Rumor got around that the local family owned farm store that we frequent had laying hens that ranged in age from 2.5 weeks to 4.5 weeks that they were looking to get rid of. It’s not so much chick-buying season anymore and these were the odds and ends that hadn’t sold. We heard about it and I contacted them to find out the details and they offered to cut us a really good deal. So we now have 25 new laying chicks in the brooder box, despite the fact that I had promised Bengt we wouldn’t brood anymore this year 
I got his permission first, honest! They are Buff Orpingtons, Buckeyes, I think a couple of another variety (like this gal in the picture), and one Silver Laced Wyandotte. It will be interesting to see how they all feather out! The “pink flock”, what was left of it, starting laying a couple weeks ago and the “yellow flock” should start laying in August or September. This flock should start laying in October through November and brings back closer to where we had intended to be with regards to number of laying hens. Hopefully we’ve learned our hard lessons with the predators and will do better with this flock. The “yellow flock” is using the hoop coop now and has been doing great in there, no predator issues. So we plan to move these kids in to the same one or make a second when they are ready to go out. We’ve started working on clearing the area that we hope to be the future home of an appropriate pasture for everyone. Our goal is to have it ready and fenced by the end of the summer, before the next flock starts laying.
I cut into the breast on the left side of the bird, feeling a little more resistance than expected, flip the meat to the side, and spotted something very unusual. Is that a leaf?
Having just spent a full day slaughtering chickens, I’d reacquainted myself with every part of the bird. The parts that you don’t see in a grocery store were as familiar as the shoelaces on my favorite red sneakers. I’d smelled guts, butts, and that chickeny chickeny smell that you just don’t get from any other animal. One of my favorite (yes, it’s weird to have a “favorite”) part of eviscerating a chicken is opening the crop and the gizzard. I love seeing that the animals raised were eating real food. Finding a bird full of grass, worms, and bugs makes me feel like we’re doing something right. I get used to the sight of Western Buttercup leaves, as I’m splitting open chickens.
Day two, I’m standing over a cutting board breaking down the meat we intend to consume over the next year. Hindquarters in that pile, breasts in that, wings over there, and the carcasses, largely stripped of the big bits of meat go into the stock pot. After a few birds, either eviscerating or butchering, I drop into the rhythm of the work. My hands move more deftly than they’re typically capable. I start to find the tendons and separate the feet from the body in two quick moves, instead of fumbling around. The knife seems to know exactly where to turn at the bottom of the breast meat, just before the ribs. I get confident; a really good feeling for something oft deemed antiquated.
Toward the end of today’s butchery session, something interrupted the flow of my work. There was a little more resistance than usual… then, after I exposed the breast meat… green. GREEN!? How did a leaf get … into the meat? I look closer. As if a play on “Green Eggs and Ham,” this really is a swath of green meat, right in the middle of this broiler’s breast. Cutting down the other side, I see exactly the same thing. Green meat. WHAT… THE… HELL!? Is it spoiled? The birds have spent the night in our freebie fridge on the porch. Did it fail to maintain temperature? Did it rot overnight? Nervous, I take a sniff. Nothing. Not spoiled?! What foul fowl is this?
Washed the hands and took a quick gander at the magical internets and, after reading several alarmist blog comments (“OMG, MY WHOLE FOODS CHICKEN BREASTS ARE ROTTEN!! MY DINNER PARTY IS RUINED!”), I found references to Oregon Muscle Disease. Oregon Muscle Disease, also known as Green Muscle Disease and Deep Pectoral Myopathy, is most commonly found in heavy meat chickens. I was able to find a few descriptions of the condition and one or two that discussed the cause at length:
It has been estimated that, in turkeys and broilers, the supracoracoid increases in weight by about 20% during activity for the huge blood flow into the muscle. The increased size of the muscle is so marked in the heavy breeds that the muscle becomes strangulated and ischemic, because the increased pressure within the muscle occludes the blood vessels and causes a necrosis of the muscle […]. The resultant necrotic muscle has a characteristic hemorrhagic appearance, with a swollen reddish-brown lesion (early developing stage) that later becomes green and shrunken and then pale green (old stage), depending upon the time of induction of the vigorous wing exercise […]
(The Occurrence of Deep Pectoral Myopathy in Roaster Chickens from the journal “Poultry Science”)
These chickens are bred to maximize the size of the breast muscles; American consumers have learned to expect tidy heat-shrink wrapped packages of huge chicken breasts. Producers, processors and retailers are eager to serve the demand with the highest margin cut of the bird. In intensive poultry operations, meat birds are raised in large warehouse-like coops. The birds are kept in almost complete darkness to minimize flight/flapping instincts and the occurrence of deep pectoral myopathy (DPM). Our birds are kept outdoors and on pasture: certainly more likely to flap.
