It's a girl! And two boys!

On March 23, Natchan the Goat gave birth to a girl and two boys!

Here's the new family four days later:

Natchan the Mom with her children. (2016/3/27)

4 days old baby goats are pretty much like toddlers rather than "babies." 

The one with red ribbon is the girl !

Mom goes out, we go out!

Pretending to be eating grass, like Mom does!

Natchan and her new family will stay in their home for a few more weeks. They plan to come back to our farm in mid-April. (Navigating three small, ultra playful baby goats to the farm along a road where cars may pass is not an easy task. It requires some logistics, and the goats must also grow a bit bigger and be able to walk faster and in a straight line. Right now they just totter in funny drunken ways and jump around without much control of where they fall or what they bump into.)

Mom mom mom more milk mom mom!

Okay, here you go.

These days the siblings mostly sleep, and when they don't sleep, they eat (Account by Mrs. Yagishita). Aah, I'm so envious of their busy schedule.

Royal visit and fluffy bottoms

A few days ago, Natchan the Goat paid us a surprise visit. What an honor!

Natchan with a huge  balloon belly. 

As is often the case with goats, the purpose of her visit was not clear. It seems that Natchan just felt like going out for a walk on this fine spring day, and her caretaker-in-chief, Mrs. Yagishita, had no choice but to follow.

Once at the farm, Natchan briefly remembered that she used to have a Kingdom before. But the grass in her Kingdom has been decimated by the chickens, so Natchan quickly turned her focus to the grass around the power plant. To chickens' great relief, Natchan forgot about her Kingdom instantly.

Absorbed in grass inspection, Natchan didn't notice that her caretaker-in-chief had already left.

When she finally did notice, she rushed to catch up.

Wait! 

Waaaait!
(Caretaker-in-chief is yellow circled.)

That was the end of Natchan's visit.

So it's time to go back to chickens. Here are some close up pics from yesterday.

How do you like my eye shadows?

What? No treats today?!

Elegant curves, chicken version.

As the old saying goes, "Fluffy like chicken bottom." 

And finally a group photo:

Everyone cluck cheese!
(2016/3/18)

(Chickens are not so good in saying cheese. )

Alternative perching options

Chickens like perching.

These are our chickens 10 months ago. As soon as they learned to fly, they started exploring their perching options.

12-days old chickens exploring their perching options.

A perch is for chickens what a bed and a sofa is for humans. It's not absolutely necessary for survival, but it makes life much, much more enjoyable.

Unfortunately our farm has only one proper perch - the one inside the coop. That perch is chickens' bed at night and their sofa during the day. From the chickens' perspective, however, having just one combined bed-sofa perch is terribly inconvenient - to reach a perch during the day, when they are mostly out in the run, they have to walk all the way back to the coop.

As always, chickens proved resourceful in identifying alternative perching options. Here's a collection of them, as spotted in the past ten days.

Alternative perch No. 1: Gate

The gate-perch is a bit shaky but it does fulfill the minimum Perch Requirements.

Alternative perch No. 2: Goat's royal seat.

Goats (quite like chickens) like high places. Natchan the Goat had her personal pedestal, on top of which she would stand, enjoy the view and feel like a queen.
Now that Natchan is not here, sometimes a chicken jumps up on the goat's pedestal, looks around and tries to feel like a queen. But something doesn't feel right. No wonder, it's the goat's royal seat. It's too flat for a true chicken perch. But better than nothing.

Alternative perch No. 3: Roof (of a low structure)

In the back of the picture, you can see a low wooden structure with a chicken on top of it. We expected that chickens would notice the perching potential of this roof at some point, and indeed they did. It actually took them longer than we thought.

Alternative perch No. 4: Absolutely mistaken choice


Chickens sometimes go too far in their inventiveness.

One day we worked in the coop until late afternoon, with the door between the coop and the storage room open. Slowly, chickens started to gather in the coop, jumping up the perch and getting ready to sleep, which mainly involves who-gets-the-best-sleeping-spot fight. Then one chicken discovered The Door.

"I got the best spot!" (top right)

The hen was seriously determined to sleep on her new perch, so we had to politely help her off. We apologized for inconvenience, but I think she was angry with us for taking that perfect spot away from her. Some perches are simply too good to be true.

The Destroyer Chicken

The Destroyer Chicken of our flock is the same as the Explorer Chicken. We call her Christine because she used to be a great explorer like Christopher Columbus, which caused us a lot of trouble but we still found Christine's adventures unique and inspiring. Not any more. Now she turned into a real Destroyer Chicken.

