Even when the water has been sitting out in a watering trough or water-er all day long and is the temperature of bath water, as long as they have access to it, livestock will drink it. And it will keep them alive. They might not like it; it might have slime on the bottom. But in 100 degree temperatures, it will keep them alive. The younger they are, the closer to birth they are, the more they need water and lots of it. And the greater the chances that if they don’t or if they don’t have access to it, they will not make it. The higher the temperatures go, the faster they will expire without water and access to it.

This past week, the temperatures up in our area were absolutely mind-blowing. High 90s every single day. The first day was a holiday and although we filled all the animals’ waterers full, we also took off to do ‘our own thing’ for the day, forgetting …that sometimes, things happen. The chicks in one of the pens tipped over the waterer. We did not get back until late in the day. You can guess the result, though we were lucky and only lost a dozen. These were not brand new chicks; these birds were 6 weeks old. But it did not matter. No access to water and within a few hours, overheating. For the rest of the week, our son was at home and every day, he went up a couple of times during the day to check on the animals, make sure they had plenty of water. No more losses.

Water – it’s what animals need. All the damn time.

(photo courtesy of oddobjects)

And well she should be. A sheep with overgrown hooves is a sheep in pain (think you in Jimmy Choos that are two sizes too small). It is also a sheep that very probably has developed disease in the hoof itself, another source of misery for the animal. The outside layer (think the fingernails on your hands) grows no matter what. If a sheep is in dry rocky country (like Rocky Mountain sheep territory), then that horny layer gets worn away and keeps in natural trim. If they are not, then that layer will just keep growing and will curve under and basically trap muck, manure, and goodness knows what else between it and the softer underside (see photo – the part of the hoof in the center is like the undersides of the tips of your fingers only a bit tougher). It becomes very painful for the sheep to walk. A sheep that can’t walk is a sheep that can’t graze. You will even see sheep with overgrown hooves on their knees – and what they are praying for is a shepherd to come along and trim up their hooves!

So, this weekend, because a) I needed something for the blog and b) I’m a real nut about keeping the hooves on sheep checked, the DH and The Boy and I went out, corralled the four lambs we are raising in the shed and checked and trimmed their hooves. As you can see from these photos, these guys are not in bad shape – we probably could have allowed them to go another several weeks or a month. But better to get them checked right now. As you can see from the photographs, a sheep’s hoof (like all other ruminants) has two toes, which are both rather teardrop shaped, with the nail layer at the outside wrapped around the more rubbery inner pad.

To check and trim hooves, you need two things for sure, plus one which is nice to have but we never seem to use it.
Absolutely necessary: Hoof clippers (or a hoof knife – hoof clippers seem to give you more control in terms of how much you trim off – and it’s also less likely that you will cut yourself on the upstroke). And, a bottle of disinfectant. We use plain label 10% provodine iodine solution.

The nice thing to have is called a ‘hoof plane’ and looks like a small, 6” wood workers plane with a cheese grater bottom. These work really well if the hooves are really dry and hard – if you can’t trim them easily, you can literally plane them down. You can also use these to get the proper angle on the hoof – you will want the bottom of the hoof at the end to be parallel to the growth lines that you can see around the nail portion of thehoof on the outside; you are not trying to give the goat a set of wedges to walk on (that’s tough on the rest of their legs) .

Some other things to have around as ‘just in case’ – A bucket of hot water with a little bleach/soap in it (if the sheep’s hooves are really mucky – it helps to have something cleaner so that you can see what is going on before you start to trim), paper towels, duct tape, a couple of clean sanitary napkins (in case you trim off too much and the hoof is bleeding, disinfect the hoof area, put on half a sanitary napkin over the bottom of the hoof and wrap with duct tape, forming a boot. If it doesn’t fall off on its own in a day, take it off) and ground or powdered lime. If you have a lot of muck around and the entrances to the barn area are wet, put down a lot of lime (the floor should look actually white). First, it will absorb a lot of the moisture and firm up the ground, which is better for their hooves, and second, it is also a great protector for the animals when it’s on the floor of the barn. Of course, cleaning up the barn floors is your first line of defense in this.

