It's a Year of Dog.
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| 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!
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| "My genius idea is just about to pop up." |