Egg Count 8

I've finally had a chance to look at July's egg count, which is the lowest since high winter. In total, the hens of Ecotone laid 1,623 eggs, or 135.25 dozen.

At the beginning of the month we transitioned both laying flocks to a certified organic grain ration, grown locally by Mr. Alfred Farris of Windy Acres Farm in Orlinda, Tennessee. Combined with the high quality of this grain, the low metabolism of one flock coming into molt (they pretty much stop laying), and the high heat of summer, feed consumption dropped considerably from previous months.

The approximately 300 chickens of both flocks, that is, ate 1,638 pounds of grain, or 52.86 lbs. a day. If you're following the ongoing accounting, that's 12.12 pounds of grain for each dozen eggs, or roughly a pound an egg. While the shape of these numbers hasn't been as sad since last winter - amid all that snow and silence - the hens nevertheless managed to contribute $66.27 of net income to the Ecotone economy.
Given how little I've been working outside because of teaching and the heat - about half an hour a day for the hens - that's roughly $4.28 an hour for my time to work with these chickens and their eggs. Not bad, really, for the chance to live, work, and learn at Ecotone: an experimental farm in the service of, among other things, a metaphysical riddle. But with the month's seasonal pressures and structural changes (i.e., the organic transition), this fact is in fact a pleasant surprise. And the eggs are pretty good too.

Rules of the Wrangle

Well, all but two of the piglets have made their way to new homes! Over the last two days, folks from as far away as Kentucky and North Carolina came to Ecotone to pick up these fine little hogs, some for breeding and some for feeding.

Of course, catching them in the field is easier said than done. After having several sessions of pure farm folly - picture us running around the pasture trying to catch them by hand - I came up with the idea of a trap constructed with T-posts and pallets. The first person to come by saw the trap function in all its glory. With one drop of the door, I caught all the piglets. The second attempt, however, did not go as well. Here are some rules for piglet wranglin' that I came up with in the hours after the first piglets left, trying to catch the rest.

1) Porcine Patience: Patience is the first rule for dealing with pigs. You cannot force pigs to do anything they do not want to do. Period. Pigs are intelligent. They understand what you're up to, especially if they've seen it before. Now I cannot speak to the capacity for long-term memory in pigs, but I do know that it lasts for at least several days. The second round of piglets were surely aware of what was going on, refusing to go into the trap and making themselves scarce in the bushes. By this time they had also had plenty to eat, and so were that much less inclined to cooperate.

2) Time of Day: If you must wrangle pigs, do so at dawn or dusk. Trying to convince them in the heat of the day, when it's not feeding time and when their preference is to wallow in the mud, is futile. Approach porcine when they're hungry and when it's cool.
3) Have a Plan: Do not simply start working with pigs without a plan. By the time our piglets left, they were a healthy 35 lbs. of pure muscle. If you grab one, have an idea about where you're going, and who's helping.

4) Do Not Attempt Alone: Following the previous rule, it is silly to try to work with piglets alone. The adult animals are slower, and know that you represent the Platonic forms of Corn and Soy. Piglets, however, see humans differently. To them we are unpredictable, strange, and scary. Though sometimes we show up with goodies too delicious to resist, often we show up with other, less pleasant, ends in view.

5) Respect the Sow: Most of these old-style pigs, raised outdoors on pasture, retain strong maternal instincts. Some even build elaborate nests of brush and sticks and whatnot. When attempting to retrieve piglets, treat the sows with the utmost respect. They weigh around 400 lbs. each, and are seriously committed to their piglets. Talk nicely, and try to explain what's going on. But if this doesn't work - and we all know reason has its limits - get the hell out of her way. No matter how sweet she is normally, liking her ears and belly scratched in the mud, when you're trying to get her babies, she's trying to get you. They go for your knees, and with a good bite could really do some damage. So respect her. Thank her. And you'll be back on her good side in a few days. With plenty of food.