OK – how much should you trim off? Well, the doctor from Cornell was pretty Draconian – as I recall, she shocked the entire room with her answer of “Keep cutting until the hoof starts to bleed – then you know you’ve gotten everything.” Well, if the animal has ‘hoof rot’ or ‘foot scald’ (which are infections caused by the interaction of several anaerobic bacteria and more information can be found hoof rot ), the animal is already miserable and lame. In order to really treat the animal, you have to get beyond the mess to good solid material in order to give the sheep or goat a shot at healing up. If the hooves are not too overgrown, a simple cleaning out of any manure or dirt (especially between the toes) and trimming up with a little squirt of disinfectant if you get too far in should really be enough. One way to become familiar and comfortable doing this, frankly, is to get involved with your local 4H sheep or goat group or find a small sheep raiser, and learn how to do it properly and get some practice. Part of the trick is getting the sheep on his or her rear end (then they are sort of helpless and you can work on them without too much struggle), but learning how to be brave with the clippers is important too.

So, let’s go back to the photograph at the top. What’s going on with this hoof? As you can see, there is not a lot of muck packed in between the toes (actually the DH had already checked that area; if there had been anything, he’d have cleaned that out). If there is stuff in the slot between the toes, you want to get that out because it puts horizontal pressure between the toes. Not good. There is a little bit of overgrowth on one side of one of the toes; the other sides just need a little bit of a trim. The pad areas in the back are pretty good; they just need a little bit of trimming also. This is a very simple job – and actually is the sort of trimming chore that a shepherd wants to see because it means that the general health of the hoof is good.

Things to look for that mean trouble (besides sheep that are limping) and you have to really trim hooves to heal them up:
1) Really funky odor. I realize that faced with manure on the hoof, you’d think – how funky does she mean? If the animal has a bacterial infection in the hoof, it’s an entirely different smell.
2) Mushiness in either the nail area or the inner layer.
3) Cracks in the nail wall
4) The rubbery inner pad should go all the way across and the nail layer should lay right against it. If there are any pockets between (you’ll be able to tell because there will be dirt there), dunk the hoof in water so that you can see things more clearly and clean any pockets out and trim the nail layer down to them to open them up. The hoof will grow down properly. Pockets promote infections – open them up.
5) Anything that looks like it has pus or other material coming out of it, or is draining.
6) Anything that impedes your view of the inside rubbery layer of the hoof – that’s overgrowth and it’s got to go.

I realize that there is a good bit of the ‘ick’ factor in this discussion – don’t let this put you off from raising sheep or goats if you want to. Once you get the hang of this, it goes quite quickly to do it and it’s something that you can put on the calendar and take care of on a regular basis. Along with keeping the barn floors dry (use that lime) and the barnyard firm (ditto), hoof trimming will keep your sheep on their feet and out in the pasture transforming grass into wool and lamb.

Which is what you want, right?

If one of those babies steps on your foot, you will NOT be wearing Manolos again. Trust me; I know.

But there are many aspects of raising sheep, goats and cattle that are the same, so … just pick one and learn to care for them really really well and you’ve got the whole class licked. Ruminants – it’s what’s for dinner. There are two areas where, if you learn to get them right, you’ve got 90% of ruminant health licked (in a good way): the digestive system and the hooves. I’ll do this in two parts, the first being the digestive system.

If you want to know why swine, which do have a ‘cloven hoof’ (one of the requirements of animals considered Kosher in Judaism) are NOT Kosher, it’s this: They aren’t ruminants. They are monogastrics. They have a digestive system..just..like..ours. Shorter. Straighter. But the same: mouth – esophagus – single stomach – intestine – out.

But ruminants. Boy, THAT class of mammals has the elegant design solution on digestion. They can live on practically anything made out of cellulose because they are basically (at least in the body cavity) one giant series of different digestive solutions. What can’t be taken care of in one place will get taken care of in another one of the other ‘stomachs’ (in a true ruminant, there are four). If what they’ve got isn’t fully digested, then they have the ability to cough it back up to the beginning (think of it as a digestive infinite “do-loop”), chew it up again, swallow it again, and send it someplace else, with a different set of bacteria and enzymes and it will be dealt with there (oh, yeah..that’s why chewing something over and thinking about it is referred to ‘ruminating’). For more scientific details of how this all works, go here.

That’s the major, defining difference between mammals such as swine and human beings and ruminants. We actually can’t extract a whole lot of stuff out of cellulosic materials. There are certain vegetative things we can get some good out of: fruits and veggies, and what we’re getting out of them are water, vitamins, minerals and from items such as beans, incomplete proteins. But grass? Bark from trees (that’s catnip to goats, which is why the Middle East is as dry as it is – all that goat grazing killed off most of the trees)? Nuthin. And as a matter of fact, when human beings have been forced to eat that sort of material due to famines, they die.

