No dig gets off the ground

The Easter holiday comes as an annual life saver for me. It is a chance to catch up with everything (including writing my blog!!!).

For once I am actually pretty well on top of everything at the moment. There is a steady flow of seed propagation from the conservatory to the polytunnel. The basic rule is that once the conservatory is full, whichever tray of seeds is most advanced goes out into the polytunnel.

From there, hardier seedlings go into the coldframe before being planted out.

The no dig beds are taking shape - it really is bringing an exciting freshness to my growing. Already I have broad beans, onions, shallots, garlic and parsnips in the ground, as well as half of my potatoes. 

I am trying quite a few new crops this year, at the forefront of which are Spinach Rubino and Bull's Blood Beetroot, whose seedings are already in the gorund under fleece alongside mixed lettuces. With regular picking these should provide a steady flow of mixed salad leaves well into the summer months.

One major problem with no dig is that nobody sent the memo to the chicken escape committee. Cocky and the two Cream Legbar girls jump the fence every morning and spend the day looking for freshly laid compost mulch to shift. Even better if this involves dislodging a few onion sets or freshly planted seedlings.

A few rustic sticks and some old scaffold netting protect the young broad bean plants

This has necessitated a little more crop protection than usual. I'm sure after I've chased them off a few more times and lobbed a few more clods of soil in their general direction that they will give up with their vandalising behaviour and find somewhere else to hang out.

The new ducks on the other hand are much more considerate, spending most of the day hoovering for slugs. They even stick mostly to the paths.

To Save A Chicken

Our newest inhabitants on the smallholding - 'rescue' hens

Read on and you may be surprised I've got these

A vast majority of chickens and eggs in this country are produced in extreme intensive systems. Even those which claim to be free range are usually not much different to the others. Battery hens may have been outlawed, but the replacement systems are not much better. Barn-reared as a description is a vile deception. This is minimum welfare standard. The chickens may not be in actual wire cages but they are caged in by their instincts in highly overcrowded sheds.

Some of the practices which go on sadden me. Overworking of laying hens. Genetic obesity in meat birds. High losses accepted as collateral. Routine drugging. 

Here is an excerpt from an article I found entitled UK Government Rejects 2016 Beak Trimming Ban.

It (BTAG, Beak Trimming Action Group) found that although other countries such as Austria and Sweden have implemented bans on beak trimming, the UK's larger flocks and different breeds mean lessons learned from these countries are not easily transferred over.

BTAG concluded that an imminent ban on beak trimming could result in significant welfare problems through outbreaks of feather pecking and cannibalism.

It goes on to say

The NFU supports and is actively involved in ongoing industry work to better understand what the trigger points are that cause injurious feather pecking.

Those 'trigger points' would not take a genius to work out. What they really mean is:

We are making a fortune from an incredibly inhumane industry which puts zero value on the welfare of birds. We will continue to strongly influence government through lobbying and will make a few right noises about having good intentions.

The chickens which make it out of the system are often in an awful state and need nurturing back to good health. I don't mean that they are hatching and executing elaborate plans of escape.  These are the chickens which well-meaning individuals, often smallholders though more often people with very little experience of keeping any birds, purchase as ex-commercial layers.

At least one of the charities involved in the rescue hen trade really pulls at the heartstrings.

Now the intentions of such charities may be good and I may seem harsh to say that I would rather the chickens' lives were ended at 72 weeks, when their production starts to dip, rather than go on to live a long and happy life in someone's garden.

However, hear me out.

The normal fate of the chickens, whether from caged, barn or free range systems, is for their carcasses to be sold off (presumably very, very cheaply) at the end of the most productive period of their lives. The meat would go for dog food, baby food or cheap processed food.

But now there is an alternative. For around £2.50 you can save one of these chickens. Nice idea.

But here's the rub as I see it.

The chicken-saving charities pay the chicken factory owners for the birds. By doing this you are propping up a cruel and inhumane industry which exists because there is a demand for unethical cheap meat and eggs by a public who prefer to close their eyes to the situation. If you pointed out how the chickens were kept, they would block their ears and go LALALALALA. Or just shrug their shoulders. 

And before you say "That's ok for you. You're not poor and can afford to pay a premium." I get that argument, but cheap meat is not a dietary necessity. In many countries meat is an occasional treat and it is valued. There are plenty of cheap, healthy alternatives, there is a different balance that can be struck.

The 'farmers' must be rubbing their hands in glee. Here are the people who know that their industry is cruel coming along offering to pay them to take the birds away which they would otherwise sell for pennies. They probably wish they themselves had come up with the idea for the scheme in the first place... 

