Home for Chickens

Good Morning -

I've got another early day today, so this is going to be brief (but while I'm thinking of it and since I know she reads this and I don't know when I'll get to my email to respond - here's a congratulations to my friend in San Antonio for the wonderful family news she sent my way this week).

So - chickens. As you can see from the Virgen, this tile is about chickens.

I need a place to have some chickens. I haven't learned all of the chicken math yet, but know that we currently go through about a dozen eggs a week, which would mean that I'd like enough chickens to produce a dozen eggs a week. I don't know how many that is.

I also don't know if having two chickens is like having 20 chickens - whether or not it's the same amount of work - but if it is, then I'll have more chickens than I need and share the eggs with family and friends.

I boil a little each time I have to buy eggs at the grocery. I know the "cage free" on most of them is bull shit (we've talked about the small door at the far end of the overcrowded hen house), I know that organic is sketchy and expensive, and I know if they say "vegetarian" and "cage-free", it's a big lie because chickens unfettered will eat all manner of bug and worm, which doesn't make them vegetarians.

I know that the eggs sold now - regardless of eco-sucker labeling meant to justify a higher price and ease my consumer guilt - have way more cholesterol than they should because chickens are fed corn, which isn't what they normally eat and which makes for a fatty, fatty egg (and chicken).

There's a whole explanation about the seepage of corn into our lives in Coming Home to Eat, but I don't have time to go through it here - basically, it involves impact after WWII, which led to farmers growing a lot of corn, which led to surplus, which led to feeding corn to cattle and chickens, which isn't what they are intended to eat, which messes with their systems and produces fat-filled foods.

All of this would be solved if I had my own chickens in my backyard. I know there are predators one needs to watch for and I have learning around chicken maintenance, but also believe that if the average 5-year old in a rural area can raise prize chickens, I can keep a few alive in my yard.

Oh, it's time to go. More on chickens later. What I will give to the chickens in return for eggs, is a wonderful, clean, dry, warm home with good nesting materials, safety from predators, and grasses on which to wander and peck their whole day through.

Here's to that. Here's to warm, dry, safe, and clean homes. Here's to grasses on which to wander our days through. Here's to home-raised chickens and the delicious, healthy eggs they make.