and growled profane threats under her breath.

This happens from time to time; usually I can make out nothing in the darkness. I believe her, but in winter, with all our creatures locked in after dark, the night belongs to the wild things.

This time, moon blazing once again and snowy world glowing, I could see the owl, posted on top of a defunct utility pole a hundred feet from the front door. She was scanning the garden, hayfield, and stone retaining wall for prospects of her own Yule meat feast.

Uncommon brightness illuminated the solitary life of a night creature on this, the darkest day of the year.

Food/Feed Part One: Nitrogen is Nitrogen

The students at Sheep School (aka classes offered in conjunction with the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival) were a mixed lot: a few experienced small commercial stockmen and women, hobby farmers, hand-spinners, pet herders, stockdog handlers, and farmers new to sheep. And me, the stock farmer wannabe; closing on our farm was still a week away.

The instructor for our integrated pest management class was a bit ADHD and very widely knowledgeable, so the course strayed a bit from the closely-defined curriculum. At times, quite a bit. We spent a good deal of time discussing general nutrition. How to balance a ration, how much protein was necessary, working with the feed mill for custom mixes, computing supplements for animals on pasture. And making use of "waste." One student fed bakery discards to his flock. Another was exploring a deal with the produce manager of a supermarket. Good economy if one could ensure that the animals got proper nourishment, if their "ration" was "balanced" overall.

Then the skeptical question, from one of the more experienced students: What about this thing he had read about, feeding poultry litter to sheep?

Whaaa?

For those of you whose brains are reflexively vomiting back what you just read (and good for those brains, that is the right reflex), I'm afraid, yes, he was referring to feeding chicken shit, feathers, and soiled sawdust (corncobs, peanut hulls, shredded paper, whatever) to sheep. To animals that evolved to eat God's grass. To animals that are eaten by humans. Whose milk is consumed by humans.

Most of us in the class had to have this clarified and explained too. Not because we were thick.

It's worse than just that, though. What is the source of "poultry litter" to be added to the silage for sheep, goats, cattle? Not the smallholder's wholesome happy henhouse, but, of course, the industrial broiler factories, "vertically integrated" McNugget mechanisms where hundreds of thousands of freakish hybrid birds are crammed together for the short duration of their lives, scarfing down pellets laced with subclinical antibiotics, growing at an astonishing rate, and shitting prodigiously.

The instructor's official response came straight from the playbook of industrial agribusiness: Well, nitrogen is nitrogen.

Translation, long form: As long as an animal receives known chemical nutrients in the right amounts and relative proportions, as determined by science, it doesn't matter what foods it eats.

"Food" is presented as a quaint vehicle for delivering chemical nutrients. No, not "food." "Feed." If livestock eat it, it is not even dignified as "food."

A joke: April Fool's broadcast of NPR's All Things Considered in the early 90's. The well-crafted spoof spotlights the growing practice among organic gardeners of skipping the middleman and eating delicious, rich, nutritious finished compost.

Okay, cute. Funny part was listener reaction the next day. There were the clueless who never got it, and earnestly wrote and called in to solemnly warn about the dangers of pathogens in compost. And the pinched and humorless, who upbraided the wicked reporters for their irresponsibility, invoking the legions of listeners led astray, and out to the corner of the garden with a spoon.

Little did they know.

Sitting in that tent in Maryland, I remembered the previous year's pet food recalls. Are nutrients packaged and marketed for dogs and cats "food" or "feed?" On the bag it says "food." The pet-owning consumer likes to think of it as food, no scare quotes. The industry periodically drops into referring to it as feed, same as the pellets and crumbles and grain mixes sold for poultry, cattle, horses.

Dog and cat food, or feed, was systematically killing beloved pets because, somewhere at a factory in China, someone had discovered that a cheap industrial plastic could be added to agricultural commodities to make them appear to be higher in protein. It was cheaper to add waste plastic (impure "melamine scrap") to grain products so that when these products were tested for "crude protein," they would appear to be more valuable than they were.

What does the simple, cheap "crude protein" test detect? Not protein, but nitrogen -- an element that is lacking in lipids and carbohydrates, but abundantly present in the amino acids that form proteins.

Logical enough. If nitrogen is part of a food, it is tied up in the protein. Measure nitrogen, you measure protein. Why would one expect anything else?