Raised Jawbones

On the night of July 4th, Cletus went missing. He wasn't there to greet me at dawn, and he wasn't around to guard the hens at night. He was gone. We assumed he got spooked by all the fireworks, but I saw him late that night after much of the bang had already blown up all those bucks.

After not returning the first night, I began to walk the woods between our place and the interstate, crisscrossing my neighbor's place several times in several ways. Along the way, with Ozark in the lead, we came across a full bovine skeleton. My eye fell upon this bone, which I immediately recognized from a Billy Collins poem I'd read that morning.

This love for the petty things,

part natural from the slow eye of childhood,
part a literary affectation,

this attention to the morning flower
and later in the day to a fly
strolling along the rim of a wineglass -

are we just avoiding the one true destiny,
when we do that? averting our eyes from
Philip Larkin who waits for us in an undertaker's coat?

The leafless branches against the sky
will not save anyone from the infinity of death,
nor will the sugar bowl or the sugar spoon on the table.

So why bother with the checkerboard lighthouse?
Why waste time on the sparrow,
or the wildflowers along the roadside

when we should all be alone in our rooms
throwing ourselves against the wall of life
and the opposite wall of death,

the door locked behind us
as we hurl ourselves at the question of meaning,
and the enigma of our origins?

What good is the firefly,
the droplet running along the green leaf,
or even the bar of soap spinning around the bathtub

when ultimately we are meant to be
banging away on the mystery
as hard as we can and to hell with the neighbors?

banging way on nothingness itself,
some with their foreheads,
others with the maul of sense, the raised jawbone of
poetry.

- "No Things," Balistics (2010)

I found Cletus a few days later through the vet's office. A very nice neighbor had found him on the morning of the 5th, scared and limping, and was taking very good care of him. Everyone, but especially Daisy, was happy to have him come home.

The 11th Commandment

Even though it's longer than all the others combined, I thought this suggestion for an 11th Commandment, quoted by David Montgomery in Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (2007), was appropriate:

"Thou shalt inherit the Holy Earth as a faithful steward, conserving its resources and productivity from generation to generation. Thou shalt safeguard thy fields from erosion...and protect thy hills from overgrazing by thy herds, that thy descendants may have abundance forever. If any shall fail this stewardship of the land...thy descendants shall decrease and live in poverty or perish from the face of the Earth."

- W.C. Lowdermilk, Conquest of the Land Through 7,000 Years, Agricultural Information Bulletin 99 (1953), U.S. Dept. of Agriculture

Egg Count 7

The egg count for June stands at 179.5 dozen, or 2,154 eggs. That's an average of 5.98 dozen per day. With roughly 135 hens, eating about 50 pounds per day, that's 8.36 pounds of grain per dozen on average.

Even though we're in the midst of the longest days of the year, with rising temperatures the hens have slowed down laying considerably. It turns out that eggs are not simply dearer in the winter, but in the summer as well. Raising animals outside, on pasture and with the seasons, means following its cycles of activity and resource availability. Summer is slow. Take naps. Stay cool.

Some of you may have also noticed that the eggs are a bit smaller than normal, and that their color has lightened significantly. Interestingly, both of these changes are in response to the heat, and should vary throughout the season. I hope you find these variations charming, interesting, and perhaps even meaningful. Every egg is a unique gift from an individual hen, and for me their differences represent this utter specificity of the edible, the radical particularity of food. As Mr. Berry says, "when you quit living in the price and start living in the place, you're in a different line of succession."

Lila

Just over a week ago, Jonathan and I went up to Windy Acres Farm in Orlinda, TN and picked up the newest resident of Ecotone. Lila is a four month old 3/4 Dutch Belted and 1/4 Milking Shorthorn calf, and will produce roughly 2-3 gallons of milk a day when she's mature.

Lila came to live with us for two reasons, the first of which is to move ahead of the chickens and pigs in the pasture rotation, eating the tall grass down for the critters to follow. The second reason, of course, is to provide milk and other sources of protein to the humans and other animals on the farm. Since arriving at Ecotone, Lila has stayed in the backyard, hiding behind the dove aviary during the heat of the day, and venturing out only in the evenings to graze and provide the occasional "Mooooo".