"It's worth it to save a bird", I hear some say. Well, do you really think that no-one is going to step into the breach and provide low grade meat for unidentifiable food? It just means it won't be your particular chicken that won't end up in that part of the food chain.

So there you have it. My probably very controversial view. 

I guess the thing is I get that when the birds' production drops it makes economic sense to replace them and to use the carcasses for something. We cannot expect to have a bounteous supply of eggs available and for the farmers to look after the birds into their unproductive old age. Even I am not that unrealistic.

But there is a point where cost-cutting becomes unacceptable. I would argue it is about how the chicken lives rather than how long it lives. 

Having said all this, yesterday I picked up 8 laying hens from a big poultry shed. Hear me out.

The birds are equally 72 weeks old and I plan to give them one extra year of life, during which they will be productive enough for my needs. Next year I will replace them with birds from the same source and they will make nice chicken soup, pies or treats for the dogs.

But the place I acquired them from, for I did pay £1 each which probably helps out the lady who keeps them, came recommended by others. The chickens were kept in a large shed. I didn't see inside, but what I did see was lots of chickens coming and going freely and wandering over a large area. There were trees for them to gather under, dusty ground (probably moreso than usual with the drought) for them to scratch at and roll around in and space for them to stretch their wings and legs.

This I guess would count as a small scale commercial enterprise and seemed to be a system which I could accept as a means of producing fairly large quantities of eggs without compromising the welfare of the hens too much. I'll be honest, I wouldn't say everything was perfect. The chickens' feathers were not in great condition and they looked like they needed a bit of a rest. They were nowhere near as bad as those which come from more intensive systems.

In the back of the car the chickens clucked to reassure each other and when we introduced them to their new pen they entered confidently. They quickly found their food and water and started scratching around. They clearly knew how to behave naturally.

It's a short life for a meat chicken

This seems a long time ago now

Six months does not seem a long time for a table bird to live before it makes the journey into the freezer. Before I became a smallholder I definitely would have questioned why a bird couldn't enjoy a longer life before that life was taken for our culinary pleasure.
That was until I finally plucked up the courage to dispatch some of our older cockerels. They were tough as boot leather!
Add to that the fact that cockerels if let grow too long will become aggressive to each other and ungentlemanly to the hens.

Suddenly a touch of reality strikes home. These birds are not pets. They will live for six months and that's it. So the best I can do is give them a good life.

Three Ixworths and a Muscovy duck

Until this year our meat birds have been Ixworth chickens, a traditional breed, and Muscovy ducks. We didn't feed them any different to the other birds, for they all lived together. The Muscovies grew to a good size but the Ixworths were mostly leg with slithers for breasts.

The Ixworth trio when we had them.

Smart birds, but not a lot of breast.

But it gets more complicated. Six month old birds would be considered slow-grown. Commercial hens will be ready in 6 weeks. Over the years this age has come down dramatically. At the same time slaughter weight has risen equally dramatically. Since the 1940s, slaughter weight has doubled while slaughter age has halved.

Graph taken from Compassion in World Farming document

Now there is so much that I find abhorrent about intensive poultry farming. But the age of the birds is, as I have discovered, not quite so straightforward. The birds probably have no expectations of how long they will live, but would certainly prefer to have space and freedom while they are alive.

We recently reared some chicks taken out of a highly intensive system. Their rate of growth was astonishing, as was their ability to eat and drink vast quantities. But at least these birds were able to live the life of a truly free range chicken until they reached slaughter weight. I would genuinely say that it wasn't overly cruel, though they were abnormally big-breasted and by ten weeks old some were quite waddly. None went off their legs, though they would have if left to grow even heavier. A couple spent some time apparently gasping as they got older. Maybe this was indicative of heart problems or being just too big and misshapen.

Anyway, my conclusion was that provided they were slaughtered before they got too heavy, although their life would be short we could offer them a reasonable life. But I did feel that genetic 'improvement' had gone a little too far.

Our next meat birds, the ones we have just slaughtered, came to us as one day old commercial broiler chicks. They come through a friend and don't even have a breed name. In fact they are a bit of a mish-mash. Most pure white with thick yellow legs and bright red combs, but some clearly mixed with traditional brown hens and a couple specked with rogue black feathers.
They grew much quicker than I had anticipated and took me unawares as they suddenly reached a good weight. I had to hurriedly take them off growers pellets and put them onto finishers (for growers pellets contain medication so require a withdrawal period). They were ready for slaughter at 12 weeks or 84 days. I was very happy with these birds. They did not seem out of proportion. They were healthy birds, it's just that they grew much more quickly than the traditional breeds we had previously tried to rear for meat.