But that's not quite true of "feed." Ruminant animals -- cows, sheep, goats, camels, deer, etc. -- can, to some extent, utilize free nitrogen as nourishment. The microbial symbionts in their reticulorumens (first two "stomachs") are able to convert non-amino acid nitrogen to both microbial amino acids and -- if an excess is present --ammonia, used as an energy source. The animal does not digest this free nitrogen (as well as undigestible cellulose) itself -- the animal digests the microbes that have eaten these uneatable feeds. And their poop.

Feedlots have been adding urea to the already unnatural rations of cattle for decades. Since the feedlot steer is not meant to live to adulthood, what does it matter that his kidneys are being destroyed? The captive-bolt will beat fatal organ breakdown by a few months. There isn't even the conceit of optimizing steer nutrition for health and well-being. Cheapest way per pound to cover bone with meat over the course of the next few months.

Monogastric animals -- dogs, cats, chickens, horses, almost everyone, including us -- don't carry around a belly-load of symbionts ready to digest these particular undigestibles for us. Nitrogen that isn't chained into an amino acid is useless to our innards.

So that's the basic biochemistry -- the reason the ag-school expert was willing to pronounce that "nitrogen is nitrogen," even when faced with a practice that, from her paralanguage, evoked the same disgust in her as it did in the rest of us. Official line: Industrial chicken-shit and prime alfalfa -- same diff to a sheep's symbionts. Do the math. Use what's cheap.

A notion that has grown rather more legs than are justified by sciences and disciplines beyond the basic biochemistry involved in a nutrient analysis.

Does it make sense from the standpoint of evolutionary biology?

Well, there are animals that consume the feces of other animals for nourishment. They are called scavengers. If you've kept an aquarium, you've likely employed catfish or snails in this capacity. Sheep are not among them. Sheep have evolved to to eat grass.

The will to ignore the observed facts of biology comes from the conceit that, because we understand more about the chemistry of nutrition today than we did a hundred years ago, we know everything about it.

Does it compute from a public health perspective?

Factory broilers consume sub-clinical doses of antibiotics from the day they hatch to the day before they are slaughtered.

Does your lamb chop need to consume megadoses of not only the antibiotic residue in the chicken shit, but the mutant coliform bacteria themselves?

Does it pass the sniff test of food safety?

The melamine in US infant formula wasn't dumped into the milk powder from a vat. It was concentrated in the kidneys of cows fed contaminated "feed."

The contention that "nitrogen is nitrogen" -- could that be the underlying industriagra conceit that gave us Mad Cow/scrapie/Creuzfeldt-Jacob? That poisoned dogs and cats who were eating a "balanced" and "scientific" ration? That has destroyed the kidneys of uncounted Chinese infants? That has American cows' milk testing positive for the same a fossil-fuel-based contamination that "couldn't happen here?"

Has this conceit clambered up the food chain to become "fat is fat" -- which has given us industrially-altered trans-fats and their attendant heart disease -- or that "sugar is sugar" -- whereby chemically mutated high-fructose corn syrup replaces cane sugar?


Are eaters -- and feeders of eaters -- falling prey to a sad shadow of physics envy -- and regarding as "sciencey" the neatly quantified pronouncements of industrial nutrient peddlers? I see an agribusiness creep -- from livestock "feed" through pet "feed/food" to ConAgra's interpretation of "food" for humans

The goal of the feed seller is to get away with the maximum markup between raw material cost and the feed bag on the shelf at Agway. Some can spin chicken shit into gold.

The goal of the commodity farmer is to get the maximum production for the least cost. A broiler chicken's lifespan is eight weeks; a lamb's, eight months; a steer's, eighteen months. No one is worrying about cancer or blindness or kidney failure striking down Ferdinand in middle age.

Pet owners were surprised in 2007, when we found out that the feed sellers did not ethically distinguish between beloved pets and working dogs and future lamb chops.

Happy Thanksgiving

Dad...?

Twitterpated

What? Walt Disney got the biology of critters wrong? Say it ain't so!

Spring is not the season of twitterpated. At least it isn't around here.

As the plant world and the invertebrates* die or tuck themselves in for the year in the forest and farm, the local tetrapods are getting busy. Late fall is the time for making babies. When I say you can smell the sex on the air, I'm not being hyperbolic or metaphorical. I'm hoping the wind doesn't shift from the goat pasture towards the house.

Rosie is in season, which makes her pushier, snarkier, cuddlier, and generally underfoot. She harasses the eunuchs and has her way with them. Neither Moe nor Cole got the memo about their testes, so they are happy to oblige. It's hazardous to turn a corner suddenly around here -- always a little disconcerting to walk in on a couple of dogs in flagrante delicto.

