日本語 There are many things you can do on a farm, and one of them is, obviously, yoga. We had our first yoga class on the farm last Saturday. The great thing about solar sharing is that you can do just about anything under the panels. Yoga class sounded like a fun event. Because goats participated as well, we'd like to call it Goat Yoga.
日本語 Finally a new post after unbelievable four-month-long break. The blog might have looked dead but the farm is alive and well: Chickens and goats are thriving and solar panels seem to be mostly okay too (what a relief). Having more work than before, I have less time to spend with our chickens and goats (and to write about it). This is a pity because it's always exciting to secretly spy on them while they think they are spying on me (and then share the details with our anonymous online audience). Today I want to write about our chickens' social order, or as hoomans call it, pecking order. For those who think this is a boring topic: You'd be surprised how similar chicken society is to human society (that is, before humans invented "equality" and "human rights" for themselves). I will especially talk about Ashiko, the chicken at the social bottom of our flock.
Ashiko!
Being at the social bottom is usually a bad thing, but on our farm, this means that Ashiko is our favorite hen and gets special benefits. This is because of our farm's philosophy "No chicken left behind." (If our farm was a country, it would be a more notorious welfare state than Finland)
Click on picture to see it clearly.
As there are now only nine chickens (and six goats) on the farm, it's easy to see the social structure quite clearly. Of the nine chickens, eight are hens and one is rooster. The rooster, Justin, has a unique place in the flock, as roosters usually have, so the social order I'm going to describe will be mostly about the eight hens. (Regarding the rooster's position, it's hard to say whether it's low or high. This is because Justin is inconsistent and seems unable to decide whether he wants to be the leader or not. He likes to keep low profile and blend with the hens, except for the occasional half-hearted attacks on enemies like small children, Nobuo, and me.)
Justin the Rooster (center) trying to blend in.
So, the eight hens. The top hen in our flock is Maruko.
Maruko! (Please ignore the photobombers.)
Not that it would matter, but Maruko is the prettiest hen in our flock. She has beautiful feather coat, which I guess is both a reason and a consequence of her high status. During meal time, she can choose whatever feed tray she wants and no one will challenge her. She is never pecked at by any other hen. This means she gets the best nutrition as well as zero external damage (and she just seems to never molt), so her beautiful coat is not a coincidence. Btw the chicken on the title photograph of this blog is also Maruko.
Front: Maruko the Chicken. Back: Tobi-chan the Goat.
Poker smile
When I do some digging or weeding in the chickens' run, Maruko is the one who comes close to "help" and gets all the bugs and worms that come out of the soil. These are delicacies and all hens crave for them, but Maruko somehow has the privilege to come first and get the best bugs. Other hens wait nearby for their chance. Despite of (or because of) Maruko being the most dominant hen, I can hardly recall seeing her being aggressive, like attacking other hens for no reason. From which I assume Maruko is a born leader with natural authority. Below Maruko, there are the upper class hens, then the lower class hens, and then there's Ashiko.
Social stairs (ladder was too difficult to draw)
Ashiko is at the very bottom. In most social groups this is unfortunate position, but on our farm, any hen (or goat) that falls into the lowest position immediately gets V.I.P. protected status. This wasn't always the case. Before, our philosophy was to give chickens autonomy and let them solve their disputes on their own. But Ashiko taught us that we can do better.
Ashiko's bullying started some six months ago. The trigger was her getting sick and limping on one leg as a result. This made her different enough from other chickens to become a target of bullying. Chickens hate diversity, you know. (Just as many goats, dogs and humans do.) If chickens wanted to inscribe a motto on the wall, it would be: "Either you are like us, or you are an enemy."
We noticed that Ashiko's was being chased away during meal times (but a hen can go back to feed when other chickens finish eating) and generally picked on for no reason. It wasn't so bad, however. So we didn't step in - who would want that kind of micromanagement. Our chickens' run is big, I thought, so even if a hen turns out to be unpopular, she can always hide away from her bullies, I reasoned. I was convinced that the terrible cases of group aggression (pecking a hen to death) only happen on other farms with stressed-out chickens crammed in cages or in a barn. That's what I believed until one day I found Ashiko sleeping outside, not in the coop with other hens but alone, with dark blood marks on her crest and one of her eyes closed as if she had an injury. She looked miserable.
Ashiko the day after attack (already in her private room.)
You can see that one eye is closed.
This was a shock and a wake-up lesson. This has been the only case of such bullying on our farm, but it proves that even stress-free environment and a big outdoor run cannot always guarantee well-being of all chickens in the flock.
The moment we found Ashiko like that, we changed our philosophy from "leave it to the chickens" to "early intervention." For Ashiko the intervention came a bit late, but not too late. Ashiko immediately qualified for protected status. She got a private room, where she would get all her meals separately from other hens and she would also sleep there. She got a special run separated from other chickens.
