It's not Just Joel Salatin anymore - Page 23

 


Yep, corn does give yellow fat.  dunno what gives the yoldk it's yellow
colour in pellets though.  do you want me to dig out my A'Asian Poultry mag
with that article in it about yolk colour and give you a precis?

I'd say it's more freshness than anything.  Duck eggs are even more so of
both.

The same ref (McGee 'On Food

Before you even start that, pay strict attention to rats and how to control
and exclude them. But really chooks are easy.  Keep the foxes away and wild
birds out of the night yard/feed area.  Keep the pullets confined when you
get them till they get used to their night house and yard and then let them
out to range (Ours range in an orchard which is prolly about a quarter of an
acre).  I wouldn't fully free range if you want to have veg though or
toehrwise you wont' have veg.  They will do a good job of spreading horse
plops.

 

FarmI wrote:

I am interested but don't go to too much trouble.


I already have a master plan for the erradication of the rodents since they
ate the weather seal off my shed door to get in and they attack the produce
on the verandah.  It doesn't work of course but I do fight them to a draw.
People comment on how generous I am with feed for them.  Them pellets ain't
chook food.

Keep the foxes

Foxes are a real problem, such destructive buggers, the chook house will be
metal with buried barriers, the yard will have a loop off the electric fence
around it as well.

How do you stop them scratching all the mulch off your fruit trees?

David

 


OK.  I have to dig through them to let someone on another ng know aobut why
lime is used in the henhouse so when I do that for her, I'll look for the
article for you.


Unlike mice, rats are much harder to kill off.  We've done the hose pipe
from the car exhaust down the tunnels, the Jack Russells and a shovel and
posion  but the sods keep coming back.  I'm advised by the chooky people I
know that traps don't work like they do for mice.  I think far more concrete
might be the next strategy.

Also lay about 30 cm of wire out from the fence towards where the foxes
would be coming from.  They don't think to step back and then to burrow
under so it's more efficient than burying it.  Also use a heavy guage
netting on the bottom part of the pen.  The idiot who built ours used a very
light guage and the foxes worry at it till they get a hole and you'd be
surprised at how tiny a hole is needed to let a fox through.  I've had to
progressively go round that blasted orchard and add new wire in addition to
the old stuff.

I don't.  I chuck piles of weeds under the fruit trees and the chooks go in
and forage and scratch it around and while they're doing that they're
leaving droppings and getting rid of excess grass growth.  My garden is not
a pristine, neat place but it is productive.  Me and the willing but
ignorant undergardener have 2 farms to look after and 2 houses and 2 gardens
so there is not a lot of time for 'neat'.

 

 I chuck piles of weeds under the fruit trees and the chooks

Here is a gem for the spectators (if any): do away with terminal neatness.

D

 

Bert Hyman wrote:

Will that be when oil becomes so expensive that it cannot be used to make
fertiliser and the broadacre crops' yields drop to pitiful?

You are right (if I understand you correctly) that we don't know how to feed
the world sustainably yet.  Altering how we do agriculture is only part of
the solution.  Unless we also deal with over-population all other resource
problems will be exacerbated to breaking point.

We will only go back to an agrarian economy if the present system has a
catastrophic collapse, followed by a population collapse, and nobody wants
to see that.  The alternative is to work out how to do sustainable
agriculture and reduce our population.  We have to make that choice or
nature will make it for us - and then the results won't be pretty.

Whether McKibben has it right and this requires breaking production up into
local units remains to be seen.  I suspect that some degree of localisation
will have to be part of the plan in order to reduce transport costs and that
implies eliminating huge monocultures too.  There are of course other
reasons for doing that besides the transport difficulty.

We need more people to work on making the conversion to a sustainable way of
life a soft landing instead of a crash.  Saying "we will all be ruined" and
using that as an excuse to keep the present system will become
self-fulfilling.

David