I've had bitches who became uncharacteristically stupid or wacky when they came into season, and were unreliable in their work. Pip and Rosie just add energy and intensity to their already driven performances. Rose has done a bang-up job on her last two trails; her estrus is a good time to throw extra distractions and new challenges her way. Canine sublimation?

Next estrus is put up or shut up time; we'll be deciding soon whether she will be a mother.

The deer rut means that I see more of them, as caution takes a back seat to libido. Six paraded through the south pasture at dusk; I think it was five does and a buck, but there may have been two bucks. Their rubs are particularly shreddy this year.

Our new rabbit herd got off to a slow start. The first doe that my original buck bred, back in September, did not "take," though she seemed to have. It's likely that his swimmers' soup was overcooked by the summer heat. The second doe had a litter of six, around the same time that the buck sadly succumbed to (what turned out to be) a urinary blockage. I got a new unrelated young buck from a different breeder, and have just integrated him and a new doe in the colony. Within two minutes of being released, New Guy had scent marked ten places in the stall, bred one of the younger does, and gotten his ass kicked by the dominant doe. With five does in the colony, I expect an early winter population explosion.

Gollum the barn cat, fearsome slayer of mice, voles, rats and chipmunks, has taken to sleeping amongst the rabbits. No shit. He ignores the babies, which are hardly larger than a large rat, and I've spotted him nuzzling with more than one of the does. Gollum said buh-bye to his little friends at a tender age, so I don't think he's joined in any Samhain barncat orgies, but he did get into a fight recently, which for a cat is much the same thing. His face wounds healed up fine, and he kept claiming that I shoulda seen the other guy. His sister does not corroborate his account, however.


It's not just dogs who can† discriminate between "ours" and "other" without explicit instruction and control their predatory impulses accordingly.

Meanwhile, I have to remind myself that our baby chicks and turkey poults were also freaking adorable, and grew up to be delicious.

Speaking of bucks, and urine.


Jefferson the he-goat is visiting from Rachel and Stan's farm.

He's got a lovely calm temperament. Pity about his personal habits. I do everything I can not to touch him. There's burdock in his beard and on his rump, and he's just going to have to cope, because there is no way I'm combing him out. Also, I know just how far backwards he can reach; he could groom that burdock out if it was a priority for him.

His job here is to settle Patsy and Edina. Lovely term that. Knock them up.** We'll know in a couple of weeks whether he's succeeded.

He courts the ladies by applying Capraxxe body spray, waggling his tongue, blubbering, flaunting his flehmen, and -- well, now I know what inspired the odd-looking phalli on all those vases depicting Bacchanals.



The wethers swear that he's been hanging around the playground wearing a trenchcoat and talking about a lost puppy. I'm monitoring the situation.

Jefferson gave me some crap about the gate his third morning here. Cole, who is deathly afraid of the electric fence around the goat pasture and never willingly approaches it, came flying off the back porch, through the gate, and straight at the he-goat's nose. Cole doesn't think much of visiting he-goat, and he interpreted a little stroppiness as a genuine threat. And now I know what he does when he thinks I'm threatened.

Good to know.

Finally, a weirdly untimely ray of hope in our disappointing heritage turkey breeding season.

Three or four weeks ago I noticed that the Bourbon red hen who had not succeeded with a clutch this year was not coming in to roost or running with the flock. But I would sometimes spot her for a few minutes in the morning around the feed trough before she would dematerialize.

Far too late in the year to be setting a nest, but the signs were unmistakable.


I finally found her Tuesday morning, close to the barn and setting a dozen eggs. She'd already pushed out three eggs -- a good sign, actually, indicating that she was paying attention to their viability and keeping the live eggs protected -- and this nest and eggs were clean, unlike her previous nests.

It is now far too cold and snotty for her to set outside, and I lost two shrubbery-setting hens this year to a raccoon, so in she came, whether she wanted to or not. The answer was Not. A twelve-pound bird can be surprisingly strong when she Does Not Want, but in she came with her eggs to a private stall. I candled them Thursday, and found squirming embryos in seven of them. Fingers crossed. It's a ridiculous time to raise turkeys, but I cannot say no to her.


The broody hens work so hard. It breaks my heart when things don't go well for them. Such devotion demands fulfillment. The only thing harder than brooding a clutch is the hero's journey of hatching out of an egg. It's hatch or die, and if anyone takes pity and helps the little warrior, it's likely to kill or cripple him. We mammals know nothing of birth struggle.

