Henpecked? Ouch (Windsor Dairy Pt. 2)

Last weekend I mentioned that we went to check out the raw milk Windsor Dairy. I didn't go into much depth because there was so much to talk about, I had to control myself and ration it out. This installment? CHICKENS!!!

Why am I devoting yet another blog post to chickens? (see my previous series on free range chickens) I'll just come out and say it ... because they are really weird.

Ok, as I've confessed, I'm a hard-core offspring of suburbia. I have seen maybe a handful of chickens in my life. I've eaten a lot but haven't actually seen them in their feathers.

Windsor Dairy has a few thousand chickens, most of which are wandering around. Around the parking lot, around the road, around my car, chasing my baby, chasing the dog, being chased by the dog. You get the idea, they were everywhere.

The dairy only just started raising chickens recently. They were setting themselves up for raising a much smaller number of two breeds, one egg-laying hen breed and one breed of roasters, when another organic farm turned down an order of 1600 hen chicks. They decided to accept the chicks, leaving them with a serious housing problem.

Ultimately, all of the chickens will be not just free-range but pastured. They will live in portable chicken coops, currently being built, which will be rotated onto pastures recently grazed by cows so that they can clean the field of bugs (attracted by the cow manure) and fertilize the field by scratching the cow and their own manure into the ground. Some time later, the fertilized soil will be covered in new grass, ready for more hungry cows.

Not only will the chickens be providing free labor in the fields, but their eggs and meat will be rich and delicious because their current diet of organic feed will be supplemented heavily by grass and live bugs.

But the chickens aren't quite on the road yet because they need some free-range education.

Apparently, chickens don't automatically know that they need to go back into their coops at night (and if they don't, they're chances of survival are not good). Even chickens in pens have trouble finding their way back at first.

So how are they trained? Initially, they are raised to a certain size in a closed, heated coop. After a little while, they're released into a pen. Later they're released into a larger enclosure, and finally released out onto the farm. The dairy hasn't tried actually moving the coops from field to field yet, but I have a feeling the chickens might be running around like chickens with their heads ... well, you know.

When we saw them, the chickens were in various stages of training, some still inside, some in pens, and many more than I can count living out of a trailer and having the run of the whole farm. Not a bad life.

All of this doesn't explain why I think they're weird. First, there are just so many of them, everywhere, crowding, strutting, squeezing into small spaces. Check out the picture up top of them pushing each other in and out of the trailer. These were the completely free chickens ... they were doing this by choice!

And the way they carry themselves. They're cocky (!), completely oblivious to the much larger size of the people, goats, and cows that they seem to love to annoy.

And finally... I had no idea what the term henpecked meant. According to Webster, it means "to subject (one's husband) to persistent nagging and domination," but I have now seen with my own eyes that it literally means getting pecked by a hen. I would have thought that the life of a rooster in a hen house would be great, but not so. A rooster gets pecked and pecked and pecked, not just by one hen, but by as many as can crowd in close to him. Perhaps the attention is nice, but is it worth the pain?

The Chicken Came First (Eggs Part 2)

Back by popular demand, for all serious insomnia sufferers, the chicken. Don't worry, the egg post will come soon, but first I need to finish talking about how chickens are treated.

Last time I discussed the living arrangements of chickens. But what do they eat? What should they eat?

As far as I can tell, the answer is anything, including dirt, actually. Chickens are omnivores and dirtivores.

First, the pastured view. According to a website devoted to raising chickens traditionally, an ideal diet for a chickens consists of:

• Grass, up to 30% of calories if given sufficient space
• Protein - bugs in summer, but need supplements in winter (soybeans, fish - can chickens fish?)
  
• Grains - ideally a mixture of fresh grains, not just corn
• Lots of water

I'm a little confused by this website - it seems to be passionately devoted to chicken feed, but also sells traction pads for getting your car unstuck from mud or snow. Weird. I did look a few other places that seemed to have similar information, but this website is incredibly comprehensive on the topic of natural chicken feed.

Apparently most people also supplement chickens' diet with commercial feed or kitchen scraps, ideally greens, or grain, or just about anything edible from what I can tell, as it is hard for a chicken to get enough calories from foraging, especially during winter.

Can you believe this? Chickens that aren't free range need to be given grit or sand. Since chicken don't have teeth, they need something gritty to grind their food.

According to an article on a website called Mother Earth News (Have I been brainwashed yet?), one study found significant nutritional improvements in the eggs of pastured chickens when compared to USDA nutrient data for commercial eggs:

• 1/3 less cholesterol
• 1/4 less saturated fat
• 2/3 more vitamin A
• 2 times more omega-3 fatty acids
• 3 times more vitamin E
• 7 times more beta carotene
  

I'm starting to see in many places a similar theme regarding omega-3 fatty acids, which is this...

Your body needs a balance of omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids (I think). The omega-3 fatty acids play an important role in many areas, including healthy heart and brain function and reduced risk of cancer. Omega-3s come from various sources, fish, nuts, etc, but most abundantly greens, such as grass and algae. Animals, like cattle and fish, that eat grass or algae have a much higher proportion of omega-3 fatty acids than do animals fed on grains, which are a source of omega-6 acids only.¹

So what about the other point of view? What do chickens in large industrial operations eat? In other words, what exactly is in commercial chicken feed?

The only thing I could find was a few ingredient lists taken from commercial feed on our trusty Traction Pad website. On the websites for these particular feeds, I wasn't able to find ingredient lists. According to Traction Pad:

FeatherCrest Brand contains many of the ingredients already discussed, grains, etc, but it also contains a lot of strange sounding ones. I assume that most of these are vitamin and mineral supplements. One ingredient which is self-explanatory is poultry fat. That seems strange to me - I know chickens are omnivores, but I don't think they are cannibals by nature.