And so I feel we have found our meat chickens. Their short life is nevertheless a good one, far removed from most of their cousins in intensive systems (and I include minimum standard so-called free-range in that).
There are some big benefits to them having a short life too. Feed costs are lower, there is less demand on housing and the ground can be rested more. But there are limits.
The European organic standard gives a minimum slaughter age of 81 days, which I would say is about right for today's fast growing birds. Anything which reaches table weight considerably before that is probably too genetically manipulated to have a comfortable life, not to mention the conditions it is kept in to maximise profit and the expense of welfare and taste.

Taking Stock on Midsummer's Day

Thursday 21st June 2018
Midsummer

It's midsummer. Most of the sowing is done. Most of the baby animals and birds are born. A few crops are starting to yield, but by and large this is a period of growing and rearing in readiness for harvest.

The Year's Weather So Far
Winter bites late then hangs around like a bad smell
The weather has been testing this year. Winter was not too bad until it turned round and bit us with The Beast From The East which was followed by a good few weeks of winter stubbornly putting its foot in the door and barring any entrance by Spring.
The cold snap was really challenging, especially for the pregnant ewes. We almost lost one, but in the end three ewes gave birth to seven lambs. We lost one and two ended up being bottle fed.
The runt third triplet, who we named Flash, continues to be very runtish. In contrast the other bottle fed lamb, Rambutan, is huge. All six lambs have just moved down into the further paddocks where the grass is now taller than they are.
The ewes are recovering well now too. We may give one or two of them a break from breeding next year.

The fruit and vegetables were left floundering too, maybe as much as a month behind usual. This was reflected in nature, with many migrant birds, including our swallows, arriving back very late. In fact many don't seem to have bothered at all.

A Warm and Wet Spring Finally Arrives
When Spring did arrive, it was pretty warm but came with plenty of rain. The water table sat just below the surface of the land so every time it rained we had puddles. The muddy conditions didn't last too long though and we have had much stickier in the past.

Early Summer And The Rain Dries Up
And so on into May and early summer. It has actually been very warm allowing many of the crops to catch up to close to where they should be by now. But it has been dry. Ridiculously dry. The water butts are all empty and I have had to water very selectively. We have only had five minutes of rain in the past month and the ground has gone from waterlogged to gaping cracks opening up. There is still water enough under the surface for most of the outdoor crops, but the carrots have completely failed. This happened two years ago too when we had similar conditions - a cold damp early start to the season followed by dry conditions and a hard crust on the soil.
At least I can still get a good crop in the polytunnel where they are more easily nurtured.
I am not sure how much the early potatoes will swell up. They should just about be ready for harvest soon, so I gave them a good drink last night. This should help them along.

And I am a little worried about the sheep paddocks. At the moment they are still ok, but if we don't get rain soon there will not be enough lush grass to fatten our lambs well.
People have already cut their hay and are baling it at the moment. I like to collect it straight off the field, but my first line of supply was short this year as the grass yield is down. Hopefully the second will come good.

On the positive side though, the sweetcorn, pumpkins and tomatoes are loving the Mediterranean climate.
It seems to be a good year for most of the fruit too. Apples and pears look like they will give us our first really decent harvest now that the orchard is maturing nicely. The blackthorns are absolutely smothered in sloes.

The strawberries are doing very well, free of strawberry seed beetle which devastated the crop last year, though a little rain might help them to swell up a bit more. The sunshine is making them taste like little buttons of sweet deliciousness.
The raspberries are just beginning to ripen and should produce bucket loads and the gooseberries are almost ready. Last year was disappointing for these but this year looks like a good crop of large berries.
The currants are not faring so well this year. It may be time to replace some of the bushes. They seem to prefer cooler, wetter years.
Finally, the cherries are ripening so hopefully we can get at least some of them before the birds do.

Poultry
The turkeys have enjoyed the dry weather too. In fact it was the day the poults hatched that it stopped raining. The nine poults we have kept for fattening up are doing extremely well, so well indeed that the two hens have left them and are both now sitting on new clutches of eggs.

If these hatch it will be a big bonus for us as the sale of the young turkeys will more than pay for the food to rise them and to support the adult birds through the year.

The meat chickens which we purchased as day old chicks about ten weeks ago have put on a sudden spurt of growth, so much so that they are pretty much ready to go in the freezer. It is a short life for them but they have had it infinitely better than any commercially produced birds, even the so-called free-range ones. I wasn't expecting them to make weight quite so soon, so need a couple of weeks to change their diet to finish them properly. But their early departure will free up accommodation and give the chance to rest the ground a bit.
It is actually quite good to be able to buy in, raise and dispatch in a relatively short period. Having lots of birds in different pens with different feed requirements can be quite demanding and quite a tie.