Spring may be the time of vegetative abundance and enthusiasm, but as the death and dormancy of Winter looms, the animals flaunt their eternal optimism. Snow all you want, we'll make more.

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* Including the hornets, wasps and bees that make life exciting and possibly brief, and the $#@^$ stink bugs that make it annoying.

** For the dairy-animal uninformed: A goat (or cow) can produce milk for about a year after giving birth (kidding or calving), provided she is nursing offspring and/or milked regularly. To continue to get milk, the farmer must breed her every year. The onset or resumption of lactation is called freshening. She'll lactate just fine while pregnant. It's the usual practice to dry her off a couple of months before she's due again. So I'll stop milking the girls, and wean their 2010 kids, in February in preparation for April kidding.

None of this applies to the "Happy California Cows" of agribusiness fairy tales who calve and freshen, then receive hormone injections to keep them continuously lactating until their udders break down and they become hamburger. (The cows. Come to think, the udders, too, both metaphorically and probably literally.)

† Can. Can. Not necessarily will. And an absence of formal, or even conscious, training does not equate to a guidance vacuum or magical thinking.

Well Enough Alone

I just won't leave it.

For one thing, I need to provide some entertainment for Randy at the feed mill.

For another, I'm cheap.

But mainly, I don't trust conventional wisdom when the "wisdom" comes from a multinational agricorp and the "conventional" is the convention of the compliant customer.

We're talking about a woman who personally salvages whole cow tripes -- innards so vile that the slaughterhouse workers refuse to touch them -- for her dogs. Because they are that good for them.

When I got my first chickens I bought commercial chicken feed at Tractor Supply or Agway, in fifty pound sacks. The food is in pellet or crumbled pellet form, its constituent ingredients unrecognizable. It is "complete and balanced."

You can guess how long that lasted.

When we bought our first flock of meat chickens, our friends Rachel and Stan encouraged me to have feed made up at Zanella's.

Nineteenth-century technology, still going strong at Zanella's and mixing my chicken feed; photographed with a five-year-old cell phone camera that is already obsolete.

This is the sort of thing I do on principle -- buying from a local small business that sources most of its supplies from local small farmers. It was also significantly cheaper. Our local, local mill, Knauf's in Harmony, a few miles away, has been shuttered and for sale since before we moved here. I remember buying a few dog supplies and garden things there years back, when we lived in the sprawlburb to the south. They were phoning it in then. I wish someone would buy the mill and do something with it. John Zanella says the mill equipment is probably not salvageable; I still think the building would make a keen brewpub. It's a great location, but parking would be an issue.

Randy, the animal-feed guy at Zanella's, ground up the standard corn/soy mash for broiler chickens, and I drove off with a half-ton on the trailer. Did the same this year, and while I was kvetching about the high cost of layer pellets, Randy pointed out that the broiler mash could also feed the hens, as long as they were getting oyster shell.

Derrrr ....

But later this summer I started reading and talking to people and thinking (always a mistake), and then buying sacks of whole grains and experimenting.

How locally can a chicken eat?

What are the optimum protein, calcium, fat contents?

Are the whole grains better for the birds than pulverized?

How can I keep egg quality and hen health up during the winter, when pasture is snow-covered or just dead?

I goosed out a recipe that we'll try:

cracked roasted soybeans
rolled corn
wheat
oats
milo
(All the above grains are local)
sunflower seeds
soybean oil
dicalcium phosphate
brewer's yeast
mineral pre-mix

ad lib (in separate hoppers):
kelp meal
oyster shell

add in winter:
alfalfa meal (as rabbit pellets)

Soybeans and corn need to be cracked for the chickens; the other grains are served whole

Pasture all year when it isn't encased in snow, but the food value of the pasture starts dropping off to negligible levels around now (the psychological value is indisputable -- just ask the chooks who were snowed in for much of last winter).

Scraps from wherever I can get them -- our kitchen, friends. I'm going to try to work with some local restaurants on recycling scraps this winter. I hate waste even more than I'm cheap. Chickens eat anything. The commercial diet is deficient in animal protein and fresh green stuff, and they can't make that up on pasture in the winter. I'm interested to see how much difference the rabbit pellets might make.

At the moment, store brand layer pellets (think chicken kibble) are $12.89 per 50# bag at Tractor Supply, my closest feed store. 25.8 cents per pound, or $516 a ton. Purina Layena is $13.99 a bag, or $559.60 a ton.