But ruminants? With the very elegant features and occupants of their digestive systems, they can eat grass (or leaves, or bark or young ends of branches of trees), and transform it into everything they need: protein, carbs, vitamins, the lot.

And what this means, more than anything else, is that while as a group they need a good pasture of mixed plants, grasses, wildflowers, etc., ruminants do not need fancy feeds. As a matter of fact, the simpler the food, the better. It also means that there are things that ruminants do…not…need and frankly are not good for them, the major item being sugars in the feeds, such as beet pulp or molasses. When feed mixers put that sort of thing in ruminant feeds, it is more to placate the owners. The animals don’t need it and frankly, it puts the bacteria et al. in the systems on their own little versions of steroids. They go crazy, generate a huge amount of gas, which causes a lot of pain for the animals. That’s called bloat.

Another item in feeds (or in pastures for that matter) that ruminants do not need is a lot of protein. Even in the depth of winter..even while pregnant, ruminants do not need to be fed things like soy protein. Hay with a lot of alfalfa in it can give them a lot of stress as well. Remember: The bacteria in the gut of ruminants makes protein. The animals themselves don’t need to be fed protein.

Another item to watch for in feeds (or in salt mixes or salt blocks) is copper. This accumulates in the liver for sheep and will kill them. So, if you live in a hard water area and have copper pipes running up to your barn – do not be surprised if you have issues with your sheep and your vet tells you that they have copper poisoning.

So, back to the digestive system. In a ruminant looks like this:
Very different from us.

One of the other aspects to this is that there are a lot of things that can totally unbalance the system and make the animal very very sick. As mentioned before, too much protein or sugar in the feed or pasturage can cause bloat. If the animal gets a bacterial infection, this can cause all sorts of havoc. Once, years ago, we had two rams, one of which got an infection that totally wiped out his ‘normal flora’. The only reason we found out of about it was that we came into the barn one morning and found the other ram holding him up against the wall like an old drunk. He’d gone completely blind and had no sense of taste or smell. We could not tempt him with any food of any sort. We could put it into his mouth and he’d just push it out with his tongue. The problem: since it’s the bacteria in the gut that synthesize the B vitamins for the sheep, any bacterial infection that kills off the ones you want, destroys the ability of the animal to make its own B Vitamins – and that is what caused the blindness and lack of smell and taste. We had to give him huge amounts of antibiotics and B-vitamin shots for days and then repopulate his gut with horse syringes full of unflavored yoghurt (our other option would have been to pass a stomach tube to one of the other sheep and then transfer some of that animal’s gut contents into the stomach of the sick ram. But I digress: the therapy worked). So, remember – a healthy digestive system is your best weapon in keeping your sheep happy and healthy as well.

Next episode: Hooves: no, we are not talking mani-pedi’s here.

(ruminant digestive system courtesy of: Colorado State Sheep photo courtesy of gari.baldi)

It’s been a little bit tough to put together content here because so much of what I do requires two hands but I’ve got something today because the two hands (well, technically the four hands since it is The Boy and the DH who did it; I just stood there and documented it) were provided by others.

This year, we’ve expanded our livestock raising again. In addition to the chickens, we’ve got turkey poults and we have three lambs out in the pasture (we’re supposed to be getting another one, but I’ll believe it when the little bugger shows up). Now, we are not new to raising sheep. Until 2002, we had between 10 and 15 breeding ewes and raised lambs for the Easter market. Why we got out of that is a story for another time but this is a little bit different: the lambs were bought young from another breeder and we are only keeping them through the fall, when they will, as we say coyly around here, “go down the road”. They are also being raised strictly on pasture, so we are avoiding the costs (both literal, environmental and healthwise) from feeding them commercial feeds.

Now, I have to admit that one of our issues here at Chez Siberia in the past for livestock is that our pastures were not really tiptop. Part of that has to do with the quality of the topsoil (thin, rocky, lots of clay), the lay of the land itself (sloping and wet in spots), and the fact that we really did not know what we were doing. We used permanent fencing set up into paddocks and probably should have rotated them through more often. But we didn’t. So the sheep (as is their wont) nibbled the grass right down to the rocks and by August, we’d have to start feeding hay (they’ll do that; that is why they say that a sheep’s life is really only limited to how long they keep their teeth). But we’ve been reseeding and judiciously mowing and things look pretty good. If we get some decent rain across the summer, the pastures might hold out through the fall. If not, we’ll just have to go down our road to buy hay.

