The Wisdom of the Radish (9 page)

So marketing was my first line of argument. Then there was the concept of a closed-loop agricultural system: a farm that requires no additional inputs (specifically in the form of fertilizers) in order to maintain productivity from year to year. This sustainable ideal is a particularly difficult thing to achieve because every farm, with every harvest, exports nitrogen, carbon, phosphorus, potassium, and calcium. Drawn from the soil, contained in beet bulbs, chard leaves, broccoli heads, and green beans, these essential elements are
destined for customers' bellies. And what doesn't go into bone, muscle, and nervous system function ends up in the john, not back on the field.
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So how does a farmer ensure continued productivity of his soil? Although nitrogen may be replenished with the help of legumes—which snatch nitrogen from the air and deposit it into the soil through a process known as nitrogen fixation—the other elements necessary for plant growth are trickier.

Which is where chickens come in.

Foraging poultry can help narrow the gap, if not close the loop entirely. Chickens are extremely effective composters—and they're willing to compost things that wouldn't end up in a typical farm compost pile, thus providing a net influx of nutrients. Chickens are more than happy to forage for weeds, weed seeds, and bugs, turning them into mineral-rich manure. They enjoy dairy products, baked goods, and oily cooked leftovers that would normally spoil the compost pile. They'll also gulp down thinned seedlings and leftover market produce. Although chickens burn off and use up some of the compost's value through digestion, this loss is balanced by the farmer's satisfaction in feeding leftover market produce to a live, hungry creature (one who'll turn it into an egg, no less). The alternative can be disheartening: tossing beautiful bouquets of chard and kale on the ground to wilt, wither, and rot.

There are other benefits to chicken composting: it can provide a nitrogen boost midseason. While nitrogen-fixing legumes are usually planted in winter as a cover crop—and
a backyard compost pile might take a year to fully mature—chickens miraculously crap year-round. For market growers like us, who easily plant eight lettuce successions in a given growing season, it's useful to have a quick, easy soil pick-meup on hand—one that you can add anytime, anywhere.

Another chicken benefit I pointed to: effective pest control. Chickens love bugs. And although they're not particularly discriminating creatures—they're not about to pass up a beneficial insect like a ladybug or mantis for the greater benefit of the farm—they can prevent insect populations from exploding. Besides, our farm (like most small farms that find themselves growing in the middle of a monoculture) possessed an abundance of evil insects and a paucity of good ones. If I couldn't find any ladybugs, but brushed dozens of cucumber beetles off my clothing by day's end, I guessed that the chickens would dine primarily on the green, gooey cucumber beetles.

Finally, I had a bit of a moral and culinary imperative. Emmett and I had both been vegan for a number of years. His primary reason related to health; mine, ethical treatment of animals. But while I had stopped eating eggs, I never stopped craving them. And I had a hunch that perhaps I could find a moral, ethical way to produce eggs that would satisfy both my conscience and my cravings. With a Foggy River flock, we could demonstrate to ourselves and our community the feasibility of local egg production—a model system in which chickens would roam a large yard; eat a healthy diet of organic produce, organic grains, and foraged foods; and consequently produce healthy, tasty eggs. I started salivating just picturing it: guilt-free scrambled eggs and tofu sausage on multigrain toast with Earth Balance faux-butter spread. Yum.

And so I was able to convince my farming partner that Foggy River Farm really, truly needed chickens. We set aside
the challenge of what to do if we were to move to another property, and invited poultry into our current, transient lives.

The number of chickens—thirty—was partly thanks to back-of-the-envelope calculations, and partly thanks to chick shipping requirements. If thirty hens laid eggs six out of seven days, I'd have fifteen dozen eggs to sell at market, netting me ninety dollars per week. That, plus the advertising value for our market stand, would make chickens worth my time. And if we wanted to order day-old chicks from a hatchery we had to order at least twenty-five birds anyway.