I paid $275 for this latest batch of feed, which came to about 1150 pounds. $20 for rolling and mixing, $255 for ingredients, including the kelp which will also be fed to goats, cats, and dogs. (But not rabbits. It is "not recommended for rabbits." I do not know why this is.) 23.9 cents per pound.

Not the huge savings I got with the off-the shelf formula broiler feed, but the quality is just not comparable to the industrial hen kibble. This is primo chicken feed. My hens, and everyone who eats their eggs, deserve no less.

Since I was planning to add ad lib kelp to the chooks' diet regardless, and I'm not yet sure how much of it will be fed to chickens and how much to my other critters, it's reasonable t0 subtract that $35 and 50#, making the figure 21.8 cents per pound or $436 a ton. Eighty bucks saved looks a lot better than four cents a pound saved. Plus I expect to save a lot by not schlepping into TSC -- or for that matter, Zanella's associated hardware and farm supply store -- and picking up odds & ends that I could probably do without. I make feed runs every week or so when I'm buying bagged, and that adds up just for the gas.

I reuse my woven feed bags from Zanella's, bringing them back to Randy when he rolls and mixes my next batch. Or I forget them and get my chops busted until I threaten to tell blog readers worldwide which key ingredient he forgot to mix in to the last batch of feed. Most bagged feed is in paper bags, which are useful for trash, but one can only use so many. Tractor Supply and Purina are now using some pretty nifty-looking woven poly bags that can be re-used for other things. I've used some of them as shelf backing in the barn, and am experimenting with remaking others into reusable shopping bags for sale. But again, one can use only so many of these.

So far, so good. The poultry have been eating the custom mix for about a month. Egg production is up somewhat (it normally drops off in the fall, and some birds are still moulting) and shells seem stronger.

Charter of Freewarren

A Note for Naysayers

Nobody, even the most avid animal-rights fanatics, needs to worry about depriving caged rabbits of their liberty. Those born in confinement don't know what liberty is; they are not deprived of anything.

Also, you will note I advise housing rabbits only in wire hutches. If you house them this way you and the rabbits will do just fine. But if you let a rabbit out, you are asking for trouble ... That goes for pet rabbits, too. The wire hutch is ideal. Keep them there, except perhaps to hold and pet them.

-- Bob Bennet, Storey's Guide to Raising Rabbits

We are now wabbit wanchers.

I'd been looking into this for some time. We raise the pastured meat chickens in the summer and fill the freezer, make a little money selling them. We hunt, and a friend is raising pigs, one of which we'll buy a whole or half-interest in. Hair sheep and perhaps a feeder steer are in the works.

In addition, I wanted to explore a fast avenue to fresh meat in the winter and year-round, something that wasn't dependent on freezer storage. And a varied diet is important for us and the dogs, yes? Americans eat way too much chicken and beef.

I am not sure whether we are okay with my devoted-to-pet-rabbit friends. I am respectful of their sensibilities. I hope we can all come to an understanding about animal welfare, and the touchy problem of pet v. livestock within a species.

I've had pet rabbits in the past. The archetypal bunny-in-a-backyard hutch as a child. A house rabbit as an adult. The latter demonstrated the range of a rabbit's social capacities, and the species' need for enrichment. I've also delivered several abandoned bunnies to house rabbit rescue folks, in the days before Pittsburgh shelters accepted them, and acquaintances who found pets dumped in the park would call the crazy animal lady to take this thing out of their bathtub.

I don't care whether it is livestock or pet, solitary living in a backyard hutch is not species appropriate.

What do all animals need? Fresh air, sunlight*, wholesome food and clean water, general hygiene, and the opportunity to move about freely.

What do rabbits need, specifically? The opportunity to dig and chew, social interaction with other rabbits, including the chance to play and groom, hidey-holes, enough space so that they don't feel driven to fight one another.

Bob Bennet can join Frank Perdue, Salmonella Jack DeCoster, this knuckle-dragging gap-toothed hick -- and the rest of the livestock abuse industry -- in kissing my shiny white ass. My rabbits are going to get what they need.

I guess I am rather broad in my definition of "need." Obviously, animals survive, grow, and reproduce without any of those things. Cattle put on weight in feedlots, hens lay while their feet have grown into the cage like a tree grows into a fence, and rabbits breed like bunnies while their hocks rub raw on wire floors. A bitch in a puppymill pumps out little lurve-objects for cuteness consumers while eating rancid food, drinking filthy water, living in solitary confinement in a cramped cage, never seeing the sun or breathing fresh air, covered in shit and shot through with parasites. Biologically speaking, hope springs eternal. A plant that is barely hanging on -- a tomato languishing in a nursery six-pack, unplanted, or a weed in a sidewalk crack -- puts everything it's got into producing a few sickly fruit and seeds. Things could get better for my descendants, so I better make sure I have some toot sweet.