Gleaners

Speaking of eating free, I'm happy to report that we're now participating in the Food Reclamation Project, a program organized through Hands On Nashville. Vendors at the Nashville Farmer's Market support the project by donating their "less-than-prime" produce (read: flawed, mostly superficially, thrown away due to our fickle industrial food aesthetic) to a group of volunteers who further sort it into human-grade quality and not. The former is then delivered to local feeding agencies and homeless shelters, while the lesser quality foodstuffs are reincorporated into the local agro-ecology.

Until recently, most of this food was directed to local community gardens for composting, which is one great way to remove organic material from the waste stream and put it back into the food cycle. Now, however, we are coordinating with the project to pick up this busted, bruised, and slightly moldy (but sometimes astonishingly perfect!) food two days a week for the Ecotone sounder. Last week, I could barely fit it all in my truck!
As you may know, pigs are remarkably similar to human in digestive anatomy. With single chamber stomachs they are omnivores, and are well-known for eating most anything and everything you put in front of them. This, of course, doesn't mean that they should or would eat those things, if given a wide variety from which to choose; but it is why they are traditionally considered unclean to eat. But it's also exactly why pigs were domesticated: because of their remarkable ability to turn all or most agricultural by-products into edible animal protein. Whether it was compost from the garden, whey from the dairy animals, or scraps from the kitchen, pigs are a crucial part of the feeding ecology for many smallholders and householders - that is, those subsistence agriculturists comprising three-quarters of the world's population.

In this sense, I've been thinking about how this project in general, and the pigs roles in particular, are good examples of gleaning, an ancient set of practices associated with the common rights to gather the remainder left in a field after harvest. Needless to say, all the pigs at Ecotone are happy to oblige in this role, and sometime in the future - after we've helped turn that so-called waste into protein - we'll return it to the project in the form of food.

Radical Agrarianism 3

Wendell Berry now appears ready to go to jail in civil disobedience against the proposed national animal identification program (NAIS). You can hear him here.

Eat free or die!

Working the Piglets

Last Thursday, Ben from Pleasant View Mill came down to the farm and taught Jonathan, Jennifer, and I how to "work" hogs, which includes ear notching (for ID), worming (only as necessary), and, of course, castration. We worked the 8 piglets from Sadie's litter, of which there was one female and seven males. We castrated all but two of the biggest males, and so have one gilt, two boars, and five barrows for sale out of that litter.

We also tried, unsuccessfully, to convince Ruby to let us do the same with her litter. As I was sealing her in the farrowing hut to gather the piglets without being killed by an angry sow, she jumped out over the top, screaming like a dinosaur the whole time! Needless to say, it was sort of scary, both because she was clearly upset, and I was afraid of her hurting herself. Once out, however, she barked loudly, calling her piglets together, and off they went into the bush for a full day and a half before I saw them again. We plan to try again in a few days. Of the six piglets in this litter, I know from observation that there are at least two gilts, maybe three, and we'll castrate at least one of the males.
If you're interested in getting a piglet out of this litter, please do consider sending a deposit soon, as they're going fast! For feeders, please send $50 per hog as a deposit, with the remaining $50 due at pick-up. For breeders, please sent $100 per hog as a deposit, with the remaining due at pick-up. The prices for breeder quality stock are $250 for gilts, and $350 for boars. I am interested in trading piglets for unrelated stock as well.

Egg Count 6

The May egg count stands at 238 dozen, or 2,856 eggs, which is just under 8 dozen per day. The number of hens in Flock #1 has dropped slightly this month, and the heat seems to have slowed them down. Instead of the hens laying all the eggs before early afternoon, they appear to be breaking up into two groups, one finishing before late morning and the other beginning in the late afternoon. Because Flock #2 has yet to start laying, I don't have any firm numbers on the feed to egg ratio this month. Here are some photos my friend Scott took during his recent visit to Nashville and the farm.