Chicken Math

So, hello friends! It's been a while. The last year has been a bit tough between a couple personal illnesses, my dad's cancer diagnosis, and associated life stresses. So I have had to find my way back to a sense of humor with which to write.

What has not changed is my love of the farm life. In particular, I am a self-confessed chicken lover. Could I have seen this coming earlier in my life? Not a bit. When I pictured that beautiful farm life I lusted after since my first conscious thought, it was a specific thing I wanted: horses, horses, and more horses. A big red barn. Lots of hay. And a tractor. Well, I have the big red barn (just not a livestock barn, something I hope to remedy one day), adequate hay, and a tractor. Looooove my tractor. And I do have a couple horses. But chickens were just never in the calculus.

 I had never spent any appreciable time, in fact any unappreciable time, around chickens. I knew people who used to have them (including Farmer John, to whom I am married, who has vowed to never again have anything to do with the "processing" of a chicken), and they never seemed to comment too much one way or the other on LIKING it or not. Chickens were just something you had and chopped the head off of for Sunday dinner. NOT appealing to me in the least.

 Somewhere along the way, I got interested in chickens just a little bit. I live in a small town in Oregon, there are lots of granola types around here (which, by the way, I love, classifying myself vaguely as a former hippie and basically earth mother type), and a couple years ago while I still lived in a subdivision house there was a flapdoodle over backyard chickens. It would have made no personal difference to me, in that the subdivision I lived in is LOUSY with CC&Rs and militant enforcers of the same, and no way in hell would anyone in that neighborhood have a chicken in their back yard, sorry to say. The powers that be in that place are very hoity-toity, which is one reason I no longer live there, being neither hoity nor toity to any degree. But my friend Drew, who lived just outside my subdivision on a regular street in a regular house where normal people lived, was a passionate chicken devotee. So I got swept up in the controversy, and wrote a letter. And began to see the charm - and practicality - of chickens.

 I do love eggs, but I had never had anything but store-bought white eggs, except occasionally store-bought brown eggs. I hadn't a clue what I was missing. When the opportunity came to move to the farm where I now blissfully make my home, chickens loomed on the horizon sooner than later. My husband, the aforementioned, was not especially enthusiastic. He also left home for 4 months to work on our house in Louisiana. This is a very dangerous thing to do, leaving me and my equally animal-mad daughter alone in charge of the farm. Chickens were coming, baby.

So I began my research. I love hanging out in farm stores, they are like libraries and hardware stores - repositories of endless stores of information which is both foreign and appealing. I can peruse for hours, just wondering what in bloody heck some bit of this or that is used for, drooling over saddles, boots, gates, barn hardware, you name it. And in farm stores there is a book rack, and a large assortment of books on chickens, and indeed fowl of various types. We bought books, we bought baby ducks, and we bought chicks. This is what you call a commitment. My husband would say a commitment of a different kind might have been in order, but he wasn't here. Ha.

 When I was a child, my Uncle Jack used to require some act of commitment to start a project - he wanted to make a passthrough to the kitchen so he punched a hole in the wall, he wanted a patio so he dug a big hole outside the back door. Buying 15 chicks committed me to providing a henhouse. Now the easy way would be to buy a henhouse, and I did in fact peruse Craigslist relentlessly, but there were seldom structures available designed to accommodate more than 6-8 hens. So it became clear I would have to build a henhouse. I had never really built anything before, so this was an adventure. This was enough of an adventure it will merit its own blog. Suffice it to say, I learned by trial and error, but my daughter and I took an unused ancient former garage structure and built a raised floor, insulated the walls, cut a window and door, and created a snug, warm, safe henhouse. Not a moment too soon.

 In the course of all my research into both hens and their lodgings, I came across the concept of chicken math. Chicken Math basically states that you can pretty much expect a mature laying hen working to capacity to lay 2 eggs every three days, or looking at it on a daily basis, to get 2 eggs for every 3 chickens. It has been a while since college algebra and calculus, but I think that works out to about a 67% production rate on average.

 After several bouts of predator attrition, replacements, and additions by adoption, I have currently ended up with 12 laying hens and one rooster. I have an additional 13 babies coming up for this year, so that when my adult girls do their first moulting thing this winter and stop laying for a time, the newbies will pick up the slack just in time. But currently, there are 12 layers. So I would expect that if they are good layers operating up to capacity, I should be getting about 8 eggs per day on good days. Well, my hens obviously suck at math. In a good way. Maybe they are just exceptionally happy hens, or maybe they are physiologically freaks of nature. But they are consistently batting 83-92% instead of 67%. Today was my first 100% day - out of a dozen hens I got a dozen eggs. The impressive thing is,
this happens day after day. That 67% is a slow day!
.

 The other "chicken math" is how much it costs to raise a hen to maturity and keep feeding her, compared to the value of the eggs produced. When the hens are as productive as mine, that helps a lot with the other chicken math too! My husband loves to say our first 12 eggs were over $500 a dozen. This is an exaggeration, but not by much. When you calculate the investment of housing structures, feeders, as well as feed, there is a reason farm fresh eggs cost more. The other reason is that my beautiful girls eat no "other stuff" - only pure feed and the grass and bugs they get while free-ranging every day happily around the farm.Those store-bought eggs: TERRIBLE by comparison. Anemic in color and taste. I have come to expect a golden yolk and a rich taste, which you simply do not get at the grocery. What you don't get with farm fresh eggs is a bunch of animal-based feed and drugs. I am, like I said, a little bit of a former hippie. I am not a rabid organic only eating totally granola crunch-monster, but there are some valid points in all this food debate.

 So here is to chicken math, and my hens complete ignorance of same. Keep popping 'em out, girls! And if you, dear reader, live nearby and want eggs (or pasture raised chicken meat, which we also now raise) Red Box Farm has a facebook page and its own email at redboxfarm@gmail.com, for ordering. Oh - and Farmer John? He loves his chickens. He built a chicken tractor for meat chickens, he feeds them every day, he happily collects eggs and socializes with the hens. Neither of us expected to enjoy them as much as we do. That is the incalculable part of chicken math - like those credit card ads say: the happiness a well-tended sociable flock of chickens brings to your life-pricelss.