Fat Hens

As many of you will know, we have a little 'commercial' pastured poultry enterprise going on here on our little farm. I say 'commercial', rather than commercial, because any kind of economics-minded person would look at our set up and say it's not 'worth' it, 'commercially'. Perhaps true, if you're of that ilk, but for us, there's a lot more going on here than making a profit. Just as well, probably, cuz the profits just ain't that big... 

Luckily for us our chicken enterprise is rewarding and valuable for other reasons.

1. We're doing something we believe in, ethically, socially and economically: We treat our chickens and our land with respect, we feed our community good quality food at an affordable price, and we run our business in a way that is sustainable for us, for our community and the Earth.

2. We're contributing to the development of a local food system that is resilient.

3. We're doing something that allows us to spend time on our land, with each other, outside, which is (most of the time) really enjoyable. This one's kind of priceless as far as I'm concerned...

4. We're involving our kids in a business that is ethical and sustainable, teaching them that it's good to work (hard) for what you believe in, and that earning heaps of money isn't everything.

5. Our chickens are delicious!

These chickens are about to tuck into some fresh-cut fat hen

With all that said, though, it's not like we don't care about making a profit. Doing all the hard work (sometimes it's really really hard!!!) of pasture raising chickens and then selling them for no profit is just beyond our altruism levels. For this reason, we're working on ways to cut down on our input costs, by trying to grow as much food as we can for our chickens on farm. This, happily, also has positive environmental impacts for our business: the more food we grow, the less transportation (read: fossil fuels) is required to get the chookie's food into their beaks.

This chicken is eating some rocket

Obviously the biggest factor here is that we pasture raise our chickens, so they eat a crap-load of grass, seeds, bugs and snails that are just right there for the taking, meaning that unlike shed chickens, we don't import 100% of their food from someone else's farm. We don't do anything to cultivate our pasture, other than the odd slashing. It's naturally really diverse, with a mixture of annuals and perennials, summer and winter dominant crops, so there's not really a down-time. But the chickens do still need grain.

This chicken is eating a snail

Our grand plan was to pasture crop an acre of triticale this Autumn, but ye olde cancer diagnosis and recent mastectomy threw a spanner in those works, and we're going to have to wait til next year. Call us piss-weak, but experimental grain growing was just a little beyond our capacity at this time.

These chickens are eating microlaena seeds, and are about to stumble upon some sunflower seeds.

Chickens, in the mean time, are being satisfied with other grown-on-farm delicacies like gone-to-seed rocket, lettuce, spinach et al, and some sunflowers we kind of accidentally grew over the summer by way of spilt seeds that were left all over the paddocks by the chickens. Bonus! Next summer we might actually do it on purpose!

These chickens are enjoying some really big sunflower heads

The other big on-farm chook-feeder has been our extensive crop of fat hen, which we also pretty much grew accidentally. We've written about fat hen before, because we love it, but here's a super-cool little blurb from survival.org that really sums things up:

"Chenopodium album, Fat Hen, is probably named because chickens get fat from eating it. It has been used as a vegetable in Europe since prehistoric times. It grows faster and absorbs nutrients more efficiently than any crop, and can grow in almost anything. That plus the fact that it is also a rich source of nutrients makes it one of the most useful plants that there is."

OK!

It's proved to be an absolute boon for our chickens. They love it, and we take them bunches and bunches of it every day all through the growing season. 

This is a close-up photo of fat hen flower heads. The seeds are the little black dots

Now that it's going to seed, we're harvesting the seeds and adding them to the chickens' daily health porridge, which consists of wheat bran, ground sunflower and linseeds, apple cider vinegar, and kelp meal, and now, fat hen seeds. 

This lady-farmer has just mixed up a batch of super-health-chicken porridge, which she is about to deliver to her chickens.

They are digging it!

When I was a kid, I used to spend many of my school holidays on my Oma and Opa's farm in Goulburn. They were kind of self-sufficient, killing their own pigs and cows for meat, home-brewing, growing fruit, vegetables, chickens and eggs, and growing and selling a few beef-cattle on the side. I loved spending time at their place, though my experience was fairly limited to kid-friendly activities like riding in the back of the ute distributing hay and chopping thistles for hours on end. But the experience affected me in a pretty formative way, and in the back of my mind somewhere has always been the notion that I'd be pretty keen on giving it a go myself someday.