We decided not to breed any geese this year, but to sell the eggs instead. But one of the geese had different ideas as we found her sat on five eggs in a tyre outside. Sadly, the day after we found her the next was abandoned and the eggs gone. At least the goose was still alive.

And lastly, the Muscovy ducklings are growing well. They are still living in with the three silkie hens but will move out when they are old enough for they need  lot of space.



So that's it for the year so far.
Where it goes from here very much depends on the weather. If we return to normal levels of rain as we head into the second part of the year then it could turn out to be a very good year. If not... well.

Outdoor reared turkeys

Tuesday 22nd May 2018
The Dry Weather Turkey Chicks
The original plan was to move the young turkeys with one or both of their mums up to a stable once they were born. I don't like keeping birds inside, for I think that fresh air and exploration are key to their upbringing. However crows, cold and getting wet are most definitely not key to their upbringing.
A couple of years ago I made the mistake of putting some poults outside when they appeared strong and fully feathered at about 6 weeks old. They got soaked during a storm and were obviously suffering. I brought them back in, but over the next week we lost about one a day. It was heart-breaking.

This year we ended up with 14 chicks from two hens, ten from the more experienced hen and just four from the other. Very quickly two chicks swapped mums to the older hen. We sold four chicks while they were very young, which should pay for the others' food for a while. After a bit of 'negotiation' the ten remaining chicks are now being shared between both mums.
This year's turkey chicks have brought us good weather. They are ten days old now and have not yet seen a spot of rain. I am veering towards letting them stay outside. To this end I knocked them up a shelter, as much as anything to keep their food dry. While they are small they can all dive under mums protective wings, but they won't all fit forever.

A bigger job was to prevent them wandering through the heras fencing, for the crows have young now and will be on the lookout for any opportunity to grab a tasty treat. The young turkeys are inquisitive and go wandering through the nettles which surround the turkey pen. However the adults can't get through to protect them.
I rummaged around and found a roll of chicken wire and a roll of plastic tree protector. I found a jar of old twist ties which I'd been saving up too. Securing all this to the heras fence was a long and repetitive job and the young turkeys kept finding ways through.
In the end we got there though.

Thursday 24th May 2018
The first rain for a long while, which was desperately needed. The turkey chicks should be ok now. They are 12 days old and Mum knows what she is doing. When the wind turns cold or the air turns damp, she heads into one of the houses and spreads her wings to shield the poults.

Next to the turkey pen, the meat chickens are growing at a staggering rate. I have them separated from the other chickens so I can feed them the appropriate diet for their stage in life. At present they are on what is known as growers pellets, though they go mad for any bit of greenery I throw in the pen. They stay on these pellets until a couple of weeks before their time is up, when they move onto finisher pellets (the clue is in the name).

Growing fast

Finally  a couple of other images from the smallholding. The first is a wonderful wild rose which is brightening up my native hedge at the moment.
The second shows the strawberry rows which we have been weeding ready for the harvest. No sign of the dreaded strawberry beetle which plagued us last year, so fingers crossed for our best ever strawberry year.

The War On Slugs

Saturday 28th April 2018

The War Against Slugs
I made some new slug traps today from old plastic food pots. I am having a concerted attack on the blighters this year, using these techniques:
Night time hunts
Placing planks on the ground so the slugs shelter there during the day
Ducks - now living in the veg plot
Slug traps - filled with beer slops or, failing that, a sugar and yeast mix
Slug pellets - ferrous phosphate, organic and wildlife friendly (except slugs)
It is a battle which requires prolonged and sustained effort.




A New Home for the Table Birds
Next I moved the chicks from the broody ring in the garage. They have very quickly outgrown their space. They were very excited to discover the great outside, but even more excited by their new feeders!

Doing my bit to build a community
In the evening we had a local group of smallholders coming over. This is a group I started up as part of the Fenland Smallholders Club. We had a lovely evening and I am sure the group will go from strength to strength over the years. Everybody lives within a short distance of each other which means we should be able to coordinate some of our smallholding activities. Hopefully friendships will form and we will all be able to help each other out when we need it.

Smelly Chicks

Thursday 5th April 2018
Smelly Chicks

With Sue due back today, a general tidy up was in order. After wrestling with the hoover for a while I headed outside.
Today was a rare one for 2018, a fine sunny day. I resisted the temptation to work the land though, hoping that today's sunshine and warm breeze would dry the soil enough to be rotavated tomorrow.
Even the polytunnel has been struggling to get warm so far this year, but today the temperature in there rose to over 90 in old money. That should kick all the seedlings into action.

