You mention both fences and cages which are not compatible with the idea of “free range” and I question their compatibility with “organic.” I doubt most people in the USA today have any real idea of what “organic” means nor do they remember with what delight modern fertilizers were greeted when “organic” farming / gardening was, for the most part, abandoned.*
*For instance, you refer to “chicken/tractor” pens; you need to substitute “shovels and scoops” for “tractor pens”. You will then have an idea of what original organic farming involved but only if you yourself wield the shovels and scoops. No offense is intended nor is any part of this post to be considered a personal attack.
Did anyone see the story about puppy mills on the daily show a few nights back? Some state (Ohio, maybe) passed mandating better conditions for the animals, and they found some loon to attack the law. One part was that puppies couldn’t be housed in stacked cages, and she said, “We stack humans all the time.” When questioned, she specified she meant in apartments, and then John Oliver noted that we don’t shit on the heads of the people living beneath us.
You’re wrong.
We use ‘chicken tractors’ (although we’ve adapted the model for the Texas heat) as do all of the pastured poultry farmers I know, and they are a very effective way of dispersing manure and organically fertilizing the fields without using either a shovel or a scoop.
Our birds are moved daily to ensure access to fresh grasses and plants and the by-product-chicken shit- is spread evenly across our pastures. The neighbors spend a fortune on chemical fertilizers and herbicides each year.
We just keep moving the pens and growing lush grass.
Now back to the original post:
One thing we learned when we started selling our poultry directly to the public or to restaurants was that we had to carter to *their *needs.
Restaurants have to have chickens that are a specific size for cost control.
Did them no good if they got 4 pound chickens one week and three pound chickens the next.
Folks at the farmers market started requesting ‘pieces’-breast or leg packs.
So we started cutting some of the birds up and selling only the breasts or legs.
Takes more work on our part but you know what, the increase in sales makes up for it.
Some people want big chickens and other people want little chickens so we bring a variety of sizes to the market.
You have to know your market and constantly adapt to it especially if you’re a small business or you’ll go under muy pronto.
Awesome. Yeah, it was a bill to defend helpless puppies. Can you possibly get any more cliche in terms of something one dreams up to garner universal support? But there were opponents. TONS of opponnets. I loved how the best argument that could be given was “but it’s not a necessary law. The puppy mills are already doing all that!”
To which I’d respond “well neato then. I guess we can go ahead and pass the law since it won’t matter to those places already complying.”
I guess I don’t understand the use of the word “tractor” as in chicken tractors. I take it to mean the cages are moved and relocated by means of being hauled from place to place by tractors and that is a long way from having the chickens in one place and hauling their by products to fields and gardens that are in need of fertilizer. It there is another meaning of the word “tractor” in this context, I’d be pleased to know it.
Louis, that’s an understandable interpretation, but, Chicken Tractor refers to a sustainable agricultural practice popularized by Joel Salatin in the 90’s, now gaining steam. It’s using pastured chickens in mobile coops without floors as the first step in tilling and enriching the soil to prepare for crops the next season. The chickens get to live outdoors and have their chicken lives, and their manure and scratching for bugs helps build the soil.
I’ve seen this method work here for small farmers to great effect. The photos that show up on google are often tiny ones for home farmers— I love this homebuilt contraption, which gives the chickens more space, basically a coop-on-wheels that you shut them up in for the night, cause, ummmm boy, every critter looooves them some chicken, so you have to protect them. That one is being hauled by a tractor, but I’ve seen many that can be moved easily by one or two people.
Yes, exactly. They don’t care about the difference between those two things. Chickens, by virtue of being chickens lack the capacity to care about their predicament. They don’t rattle cups against the bars or play harmonica blues in their chicken cells at night. They don’t entertain pipe dreams of breaking free of their confines to roam the free range. They’re alive, they don’t care, they’re chickens.
To the contrary it is a known fact that some animals are more at ease when tightly confined. Cows for example are less agitated when in a very small stall than when out in the field this is because instinctually they feel they are less likely to be taken unawares by predators when enclosed on all four sides by a rigid structure.
The problem with passing uneccesary laws is that they are often coupled with several thousand ear-marks and pork barrel spending. In other words, yeah its a law about puppies but theres probably also a part where a senator appropriates a large chunk of money to his constituents and another note where a theme park gets to be built in such and such state. Every time a superfluous law like that crops up give the full text a read before you wave it through.
That sort of thing is one of the reasons why I’m very fond of the Commonwealth legislative rules which say an Act is only allowed to be about one thing at a time, unless the other things the Act covers are actually related in some meaningful way.
Yeah, we’ve had conversations about this practice before and IIRC the US was the only country, as far as we could tell, where a single bill can include several issues which are completely unrelated except through the games of tit-for-tat legislators play.
Wrong again.
Chickens confined in battery cages have to be debeaked because the close confinement causes them to peck each other to death.
It’s impossible to clean the cages and the birds eat, breath, and live in shit.
You have to dose them with antibiotics just to keep them alive.
Workers in traditional confinement houses get ‘chicken lung’ from fecal dust.
If we overcrowd our field birds, they demonstrate a variety of abnormal behaviours and become extremely stressed.
Chickens love to move run and chase bugs and roll in the dirt.
Plus, if you exclude fresh grasses and plants from their diet, their meat lacks the Omega-3s and CLA.
And yes, elelle, we use the Salatin method to great effect. The birds are moved daily, ensuring that 1) they always have a fresh clean place to live and 2) our fields are fertilized without chemicals.
Yes, that one is hauled by a tractor; I would guess the people who move them manually would love to be able to afford a tractor. And I suspect the coop on wheels does require to be cleaned from time to time and the excess feathers disposed of and all the labor inherent in raising chickens stills needs to be done. To my mind, all of this hug your chicken nonsense is a waste of money and effort and I seriously doubt a taste test performed by the average citizen would be useless in determining which chicken was either free range or organic as opposed to those that are farm raised. Does PETA take a position on these critical considerations?
