Results tagged “farm animal welfare” from Mostly Eating

This is the second of two posts that make up a Beginners Guide to Keeping Chickens. If you missed it you might want to check out part 1 first.

How much contact time do chickens need?
Chelsea asked how much time we spend with our chickens every day.  Unlike cats and dogs, chickens don’t seem to crave human company and interaction overly so there’s no need to worry that you need to be able to give them lots of “quality time” (so long as they’re kept disease free and have all the food, water and shelter that they need). Chickens are friendly, inquisitive creatures and do like to know what you’re up to but in the grand scheme of things they’re much more bothered about whether they get to free range or not.  Ours are on their own for 8 to 10 hours a day while we’re at work. They happily keep themselves busy in their run for this time but are also very excited to be let out to free range for an hour or so when we get home.

Are they noisy?
If you only have hens then there’s no need to worry about that signature, neighourhood-rousing cock-a-doodle-do. But it’s only fair to warn you that hens can still be a bit noisy. We were getting up at sunrise in over the summer months to let our chickens out into their run so that they didn’t wake the neighbours with their chatter.  They’re only really loud enough for immediate neighbours to hear, but definitely loud enough to wake a light sleeper. There are all kinds of things that you can do to try and limit how early they wake up such as covering their hutch with dark tarpaulin to fake night-time. Touch-wood our neighbours haven’t complained and once the rest of the world is up and going about its business then the odd “I’ve laid an egg, aren’t I amazing” noisy announcement is drowned out the noise of cars, people etc.

What about going on holiday?
The chickens are fine on their own for the weekend provided that you leave them ample water and food and that they’re safely shut away in a fox-proof run (knowing this was one of the tipping points that finally made us give chicken-keeping a go).  If we’re away for longer than overnight then we ask a friend to pop in and feed them and collect the eggs.

This post is a summary of everything we’ve learnt in our first four months of chicken-keeping, especially for those of you thinking about getting your own chooks one day.  Our three ex-battery chickens are completely charming chatterboxes and super-easy to look after, but there are also a few things I wish we’d known before we got them and which I wanted to share with you.

This is very much a beginners perspective on keeping hens - experienced poultry keepers would no doubt have other wisdom to add and similarly I'm sure we'll keep learning as we go.  If you are seriously thinking about getting your own hens have a read of this post first and then I urge you to go and hang out over at the Omlet forums for a while where just about any question you might have will already have been answered (probably several times over).
 
Our regular chicken care routine
We both work full time but we haven't found looking after the chickens a big task to fit into our routine.  Here's what we do:

Once a day
1. Top up the water
2. Top up their food
Chickens eat steadily throughout the day, storing the food in their crop to digest it at night. We feed our three special food from Allen and Page that is designed for ex-battery hens.
3. Collect any eggs (yay!). We're averaging two eggs a day between three hens.
4. Hand over the treats
Chard is top of the list with grapes and sunflower seeds close behind. Sunflower seeds are the non-perishable bribe of choice for getting the girls back into their run.

Once a week
1. Clean the chicken house out.
Ours is a plastic Eglu which is super easy to keep clean. All we do is empty the removable poo tray, hose down the inside of the house and waft about PoultryShield and louse powder, both easily available and designed to keep the bugs at bay.
2. Catch each chicken in turn and dust them down with sweet-smelling louse powder

Are your chickens free range and how much space do they need?
Kathryn asked how much space chickens need.  Assuming that you can let them out to free range round the garden occasionally then the run that your chickens spend most of their time doesn’t need to be very big. We’ve got a nice routine going where the girls get let out of their run for an hour or so in the morning before we head off to work and again for an hour in the evening.  At the weekends they free range all day if we’re at home.

