The U.S. Ministry of Egg Production
August 24th, 2010As usual, for this and all other food nightmares, the solution is to get more people involved with widely distributed, small scale food production. My guess is that chickens are, by far, the best choice for integrating into a small scale food production system. They’re the ultimate permaculture creatures. They provide meat, eggs, manure and tillage. You can rotate the chickens through fenced off areas of your garden and they will fertilize the soil and scratch out weeds. You can also put them in chicken tractors and move those around your garden or yard.
I gaze at our chickens for several minutes per day. It’s somehow relaxing and very satisfying to watch them annihilating the dreaded kikuyu grass that we have here. Also, Owen, our two-year-old son, takes great pride in finding eggs in the nesting boxes and carefully bringing them back into the house.
If you have a backyard, chances are that you can keep a few hens without pissing off your neighbors or breaking any absurd laws. If you aren’t keeping chickens already, maybe it’s worth considering. See: City Chicks: Keeping Micro-flocks of Chickens as Garden Helpers, Compost Makers, Bio-reyclers, and Local Food Producers by Patricia L. Foreman.
Of course, there’s always the doomed, creaking, lumbering, industrial food system that gets worse by the day.
Via: Washington Post:
The largest egg recall in U.S. history comes at a point of great consolidation in the egg industry, when a shrinking number of companies produce most of the eggs found on grocery shelves and a defect in one operation can jeopardize a significant segment of the marketplace.
Just 192 large egg companies own about 95 percent of laying hens in this country, down from 2,500 in 1987, according to United Egg Producers, an industry group. Most of those producers are concentrated in five states: Iowa, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania and California.
“I don’t think people have any idea when they see all these brand names in the stores that so many are coming from the same place,” said Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food and Water Watch, a food safety organization. “It raises the stakes — if one company is doing something wrong, it affects a lot of food.”
That magnified effect is illustrated by the current recall: Just two Iowa producers, Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms, have been implicated in a nationwide outbreak of Salmonella enteritidis, with the companies recalling 500 million eggs sold under 24 brands. “The size of this thing is kind of amazing,” Lovera said.
The complexity of the distribution chain means additional recalls are likely as investigators wade through invoices and try to piece together where the affected eggs have ended up.
We started with a few Easter Egger hens (sex-linked so it’s easy to make sure you’re getting females) then added a couple of Buff Orpingtons. One Orpy ended up being a Roo, but that worked out because he saved the flock from a fox.
He didn’t survive the encounter, but we incubated eggs he had contributed to and now we’ve got 9 new pullets that’re a bit too young to lay yet, and 2 replacement roosters.
As Kevin suggests in the commentary, we built a tractor which gets moved around the yard to a new spot each day. Careful placement of the tractor means I never have to mow the lawn around the house.
We’ve also got a predator resistant “run” for them that’s attached to the coop. I was astonished by how quickly the chickens reduce Live Oak and Water Oak leaves to humus. Piles of leaves that would take months to compost by normal methods get reduced to soil in a week by the chickens.
To cut down on the feed cost we use the tractor to provide them with fresh ground to scratch, feed them leftover vegetables from the dinner table, and feed them handfuls of “Spanish Moss” collected from the trees. So, each bird only costs us about 25 cents a month to feed and we could probably eliminate that expense if needed.
The eggs we get range from green to pink (naturally, due to the breed) and friends are delighted when we drop off a spare dozen. The yolks are so packed with nutrients that they’re orange, unlike the pale yellow of store bought.
They’re a lot of fun, not much work, and the steady supply of healthy food they provide grants a surprising amount of satisfaction and peace of mind. Now that we have an established flock, even if the economy completely crashes, my family will have food each day. Further, by skipping a few egg sandwiches we’d be able to help family and friends get self sufficient.
That’s a good feeling.
One of my coworkers asked me yesterday if I would trade some of my eggs for his excess cucumbers. After asking some questions I learned that his cucumber plant was purchased at Walmart. Huh.
The Walmart purchased plant is still going strong.
Several gardener’s in my area who grow from the ground up from direct seeding have experienced the natural die off of their cucumbers (my watermelon, cantelope, and cucumber vines all died off at the same time- last pickings taken. Yum.)
Makes me wonder what’s Walmart selling? GMO plants? Just thinking. And No, I will not give up my scarce, very valuable eggs for some shit produce grown from Walmart plants.
@Zenc,
My first encouner with chicks was when I bought Easter color dyed chicks: green, blue, etc. at the store downtown at Easter. Wow that was a long time ago. I did not ask my parents their permission to do this, but they didn’t spank me. Its kind of nice to remember my parents being supportive of me (but not always) tending to animals (my Dad really hated when I fed stray cats). The chicks lost their color dye, lived on the back porch, and actually came out to meet me and my sister as we got off the bus from school. No kidding.
Eventually, the chicks got very large. My parents always said, the animals are going to the farm in Ohio (5 miles away). Since becoming an adult, I’ve learned the farm in Ohio was gone since the aarly 1950’s.
Funny how my parents made shit up so that I didn’t have to face the death of loved ones. Not so funny that we later faced death of loved ones in spades. Long winded story. Not something captured in a post here. But fear not! What came first? The chicken or the egg?
Eggs date back at minimum to the dinosaurs era.