To summarize all of this random information, it seems to me that there is no definitive answer - chickens will eat just about anything. A free-range chicken will ideally get plenty of access to grass and bugs, but will probably not be harmed by some supplemental grain, veggie and meat scraps. It doesn't sound to me as if there is such a thing as 100% grass/bug fed eggs as most chickens need a little more, so I shouldn't be suspicious if I hear that a free-range hen is getting a little corn (as opposed to a free range cow).

Commercial chicken feed seems to be a bit mysterious, but what you can probably assume is that it isn't as diverse as a diet consisting of complex, natural ingredients such as bugs and grass, and therefore is probably not giving a chicken everything it needs to be in top shape, especially omega-3s. Plus, there may be any number of bad things in chicken feed as well, like chicken fat.

After all of this investigation on habitat and diet, do I really know what I want in a chicken?

MWF seeks FR hen, or maybe 2 - likes to roam and peck. Eats bugs and grass, but a little corn is OK too. Must get out and exercise, enjoy the fresh air and blue sky. Must be in a committed relationship to a caring farmer, not interested in living together, just want you for your eggs.

^{1 http://www.eatwild.com/healthbenefits.htm}

The Chicken Came First (Eggs Part I)

The next food I've decided to try to convert to eating "real" is the egg. Because I don't eat a lot of meat, I do eat a lot of eggs, and I love them. In this, the first of a series on finding and eating completely natural eggs, I'm attempting to discover how to grow an egg the way nature intended, or more specifically, what does a chicken eat and how should it live? So in order to find out how to eat a good egg, you have to start with the chicken.

The first question I wanted to answer is how a chicken would ideally live. I started by reviewing a number of sites from small farmers and owners of backyard flocks. From this I gathered that healthy, productive hens need:

• Shelter - According to one small farmer in Vermont, a small flock needs 4 square feet of shelter per bird.
• Heat - if the coop isn't heated during the winter. Contrary to my horrific images of crowded cages, the chickens actually do need to be crowded into a small enough space in winter to keep warm. This farmer said that a minimum of 10 seemed to work well for them.
• Perches
• Roosters - "If you don't have a rooster, the hens will lay eggs, but one hen will stop laying and starting acting like one." What do the big producers do with that hen??
• Outdoor space, and a lot of it. Hens will quickly turn even a large yard to dirt. Their natural diet includes a large quantity of fresh grass, so they need to be able to roam freely in order to graze the amount they need.

The space issue sounds like it would make raising hens in large numbers difficult. So, what's the alternative?

One alternative is what I'll call PC hens (politically correct hens!). They make us all feel good because we pay a few bucks more, they have nice, humane sounding phrases and pictures of happy chickens on top (can chickens smile?), and you buy them at Whole Foods or similar patchouli smelling natural food grocers.

There are two commonly used terms for eggs laid by PC hens: free-range or free-roaming and cage-free. I don't know if there are any universal standards, but I found some interesting information from an organization called Humane Farm Animal Care that certifies producers as humane in their treatment of animals. They set standards for what can be called cage free and what can be called free roaming. Cage free live in a barn, whereas free roaming are in a barn with strictly specified, easy access to the outdoors. They do not certify caged hen producers.

You can browse their exact specifications for humane treatment (surprisingly interesting reading), which includes things like:

• They allow minimal beak trimming, but not de-beaking, in order to avoid "heavy feather pecking and cannibalism among laying hen flocks, which can occur in flocks of any size and any production system." It is more common in cage-free systems with large flocks. I wonder if this is the social structure that roosters help provide. I didn't read anything about pecking or cannibalism on any of the small farm sites.
• "All hens must have sufficient freedom of movement to be able, without difficulty, to stand normally, turn around, and stretch their wings; they must also have an environment that supports natural behaviors such as dustbathing. All birds must have sufficient space (including perches) to be able to perch or sit quietly without repeated disturbance."

Ok, so caging chickens is obviously incredibly cruel. Is it?

I found some interesting information from a producer called Sauder Eggs, which is a member of a group called the United Egg Producers. In this paper, the United Egg Producers Scientific Advisory Committee does a comparison of caged versus cage-free systems. The main benefits of cages seem to be

• Protection from predators
• Reduces pecking and cannibalism
• Easier monitoring for health
• Protects them from weather extremes
• Increases efficiency and production

Here is an interesting video from Sauder Eggs showing their production. I wouldn't say the hens look miserable, at least they weren't moaning and crying. How do you tell?

So, what to conclude from this investigation...

I guess my opinion is that hens don't want to be in cages. I don't know if it is a miserable existence for them, but I have to assume it isn't a joyous one, and if I'm eating the fruit of their loins, I'd like them to have a little joy in life, to experience fresh air, blue sky and other things that make life worthwhile.

It does sound like raising hens "real" is not easy on a large scale (rotating them through different pastures so that they have a constant source of fresh grass or giving them a ton of land). For me to have real eggs, I will have to go out of my way to seek them from a small producer because I don't think it is possible to raise truly free range hens on a large scale, although it's nice to know that there are some large producers out there that are adhering to a humane standard (more on one of these producers later in this series).

So that gives me an understanding of my options for choosing eggs by hen lifestyle. What about their diet? Stay tuned for part II! (OK, I said this entry would cover both habitat and diet, but I have to get to work tomorrow!)