The Wisdom of the Radish (10 page)

We checked each chick for pasty butt before introducing them to their new home.

“Is this pasty butt?” Emmett asked, showing me a chick.

“Ummm, I don't know.”

That was our other problem: while all the books warn of the dangers of pasty butt, not one of them actually bothers to show a picture of it. Which led to Emmett's valiant attempt to pick off the chick's dried-up version of an umbilical cord—where it was connected to the yolk sac—which was located just below its vent.

“It's not coming off.”

“Okay, just leave it, it doesn't seem to be getting in the way of anything. The vent's up there, not down there, right?” I pulled an Ameraucana chick in close. Her vent contracted and opened in pulses, a pink little O answering in the affirmative.

In short order, the thirty chicks were transferred into their new home. They huddled beneath the heat lamp, a solid multicolored mass of fluff: pale yellow, pinkish red, mottled and striped brown, and black and gray. Emmett and I hovered over the brooder for a few minutes, just watching—entranced
as the chicks jockeyed for position, each one trying to move into the middle of the mass for warmth. A few ventured out into the greater brooder space—the biggest world they'd yet known. I almost cheered when one figured out that the trough was for food, and began pecking at the chick starter.

And then it hit me: I was hooked. And I had to admit (to myself, if not to Emmett) that the lines of argument I'd used to swing the poultry debate over to my camp were, well, somewhat beside the point. I've always had a knack for constructing convincing arguments to get what I want. (When my single mom was considering getting a gun for safety, I convinced her to get a puppy instead.) And the root of any desire usually lies far from the smoke-and-mirrors way it's expressed.

I think the real reason I'd just ordered thirty chickens was that deep down, I'm a dog person. I crave acceptance and adoration; I thrive on the sense that other creatures are relying on me. Acquiring chickens satisfied the desire for something that would respond to me, something I could mother a little. Something that might make me feel more at home in the unfamiliar landscape of Sonoma County. Something that would give me roots. (Or let me nest. Whatever.) While Emmett worried about how to keep our operation light, transferable, unbound, I was trying desperately to anchor myself to the sticky clay soil of the Russian River Valley. Even if we were to move in a year or two, I needed to feel like I owned some piece of this land if I were going to make it through this first season. And since I didn't literally own the land, at least I could carve out a space for my chickens to scratch and peck. A place for them to leave a layer of rich, fertilized soil, to take the pasture and make it into eggs. To take dirt and give me gold.

Unlike Emmett, I'm not fully satisfied by the simple joy of growth. I find pleasure in eating food I've grown, but it's not enough. Frankly, I derive more pleasure from receiving rave reviews from a customer, from the sense that my hard work has provided sustenance for another human. Emmett is a patient person and attentive; he enjoys details, and the silent, slow-growing vegetables suit him. When I met him I noticed right away that he was filled with an uncanny, quiet confidence and sense of purpose—something I didn't understand because it was so different from my need for affirmation. He doesn't speak unless he really needs to and is certain his thought will contribute significantly to the discussion. When he does say something, his sentences are well thought out. Not me; I lack any sort of filtration system between thought and speech. It runs in my family: none of us knows what we're saying until it's said.

All of which somehow seems indicative of the differences between animals and vegetables. Vegetables have a certain charm—and they do require constant attention—but when it comes to personality, they're not exactly the life of the party. Vegetables don't require the commitment that animals do; in a few months, you're done with them. You simply pull up and move on. Whereas chickens—crazy, unpredictable, needy—make the farm home.

Emmett probably understood some of this, in the way that someone you've lived with for years automatically grasps your subtext. He gamely went along with my mental math—how many dozens per week, and how much money earned? Why chicks and not laying hens? He probably suspected my hidden motivations, but he chivalrously kept his thoughts to himself.

As I watched a day-old Rhode Island Red chick tilt back her head to swallow a sip of water, I tried to convince myself that we were doing this for the right reasons.

 

 

 

It's surprising how quickly life with thirty chicks in the garage starts to feel normal. At the farm I sowed seeds with abandon, racing through tasks and constantly pestering Emmett for the time, eager to rush home to check on the babies. When I was home, I could barely be pried away from my hover position over the brooder.

There were, of course, the midnight checks—when I tiptoed into a dark garage, groggy-eyed and stumbling, making my way toward the red glow of the heat lamp. (Hell or hearth, it's anybody's guess.) Top on the nighttime checklist was temperature: for the first week, chicks' living quarters should hover around 95 degrees F. I didn't have a thermometer, but I did have the observational ability to judge the chicks' comfort level. If the chicks were spread out across the brooder—some eating, some sleeping, distributed regardless of the location of the heat lamp—they were doing okay. If they were as far away from the heat lamp as they could get, lying down and panting, they were too hot. Huddling under the heat source, too cold. Thus far they seemed pretty happy with the temperature: once they warmed up from their USPS experience, they started careening all over their new habitat.

Then there were the morning rituals. Each day, I rose early to squeeze in some chicken time before we headed over to the field. In order to get each chick used to human contact, I hand-transferred the chicks from one ninety-quart container to a second ninety-quart container with fresh paper
towel bedding. Some chicks squealed like a cat in a car; others fell asleep on my palm, basking in the radiant heat of my hand. Once that was done, I topped off the food, replenished the water supply, and watched chick TV until Emmett told me he was leaving whether I was ready or not.

Then there were the transitions of growth: from paper towel bedding, which is recommended for the first day or two while the chicks learn to identify their food, to grown-up bedding. From one container, which is big enough for the first seven days, to two containers. (And then three. And then four.)