A run of about 2m by 1m is fine for up to four birds (we’re a soft touch so we bought a run extension to give them an extra metre in length so ours have a 3 x 1m run).  Most guidelines seem to suggest 3-4 square feet per bird.  With regard to having garden space to free range in, it seems to be quality rather than quantity that counts here. Our girls spend their outdoor time making dust baths in the soil, rootling about in leaves, trashing my vegetable bed and digging for worms rather than covering any great distance.

Urban foxes have been known to snatch chickens in broad daylight so we never let ours out of their run unless we’re at home to supervise. 

How do chickens and gardens mix?
Arwen asked how our chickens are treating our grass.  There’s no way round it - chickens are a destructive force in the garden. Their mission in life is to peck, scratch and eat everything that they can.  When chickens are out free-ranging the damage to your grass is suitably wide-spread not to be a problem. If your chooks are in a confined run for much of the day (as ours are) then they are much harder on your grass and you have to move them onto a new patch every week or so (and put down some seed to refresh any bald patches). Anything delicate new growth (spinach, chard and other edibles included) is also best protected from the hens.

If ever there was a group that deserved the moniker ‘the forgotten millions’ it is the vast number of chickens living in squalid conditions to feed the UK’s unquenchable demand for cheap chickens and eggs. Until last week that is, when the forgotten millions were suddenly in the limelight, stars of their own week of TV programmes aired on mainstream terrestrial television.

As an occasional chicken-eater who always buys organic for its higher welfare standards I wasn’t expecting to particularly shocked by these programmes. Naive probably, as the level of access afforded to these programmes was pretty much unprecedented. There were two scenes that left me stunned:

- Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall performing a routine cull of birds in the intensive rearing facility used for the programme. Any bird failing to gain weight or with any hint of leg injury was immediately extracted from the barn and killed on site on a daily basis. The shock was partly in the sheer number of birds that just don’t make it through the system at all, and partly the realisation that throughout their short life-span (around 35 days) chickens are managed effectively as a crop rather than livestock, always weeded out rather than treated.

- Jamie Oliver gassing a group of new-born chicks to death. It should have been obvious really; only female chickens can lay eggs so something must happen to all of the males. All male chicks from egg-laying poultry breeds are humanely killed soon after birth (not being from one of the superfast growing meat breeds they are not economically viable to raise for meat). This was the hardest thing to learn; the practice is standard across the industry from battery to organic and as far as I can see the only way to remove yourself from it completely is by becoming vegan.

Sam has challenged all of us English to stick up for our much-maligned national cuisine, which is a fine idea but leaves us all with a bit of quandary; do we showcase one of our traditional dishes or do we attempt to show “how much we have come on”?

One of the things I think we Brits/English do really well is this local eating and reducing food miles business. One of the advantages of living on such a small island is that when we try to eat local it really can mean local. Not for us a 100-mile radius like those Bay Area people I keep hearing about - no disrespect intended if any of you are reading :-) Nope, over here local is often very local indeed (100 miles is after all, a quarter of the length of England). From where I live at the edge of a reasonably large city (Oxford) I can get artisan cheeses, an impressive choice of organic veg, melt-in-the-mouth sustainably farmed lamb all within the 18 miles from my house.

An area of British produce that has seen a big surge in popularity in recent years with both health-conscious and ethically-concerned shoppers is venison. The main species of deer farmed for venison in England is the red deer, indigenous to Britain, which I think fits nicely with the theme of the event. I far prefer the idea of eating an animal that has been reared out and about in something close to its natural habitat (hence my thing about lamb recipes) and the increase in sales suggest that there are a lot of other peope who feel the same way. Deer for the most part are still reared on expansive parkland in England, though I understand that the same is not true of all countries.

Red meat has a bad reputation nutritionally-speaking. Some, but not all of these concerns are related to the saturated fat content of the meat, so if you do eat red meat occasionally then naturally low-in-fat venison is an excellent choice. It is much lower in fat (including saturated fat) than other red meats, while retaining the typical beneficial attributes such as high quality protein and easily-absorbed iron. The venison in my casserole contains 165 kcal in it per 100g, and 2.5g of fat, whereas my next choice, lean (trimmed) braising steak that would have contained 225 kcal and 9.7g of fat.

