On lunar folk calendars, sowing clover, and the futility of backyard chickens

In which our author muses on the upside of pseudo-scientific gardening and bemoans our grabby-handed culture of scarcity in times of economic uncertainty.

It's an almanac, might as well talk about the new moon we just had. First of all, don't you think they should call it the No Moon? Me, I put a little bit of credence into the lunar cycle when it comes to activities on the farm. A little bit. Just enough to be effective. Here's the thing about folk lunar gardening... it insists on action, on a deadline. Whether or not this or that phase of the moon is best for pruning, setting eggs, grafting, sowing, harvesting, setting fenceposts or cutting firewood, the farmer, gardener, or woodcutter is being held to a schedule. A lunar folk calendar may not have any basis in hard fact, but if it keeps the work getting done I don't see the harm in it. The best time to sow clover is whenever the conditions are right and you have the time. And the timing this winter looked to be pretty good, new moon and all.

This past year I purposely created a lot of disturbance with my pigs. I also created a bit on accident. Running livestock on a piece of land does not suddenly make us "regenerative." Running them in a management intensive rotational pattern does not even promise this. Doing a good job 90 % of the time doesn't make up for the 10 % that conditions were inappropriate. Animals can be one of the best and one of the worst things we as stewards can introduce to the land. And so I must do pasture repair work, which sometimes means reseeding disturbed areas.

In middle to late winter in our climate the soil goes through periods of freeze and thaw. Being heavy clay, this causes cracks in the earth which open and shut, admitting surface sown seeds to work their way in. Smaller seeds like clover seem to do well under these conditions. Better yet is being able to get bare soil contact, and to improve upon those conditions, getting your seed spread upon bare soil right before snow cover can help to ensure that the seeds aren't pecked and scavenged upon by birds and mice. 'Round here I've heard it said that the best time to broadcast clover is the new moon in February. This is probably true for a number of reasons. February is likely to host the appropriate weather conditions for broadcast seeding. It's also a good time to get out and walk the pastures as itt won't be long before it's time to begin grazing again, and when that time comes, it is good to have made observations, walked the land, and considered a grazing strategy for the beginning of the year, particularly in complex, multi-species systems such as our own. We did it in January this time... but it's pretty close to February, and I'm fairly certain that whenever this particular lunar folk superstition was codified February then was probably much more like January now. Because everything is getting hotter all the time, lest ye forget.

It's a good time to pick up dead branches and twigs along the wooded draws, track the comings and goings of deer, harvest juniper berries, find owl pellets, note where the winter wind is strongest or stillest, and take in the larger picture of what this land wants to be, if that isn’t in fact an anthropomorphic fallacy.

Out along the thatchy slope, marauding sparrows bobble on head-height stalks of sorghastrum nutans, stripping seeds and flitting madly, dropping two seeds to the welcoming soil for each three they consume. (My best estimate.) It's a good time for seeds to be tucked beneath the snow to sleep, a good time to take part in the eternally hopeful act of dissemination, especially in the places where we hope to heal the soil from past mistakes. I think the new moon, or anytime really, is a good time make penance for our follies. And there will be follies to come.

I don't need a crystal ball to tell you that there are going to be a lot of disappointed first time chicken owners in 2023, and worse, probably some sad chickens. And while in our culture the advice to not be afraid of failure is often dispensed, I feel a need to buck that trend here and now and warn folks to not fail when it comes to other living things. If you are thinking about getting your own flock of chickens because of egg prices, don't. Now I'm not so self-important as to believe that anybody who has gotten it into their mind to maintain a personal chicken flock is going to heed my advice. If recent events are of any relevance, there is no more powerful a force in society than wrong-headed hordes of individuals motivated by self-preservation. I cannot shake the toilet paper scare of 2020 from my mind. A scarcity perpetuated by the victims, not some shortfall in the supply chain system, not the greed of some corporation, nor the neglect of some authoritarian regime, but a tyranny of the mob of individuals who all had the same thought. Please don't do this with chickens.

