Taking On Livestock, Part I
(Page 5 of 8)
March/April 1987
By John Vivian
Still, feed costs do add up. Each hen will need 80 to 100 pounds of layer pellets per year-that'll run about $10. Over her eight-month laying period, she'll produce about 12 dozen eggs. Store-bought eggs would cost about the same as your feed bill. Are farm-fresh eggs, then, worth the bother of tending chickens? They are to me. What's more, you can save money by supplementing up to half that dry feed with every kitchen and garden scrap you have. In fact, if you've got the room, you can train your chickens to free-range for much of the food during the day and come home to the roost at night. One hitch here: You will have to fence the fowl out of your garden plot. [Editor's Note: Vivian's fine handbook on the subject, "Raising Free-Range Chickens, " ran in MOTHER No. 88. J To get more details on beginning chicken raising, read Will Graves's Raising Poultry Successfully ($10.45 postpaid from Williamson, address above). The first new bird book to come out in years, it's an up-to-date beginner's guide.
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What are the drawbacks of keeping chickens? Well, if your country home isn't really as isolated as you'd like, you may need to worry about offending the neighbors. (Honeybees and rabbits are both quieter livestock.) And cleaning the winter's accumulation of droppings is the opposite of homestead happiness. The straw-and-droppings mixture is pried out in heavy slabs that are gray and innocuous on the surface, but piercingly redolent of ammonia underneath. Each digging fork releases a miasma that clears your sinuses real quick!
Pick a day with strong wind (blowing away from the neighbors) to clean your coop. Compost that high nitrogen fertilizer (it can burn young plants if applied directly to the garden), then work it into your plot, and watch the sweet corn shoot for the sky.
Nobody enjoys slaughtering, either. If you want home-raised eating birds, though, you've got to do it. String a bird up by its feet, cut its throat, scald it in hot water, pluck off the steaming feathers, gut it, and throw it in the deep freeze.
We've had laying hens keep at it for five years, but most are culled for Sunday dinner after two or three. (Commercial layers are slaughtered after their first-most productive-year, then recycled into feed for their successors.) You'll want to periodically inspect the vents of your layers; you should be able to place two fingers between the pubic bones of a productive hen. Harvest the nonlayers before they get too old. By the time an aged or ill hen begins to look ragged and dull-eyed, it's scrawny and unappetizing. I just dislocate such a bird's head from its neck with a quick jerk and bury it deep in the corn patch.
To dispose of an entire flock, advertise "Old Hens, $1 " in a country newspaper, and be willing to take half that. Someone on a strict budget will buy them for stew meat.
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