chicken

Howdy. Today, we’re talkin’ farm animals.

We’ll start with a story I enjoyed in this morning’s paper about a couple of Vermont dairy farmers who changed what they feed their cows, thereby reducing the amount of methane their cows emit via burps. (I guess that whole cow farting thing is overplayed; according to this article, most of the gas actually comes from the front end.)

Also according to this article, the Coventry Valley Farm “has reduced its cows’ belches by 13 percent.”

I hate it when news stories leave out the stuff I really want to know—in this case: How do you measure cow belches?

I found a couple of good chicken stories in the paper this weekend.

One is about a guy who is studying the language of chickens to see what all their clucks, chortles and squawks mean. I’m astonished this hasn’t been done before, considering how much chicken we eat. The UConn researcher, Ebenezer Otu-Nyarko (and what a grand name that is) points out that figuring out when chickens are stressed will help increase egg and chicken meat production. (OK, that’s kind of a sad sentence. But we farmers are very matter-of-fact about such things.)

The other story is a biggie if you happen to be in the poultry industry: California has passed a law that egg-laying hens must be able to stretch their wings without touching walls or another chicken. It’s a big kerfuffle, but apparently, what animal rights people are really pushing for is free-range chickens. Personally, I think that’s great. Free-range chicken tastes so much better than the tortured kind. The eggs, too. Look at this photo. The two eggs on the right are from my friend Michelle’s chickens. The anemic little thing on the left is a regular supermarket egg.

And since I’ve been hanging around Michelle and her chickens, I’ve grown to really love the sight of them free ranging.

Chickens are, in many ways, pretty revolting. I had a friend who grew up on a farm and as an adult refused to eat chicken because she had grown to loathe them so. I mean, they’ll eat anything, including each other. But Michelle’s chickens are so pretty and fun to watch—little dinosaurs bustling around the property, living in their little chicken alternate universe. Every now and then, something will spook them and they’ll all run this way or that way, then it’s over and they get back to their scratchin’ and peckin’. And, as night falls, they all take themselves home to their roost and tuck themselves in. Endearing, even if they do eat their young.

I can’t wait to learn what they have to say.