The other change is that we have gone with ‘electro-netting’, a type of movable fencing that gives real flexibility in terms of setting up a paddock area for the sheep, and moving them to new grass as you need it. That’s the photo at the top. We bought two sets so that we could set up a new area while the sheep are in their current area and then just open one side to get them on the new grass. Here is how it works:

The fencing comes in a roll with the fence posts installed right in it. The fence runs off a solar charger, which is attached to a ground rod (you’ll have to get both of those at your local farm supply place) and to the fence with wires. Solar chargers come with on/off switches so that you can get things set up and just turn it on. You will also want to get the charger before you put up the fence because it will take several days of sunshine to get the unit all charged up to run the fence. In the photo, you see that all the fence posts are yellow except for one. The white fence post is the one at the very end of the roll and you grab that one first and stick that into the ground at the start of the new run (you’ll want to do this basically right next to the area you are currently using for livestock and then you unroll the rest of the fencing.

You literally just stick the fence posts (which have a metal core by the way) into the ground as you go, leaving a little bit of slack.

At the corners, you will use a cord and a spike to put some strain on the fencing (like with putting up a tent) and that will straighten out the fence and make it tight.

Then, you turn off the fence at the solar charger, roll a bit back to create an opening, walk behind the animals and they will naturally move in front of you and go to the new grass. Genius.

Electro-web fencing can be found in several different conformations in terms of the holes in the web. There are set ups for poultry (with little holes in the lower part and larger holes toward the top), for gardens to keep out rabbits, and for larger livestock also.

How safe is electro-web fencing? Well, like all electric fencing, the deterrent effect (either from inside or outside) is all based on the size of the kick from the charger. The fences are all rated and labeled in terms of their electric power. All electric fences should be regarded with a great deal of care and respect; I certainly would not allow kids to be around it without an knowledgeable adult present.

This time, it’s slightly different because this particular hen is totally different looking than the other birds and we have a tendency to look out for her because she’s a bantam and about 1/3 the size of the Light Brahmas that she is with. The DH put some of their fertilized eggs under her and she has been a very good mommy so far. To give her more privacy and to put the chicks closer to the ground when they hatch, we moved them into another room, with a heat lamp (that’s why the color in the photographs is so red – the lamp is infrared). Readers who are familiar with the set up we had to raise the Light Brahmas when they arrived last year will remember this plywood box with the holes in it – we are reusing this as a corral to help keep the hen and her chicks inside and help hold the heat in as well.

Now, I probably should have read up more on moving broody hens – it can throw them off completely, which it did to this particular LRH. Once we’d moved her, she seemed to have no interest at all in getting back on those eggs, which considering it’s February, we were pretty concerned about. So, the DH tried a trick with an old lined curtain we had up there. He got her back into the nesting box (which my son had made out of three old feeding pans we had) and tucked the curtain all around her to block off the light. The next morning when he went out to feed her and give her more water, she was all cuddled down on top of the eggs and had gotten into the whole rhythm of the thing again. She jumps out, does her business, takes a drink, eats a little and is right back on the eggs again. Another method that supposedly works is to move a broody hen only at night, which I think the DH reproduced with the curtain.

Whew.

H-Day (hatching day) is now estimated at mid-week or so, so we’ll have to keep an eye out. Stay tuned.

Our little red hen, the Bantam we got as a gift, was starting to molt (that is, lose her feathers) and was hunkered down in one of the nesting boxes and was positively nasty. Wouldn’t leave; wouldn’t allow anyone to put their hand underneath her and frankly had taken on this sort of ‘loose baggy’ sort of appearance.

She’s gone broody.

Now if we were in the commercial egg production business, this would be a royal pain and we would be going through all sorts of gyrations to get her to cut it out, snap out of it and go back to laying eggs and being a productive hen. But on the other side of it, we’re NOT in the commercial egg business here at Chez Siberia and we’ve just gone through a PITN situation with trying to order Delaware chicks. Delawares are what American housewives put on the Sunday platter in the 40s and 50s, before the invention of the dino-chicken, Cornish Crosses (if you buy commercial chickens in the store, those big breasted halves and quarters are Cornish Crosses – we raised them a couple of times years ago. Never again). Now, we had a great experience growing out the Light Brahmas. They certainly are not as fast in terms of growth as a Cornish Cross, but you can raise them on pasture; they are not delicate and do not require careful watching in hot weather (Cornish Crosses tend to just lay there and die, frankly) and grow out to a terrific size and taste fantastic. But before we settled on light Brahmas forever, we decided we’d try Delawares this year as a comparison.

Us and everyone else. We thought we were getting the order in super-early. No luck – the hatchery was all booked until much later in the spring. Which is ok but now we will be getting a whole lot of chicks at one time instead of two, timed deliveries. This will take more work and watching.