Most convincing reason first: your eggs will not be any cheaper this way. As an egg producer I have had to compete with the supermarket and other local vendors for years. Unless you can receive government subsidies for your flock of six chickens, you will be hard pressed to save any money from this experience. Commercial egg production is designed to take into account the bottom line, which never leads to good environmental outcomes. Home egg production is often driven by pride. Under the proper conditions, and with much care and concern this can lend itself to a better environmental outcome than commercial production, maybe. But it will not save you money. We've been selling organic, rotationally pastured eggs for around 9 years now. If we do some funky accounting and cook the books in a way which doesn't soil our pride, it appears we may be breaking even. We sell eggs, yes. We also sell feathers for crafts and jewelry on Etsy, (not going to be a stable market in the endtimes) and we have somehow found the only market in our part of the world for tough old worn-out hens and roosters. ("Full-flavored).

Sometimes we assign an arbitrary value to the manure that we reintegrate into other aspects of our food system, or account for parasite control that chickens provide in our cow pasture, but we have no way to make a serious educated guess at the value of this work. I've been told by neighbors that the local hen houses sell their spent hens by the lot, 50 cents a head, to Campbell's Soup Co. Our egg program is at the scale where with some more efficient management and access to the right market, we could probably make a reaonable (to someone like me) supplementary wage. Maybe. There are spreadsheets to check out if you're curious; Harvey Ussery has a good one in his book The Small-Scale Poultry Flock. Just ignore the dollar per-hour pay rate cell... you don't want to think about it. There are many reasons to raise laying hens, and I do not think financial reward is a compelling one. Maybe the system is purposely rigged, or maybe that's just the nature of capitalism. Even if home produced eggs are cheaper this week, the nature of the food and agricultural economy doesn't shake out in the small scale producer's favor in the long term. Speaking of the long term, if you order your laying hens as chicks now, they will probably not come into lay until late-summer / early fall. We do not have a crystal ball to determine what feed, fuel or egg prices will look like then. I feel a little nauseous to even think of what's coming next. Chickens are no sure bet.

Economic efficiency is a difficult aspect of homestead-scale food production. It is natural to view scaling as a matter of calculating labor per unit of food. So if it takes me approximately the same amount of time to care for 6 chickens as it does, say, 24, and I'm confident there's a market for surplus eggs, there's a chance that when the cost of feed is low (say goodbye to those days), um, let's see... I will lose more money. But if I move up to 80-90 hens, and I spend the spring months desperately trying to convince folks to buy them, plus turning people away in winter because there aren't as many, um... carry the decimal... I can't tell if I broke even or lost money, but boy am I stressed.

Chickens are easy, unless they aren't. I always try to encourage my kids to try new things, even if they think they might suck at them. Even when I know they will suck at them. I will do no such thing with adults, when it comes to livestock. I don't know how many folks read this. Some of y'all are or probably could raise chickens the right way (Humanely, without negatively impacting the environment). Statistically, some of y'all would probably suck at chickens. It may not even be your fault. I raise chickens on a landscape that is not necessarily suitable to them year round. There have been environmental consequences as a result of it, like erosion and pasture degradation which I must solve if I wish to continue raising eggs with integrity. At least I am committed to providing humane, healthy and attentive management to our flock. And that takes work... work that not everyone is cut out for.

Some folks are straight up afraid of chickens, and that may be a healthy attitude to have, or at least an indication that one shouldn't consider running a flock of them. Some people are fine with chickens, but afraid of the manure. A chicken shits freely. In fact the way that chickens shit... throughout their sleep, as they walk, whenever, wherever, unprovoked and without concern or even so much as a sound, is a testament to their sovereign nature. In fact there is no act more autonomously performed across freedom-loving homesteads than the way that chickens shit. Chickens are living the life libertarians wish they were living, shitting everywhere without consequence. And goats are anarchists. But if you yourself are a chickenshit in regards to manure handling, or neglectful, then you'll be in it very deep. When manure composting isn't performed effectively or at sufficient scale, the benefits are lost... and the only thing more troubling than a world where everyone hordes their own private stash of toilet paper is a world where every backyard has a flock of chickens and individuals caches of manure that are not reintegrated into the food system effectively or have actually become small biohazards. Our food system has too many urgent problems to solve with this unscalable solution.