Christine in the act of destruction.

The thing is that we are trying to revive grass in chickens' old run so that chickens can move back there from the current run (chickens are supposed to use the two runs in turns so they don't run out of grass).

In order to speed up the recovery, we went to great pains to till the soil and plant seeds of clover and wheat varieties, which we know are chickens' favorites.
We had put hours of work into this, so we expected that now in March - when days are warmer and weeds are waking up after winter delirium - the first signs of green carpet would soon appear in the old run too. But it still looks like this:

Not very spring-like uh?

It's true that chickens had thoroughly wiped out all vegetation in the four months they had used this run. But still. We've put so much work in tilling and sowing the seeds. I've kept watering the whole damn plot. Where are the plants???

Then I found out: 

Christine was taking care of a large portion of them. She cold-bloodedly sabotaged our work. There is nothing inspiring about that.

She has been evicted multiple times but keeps returning to the forbidden area.

She's after these small sprouts that come out of the seeds that we had planted.

The whole plot should be full of them by now, something like this:

This is what it looks like these days in the back of the farm (a No-Chicken Area).

When caught in the middle of her sprout eating session, Christine makes her poker face and clucks: "What's up dude?" (Okay, I don't know if they have the word "dude" in Chickenspeak.)
She can't seem to understand that the fact that she can fly over the closed gate doesn't mean she should.

By now I gave up and decided not to invest any more time into the grass cultivation, other than occasional watering, and leave it to Mother Nature, and keep evicting Christine from the forbidden area every time I find her there (several times a day.) The only lucky circumstance for Christine is that although she can inflict considerable damage, she alone can't eat up everything. She's able to slow down the recovery process but not thwart it.

So we decided to take it easy. Lucky you, Christine.

Small scale wind power

(日本語の記事はこちらです。)

Wind power, as a type of renewable energy, can be sold via the feed-in-tariff system in Japan.

Compared to solar power, wind power has drawbacks such as noise and more frequent malfunctioning because the blades of wind turbines are rotated mechanically by wind to make electricity. Knowing these drawbacks, I didn't have very high opinion of wind power before.

However, last summer I happened to find land that was potentially a good site for a wind turbine. Seeing the possibility of building a small wind farm, I decided to learn more about it.

Wind turbine

If the electricity is just for your personal use, any wind turbine is fine, but if you want to sell electricity to the power company, in Japan you have to use one of the wind turbines certified by the authorized institution.
As of February 2016, there were 13 certified wind turbines, many of them products of non-Japanese makers.
As mentioned in the Footnote *1 in the above link, the average wind speed of 5 m/s is necessary to achieve the annual energy production described in the table in the link.

For example, if the average wind speed is 5m/s, the model GW133 by Gaia-Wind Ltd, listed in the table, can be expected to generate 27,502 kW of electricity annually.

One kilowatt hour of wind power can be sold to the power company for 55 yen. A simple calculation shows what income in Japanese yen this would yield:

27,502 * 55 = 1,512,610 Japanese yen

Of course from this sum we have to deduct costs such as taxes, security monitoring costs, insurance and annual maintenance (which, in case of wind power, is indispensable), so the general view is that there is not much profit left.

Wind conditions

Needless to say, wind power depends on how much wind blows. Without wind, wind turbine is just an ornament.
It's crucial to know how much wind blows at the potential site, so I decided to check the wind conditions there.

The minimum required wind speed of 5m/s is about the same as the wind that keeps tree leaves constantly moving.

In order to monitor the wind conditions, I had a monitoring pole set up at the site, as shown in this video:

At the top of the pole, a small propeller is attached, which monitors the wind conditions.

The propeller is a commercially available product called Wind Tracker/Wind Logger, made by Logic Energy. It can measure wind direction and speed.

It's a low-cost product with a proven worldwide record. For more information, you might want to check this blog of a friend who works in Logic Energy:

http://www.windlogger.co.uk/blogs/news

On this blog you can also find introduction of our solar sharing project.

The graph below shows the result of the first 12 days of wind monitoring with this device.

These data show that there are large variations in the wind speed, which is not very good for a wind turbine. More importantly, the average wind speed was only 3.79m/s, which is much lower than the necessary 5m/s. Too little wind is not a promising sign for the project.

However, wind conditions should be monitored for at least six months, so I decided to be patient and continue monitoring before jumping to early conclusions.

(This article is a translation of the original Japanese post by Nobuo.)