Which brings me back to our friend, the LRH (aka, the Little Red Hen), who is very calmly sitting on eggs right now (the DH put a small clutch of what we think are fertile eggs under her earlier this week and she has accepted them, which is interesting since they are probably 2-3 times as big as hers but she is molting so she is not laying at all now). She jumps down to eat, drink and do her business a couple of times a day. We will move her and the eggs to a nest in the room next door, so that we can put a heat lamp out there, and bedding on the floor and have her closer to the floor (the nesting boxes are up on the wall – if she hatched chicks in there now, they’d fall out and get injured for sure). So, save the weekend of February 20th on your Save the Date calendar and we’ll see what happens. If she’s successful and turns out to be a good mom (and Bantams are supposed to be some of the best), perhaps once we get the Delawares going, we can get her to hatch some Delawares for us.

I’m sure there are those who are saying, “Well, why don’t you just get an incubator and hatch them yourself?” Good question. We’ve had only one other experience with a broody hen and she did a good job hatching. We have had experience raising lambs by hand, artificially and the babies had all sorts of issues – sometimes it is just better to have a mom to do it, to teach them how to scratch, to get them to run around and so on. We’ll see how she does. Being broody does not necessarily turn into being a good mommy. But we figured ‘what the heck’.

For more information on broody hens and breeding your own, see Broody Hens

But, we always knew, the DH and I, that at some point this fall, we were going to have to bring the chickens inside..someplace. The climate at Chez Siberia (Zone 4 on a good day) gets into the ‘oh, crap it cold out there’ state pretty quickly.

Too quickly. It snowed – twice this week. A freak October storm for sure and we lucked out in only getting 2 inches of snow. It was not that cold – in the 30s – but it was a rather sharp reminder that winter is coming. The DH and The Boy had started the work on the barn last week to make a winter space for the chickens but we were certainly not in a position to move them yet. The barn is actually the original brooder house (which was heated by a series of coal stoves actually) for the chicken farm that Chez Siberia was in the 1930s and 1940s. It is long and low, with windows (or actually the remains of windows – the former owner used to keep his horses in there and they ‘removed’ the windows in short order) all along the south side. A couple of years ago, we came up with hinged shutters to close off the openings, but we did not get out to the end of the barn because we did not use that end of the building.

Well, now we need to use that end of the building, so we needed to clean it out (which we did). We also put in a wall to make the space that we will be using for the chickens smaller (so that they are not trying to heat up the entire back of the barn with their body heat – they will stay warmer this way). These chickens are Light Brahmas Light Brahmas and are extremely large and fluffy birds with teeny ‘pea combs’ so as long as we keep them out of the wind and give them a space that is not too big, with the South-facing windows, they should be able to keep themselves warm through this winter.

Ordinarily, we’d just put on the shutters, but we saw some interesting pictures of chickens in the snow and it gave us the idea that perhaps the birds would, on nice sunny days (and we get those starting in January), like to ‘take the air’ as they used to say. We plan to use some scrap lumber and old windows to make a 3-sided ‘sunporch’. We’ll open the shutter (it’s hinged at the top), snuggle the ‘sunporch’ up against the outside wall of the barn, put the shutter down across the top and hook it down to the outside of the ‘sunporch’. But, let’s say that we just want to give them some fresh air? The DH came up with some screens that just fit into the window openings. If all we want is fresh air, then we can open up the shutters. If we want to use the ’sunporch’ then, we’ll take out the screens from the inside of the windows and shoo the chickens out into the sun.

We’ll be able to do a bit of cleaning in their living space (always a job done much better and more ‘pleasantly’ in the winter rather than in the spring when the weather – and the manure – warms up) and get them some fresh air and sun at the same time. Win-win.

In the meantime, the chickens do not seem to have been fazed at all by the snow. And when I’ve gone out in the morning, I’ve had to knock the ice out of the waterers, so we’ve started taking hot water up for them and we are feeding scraps along with everything else to make sure they get plenty of calories. But soon..very soon, they will be coming into the barn for the winter.

Heh – little do you know…

Yes, from a capital investment standpoint, they are probably the cheapest thing going; a coop or run can be cobbled together out of all sorts of left over stuff. If you live in a moderate enough environments, the amount of shelter that needs to be dealt with is small. They do start out cute – there is no doubt about that. Chicks are terminally cute..for about four days. In terms of ease to care for, well, the family cat can handle a situation with ‘left down food and water’ better, actually: Chickens don’t like dirty water or food. So you need to wash out and refill their waterers daily and if you are feeding supplements, then you need to make sure the feeder is clean also. In terms of safety, well, depending on the breed, the roosters can get pretty aggressive and in terms of height, a full grown rooster can be as big as a just walking toddler, so having the babies out with the chickens could be a traumatic experience.