Another thing... one needn't be a hardened murderer to kill the occasional chicken, but it does require some grit at least, alongside some compassion. I have considered the possibility of going into business as a travelling urban chicken butcher, requesting exorbitant fees to rid city folk of their flock once they've stopped laying. That's probably not going to happen, but something worth considering with chickens as a personal egg strategy is how it feels to eat your pets. The way most laying operations get by on such thin profit margins is by frequently bringing in new hens and culling old hens. Usually not even that old, just ones that drop below a certain rate of lay. We keep a fair few old birds around. Some of them prove themselves to be good broodies, reducing the cost of replacement birds and brooder energy. Some of them, admittedly, are just sweet old girls that we've become accustomed to. Some are just fast. And if we don't predate upon them, something else might. The beginning chicken rearer should be aware that the potential for tragedy exists around every corner when it comes to chickens. Many of us are well equipped to handle tragedy, some of us find the experience necessary to learn from, but I've met a lot of folks who were too tender-hearted to raise laying hens. As a general rule, with a few exceptions, vegetarians should steer clear of raising chickens for eggs, or if they're truly principled, most any agriculture. We all have probably made the logical connection between death, decay, food and life. But waking up to a murder scene in the family coop is a tough introduction.

There's a lot of reasons why we've become disconnected from our food in this culture. I personally prefer being connected, but I think a lot of people don't actually enjoy seeing it being produced, in a "sustainable" setting, or otherwise. Growing food, from eggs to carrots to milk is disgusting, tragic, and smelly business at times. Also it's toil and it's unappreciated. It isn't very profitable. It's politically loaded, and folks will make your lifestyle into propaganda to express views on things they don't understand. And while I want to do my part to educate eaters, and I want folks from all walks of life to experience the magical process of converting dirt, sun, water and air into food, many people aren't cut out for it, even if they had the interest. When technology allowed modern culture to turn away from the agrarian lifestyle, people enthusiastically left in part because it is a very hard way of life. But I do think there are ways for people to come together, create alternatives to (and within) the current dysfunctional system, experience more, and gain food resilience in their community.

For now I'd rather continue complaining. I am doing my best to not go full-on bloviating, mean-natured, moralizing, sour grape eating windbag on you, gentle reader, because a big part of the failed DIY chicken frenzy has to do with a particularly confident individual who matches that description. Joel Salatin, whom I will reserve more adjectives for in a future piece, has done more to shackle families with debt and failed investments than the Beanie Baby Speculative Bubble. Please don't let me become like him, y'all. If I ever have one book's worth of good ideas, don't let me write more. If I ever turn out successful, do some research and find out why. It wasn't the farming. If I ever turn my expertise in a niche subject into an opportunity to ceaselessly moralize at paid public events, and swindle hopeful people into paying to hear me talk about their future success, please do ask who is operating the farm. You'll know I've finally lost it when I begin punctuating my book titles with dollar signs. If there's a handful of successful pastured poultry operations on account of a book Joel Salatin wrote, he would have done the world a service by hanging it up right then and there and shutting up.

I feel better now.

Truth is, beyond the question of economics, it is understandable that folks want to take part in raising the food they eat. And I don't think it's absurd to want that, or too out of reach for many folks. I'm just interested in alternatives to our current food system that meet nutritional, environmental and social needs that can actually stick in the long term. When we got out first little chicken flock, living in an urban area it felt wonderful and empowering to go out to the coop and retrieve eggs. People of all ages find this a rewarding little moment in their daily routine, and I still do find it rewarding, almost a decade in. Communal or community-supported egg flocks may be a tool in the resiliency toolbox that splits the difference between centralized, market-oriented industrial production and a society of individualists so rugged that they are unable to share resources, labor, cost, and opportunity, even when it is to their benefit.

Years ago we discovered that our dairy program could only continue if we were able to make it cooperative. It hasn't always been smooth sailing to organize, share decision-making, or tolerate different personalities, approaches, working-styles or sense of taste when it comes to cheeses, but it took a project and resources that we couldn't manage efficiently on its own and created benefit across many households. I have not decided to move our poultry program into a cooperative model at this time, and that's for a lot of reasons, some of them admittedly regarding my own pride, but I do like to think of our model as being community-supported. While the size of our flock varies widely throughout the year (we raise chickens, turkeys and ducks for meat in addition to our egg-laying flock) we try to raise enough to meet the egg needs of our immediate community, (50-80 hens is the current sweet spot) as fickle as they may be at times. As I've mentioned before, it isn't bringing in stacks of cash, but it pays for itself so long as people buy feathers on the internet, and it enriches the soil across our shared land trust, and it puts calories into people, raised with some intention around our larger ecosystem health. And this is the thing about farming without community... part of the reward is in seeing your work benefit others. It also levels the playing field a bit. Raising food requires the privelege of land access. I am eternally grateful to be farming on a land trust model, as much I will eternally complain about farming on a land trust model. Beats a mortgage.