The twenty chicks I brought home last week have been doing their utmost to mess out their cage and stink out the front hallway where they live. We usually keep them here for the first four weeks before moving them to larger and more airy accommodation in the garage, but I decided to speed up the process of getting them outside.
I needed to set something up where I could place the chicks while I cleaned out their cage. It needed a good scrub and a strong hose jet. So I set up the broody ring in the garage - I would need to do this anyway in a couple of weeks.
The chicks were quite happy in there. So happy in fact that I decided they can stay in there. To be on the safe side, they have an overhead heat lamp and the electric hen heat plate. That way they can choose which is most comfortable for them and if one fails the other will keep them warm enough.

Pekins here we come!

Friday 5th January 2018
Duck! Duck! Duck! Duck! Duck!
I received a lovely message in my inbox today. A company who supply hatching kits for schools and care homes contacted me as they obviously end up with rather a lot of unwanted young birds. It seems someone who takes their meat strain Pekin ducks off them has let them down so I have arranged to take some off their hands at a very reasonable price. This presented a great opportunity to share this fortune with fellow members of Fenland Smallholders Club. I whacked a message on Facebook and, as I write, I have orders for over 100 ducklings. We will take a dozen or more with the aim of rearing some for the table and possibly some to keep, as long as they don't get so fat that they can't waddle! They will keep the slug population down and maybe give us meat strain birds to hatch out in the future.


Meanwhile, do you remember we were given some commercial chicks to rear? Well they have been lovely so far. They are very tame and run over to see us when we go in the chicken enclosure, though I think this is more greed than affection. So far we have seen no signs of problems caused by their breeding. They are now about 9 weeks old. I suspect that would be that if they had stayed on the farm. But living with the other chickens and allowed to roam their growth has been good but not ridiculous. They will be around for a while longer yet.

A New Year Clear Out

Saturday 30th December 2017
Poultry thinning
The Muscovy ducks are so big now that, despite recently waving goodbye to four of them, there is barely room in the poultry houses at night. They are eating me out of house and home too. They are now 20 weeks old, they have had a good life, but it is time for them to go.
The final batch of Ixworth chickens which we breed and raise for meat are going too. Ideally they would have grown a little more, but we really need to thin down our stock levels for winter.

So today was operation catch. We tried to take them out of their houses in the morning, but several escaped past us. Most were successfully transferred up to the stables though and the last few we caught when they went to bed in the evening.

Tomorrow we are demonstrating how to dispatch and process the chickens and Muscovy ducks (and probably a turkey too). When we began smallholding we really didn't know how to do these things and there is only so much you can learn from YouTube. None of the smallholders in Fenland Smallholders Club (FSC) seemed confident enough to demonstrate, though they should all know how to humanely dispatch a chicken as you never know when you will need to do this.

In the end it was Mick from Cambridgeshire Self Sufficiency Group (CSSG) who showed us 'the broomstick method'. (Don't worry, it does not involve chasing a bird around and clobbering it with a broom handle!)
Anyway, we were very grateful to Mick for sharing his experience. It turns out he used to be active in FSC before a rift and that it was he who had previously shown many of our club members how to do the deed. What a shame they weren't so willing to share their knowledge with the newest batch of novices.

So this is precisely why I offered the opportunity for people to come along and join in on our poultry dispatch day. We plan to teach them humane dispatch, wet and dry plucking, gutting, skinning and jointing. How much we have learned since those days when we knew nothing!

In preparation for the day we needed to have some 'here's one I prepared earlier' birds, so four chooks and four ducks got their marching orders today. It was good to run through how we will demonstrate and explain tomorrow.
Plucking the ducks was, as ever, the task which took the longest. They have endless feathers in endless layers.

We finished plucking the ducks just as darkness began to shroud the stables. Then it was inside to make a couple of loaves of bread for our guests to dip in their soup tomorrow.





Sunday 31st December 2017
What better way to end the year than a good communal activity. We had four people come along to our poultry processing day, which was a good number. Everybody got to have a go but nobody had to wait too long.
Hopefully they all learned loads and will be more confident chicken keepers because of it.

Sue explains dunking for wet plucking

A bit messy this one.

We are drying the chicken and duck feet. Apparently the dogs will love them. Waste not, want not.

And that, as far as 2017 is concerned, is that.

I have big plans for 2018.
We at Swallow Farm wish you a Happy and Fulfilling New Year.