The other thing and newbies are just amazed at this, is that chickens dig dust baths. Big, honkin’ roll-around wallows that they can get the whole of themselves into so that they can roll, wriggle, and flop around. They do this to help get rid of any insects (and they always have insects – it’s ok…no need to start running for the pesticide can). People don’t envision this because..well, people have not had ‘in the natural environment’ contact with chickens on a regular basis for about 50 years – chickens kept in cages or big coops don’t have access to floor space with deep enough bedding to dig themselves a foot bath..much less something they could actually get their whole bodies into.

So, as a public service, here is Aunt Toby’s Introduction to Chicken Excavation Behaviors, A Pictorial Atlas. These literally are this week’s projects from the Light Brahmas. Because we move them every day, I can tell you that they scratch things up pretty good on a daily basis, but major excavation work is done on an every-other day basis. It’s amazing – just like clockwork: “Oh, today is Thursday; we have to create a major earthwork today.” The holes don’t look particularly dusty – we had a lot of rain in the past 24 hours, but you’ll get the idea.

When the birds first got started scratching out holes, the holes themselves ranged in diameter from 3-6″ and perhaps 1-2″ deep. No great edifices here. No ambitious Pharoahanic (if such a word exists) stuff. But now:
Chickens obviously like, from time to time, to deal with the dust bathing in a communal manner, sort of like a Turkish Bath. One big honkin’ hole that multiple chickens can flop into. Since Aunt Toby’s chickens generally are very impatient birds (and seem these days to be more interested in ‘break out sessions’ more than anything else), this hole looks as if it could accommodate at least two hens simultaneously. The others will just have to take a number and wait their turns.

This example shows class ‘territorial’ bath building, the Classic 3-Holer Arrangement. On this day, I imagine that the birds just were NOT going to ‘take a number’ — and various hens decided to just muck it out by themselves.

This example shows what can be done by hens with creativity and ambition when the chicken ‘tractor’ has been left on uneven ground, throwing up great ridges between the baths, the socalled Contour Map Scheme. It would appear on this day, the birds were more interested in throwing up walls; perhaps there was a breakdown in political discourse that day.

And I’ve saved the most special for last, the Trans-Siberian Trenching Behavior. Built in the direction from Northwest to Southeast, these trenches are quite unique and indicate chickens focused on a mission. No distraction. No fighting for placement or authoritative position..just simple, concentrated cooperative digging. There are animal science specialists who feel that this is actually an indicator of advanced intelligence, that this trench is actually meant to enable the birds to worship the rising and setting of the sun. It is very difficult to ascertain the credibility of this theory as chickens do not have a written language(or digits capable of grasping writing instrument for that matter); however, it is an intriguing postulation. If we get up early enough and hide ourselves cleverly, perhaps we will be able catch them in one of their ancient ceremonies and be able to test this out.

Small? On the scale of “Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large, Jumbo and OOOOO, That Hurts”, this particular egg did not even register as a Pee Wee. Pee Wee Eggs need to be 1.25 ounces. This one weighed 1 ounce. Flat.

Fertile? Maybe – possibly – but not necessarily likely as at this early date – a pullet’s reproductive system is still getting organized in terms of putting the eggs together, putting a membrane around it and putting a shell around it. Sometimes things get all mixed up and you can get eggs-within-eggs, eggs without yolks and so on. Odd Eggs

One of the things that occurred to me when I was looking up the weights on egg grades (and if you want to know more about eggs than perhaps you EVER wanted to know, go
USDA Egg Manual
is this: the weight of an egg is really sort of indicative of how much actual liquefied stuff is resident inside that shell. I realize that sounds sort of like an agricultural ‘No, duh” but for those of us who bake, the size of an egg – the sheer amount of liquid that it adds to a recipe – makes a huge amount of difference in terms of the end product. The more liquid in the recipe, the more dried ingredients you need to balance it off. Here’s a basic chart:

Egg Size………..Weight Per Egg in Ounces
Jumbo…………..2.5
Extra Lge………2.25
Large……………2
Medium……….1.75
Small……………1.5
PeeWee……….1.25

Now, let’s just look at that for a second. If your cake recipe calls for 2-3 large eggs (and there are a whole lot of cake recipes that do call for that – we’re not talking chiffon cakes or pound cake or anything like that) that is between 4 and 6 ounces of liquefied stuff. It occupies a certain amount of space in the batter. For the sake of argument, let’s say that your spousal unit went to the farmers market and thinking he’d do you a good deed, he bought Extra Large eggs instead of Large. If you use 2-3 Extra Large eggs, you are putting between 4.5 ounces and 6.75 ounces of liquefied stuff into your cake batter instead of the 4 ounces which would have been contributed by 2 Large eggs.