After a few minutes of surfing the poultry information superhighway, I went back to parting out the rest of this years’ meat birds. Left with thoughts of what I’d learned, I reconsidered a question that’s become quite common, since we started the farm… “are we doing the right thing?” We’re raising our own food (plus some for others) and are trying to “do the right thing” in every decision we make. I’ve commented on our decisions to let chickens “behave like chickens” and this years’ flock was most certainly allowed to behave like it wanted. Some of that behavior included… well… flapping and, apparently, some of that flapping led to “strangulation” of the pectoral muscle. While all the research I’ve been able to find states that it “does not appear to affect the general health of the bird,” it can’t be pleasant. So I’m left with a query and a quandary; our decision to raise the chicken we like to eat in the way we think is “right” has resulted in something most decidedly “not right.”
In commercial production, incidence of DPM is as high as 1-2% (higher in “free range” plants) and us Americans buy almost all our meat parted out. Our addiction to ‘boneless skinless chicken breasts’ means that most people are unlikely to ever see bright green chicken meat; processors find it and discard it during deboning. So, given 1 bird of the 33 birds we slaughtered this year had this issue, it’s not surprising that we had one… but does that make it “OK?” Nothing else about commercial chicken production is OK with us, why would this be?
In our quest to provide food for ourselves and those around us, we’ve taken chickens with breasts so big that they’d be well suited for Hollywood and thrown them into the forest to “behave naturally.” It’s a case of doing the right thing with the wrong bird. The Cornish Cross flock from this year (and certainly their Jumbo brethren from last) may just be the wrong birds for us.
If nothing else, this has spurred our interest in finding a heavy meat bird that’s well suited to this environment. We’ve discussed finding a bird that we can sustainably (both meanings of the word) raise in the way that we think is “right.”
Oh, and in case you find green meat in a “free range” roaster, from our farm or another, it isn’t spoiled, it isn’t poisonous or bad to eat… in fact it may actually be more “green” than you’d thought.
We got the last of the scheduled planting done the same weekend we did our final slaughter and we are starting to be able to harvest some of our bounty. I also need to work on better succession planting this year as I tend to get distracted after the first big wave of planting and fail to do so. We are a little behind on getting a few things out and building the raised beds for the warm weather vegetables, but I’m hoping we can catch up. Right now they are in the green house and seem to be doing okay with that.
Harvesting:
Arugula, Chives, Mustard Greens, Nettles (wild), Oregano, Radishes, Sage, and Sorrel.
In the garden/containers/or beds:
Beets, Blueberries, Brussel Sprouts, Cabbage, Carrots, Cascade Hops, Cucumbers, Green Beans, Head and Leaf Lettuce, Kale, Lavender, Miner’s Lettuce, Parsnips, Rhubarb, Soy Beans, Spinach, Storage Onions, Sugar Snap Peas, Summer Squash, Sunflowers, and Swiss Chard.
Still to (trans)plant:
Basil, Eggplant, Gourds, Nasturtiums, Peppers (sweet and hot), Potatoes, Sunflowers, and Tomatoes.
Running wild:
Alpine Strawberries, Salmonberries, Thimbleberries, and Blackberries.
I moved our new newest laying flock out to a small fenced area in the front yard this past weekend. We’ve done this “half way house” at various times over the past three years with no issues and I had no reason to think there would be any challenges this time. The young birds get a protected area to range while they adjust to living in a range house instead of the comfort of the brooder box in the garage. Over the past week a crow (or possibly raven) has proceeded to thwart our repeated efforts to secure the yard and killed 15 hens. It’s been quite the blood bath. Crows are known to poke the eyes out on their prey just prior to beheading them. We’ve come home to bloody piles of little more than bones, feet, feathers, and gizzards.
Saturday morning we gave up on trying to secure the yard and moved the remaining hens back in to the brooder box. Once we moved the young hens back inside we haven’t seen the crows around at all. One of the hens we moved was badly traumatized by the attacks and while she showed no fatal injuries she had certainly been mauled. She died in her sleep in the brooder box bringing the final tally to 16 dead.
We are still working to exclude the crows from the young hens. For now the hens remain in the brooder box until the weekend. We will work to relocate them to a more secure home (the hoop coop/chicken tractor) in a new, less visible location until they are larger. Clearly the crows have no interest in the full grown hens, the backyard flock has been free ranging through all of this, so this problem is a temporary one.
I believe in “live and let live”, I really do, but at some point it’s not a peaceful coexistance and action has to be taken. For those keeping score we’ve now lost about 35 hens over the past 4-6 weeks due to predators. It’s disappointing, frustrating, and exhausting on so many levels. I’ll continue working to find the right balance.
We are having a bit of a predator problem.