For the record, I'm not the only Greenhorn farmer who became enamored with the idea of chickens. It turns out it's a common theme on start-up farms all across the country, from Oregon to Vermont to Missouri.
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It's not just professional farmers who raise broiler chickens and egg layers, either. Even suburbanites and city-dwellers are getting in on the action. Historically speaking, livestock is no stranger to the city. Nineteenth-century New York City streets were home to thousands of pigs that roamed the alleys and avenues eating trash.
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Families commonly kept hogs, milk cows, and chickens for home consumption. In other words, it wasn't unusual for non-farming Americans to have one foot in the world of agriculture. But urban livestock fell out of fashion in the tidy, techno-savvy cities and suburbs of post-war America. Backyard bevies came to be considered filthy, unhealthy, and definitely not in vogue. Personally, my parents drew the line at a dog or cat. Anything bigger belonged on a farm.

But now the pendulum is swinging back, and urban agriculture is all the rage. For reasons that range from eating locally to reducing carbon footprints, more and more Americans are raising their own animal products—from backyard hens in Los Angeles to rooftop honeybees in New York City. In cities
big and small, residents are raising mini-flocks of egg layers. Although some cities have ordinances in place banning backyard chickens, many others allow them. And many of those cities with prohibitive ordinances are eliminating them in the face of populist pressure. Experts put the percentage of U.S. cities that tolerate backyard chickens at about 65 percent.
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Big cities like Los Angeles and New York have no limit on residential chickens, so long as you don't invite any loud-mouthed roosters to join the party. In our region, the Sonoma city council has passed an ordinance allowing sixteen chickens and eight rabbits on any city parcel. Every year, more cities join the ranks of the chicken-friendly, allowing their residents to dabble in small-scale fowl raising. If thousands of urbanites with no farming background can raise chickens, why couldn't I?

Which brings me to the abject terror of picking up thirty tiny, helpless creatures from the U.S. Postal Service. The very same USPS that delivered my brother's eighteenth birthday present drenched in water, missing several key gift components, with an apologetic note at the bottom of the box essentially stating that “shit happens.”

Shit better not have happened to my chicks. At 8:00 a.m., an hour before the post office officially opened (and fifteen minutes after fruitlessly searching the first, incorrect post office), Emmett and I headed around back—the one instruction I'd managed to receive from the postal worker over the phone—to the “authorized personnel only” loading area. After a few minutes of aimless wandering, we found a woman loading up her postal truck.

“Excuse me,” I said, a little embarrassed, “I'm here to pick up chicks.”

It occurred to me later that some women might find this suggestion offensive, but the postal worker seemed to take it in stride.

“One sec, just wait here,” she said, and disappeared.

Within a minute, she returned with another postal worker who bore a peculiar package: a perforated cardboard box that was peeping rather indignantly.

“We got a shipment of crickets this morning, too,” she said. “I was beginning to feel like a zookeeper.”

She handed me the package. Thirty birds plus a box: oddly lightweight, just a few pounds.

“What did you get?” the first postal worker asked.

“Chicks,” I said, grinning widely.

“I know,” she said, smiling kindly at my idiocy. “What kinds?”

I rattled off the breeds: “White Leghorns, Ameraucanas, and Rhode Island Reds.”

“Rhode Island Reds will eat you out of house and home,” the woman informed me. “White Leghorns will lay their hearts out for you. And Ameraucanas will be your friendliest, nicest birds.”

“I take it you're a chicken fancier,” I managed.

“I used to be,” the lady replied. “Now I'm a truck driver.”

Not really knowing how to respond, and hoping this wasn't an omen of things to come, I bid her farewell and turned toward my station wagon.

As I gingerly placed the cheeping package in the trunk, I felt equal parts thrilled and terrified—terrified that not all of them had survived the journey from Fresno, and thrilled to be in charge of thirty baby creatures. Not to mention the inherent exhilaration involved in a bizarre experience. Picking up thirty live animals at a closed post office: definitely weird.

