Livestock: Chickens: Origins

In medias res is a Latin phrase denoting the literary and artistic narrative technique wherein the relation of a story begins either at the mid-point or at the conclusion, rather than at the beginning.

We have chickens. Most people who post about animals start from Day 1 or earlier and detail all their exploits. I had the though about doing that, but never got around to writing anything detailing my activities. Oh well. Better late than never, right?

So, the background: I am really interested in self sufficiency. If I could live off-grid AND keep my day job and live relatively close (minutes, not hours) to the beach in New England, I would be happy. One impediment arises almost immediately. Land prices around here are ridiculous. I couldn't even hope to put my hands on an acre, let alone the 100,000 square feet (about 2.5 acres) of land that my town says I must have to be able to produce agricultural products. Good luck convincing animal control that a cow or a couple pigs are pets that you plan to eat. In fact, a few years ago, a kid with a mental disorder (autism, I think) had his therapeutic pet miniature horse evicted because the family didn't have the right to keep horses. That said, a miniature horse isn't much bigger than a dog. To attest to this fact, a family down the street has one and they were walking it in a field, and from a distance, I though, "Holy crap, that is one huge dog!"

Which brings me back to my topic, I have chickens even though I technically don't meet the minimum criteria for keeping them according to my town. I figure, the guy down the street has a freaking horse, so...

So, how did it begin? Well, about 3 years ago, we signed up for a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program at a local farm. It was a pretty good deal for what we expected to get. Our production from our gardens in the backyard was somewhat underwhelming. We signed up for eggs and veggies. The only thing keeping us from signing up for the meat was that it was so ridiculously, insanely expensive that it wasn't worthwhile for us. We participated for a couple years, but like everything, the price went up. We planned to cut back to just eggs for the summer. My wife had the idea that we could put the money we would have spent into improving our gardens and it would give us far more production than we could ever hope to get from the CSA.

That left us with a good supply of vegetables, plus eggs. The self-reliant side of me, however, couldn't leave well enough alone. I just couldn't get over paying store prices for low grade meat. If only there was some way to grow meat at home, on a quarter acre house lot. I thought about leasing land. I thought about buying a fully fleshed out animal and having it butchered. I thought about buying a bow and arrow, teaching myself to hunt and going out to try to take down a buck. All of these options have pros and cons. All of them are still in the back of my mind for consideration at some point in the future.

What really kept gnawing at me, however, is that I like the thought of co-located production and living facilities. If I have the animals in the back yard, I can raise them, care for them, and butcher them, all myself. After thinking and thinking and thinking, I had the thought that small animals would be the way to go. My first thought was chickens, followed by ducks as an alternate. I had land in one town which required 2 aces for horses but 5 for chickens, so I figured an alternate preliminary plan was a good idea. I looked into the ordinances and was discouraged to learn that my town considers chickens, turkeys, ducks, cows, sheep, goats, horses, grains, and honey as agricultural products which require 2.5 acres. Well, that's annoying. Seriously. Commercial places raise chickens in cages where they can barely move, but I have to have 2.5 acres?

I took another churn of my brain and another read of the ordinance. All of a sudden, it popped into my head that rabbits are supposed to be good eating and they were not listed as being agricultural. I convinced the wife enough that she tentatively agreed with me. I picked a book up at the library and read it cover to cover. I started to price out equipment and figured out the return on investment (ROI). Needless to say, either it would take a long time to make back the equipment purchase or we would have to eat a lot of rabbit. What does rabbit taste like anyway? Well, that was really my wife's concern. Sure, we have chicken and/or beef once or twice a week, but she never even tried rabbit.

I was hovering somewhere between keeping it on the back burner and just calling it a crazy scheme (the only kind of scheme worth having). The last pockets of interest were still occasionally bubbling to the surface though. On one of these occurrences, my wife through out a crazy scheme of her own... "Why don't we just get chickens? The guy down the street has a freakin' horse."

One rule that I have found to be inviolate in lasting relationships. People either have complimentary roles or contradictory roles. In other words, one person is full of crazy schemes and the other person is the sane, rational one who points out the obvious. I am said crazy-scheme-guy. I have a wacko idea. My wife brings me back to reality. That's the way things work. One reason I say the rule is inviolate is that bad things happen when Mrs. Sanity throws a little crazy of her own on the table. In this particular case, we ended up with chickens.

A few of the details: We ended up getting Rhode Island Reds. We wanted something that was hardy. We also wanted something that was somewhat of a dual purpose breed, in case the neighbors ratted us out and we had to eat them (The chickens, not the neighbors). We planned for 4, but ended up with 6. The have a nice split level coop and a run which is a pretty good size for a decent life as a chicken. I'll get into some more specifics about what we have and the process of getting them in my next post. As it is, this post is already really wordy and keeps getting wordier (hey, spell check says that's a real word) as I type.