Better to hedge your bets and only put in 2 Extra large eggs (4.5 ounces), see how the batter handles that and if it is too thick, add 1-2 tablespoons of vegetable oil (such as the light olive oil made for sautéing and baking).

Why not just add another Extra Large egg? Because if you do that, then you have to balance that off with more flour and in a cake (especially if you have already added the flour and have beaten it up and the protein in the flour, the gluten, has been worked a bit), this can frankly make the cake texture “tough” and the added flour may not combine as well as the rest and you will end up with little clumps of flour in the cake when it’s been baked.

Yuck.

Or, let’s look at the other side of things. Now, I sincerely doubt that you’d be able to find, in your local “super-marche” small or even medium size graded eggs. Just like, your chances of finding anything other than Grade A or Grade AA eggs are basically nonexistent. But at a farmers market, you just might be able to find mediums or even smalls. What do you do then? Well, if you know you have mediums right up front and know that you need 4-6 ounces of stuff, then you can do a little bit of figuring and and jigger the recipe right from the get-go. Take out your calculator and multiply the number of large eggs called for in the recipe by 2 ounces and then divide that by the number of ounces per egg that is in the size egg you’ve got.

Voila.

And, this little egg here – well, it is going to be joined by many many brother and sister eggs over the next several months. Once a hen gets her egg laying system going, they produce, on average, 2 eggs every 3 days. And we have 12 hens out there. That means for every hen, in a two week period, we’re going to get (on average again..all dependent on feed, light, warmth, etc.) 8 eggs.

And we’ve got 12 hens out there. That’s 96 eggs. Every two weeks.

You see how people end up in the egg business?

Sigh. We knew it was going to come to this, right? We all knew that when Aunt Toby and the DH got chicks earlier this year, that some of them were ‘born for the freezer’, right? We got ‘straight run’ (that is, no one took a startlingly intimate look at their rear ends and decided which ones would grow up to lay eggs…and which ones would grow up meant for other things). “Sexed chicks’ cost more – a lot more – because it does take some skill to look deeply, passionately, into the rear end of a chick and be able to make that sort of decision. With ‘straight run’, you don’t know how much of which you will get, but you will get some of each.

We got about 50% roosters, which is pretty good. We weighed all of them earlier this summer and the biggest and with the most development (combs, wattles, condos with sports cars out front), got to take the lottery as to who got courting rights with the hens…and which ones would eventually make the trip to Pepperoni-ville.

We eat meat. We obviously raise our own and buy from others who pasture raise their own. Raising your own really does give you a lot more control over what ends up in your own body and it also gives you control over the quality of life that your animals have. We always took the position that our livestock came first. No matter how tired anyone was; no matter how crabby anyone felt – taking care of the livestock always came first because that is the relationship between caretakers and domesticated animals, the animals who came out of the darkness and allowed themselves to become part of our lives.

For that, we owe them the highest quality of life that we can give them, since we have forever changed them, turned them into creatures of our convenience (which is why sheep now keep their fleeces on rather than shed them, which is what they used to do), and of overwhelming dependence.

Now, the DH and I don’t slaughter and dress our own birds (I hate all the ‘finagle’ words out there for this like ‘process’ – I also hate weeny-whiner weasel words such as ‘harvesting’). A long time ago, we actually tried that. If you don’t know what you are doing, you can cause the bird a lot of anxiety, pain, and upset on the way to becoming something for your freezer. It will also take you a lot longer than it does someone who does know what they are doing and who has the equipment to slaughter, scald, clean, pluck, eviscerate and package. One of the things that got us out of raising meat birds was the fact that we could not find anyone who would do this for us (ok – we are ‘chicken livered’ about this – slaughtering and dressing animals puts you in touch with a part of yourself that perhaps you don’t want to get to know that well).