So here we are in Bega with 7 hilly acres up our sleeves, embarking upon a journey of home-building and earth-tending and food-growing. It's the realisation of a pretty long-term dream, and we're pretty bloody excited and happy about the whole caper, but things are evolving and our dreams seem to be moving well beyond our tree-hugging back-to-the-lander aspirations.

I am, at present, reeling a little from a mind-blowing couple of days this week, courtesy of the Meeting the Challenge for Change conference, held right here in Bega at the showground. It was pretty out of control, filled with people doing some incredible, ground-breaking (no pun intended) work on their broadacre farms. Pearl and I have both been on a bit of a whirlwind ride since arriving here in Bega, meeting people and learning from them, engaging with the incredibly vital community of land-management, farming and local-foodie activists. I'm now on the executive committee of the Sapphire Coast Producers' Association, closely involved with the forward movement of the South East Food Project, and Pearlie's just started her TAFE course in Holistic Land Management. So let's just say that our worlds are swimming with the possibilities for our little chunk of land, and the sense of responsibility to do our very best by it, and the future of food in our community.

At the last SCPA meeting we had a couple of dudes from Bega Valley Gourmet Meats come to talk to us about their small species abattoir, which can be used by anyone needing help with the slaughter and processing of their smaller species. Having killed and plucked and prepared a chook for eating, I'm pretty much in favour of the service they provide, and am also keen on the fact that one of them was exactly like Pearl's boyfriend Matthew Evans. After this talk, (and some ruminations on the fact that in Sydney we bought Bega Valley organic chickens but here in Bega they're nowhere to be found on account of them all being shipped to Sydney and Melbourne) we were all a-flurry with plans for raising some ducks and chickens to sell to the abattoir. But what about the feed? Buying in feed for poultry is a distinct no no when you're trying to create a closed loop farm, but the thought of growing grain was for some reason overwhelming me. That was until I heard Colin Seis' talk at the Challenge for Change conference, which he titled 'How we Totally Stuffed our Land and then Fixed it'. Colin's practice of pasture cropping - the practice of growing annual grain crops right in your perennial native grassland - has totally revegetated his land, which had been devastated by generations of chemical wheat-growing and intense over-grazing, to the point where he now has about 50cm of topsoil. Unbelieveable. And so inspiring I almost started crying. Suddenly I felt like we could grow ducks and chickens for Matthew Evans' doppelganger at the Bega abattoir and we could grow our own feed, at the same time as we are cultivating our native grasses, like this super-attractive Kangaroo Grass

and sequestering carbon in the soil. Holy moly. When this realisation hit me, I was set to explode.

These ideas had kind of been in the periphery of our minds, having followed Milkwood Farm's, Joel Salatin's and Taranaki Farm's amazingness for some time, but to hear Colin speak, to see photos of his land, and to think about all this in the context of our place, was something else.

I was also pretty excited to hear more about the benefits of controlled grazing, which Pearl had already touched on in her course.

We've got a few steers up on the land right now, grazing and trampling and pooing (yay!), and while there are a fair few less of them for a fair while longer than in a normal process of regenerative grazing, it has still be excellent for us to be able to see the difference they make to the vegetation as they go about their daily business of grazing and trampling and pooing (yay!).

But, if you can believe it, the conference's revelations about the possibilities for our land weren't even the most profound thing for me. No siree. It was this quote from Wendell Berry:

"Eating is an agricultural act"

Yes folks, it's true, you don't actually need to grow anything to be able to influence and support sustainable and regenerative farming practices, because it's the money you spend on food that can influence the way someone grows. Every single person who eats something that has grown in the earth is participating in agriculture. Most of us are participating in and supporting agricultural practices that literally kill the soil and exploit farmers to the point where they have no choice but to continue with a practice that most of them know is not the way to go. But if you start asking questions about the provenance of your food, start thinking about where it came from, who grew it and how, and then start putting your money where your heart and your head tell you is the right place, you can cook your veg knowing that no microorganisms/insects/plants/animals/humans or planets were harmed in the making of your dinner. Get to it.