This arrangement lasted for several months. Ashiko completely recovered, including her eye, which at first we thought was permanently damaged. Luckily it wasn't. Now Ashiko is back with the flock, and although she is still at the bottom of the hierarchy, she's now same-enough to be tolerated by other hens.
Ashiko socializing with other chickens. (Preening is important group activity. Standing this close to other hens is an achievement for a previously bullied chicken)
On the weekends she sometimes still gets her meals separately and gets a special time in her own run. This is more because Ashiko now expects these privileges than because she needs them :D Right now there are just nine chickens and six goats, so it's easy to make sure every single one of them is happy. But imagine we had 30 or 50 or 100 chickens, and we still would want to run the farm by the "No chicken left behind" philosophy. So the big question is, how to make this work on a bigger scale. Meanwhile, we're happy to see Ashiko integrated back in the flock and living her carefree chicken life.
日本語 Third-graders from Tsukuba International School(TIS) came this year again to learn about renewable energy and solar sharing.
20 students and 7 teachers and parents on February 6, 2018
This was already third time that TIS students visited our farm. This time, baby goats and chickens took all the spotlight, but that's just fine. As far as I remember, the purpose of school excursions was always (1) to have fun, (2) maybe to learn something. But the times may have changed since my school years, because the TIS children were (despite the baby goat distraction) curious and inquisitive, as they've always been on their visits to our farm, so we most probably managed to learn something together. We talked about how the energy from sun turns into electricity when sunlight hits the panel surface, and how that electricity moves through the cables to inverters, then to the distribution box and finally up the utility pole to the public grid, so people can use the electricity in their homes.
As all the things mentioned - the panels, the inverters, the utility pole - were right there on the farm in front of us, I hope the abstract concept of electricity became a little more concrete. We also checked out how much the electricity production changes when I change the tilt of the panels. (In February, the optimum angle in our area is 50 degrees. When we moved the tilt to the July position of about 4 degrees, electricity generation dropped by about 30%, which is a lot.) *We can check power generation status of the farm in the real time thanks to Solar monitor.
This year we didn't have much time to talk about the chickens (why we have chickens at the farm), but that's fine too. As long as the students had fun and remember the chickens, the goats, and the solar panels as they saw them on the farm, mission is completed. I can sleep well at night.
As we already announced on our Japanese blog, Natchan the Queen gave birth to four healthy baby goats on January 19, 2018, or about a week ago.
Natchan and her day-old babies (2018/1/20)
It's three girls and a boy! (2018/1/20)
If Natchan's delivery is already old news, the new news is that five days later, on January 24th, another goat, Momochan, delivered too! She gave birth to a healthy girl.
Momochan and her baby girl (2018/1/25)
Momochan currently doesn't live on our farm. She has a private room in the home of Mrs. Yagishita, our Chief Goat Officer who lives a short walk from the farm. This is because Momochan has an inborn problem with front legs and is easily bullied if kept with other goats. Instead of walking straight, she prefers to walk with her front knees bent. Otherwise she's a healthy, mild tempered, sweet goat, but she's not exactly super-strong and we never expected her to get pregnant. However, now she's a good mum and her leg issue is clearly not a problem in fulfilling here mum duties.
Momochan in her preferred standing position. (She can stand or walk straight if she wants.)
Moreover, the current situation brought about an additional benefit: the opportunity for "mum sharing".
"Mum sharing"
Mum sharing means that babies share their mums. Natchan gave birth to four babies, which is a little too many to support without human assistance. Goats have only two teats, so four babies have to compete who gets most milk. That's why Mrs. Yagishita would have to do some bottle feeding to make sure all four babies grow fine.
See the milk bottles?
But Momochan's new mum status created an opportunity for a better solution: We took the smallest of Natchan's four babies to Momochan to see if she would accept her. And Momochan said, okay, why not? She snuffed the new baby's bottom, it smelled good, so she let her suck.
Momochan's baby girl now has a playmate!
As a result, Natchan is feeding three babies and Momochan is feeding two. In the meantime Yagishita san is busy procuring enough food both Natchan and Momochan. This is not easy in winter. If you are worried that Natchan or the baby might have suffered emotional damage from being separated, I can assure you that this is not the case. Natchan hardly noticed one baby is missing, and the baby was happy to be with her new mum as soon as she was allowed to suck. (It's easy to identify a goat in distress. There was none this time.)
"Happy New Year!" chickens and goats must have said, but we missed it because our Chickenspeak and Goatspeak are still poor.
It's a Year of Dog.
Here are some of the New Year postcards we got!
Because it's a Year of Dog, our chickens quickly decided to forget that Chinese Zodiac ever existed. (They liked Chinese Zodiac last year. It was a Year of Rooster.)