We had been monitoring the diminishing chicken population for the free-range laying flock (the “pink chickens”) farthest from the house, but it kind of came to a head a couple weeks ago when we actualy saw a full size coyote kill what turned out to be his second chicken for the morning. Excitement abound as the dogs take their role as farm protectors quite seriously and need little encouragement to understand what wild life we consider “bad”. We’ve had some very tired, dirty, (and slightly uncontrollable) dogs of late as soon as the lab, Mars, gets the faintest whiff or sight of the coyote and takes off like the wind in pursuit.
We’ve been held up on clearing to get up fencing due to issues with both the chain saw and tractor so we haven’t had too many options, and the situation was slowly but surely tipping from the ‘live and let live’ to the ‘need to protect our livestock’. The flock count has dropped to a fraction of what it was and several had taken up living in the goats barn and fenced yard. Two more started showing up on our front porch, prefering to sleep on the porch light above our front door bell rather than take their chances elsewhere (not a bad plan really).
So we’ve moved the remaining hens in with the “backyard flock” in the coop next to the house under Boot’s care. I’m just really hoping the coyote doesn’t deside to venture so close to the house now that his buffet has disappeared. He hasn’t shown interest, that we can tell, in the meat birds as they are enclosed in a chicken tractor (portable pen), but I also can’t image that poultry netting would really be that much of a hinderance if he changes his mind.
I’ve become less resistant to the shot gun being in the house in light of this turn of events. I can say that with certainty.
In other news we sowed out all of the direct sow vegetables this past weekend and some of the transplants we started in side. I also moved some more transplants from the house (under the growlight and with heat) to the unheated greenhouse to start their transition to the garden. I’m still really pleased with the garden plan and guidelines provided from www.growveg.com. It certainly made things a bit quicker and easier, particularly with Bengt’s help.
We still need to get started on the front beds/container garden for all of our warmer weather vegetables/herbs. I need to build two more bean teepees and plant those since I ran out of materials this weekend. I also need to plant the few annual flowers I’m trying this year (sweet peas, nasturtiums, and poppies). I realize the nasturtiums are actually edible, but they are going in the flower bed regardless. We also added a few marigold seeds to the vegetable garden in the hopes of discouraging some of the bad insects.
Currently in the garden/containers/or beds:
Head and Leaf Lettuce, Miner’s Lettuce, Spinach, Mustard, Brussel Sprouts, Radishes, Carrots, Storage Onions, Sugar Snap Peas, Green Beans, Kale, Parsnips, Rhubarb, Storage Onions, Chives, Cabbage, Sorrel, Lavender, Oregano, Cascade Hops, Sage, and Blueberries.
Still to (trans)plant:
Soy Beans, Beets, Cucumbers, Summer Squash, Potatoes, Tomatoes, Peppers, Eggplant, Herbs, Corn, Sunflowers, Nasturtiums.
Currently running wild:
Alpine Strawberries, Salmonberries, and Thimbleberries.
* Things we are currently harvesting.
We couldn’t have asked for a better weekend to do the bulk of our meat sales this year. It was mild, even if a bit rainy on Saturday, and sunny and gorgeous on Sunday. With our pre-planning of the process and our past experiences the pace I set ended up being quite prudent so things weren’t stressful. We’ve determined we can probably process twice as many birds in the time we had scheduled. We also learned a few more things this time around like the perfect scalding temperature/time as well as the fact that we need to invest in some professional killing cones. The one that we had made ourselves worked okay for the larger “roasting” birds but worked somewhat poorly for the “frying” sized birds. We had a couple instances of dislocated wings during the final death throes because we had to remove the birds from the cone. It doesn’t impact the usefullness of the product but I was not happy with the presentation. I am going to rectify the situation by ordering cones this week.
The Dept of Ag inspector came out on Saturday morning and was quite pleasent to chat with while we got started. I was also quite pleased with the weights on the birds. They came in spot on for what the breed was advertised to produce and I feel pretty good about the supplemental feed to weight conversion. Also when isolating them to the slaughter pen (to keep the ones to be slaughtered off food for about 12 hours before hand) we were able to observe their behavior more closely and I was quite happy with how chicken-like and happy these birds seemed. I still want to research breeds more and try to find a standard breed we like, but these didn’t seem like the franken-chicken of last year.
So now we have another weekend of work in mid-May for the “roasting” weight chickens which also includes the chickens for our family’s yearly consumption as well. I’m not sure I want to do “frying” birds again. They are actually a little harder to handle due to the smaller size and the aren’t any less work to slaughter. It may sound a little weird, but we really do look at a lot of things in the terms of getting the most for the life taken.
Now I need to get focused on the garden again. My peas are just starting to come up and it’s about timet to start transplanting, direct sowing, and succession planting some of the cooler weather vegetables.