If you’ve read the post just before this one about sustainable lamb farming, you’ll know that I sometimes buy the lamb farmed by the Northmoor Trust at our local farmers market in Oxford (see their picturesque location above). The first time I bought their lamb I bought a pack with 2 rolled breasts of lamb in it; it was both a bargain and an item of complete foodie curiosity. It looked a bit like an over-sized, fat-streaked, rolled pinwheel of bacon, cut to a 2 cm thickness rather than the usual few millimetres. I left the market very happy that I would be able to put it to good use with a bit of help from Google and a few cookbooks, and while I’m not really into pigs ears and those sorts of things, it gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling to be using a cut that might otherwise have been overlooked.

So, on to the day of the cooking of the lamb. What did Google have to say for itself? Not much really is the answer. I thought Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall would be the man to search for, him being a champion of cheap and lesser known cuts of meat. I did find his recipe for breast of lamb Ste Ménéhould, apparently a recipe from The River Cottage Meat Book, but it sounded very complicated (cooking on one day, resting overnight under jam jars and then coating in breadcrumbs and cooking again the next day). The other sites were a real mixed bag and bought up more questions than they answered. Did it matter that I have breast of lamb rather than breast of mutton? Could I use a recipe for bone-in lamb when mine has been deboned? Most importantly, what do you do when you want to cook and eat on the same day? The only recurring theme seemed to be that stuffing was the way to go if you had a piece of boned breast meat.

All this talk of eating locavore and buying food at the local farmers market is making me feel like a better shopper but I’m still self-conscious that I only have fairly basic grasp on how farming works, especially when it comes to keeping animals. Should I buy the sustainably farmed local meat, or the organically certified lamb from a few hundred miles away? I like the reassurance of buying from a certified producer but also like to think that if I buy meat from a small local producer then animals will have been well looked after and subjected to minimal stress from travelling. In the end the only way to know for sure would be to go and check it out for myself. I’m not really the sort of person to ring up my local farm and ask if I can pop round for a up of tea and a nosey, but happily this time I didn’t need to because the lovely people selling Northmoor Trust lamb at Oxford Farmers Market were inviting people round themselves, for their annual open lambing weekends.

The Northmoor Trust is the custodian of nature reserve that surrounds the Wittenham Clumps, a series of iron age hill forts near Wallingford in Oxfordshire. These have apparently known in the past by much more colourful names like “Berkshire Bubs” and “Mother Dunch's Buttocks”! The clumps are curved grassy mounds topped by little tufts of beech tree – think how a hill looks as drawn by a five year old (I like this picture on flickr). The surrounding land is part nature reserve, part sustainable farming experiment, researching and promoting methods of farming that improve animal welfare and look after the environment, while still being economically viable (plenty to keep them busy there then!). Sustainable is the important word in the case of Northmoor; this farm is not organic but instead aims to “enhance the economic, social and environmental fabric of the countryside”.

I am more than happy to spend a bit extra to eat organic but there’s no getting away from the fact that organic meat costs more. I'm not going to buy non-organic meat so this leaves me with two strategies to play with, both of which I use. The first is to eat less meat, which many of us are choosing to do for health reasons. The second is to go for cheaper cuts, hence my purchase last weekend of a pack of lovely organic lamb mince. My usual recipe choice for this is Nigella Lawson’s “Greekish Lamb Pasta” from her Forever Summer book, a Mediterranean take on spag bol which I serve with crumbled feta and chopped fresh mint over the top (delish but decidedly not a low cal option) . This time I felt in need of something different and a bit lighter (it is January after all). The resulting dinner was lamb, sultana and mint polpettine served on a big flat tortilla that had been spread with houmous and then rocket and pinenuts added at the end for a bit of crunch.