eggs & tea

Jan. 17, 8 am to noon, at Jan’s house in Kalopa (near Honokaa) you are invited to join us as we will demonstrate how to humanely process 17 of our chickens.  Attendees will participate and learn about backyard chicken processing.  In addition, even if you do not attend, you can buy a processed bird to eat.  11 of them will be available for sale at $4/pound.  They are nearly 3 years old – so wet cook only, stewed or stock.  If you’ve been following this blog, you know these hens have been locally raised free-range on grass, organic feed, comfort and human affection their whole lives.

This is a Slow Food Hawaii event, so SFH members get priority, but there are still spaces open, so non-members are welcome too!  To sign up (to attend, and/or buy a chicken to eat), email our SFH president Shelby.

Reference URLs: how to butcher a chicken [equipment will be different; processing method similar] and slaughtering chickens.

If you have questions, please feel free to contact us (see the Egg Farm page).

I read a great article today, From Cubicle Nerd to Cucumber Vendor: Learning Small Scale Farming in Mid-life.  As usual for the Oil Drum, much of the information is in the ensuing discussion (all 30,000 words of it).  An engineer moves to the country (in this case, Virginia), starts to farm, and produces fascinating measures of the activity (950 gallons of fossil fuel, 1,078,700 food calories produced..)  People from around the country add their own experiences, including a guy on Maui.  It seems there are a lot of people in my situation: Moving partly or fully from white-collar work to producing food, attempting sustainability, an incredibly complex set of challenges, a lot that is different in each place, but also a lot of things we can learn from each other.

Last Saturday (10/18) in Holualoa, Deb and i attended this workshop.  I gave a half-hour talk on Local Chicken Feed, basically summarizing what’s in my chicken notes.  It was great fun, people really liked my talk and i learned a lot also, about fruit and low-maintenance perennial food crops.  It was a sold-out crowd of around 80 people:

We got cuttings from 7 perennial crops (Cassava, Chaya, Katuk, Moringa, Okinawan Spinach, Pacific Spinach aka Edible Hibiscus, Sissoo (Brazilian) Spinach).  I planted them in my garden to see if any will grow here.

More info: Leaves to Live By: Perennial Leaf Vegetables, PerennialVegetables.org, ECHO Tropical Vegetables

It hasn’t been widely publicized, so i want to help: If you are in Hamakua, check this out. HHCDC’s Agriculture & Sustainability classes:

PRACTICAL AGRICULTURE FOR HAMAKUA 2008
Supporting local agriculture through classroom instruction, field operations and farm tours from specialists and local farmers who support sustainable agriculture in Hamakua

There are classes on soil, planting, monitoring, harvesting, value add, irrigation, aquaponics, biodynamics, alternative energy, food security – and a class on Poultry taught by me (Ben) on Nov. 13, followed by a farm tour here on Nov. 15.  You can sign up for the whole thing, or just drop in on the events that interest you.

At one point last year, Deb brought home a packet of Seeds of Change Japanese White Hulless Popcorn.  I planted it in the upper ‘experimental’ garden area in spring, and just harvested today, at 4 months later.  The catalog says [4-5' tall, 3-6 4" ears per plant, 95-105 days].  Mine grew to 5-6′, but had only 1-2 ears per plant after 120 days:

I did plant them a bit close, and this soil is unknown (first time planting in this new garden area), so any number of things could explain the low ear count.  On 30 stalks, i got only 35 usable ears.  Despite the small planting, pollination was very good, and it’s quite pretty:

Here they are with only one row left to harvest.  Note the narrow bed, surrounded by peanuts and taro and yacon:

I wasn’t sure whether to husk them or not before drying them, so i went ahead and husked them and put them in an open container in the greenhouse, probably the most sunny/dry place we have on the farm.

At last weekend’s famer’s market, the super nice Uluwehi farm folks brought me some Azolla. This is an aquatic fern which might prove to be an easily grown local feed for chickens. I brought it home and put it in some water with a little horse manure dissolved. It started growing right away:

I have updated the chicken notes page with a whole new page for Azolla as a Feed for Chickens.