This is Celeste, Bengt’s oldest daughter, I’m here to help you on taking care of baby chicks. First, you need to pick out your chicks, I use Murray Mcmurray Hatchery but you can use any hachery! Than, you have to pick which type of chicks you want to buy. After that, you need to get prepared for the chicks to come so you need to get a bag of baby chick feed, water, dishes, a heat lamp or source of heat, and a house for them until they get old enough to explore. When they get home put them in their pre-made house with food, water, and a heat lamp. Then you return every 1-2 days to refill their food and water dishes,and eventually you’ll have full grown chickens!! Please also take in mind that you will have to expect at most 10% of your chicks to pass away before they are fully grown.
Ok, so now that we’ve discussed that matter, you can hear about MY baby chicks! First off lemme tell you that one of mine died. =( It was a pom-pom chick aka Golden Polish. We have one little chick who isn’t doing good, she/he has spaz attacks my dad thinks it has to do with it’s nervous system. Other than that my flock is doing great! I bought 2 Dark Brauhmas, 27 Barred Rocks, and 4 (now 3) Golden Polish. We had to get up at 5 in the morning over spring break while visiting dad!!!!
Licensing complete! Thanks to the lovely ladies of the Washington State Department of Agriculture. Customer notifications are prepped and we have the tentative schedule. I’ll be sending them out in the next few days. If the weather would only cooperate as well, I’ll be thrilled. One of the ladies is coming back out on our first day of slaughter to check on us, but it sounds like things should go pretty smoothly. I’m so happy!
It’s been a little bit exciting around these parts!
Over the weekend we made a wrong turn and ended up driving around the back of a local grocery store. I pointed out a commercial fridge/freezer out by the broken baskcarts and wondering aloud if it worked and/or was available. Bengt quickly got excited and when we went inside to pick up whatever it was that we were buying we found the supervisor and asked. She had no idea what the deal with it was and suggested we call back on Monday for the manager. So we called back Monday but the Dairy guy had left so the manager said to call back on Tuesday morning. We called back on Tuesday morning and the Dairy guy was out sick, but the manager seemed to be impressed with our deligence and the thing had been sitting outside so he said we could take it. We figured it probably didn’t work, but it was worth trying, so we threw it in the back of the car on our way to work.
When we got home Bengt eagerly set it back up right on the patio and we let it sit overnight for all the fluids to settle. Wednesday morning he fired it up and low and behold, by last night, it was 28 degrees! It actually works!
Behold! The Misc. Farm egg fridge!
Right now it’s sitting on our front patio, so we need to move it in to the garage, but this was one of my big worries about increasing our laying flock. We can hold about 16 dozen eggs in our fridge, but we lose an entire shelf of storage and that wasn’t going to scale well for increasing our flock (we normally have 4-8 dozen eggs in our fridge at any given time). This is perfect AND FREE!
Big Agri gave something back to little agri this week (with out knowing). I call that a win! Bengt already has plans to make new signage for it
In other news I got the call from the Washington State Department of Agriculture Inspector in our area to start our licensing/inspection for on-farm slaughter. I have an appointment with her for next week to do the licensing paperwork and walk them through our set up. Then they will come out again on one of our slaughter days to inspect/observe us in action.
I was honestly quite nervous about the whole licensing/inspection thing. We are a small farm and are slaughtering only 20-25 chickens for consumer sales, partly as a trial to determine if it’s “worth it” to do in the future (both financially, fiscally, and legally). You hear all the horror stories about how government is run by big bussiness and the little (wo)man is being pushed out, but so far every person I’ve dealt with in Washington State government in regards to our little farm has been incredibly friendly and helpful. The inspector was great over the phone, helping me come up to speed on what to expect. I’m actually looking forward to their visit because I think I will learn more from them.
Lastly, the garden was tilled up last weekend and last night we planted the peas and got the stakes pounded in for their trellis. It’s officially gardening season!
We finished the hoop coop early last week and moved the meat birds in to their new “home”. The tarping could use some work, but I was trying to save a little using some tarp scraps we had. Despite the ugliness it seems to be keeping the chickens dry (if not terribly warm). We will probably rework the tarping soon. Otherwise the chickens seem much happier to be out of the brooder. We expected to need to move the coop with the tractor but instead moved it both with the truck and by hand and it’s pretty easy to move (on flat ground anyway). We need to reinforce a few things, but otherwise I’m quite pleased.
The tractor is supposed to be back this week, but it was also supposed to be back last week and a few weeks before that. The dealer/service seems to find something new each time they look at it. I’m not terribly pleased with them right now. We’ve not had it for almost two months. Thank goodness we don’t rely on it at this point.
I’ve got almost all of my seeds started that need to be started indoors at this point. The girls even planted a few while they were here so I have some rather early corn (it was Eva’s choice) so we’ll see how that holds up. I’ve already had to pot it up. About the only thing not completely sprouted are my peppers, but that’s pretty normal. We are scheduled to start direct sowing and getting things ready to transplant in the next few weeks so it’s time to break out the tiller and potato boxes.
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