I was sitting downstairs playing some Grand Theft Auto while Cassie was teaching aerobics when I had the odd feeling that I should check on the chickens. I went outside and saw one of the local cats that lives in the fields behind us was giving the chickens a hard time. I chased off the kitty and started my search for the ‘other chicken’. One was in the greenhouse and I couldn’t find the other…Fearing for the worst I checked outside the fenced area first thinking a cat could have scared the chicken over the fence. Didn’t see any chicken….People in the neighborhood didn’t look as if they had seen a chicken….So I went back in the backyard.
I saw the white chicken in the flower bed. Good, I thought. I went to grab it and it shot off like they do. After watching them eat grasshoppers and other bugs I’ve noticed that chickens have no latency. Their reaction time is instantaneous. It bolted off right down the window well.
“Chicken Little” in the window well
I figured at this point that it would be easiest to grab her from the downstairs window. Our roommate Luke lives in this downstairs bedroom. But he wasn’t home. I snapped a picture because it hit me…how odd is this? This situation certainly hasn’t happened to me before. So I snapped a few more.
Behind Glass
It was time to meet Cassie on bikes downtown, so I figured the chicken wasn’t going anywhere and I left. We came back and it was dark, the Chicken was still there. This video I think explains the chicken rescue.
By Cassie
Gathered up the materials: Eggs straight from our hard working and feisty leghorn backyard chicken, basil (the chickens have helped our grasshopper infestation as well so we have more basil another benefit!), garlic clove, cherry tomatoes, jalapeno, potatoes (all from our garden) and tortillas from a Greeley tortilleria
Purple potatoes are awesome! Unlike red potatoes, the potatoes are purple through and through. Britton didn’t even have to dig much at all to get these out of our garden
We had to use up some of the older store-bought eggs as well. Can you tell which is which? **Hint the local egg is bigger and oranger!** FYI-Free range eggs like these are much higher in omega 3 and have a closer omega 3/omega 6 ratio than industry eggs. This is mainly due to the fact that they can eat grass, bugs and other plants in addition to just feed
VOILA!
YUM!
If you have never heard of the locavore movement, aka real food movement, aka local food security, aka 100 mile diet, aka food sustainablity and related to the organic food movement, this meal is a representative of this. It is not all that hard especially in the summer. Basically, the assumption is that we can use less fossil fuels, bring ourselves closer to nature, feed ourselves nutritious foods and avoid the atrocities that are committed every day in the conventional food industry such as genetically modified (GMO) foods, pesticide residue, chemical dependence and a disconnect from nature.
An example of this: Most egg and meat chickens in the conventional industry have their beaks burnt down when they are chicks so that they don’t peck the other chickens to death because they are so stressed. The local food movement (locavore movement) also avoids the monoculture tendency in the current farming practices which means you can grow a variety of things to eat rather than just fields and fields of corn (most of which is not to eat anyway).
This is a major reason why I am so excited to live in Puerto Rico. I can eat local and healthy here in Colorado in the summer (with a lot of help from sprinklers or it’d be too dry!), but not so much in the winters. I can’t wait until we can eat off of the land year round! In fact, there is often so much food that one family could never eat it all. Imagine: Oranges, grapefruits, passionfruit, mangoes for breakfast, fresh avocados, tomatoes, goat cheese, and eggs for lunch, and salad, beans, fried plantains and maybe some fresh meat for dinner with a fresh lime and mint with local Bacardi rum or a lime slice for a Medalla Light (local Puerto Rican beer). All from your own yard or within 100 miles! And that’s just an idea…I am sure we will have to be very creative in order to use all the different things out there.
We drove outside of town and met up with some folks that had chickens. They sold us 2 of them for $15, not sure if that is a good or bad deal as I’ve never bought chickens that were alive?
We put them in boxes and loaded them up in the back of the Honda.
Took them in the backyard and showed Kitty. He didn’t know what to do.
Unpacked them
Happy New Home:
We need to buy some feed and I am going to make them their own coup instead of the greenhouse. They poop a lot and I am not sure what that would do to the plants in there.
By Cassie Britton sent me the link to an article with that title, so of course I had to read it. (And Isaac sent it to me after I sent him the Michael Pollan video – bk)
I thought it summed up a lot of what Britton and I have talked about before. The “system” -the impersonal “they”- make it very difficult to get OUT of the system that was built by them. “9/11 fueled renewed acceleration to eliminate freedom from the countryside,” said the author of the article, Joel Salatin. It is interesting to think about 9/11 as a conspiracy or a launching pad for a way to control people even more than before. The Patriot Act seems so finely tuned to remove personal freedoms including privacy, it is scary that everyone went along with it without much of a peep. All in the name of fighting “terrorism”. These are policies that revolve around fear. If we turned it around and another country were doing what we do daily, they would be on our Enemy Number 1 list (torture, spying, weapons proliferation).
The article goes into detail of all the things that a farmer today cannot do including: processing his own food to sell, using the farm as an educational outlet, collaborative marketing and selling other farm goods at his farm, employing youth and interns, and building a small house. He also discusses why the big companies want eradiation (basically x-raying and killing all living material in food for fear of food-pathogens), genetic altering of food (this questionable process stands to earn Monsanto, Dow, and the other chemical companies hoards of money in patents), and to not allow people to even visit farms for fear of infecting all the immune-compromised animals (this is already true). They want to require GPS on all farm animals (this is already happening, but not feasibly working), and to remove firearms from farmers who may need them to defend the farm against predators, or to cull a downed animal. All of these have been proposed and/or are in the works as part of our national food policies.
Goat Farming
When we were in Puerto Rico talking with Awilda about the finca (farm) we asked her about regulations, permits, water rights, etc. She said, “This is el campo (country), no one comes up here, but if you want all that trouble, you go to Arecibo.” She makes pasteles out of the food grown on the land and sells it to local health food stores and had to get food labels made. “If they could, they would attach a box to your back and charge you every time you breathe.” I think I like this lady.
I hope to see a lot of these down there
I understand regulations and their need in our society, but sometimes we need common sense and incentives to make it easier to live green and sustainably, not disincentives. The roads on the way to work have no sidewalks or bike lanes, for instance, so my incentive seems to be to drive, not bike. It is much easier to fill out paperwork and work for someone else than to start your own business. It takes a lot more motivation, but that is the only way to fight the system. Going along with everything just further entrenches us. Live and work in the little boxes we created for you, you can’t go far without us, the system seems to hum at us, like a concrete and metal bee hive.
Also, I found this great website: www.ted.com There are so many great discussions on here. This is one from Michael Pollan, and he actually compares us to bees as well. Joel Salatin is one of his mentors and is highlighted in The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