Transitions were where the biggest hiccups occurred. Take, for instance, the seemingly simple transition to grown-up bedding. Most poultry books recommend pine shavings, approximately one inch deep, placed on the floor—it prevents feces from sticking to the birds' feet, keeps the brooder smelling fresh, and provides a textured, insulating bedding for the birds to sleep in. However, the only pine shavings I could find in the local hardware store boasted a big warning label: NOT FOR USE IN ENCLOSED SPACES: USE ONLY IN OPEN ENCLOSURES. Maybe I'm too easily scared off by the use of all caps, but I decided to go with a second option listed in one of the more esoteric guidebooks: peat moss.

So I returned home, covered the brooder floor with peat moss ... and the chicks immediately determined it to be lunch. An internet source revealed that if the chicks ate peat moss and then drank water, the peat moss would expand fivefold in their stomachs, killing them. This spurred an emergency return trip to the hardware store to get the pine shavings, all caps be damned.

After the peat moss scare subsided, the pine shavings opened up a new world. Now the little ones could scratch the pine shavings with their feet, kick it all around the brooder,
and then peck through it to find bits of spilled food (and/or eat wood, which does not expand considerably in water). The chicks lay in the pine shavings, fluffed their wings, and kicked the litter up into their feathers to take a “bath.”

I found this pecking, scratching, and dust-bathing behavior to be really cute until I realized that really, it wasn't so different from having a poop-throwing monkey in the house: feces in the food, feces in the water, feces on the animals. Feces on the human caretaker, too.

These are the things the poultry books don't tell you. Namely, that you'll spend an hour a day picking chick-kicked poopy pine shavings out of the feeding trough and waterer. That you'll think you're the only person who has ever done this, that something must be wrong with the design of your waterer/feeder/litter/chicks. There isn't, of course. (Just like there isn't anything wrong with the baby who fills up diapers with poop four times a day.) It's part of the process. You can try elevating the waterer and feeder above kick-level by placing them on a two-by-four pedestal, but that just opens up a new can of worms: the waterer or feeder capsizes, which results in wasted feed or soaked litter, respectively. Soaked litter, of course, can grow toxic mold, which can kill chicks. Drenching the fecal matter also releases a powerful ammonia smell, which can harm the birds' small, developing lungs. (That, the books tell you.)

In other words, as a novice farmer, most of what I needed to know about raising poultry couldn't be found in a book or a class, or even in the spoken advice of a fellow farmer. I had to learn the hard way, by doing. I will admit, though, that I had one decidedly twenty-first-century resource at hand:
BackyardChickens.com
, “the #1 destination for the information you need to raise, keep, and appreciate chickens.” If
there's one tool available to Greenhorn farmers that our predecessors lacked, it's the Internet.

For starters, the Web didn't exist at all when today's oldtimers were first learning the ropes of farming. But even now that these older farmers have home computers, let's be honest: most folks over fifty just don't have the same knack as us young'uns when it comes to getting the biggest bang for our Internet buck. The numbers support this assertion. A 2008 survey by the American Farm Bureau found that 90 percent of farmers age 18 to 35 have cell phones and computers, and 99 percent use the Internet.
²³
As recently as 2009, only 61 percent of
all
farmers owned or leased a computer and 59 percent had access to the Internet.
²⁴
So, while information technology use is growing rapidly among farmers of all ages, it is the youngest of us who have been able to hit the ground running.

This is especially true for many Greenhorn farmers, those of us who didn't go to agriculture school or spend our teenage years as apprentices on working farms. Instead, we attended colleges, studied in computer labs, researched with online databases, and used Google Books to fill our bibliographies. We grew up in front of the keyboard. To us, the Internet search is a familiar art. Rather than relying on traditional networks of farmer-to-farmer support—calling up our neighbors to ask if they have any wisdom to dispense on prolapsed chicken vents, coughing goats, or shriveling winter squash—we are much more likely to first open up a Web browser and perform a quick search.

I'm not saying that farming in the Internet age is an improvement, but I do know that it introduces a decidedly different approach to agricultural problem solving. We can pull up crop analyses from all the agricultural extension schools in the country from our living room sofas. We can look at photos
of flea beetles, cucumber beetles, squash beetles, and predator beetles without even getting out of our pajamas. And in the case of chicken crisis management, we can communicate with a vast pool of other poultry people from all across the country, just by logging in.
BackyardChickens.com
gets a whopping six million page views per month,
²⁵
and its online forum is fifty thousand members strong. And although the individual chicken fanciers who frequent the website probably don't have a veterinarian's grasp of poultry problems, the collective intelligence of the group rises above its component parts.

Another thing the guidebooks don't mention but my Internet queries confirmed: how quickly the chicks develop distinct personalities. Stumpy the rooster—identified by the hatchery with a pink paint dot on his head—was a sweet, mellow guy who knew all too well that he was outnumbered. He let his twenty-nine lady companions walk all over him. (He was also slower to feather out than the fems; his wings, stubby by comparison, earned him his name.) The other Rhode Island Reds and the White Leghorns remained indistinctive, but a number of the Ameraucanas earned names thanks to their distinct down patterns: fluffy, gray Penguin; friendly Bandit with her raccoon mask; small but spunky Runt with her scruffy mottled head.

And then there was the chick that quickly wiggled her dirty little butt straight into my heart: Buffy the Buff Orpington.