Aside from the usual spring planting, here are some things that have been going on at the farm.

• I dug several new beds above and outside the upper garden. In addition to the usual taro and veggies, i have planted some “hull-less” popcorn and a large bed with two different kind of peanuts. I bought the heirloom peanut seed from organic farms i found on LocalHarvest.
• When all the stores were out of Azomite (which we use to add all the minerals our soil lacks) i got a bag of Kelp Meal instead. Expensive, so i use it sparingly, but seems like great stuff.
• I ‘activated’ a gallon of EM and have started a number of experiments with it, seeing if it affects anaerobic composting and whether it helps to “balance” the rough compost. In addition to the anaerobic tests, there are number of pots with 5 corn plants each, with varying amounts of finished compost and EM.
• On a tip from Tom Baldwin, i am now looking for some Azolla (aquatic fern) as a way to grow nutritious feed for my chickens.
• I gave a talk on biochar at a local gathering of farmers, a seed exchange/potluck event held in Honokaa every other month. Lots of other biochar news, but that’s another blog post..
• I gave a talk on How To Eat Local, at the Waimea library. Only a few people showed, but the talk went well. I hope to give the talk to a big audience at some point.

Here are the new upper beds as of a couple weeks ago. That brand-new bed is now full of peanuts:

For the past few weeks, i’ve been getting more and more excited about biochar – that is, biomass charcoal as a way of producing carbon-negative energy and improving soil. I really can’t summarize the whole field here – just take a look at the Biochar Fund, International Biochar Initiative, Biochar: the new frontier at Cornell, Terra Preta, Carbon Diversion. The article Black is the New Green, from Nature (2006) gives a good overview with pictures. This is really the closest thing to a world-saving technology i’ve ever found – and i can’t wait to try it out on our farm. I’m looking around for a source of quality-controlled char, emailing UH and asking everyone i know, spreading the word.

Despite the rapidly-increasing awareness among researchers, environmentalists and technocrats, apparently still very few people – including farmers – have heard of biochar. Global warming has reached the mass consciousness, but not any realistic solution. That may change soon.

My back failed dramatically last week (sacroiliitis) and i was unable to sit or stand for four days. A great time to catch up on reading, i finished two ag books:

You Can Farm, Joel Salatin.  A great book on how to realistically earn a profit raising food in a healthy, humane, sustainable way, on a family farm.  It’s fun to read, blunt, loaded with excellent advice, and definitely not for vegans.   Lots about chickens.  One very interesting point Joel makes in Chapter 13: to have realistic access to markets, you should be within ~40 miles of a town of at least 25,000 people.  Here in Ahualoa, we aren’t – all of Hamakua, plus all of Waimea, is less than 16,000 people.  For people like us in such a rural area, selling enough products, and trucking it to markets, would be a real stretch (in time and fuel).

The Farm as Natural Habitat.  It starts out kinda stuffy and academic, but there are some great chapters in here (all by different authors) on exactly how agriculture and biodiversity can and should coexist.  Most of the book is about the US midwest, but there is also a chapter on Tule Lake in California, and the meadows of England.  There are actually systems in place in the world where agriculture improves land for wild species, and vice versa – the farm doesn’t have to be a “sacrifice zone.”

Several of my cover crop experiments have grown up and produced seeds. I harvested the tops from the flowering sorghum, and the dry pods of the pigeon peas. Both are nutritious, and the sorghum might be a good food for the chickens, although there is just enough here to use for seed. Pictures of the harvest table, sorghum, pigeon pea pods, and pigeon peas:

It takes a lot of time to shell those pea pods by hand, probably more than two hours for what you see on the table (although it’s fun). Other folks say they just stomp on the brittle shells (after they’re really dry, i guess) then separate out the peas from the chaff, but i didn’t try that.

I did try feeding a head of sorghum to the chickens as-is. They just looked at it, quizzically. When i stripped the grains off with my fingers and threw them on the ground, then the chickens happily ate them. I’ve updated the chicken food notes with more about sorghum as a possible chicken food we could grow.