Now some important updates about the farm.
There are now 11 chickens and 3 goats on the farm. The number of goats is pretty stable, but the number of chickens dropped to one third of the original flock. This is because we killed and ate them. We did our best to take their life quickly, and we didn't waste anything as we turned them into food.
Killing our chickens is never fun and I'm relieved we don't have to do it again for at least the next few months. With the last eleven chickens left, their "pet" status naturally grew stronger. To put it another way, their "farm animal" status has become a little untenable. We should have expected it: as there are fewer animals, their personalities stand out more and it's harder to subscribe to the pet-is-friend-but-farm-animal-is-machine doublethink. (That's why big industrial farms with tens of thousands of animals are the perfect design to make us numb.)
After selling eggs for more than two years, we stopped last autumn, or about two months ago.
Chickens still lay a few eggs a day, just enough for our personal consumption and sharing with neighbors.
The question is, what next.
At first this may seem like the end of the Chickens' Playground, but we'd like to think of it as a creative break.
Here's the thing: We really want to continue the farm. Of all the chicken farms I've visited in Japan, our chickens have by far the best living conditions and the highest degree of relative freedom where they can express all of their original behaviors including their foraging habits (unfortunately, large outdoor runs like ours are now extremely rare on commercial chicken farms in Japan. Reason: they require more space, more spending on fencing and more risk management tasks for the farmer, including unavoidable contact of chickens with wild birds = potential disease-carriers.) If I eat eggs, I want them to be from a farm like ours. But there is no other farm like ours. That's why we have to make our farm work.
But it's not that simple. There is a reason why there is no other farm like ours - because it is not economically sustainable.
Despite having a lot of loyal customers who paid three times the usual price for our hens' eggs and had to put up with the inconvenience of coming to pick them up to the farm, for which support we will love our customers forever, the farm was still relying on - mostly my - volunteer labor, which may work for a year or two, but it's not feasible in the long term. Especially now that I lost control over much of my time by switching from a freelancer to a regular 9-5 job, running the farm in the same way we did for the past two years is impossible.
We also can't rely on the income from the solar panels as much as we'd like to. Not only the equipment for chickens costs more than we had thought. Because we built the farm using our savings and a loan, using the income from electricity to subsidize the farm is like paying for the farm from our savings - you can't afford that unless you're a millionaire.
All in all, the scale of the farm - just 30+ chickens - is too small to make it pay for all the costs, including our time. This is an undeniable fact. But increasing the number of chickens is not the answer. It would only lead to the same compromises (both environmental and animal welfare) that we have seen on all the other farms.
But we believe there are ways how to fix this. First of all, we need to improve the design of the farm to make things a little more efficient and a little less time-demanding. But we have to do it in a smart way that doesn't impact the chickens.
Personally, I'm a big fan of efficiency. If I can finish a boring or grueling task quickly or easily using a smart tool, I will. I can then use the saved time to read a book. But I'm not a fan of ill-defined "efficiency" in farming, where it often means more pesticides and chemical fertilizers in exchange for a little higher yield, while all the negative environmental costs (like destruction of ecosystems) are externalized. In case of animal farming, more "efficiency" usually means less space and worse conditions for animals. Battery cage is undoubtedly the most "efficient" way of producing eggs, but that doesn't mean it is the right way. A practice that would be labeled animal abuse if it was done to a companion animal, should not be applied to farm animals either.
So there's real efficiency and pseudo efficiency, and it's important to see the difference. On our farm, we're pursuing the former - there are still many things to improve that have nothing to do with environmental costs or animal welfare. However, these improvements require either time (to figure out what works best through trial-and-error) or money (to buy or build the better designed thing) or, usually, both.
Example: We have a huge problem with sparrows who come in crowds to eat chickens' feed and to sh*t everywhere. They sh*t into chickens' drinking water and on the solar panels. I'm not overstating: the future of our farm depends on solving the sparrow curse.
The easiest solution would be shutting the chickens inside the coop, thus cutting sparrows' access to the feed. Eventually they would realize that there are no free meals any more and would stop coming altogether. However, shutting chickens in the coop means denying them access to the outdoor run, so it's not exactly a chicken-friendly solution. We asked the chickens and they (obviously) said they didn't like the idea, so we have to figure out something smarter. The solution is out there, we just have to find it. For example, building a smart feeder that only chickens could open, but not sparrows. Chickens would have free access to their meals and to their run, but there would be no free food for the sparrows. This would save us a lot of time and money.
Something like this (the video below is not from our farm):
This was just one example how better design could help us solve many of the issues that we ran into in the past two years. In that sense, the past two years were an important Stage 1 of this long term project: a learning phase that allowed us to notice what practical problems there are. Now we can start ironing them out.
That's why we'd like to call this a Phase 2: Creative break!