One of the things that changed that whole scene has been the pasture raised meats movement, which has grown like Topsy over the past five years. We found out about the slaughterhouse we used from a lady from whom we used to buy pasture raised birds – when the DH spoke to the owners, it was obvious that the reason they had time and room for our little batch of roosters was that he has a contract for 10,000 birds a year with a local grower and fills in his schedule with people like us, families who raise birds for local farmers’ markets and so on. If he did not have that contract and income, there would be no slaughterhouse for us. When the DH and I and the Little Siberians raised sheep and goats, the number one barrier to our being able to grow our market was the fact that there was (and as far as I know, still is) no USDA certified slaughterhouse closer than over the border in Pennsylvania. This guy only does poultry(which makes sense as that process takes a certain number of specialized pieces of equipment) but who knows – with the interest in locally grown, perhaps we will again have a good USDA certified slaughterhouse in our area again so that farmers don’t have to haul their livestock 2-3 hours. Another new idea is to have mobile slaughter services which will come to farms; a group of farmers in Connecticut got together, wrote a grant and developed one of those which is used in common, cleaned in common and inspected on a regular basis by the state and federal authorities.

But back to the birds. We took them to the slaughterhouse yesterday. Except for the fact that the DH had a full schedule, he could have occupied himself for a couple of hours and gone back to pick up the already slaughtered, cleaned, cut up and packaged birds (we had half of them done whole and half done as halves), but he went back this morning to pick them up. We had weighed them the night before we took them up, so we knew approximately the total weight of birds that went in. And then we weighed the packages of chicken when we got them home. The dressing percentage was 73% (that is, 27% of the birds in terms of their internal organs, heads, feathers, feet etc. are considered waste), which is much better than for other livestock such as pigs, sheep and so on, where the waste can be as high as 40%. If you want more information about how to slaughter your own chickens, go Home Poultry Processing

This year was an experiment all the way around:
1) We had never raised this breed of bird before. These are Light Brahmas, a ‘dual purpose’ bird, so they can be kept and raised for meat as well as eggs. These birds were 16 weeks when they ‘went down the road’ and the largest one had a live weight of 5 pounds 15 ounces. Broilers that are raised under confinement conditions are sent off for processing at 6-8 weeks. Most are usually a triumph of breeding called a ‘cornish cross’. These birds MUST be slaughtered at 6-8 weeks because they have been bred to grow so big in the chest and at such great rates that if you keep them longer than 8 weeks, their bodies are too large for their legs, the legs start to buckle, they have tremendous difficulty moving at all and start having age-related chronic diseases and problems such as heart attacks. Light Brahmas are a traditional chicken and were a wonder of scrounging for their own food in the pasture, eating bugs, worms, grass and clover as the complement to the grains we give them. They were also actually pretty calm birds in comparison to the Columbian Wyandottes we used to raise, who seemed to take every opportunity to peck at, bite and flap at the Little Siberians, who avoided them like the plague.
2) This was the first time we had ever tried to raise chickens out on pasture, using our moveable pens. This worked better than we ever expected; the birds got fresh air and sunshine, got to eat fresh grass and pasture plants every day(we moved them once a day, every day), scratched up the ground and have been doing a great job fertilizing a pasture that frankly had not been in great shape for a very long time. On the other hand, as someone who has raised chickens under ‘chicken house’ conditions as well, I have to say that there is nothing quite like going out in the rain to move, feed, and water the chickens, only to have to stand out in the rain to do it. In the summer, the temperatures are not cold, but I can’t see doing this in late October, when can be raining and 45 degrees. We will be setting up a dedicated area for the chickens to spend the winter, with nesting boxes and a sun porch, so that we can bring them in by the 2nd or 3rd week in October.
3) Not leaving anything to chance, we got a big bag of ‘pasture plant seed’ – mixed perennial and annual plants for reseeding pastures and every day, when we moved the chickens, we’d scuff up the areas that they had scratched bare, watered the ground well, and threw down some seed. We’ve had plenty of rain this summer, which has helped, but we are looking forward to seeing how putting chickens on the pasture will improve the quality of the pasture over the next couple of years.
4) Plans for next year? Well, if we have any hens that decide to ‘go broody’ late in the winter, then we just might be in the chick raising business. We’re also thinking seriously about finding a hatchery that does Delawares, which up until the invention of Cornish Crosses, were the meat bird of choice, and trialing some Delawares in our pasture alongside the Light Brahmas to see how they do Chez Siberia.
5) The proof of the chicken of course is going to be ‘on the plate’ – so our next experiment will be slow roasting one of the birds this weekend. I’ll report back..after I lick my fingers.

For more details on pastured chickens and how to get more out of your pastured chicken purchase, go to here