99% of rabbit breeders keep their livestock / petstock in individual wire-bottomed cages. It's orderly, takes little room, easier to keep somewhat clean, and easier to control breeding. The good breeders -- the ones who care about animal welfare -- use larger cages, provide resting boards, give the does roommates when they can get along (bucks are either fighting or fucking in a cage situation), make sure the cages are high enough that the rabbits can stretch out vertically, meerkat-like, which is something rabbits really like to do.

I got my four foundation rabbits from a breeder who has a locally excellent reputation. Her cages were large, and all the animals are in good condition.

They are Californians, one of the two most common meat breeds. I asked for animals that had excellent production conformation, without regard to fancy points such as "correct" coloration. I got a buck and three does that are of good production quality and unrelated. (I also considered cross-breeding to increase hybrid vigor, and will probably do this when I start breeding this buck's daughters -- buy a New Zealand buck to breed to them.) I do like the Californians, though, because their dark points are just variable enough that I can tell individuals apart by markings, without checking ear tattoos. This will become important, as you'll see.

I'd read about colony-raising of rabbits, and am going to try it.

The Brandywine freewarren. The walls are either block or wire-covered wood. The floor is concrete covered with rubber stall mat and thickly bedded with sawdust topped with straw. There is a high window for daylight, which doesn't open, but I'll be replacing it with one that does. It took the rabbits about five days to really start digging; they now have a nice labyrinth around the bales. It took them perhaps three days to recognize fresh greens and fruit as food, and a week or so to become comfortable with the space and climb the bales a little. I haven't seen anyone binky yet, but that doesn't mean they aren't doing it when I'm not there.

Although rabbits come in quite a few breeds, and artificial selection for functional traits and fancy points has obviously worked many changes on them, I don't consider them a truly domestic animal. Demi-domesticated, like white mice, ferrets, budgerigars, and, in a rather different way, my knuckleheaded African guinea fowl. They've lived among humans for too short a time, and too peripherally for most of it. They can't be managed in flocks or herds the way chickens, goats, cattle, etc. can.

Romans used to keep colonies in leprosaria leporaria† -- stone-walled gardens or pits from which the rabbits could not tunnel -- but did not control breeding. The leporaria kept the rabbits convenient for the catching, and provided some protection from predators. They were something like a fenced Texas game-ranch set up for canned hunts, but without the repulsive conceit of "sport."**

Rabbits became "domesticated" some time in the Middle Ages. When Pope Gregory I designated laurices as fish for the purposes of Lent and other fast days, monks and others were motivated to propagate rabbits under closer husbandry.

A laurice is a fetal or newborn rabbit, eaten guts and all. A "delicacy."

Yeah, I know. Moving along ...

In early medieval England, rabbits were introduced from the Continent and managed in open colonies established by landlords who purchased charters of free-warren from the king. The charter gave the holder the right to manage and kill rabbits, hares, pheasants and partridge in specified game preserves -- warrens. Warreners were hired to protect the colonies, create artificial earths for the rabbits, and catch them (usually with ferrets and nets) for the table or sale. It took hundreds of years of protection under extensive husbandry for the Iberian rabbits to adapt well enough to the British climate and naturalize. At the same time, warreners in some places practiced some selection for fur color in their colonies, presumably by culling the common-colored animals and preserving the eye-catching sports.

I have not been able to come up with a word in English that describes animals (or plants) occupying and evolving in this limbo between managed wild game and domestic livestock. Commensal is not right. Yet it must have been a stage in the domestication of many species, though it would look different depending on the ethology of the species and the point in technological and cultural history at which it happened. No haughty monarch was presuming to grant or deny the right of freewarren when the chickens came home to roost and the sheep joined the human fold.

Neither will the modern efficiency experts who see sentient creatures as units of meatwidget production dictate the "right" way for my stock -- livestock -- to live.
____________

* Unless one is, say, a naked mole rat.
† I am not certain of this word. The OED does not verify it, but then, it's not English. My student's Latin dictionary doesn't have it, but then, it's not the O.L.D. The term later was applied to leper colonies. An erudite reader provides the correct word, see comments!
** The Romans reserved that fiction for the arena.