Maybe I'm the one with the romanticized view of agrarian life, but when I get out into my wider community and meet folks who've been working their land to leave a legacy, to improve not only the material wealth of their fields but to improve the health of our shared watersheds, it makes sense to me why personal chicken coops just don't speak to me. It’s not the issue of personal property ownership I take offence to, it’s how we food producers handle personal responsibility. As much as the confinement livestock industry has created a non-ecosystem where living things are raised in absence of a fully-cyclic environment where chickens, soil, wildlife, microbiota, climate and humans can all exhibit and respond to feedback, so to does the mythic "self-sufficient" layer flock exist outside the important material and social ecosystem that has benefited chickens and humans since jungle fowl were first domesticated. Also, if you are raising more than 12 chickens in temperate North America and not supplementing with grain or feed imports, I will go outside and eat a cluster of honey locust thorns. A chicken is one of the least self-sufficient critters there is. Anyhow, in much of the world there are somewhat communal flocks that exist in small settlements. I do not know how the economic or social arrangements are organized in this setting, and would be delighted to hear more from readers who have experience with communal flocks.

Well once again, it appears that I'm being a bit discouraging. And it wouldn't have to be this way if there weren't so many other voices out there being so damn encouraging. After all, raising chickens humanely isn't the hardest thing in the world to do. With a bit of research and experience, it's even possible to it with ecological rigor. I too, want to do everything, and be good at it. But I cannot, and I am not. We can bring food systems to forefront of our communities, I think, but it will require something much more challenging than working with chickens, and that is working with people. My worst fears beyond our current trajectory as a society are that folks are going to begin treating chickens and chicken feed the same way they treated toilet paper, or canning jars, or garden seeds these past few years. I am fearful that chickens will become hard to obtain, or that feed and related supplies will be squandered by people who don't have any damn business raising chickens, and that this will only exacerbate the economics of scarcity. Americans are really unique in their ability to even make aspects of their own self-preservation, like growing food, all about being great resource consumers. It isn't a Black Friday sale, this is ecosystem health and economics and how we relate to land and living things. The message has been so clear to me these past few years: cooperate or die.

Isn't it a dog gone shame to live in a society with so much scarcity and abundance endlessly chasing each other in a circle? I trust that many of you learned how to share as children and are probably doing an alright job of it as adults. And I have no doubt that there are others whom, like the pouting toddler, cannot loosen their grip on this moment's item of desire, be it toilet paper, chickens, or Tickle-Me-Elmo. Only in moments of extreme danger are humans supposed to be supremely self-centered, but my fear is that we've been acculturated into this behavior by an economy that thrives on feelings of scarcity.

Our eggs have always been on the expensive side, though we do offer them on a sliding scale pay scheme. And I'm very lucky to have had folks support us back when we weren't the cheaper option. I'm not an expert economist, so I'll just wait and watch if the prices ever come down again, or if this last wave of influenza is replaced by another more virulent strain. Is this jump in price a temporary upset, or a harbinger of days to come. At what point will people run out energy trying to produce expensive things for themselves and begin to question (and respond to) the tenuous economics our food system is situated upon? Throughout history, when the cost of food became too high the peasants didn’t work harder… they revolted.

From where I sit and write today, the sun is casting slanted beams across the icy cow yard. Sugar is licking her little baby, and further down the slope, chickens are coming in from a day spent scratching the frozen duff for seeds and bits, rearing up to hop onto their perches. I enjoy the work, at least when the wind is this still, and I am very lucky to have the opportunity to connect with my food through animals and land in this way. I do wish that more folks could have this experience, I guess I question the cost of doing it alone and the lack of appropriate focus on larger issues around food, economics, and justice. I just don't believe that things are going to better until we all get a bit more ambitious about our local food goals.

And if your chickens ever need to get, you know, taken care of, talk to me. I know a guy.

Abundantly yours,

BB