Dropping thirty chicks in the mail with no food or water may seem cruel, but chicks, who have recently absorbed their calorie-rich yolk sac, are well equipped to travel during their first three days of existence. In a natural setting, eggs in a given clutch hatch at different times—and the mother bird doesn't get off the nest to lead her brood to food until all of her young have hatched and dried off. Having an extra supply of calories for those first few days enables the earliest hatchlings to survive until mama's ready to feed them. So although nature wasn't setting out to aid the mail-a-bird business, genetic survival mechanisms nonetheless helped spawn a multimillion dollar hatchery industry.

Still, mailing tiny creatures isn't without peril. The little ones, lacking a hen's warmth, can get too cold and die. Often the immediate cause of death is suffocation—the birds pile together to stay warm, and the weaker ones end up on the bottom. For this reason, most hatcheries either require a
minimum purchase (twenty-five birds for body heat) or charge extra to send chicks in insulated boxes with chemical heating pads. And only a few hatcheries ship year-round—many close up shop for the coldest months.

How could you not fall in love with these guys?

Back at home, Emmett sliced through the packing tape and peeled back the lid. All thirty of the little fluff balls within were walking, huddling together, or tilting back their heads to tell me exactly what they thought about their current accommodations. Judging by the loud cheeps and fluffed feathers, they were unimpressed.

I hoped they'd find their new home more to their liking. Over the past few days, I'd readied a makeshift brooder: a ninety-quart clear plastic tub outfitted with a ventilated lid I'd fashioned out of wood and hardware cloth. The setup was floored with paper towels for the chicks' arrival and spruced up with a plastic waterer and a small galvanized trough full of chick starter (a bulk mixture of grains). A red 100-watt flood lamp rested on the hardware cloth, emitting rosy warmth. All in all, a cozy, habitable place—far more inviting than the chilly cardboard shipping box.

They were ruddy brown, pale yellow, ocelot striped—Emmett and I began to move each impossibly tiny bird from the cardboard box into its new home. As I placed each downy baby in the brooder, I dipped its beak in the water so it would know where to go for a drink. Then I peered at its rear end and released it onto the paper towel floor.

My new flock. Little did I know that, from that moment forward, each hour that passed, each time I refilled the feeder, each problem I had to troubleshoot would create another opportunity for me to fall in love with these brainless, adorable little creatures. Innocent though they were, those thirty
birds would form the gateway drug for a full-fledged poultry addiction—the sort of hit that breaks hearts.

It all started with the pasty butt.

“Don't forget to check her bum,” I reminded Emmett as he transferred a Rhode Island Red chick.

I'd been reading up on chick rearing, which meant I was painfully aware of all the hundreds of things that can go wrong with newly hatched poultry. Top on the list was pasty butt, a condition sometimes caused by the stress of shipping. Excrement could supposedly crust over the bird's vent, preventing it from eliminating waste. This sounds neatly scientific, but what it really means is that a new, anxious chick owner will spend the first seven days constantly inspecting thirty baby bird butts, and wiping as necessary.

Well, not exactly wiping. Since chick butts, unlike human baby butts, are festooned with feathers, extracting excrement
is complicated. In the following few days, I'd employ scissors, dampened towels, warm-water chick bidets (in saucers, no less), and the “fingernail pull”—a technique that I'd eventually become quite good at. None of the books I had read on chick raising had mentioned that chick poop is like glue. On various websites, longtime poultry owners recommended removing the tiny feathers around the vent, which is where the fingernail pull comes in—but pull too hard, and you're likely to rip off tender skin, which causes a problem worse than pasty butt. Basically, the best technique of all is to pray like hell that your chicks don't have pasty butt. (And if they do, to keep reminding yourself that these are the intimate sorts of experiences that form the basis for all strong relationships. A friend in need is a friend indeed.)