I went on a 5-day sawanobori (= river trekking) trip to Shirakami Sanchi in Aomori prefecture, northern Japan. It was an awesome trip with awesome people, and we even didn't break any bone!
(Click on picture for enlargement.)
Pictures by our expedition leader Martin
Seeing the chickens after 5 days of absence, I was surprised to realize that they were clearly bigger than when I left - and it was only 5 days!
Especially the roosters are huge:
The strange thing is that chickens are growing bigger but eating less. The main culprit to blame for their loss of appetite is of course heat, but I suspect there's another reason: chickens simply got fed up of their usual food (= chicken feed mixed with raw brown rice and rice bran).
Chickens, like humans, are omnivores, and omnivores want to eat various things.
So I prepared something different for them this morning (boiled brown rice, okara, pumpkin and cucumbers - leftovers from neighbor's garden).
Chickens liked it, as you can see in the video:
We also finally got some clouds and rain and slightly cooler temperatures (29°C is not really cool, but it's a welcome improvement from 35 °C).
That was a quick update. Chickens' cuisine (locally sourced when possible) is a topic worth more research.
Hot weather continues, except it's about two degrees hotter and there's less wind than before. Chickens use their cooling strategy more often than before. At times you can see almost all of them panting and lying on the ground. Fortunately none has gone really weak or sick, and on cooler parts of the day, they're just as active as usual.
Chickens lying on the ground, panting.
More chickens lying on the ground and panting.
So many chickens keep their beaks open (to perform panting) that I feel like I'm the only one with the mouth closed. It makes me want to open my mouth too, just to fit in.
A chicken landed on my leg in search of new pecking material (buttons and birthmarks will do).
She keeps panting even then.
Another cooling activity I see more often recently is spreading wings away from the body. Obviously letting some air under the wings helps chickens feel cooler. I can relate - If I was wearing a thick coat and couldn't take it off, I would at least unbutton it and let some air in to cool myself.
Wings spred away from body.
This is not a take-off position before flight. It's a semi-permanent pose as a part of cooling strategy.
Wings spred away from body, from different angle.
The only thing I can do to alleviate chickens' plight is to make sure their water is fresh and cold all the time, that is, to change it often.
We tried one more heat-beating strategy: mist! Cool mist should help lower the outside temperature, so we put a water mister in chickens' yard.
The blue pole in the lower middle part of the photo is water mister.
Can you see the rainbow?
Water mister from different angle.
The result of the mist experiment: Mist did help a little, but not significantly. It did work well as new object of curiosity for the chickens. They liked to peck at it.
Goats
Two baby goats Natchan (girl) and Kaakun (boy) used to graze at our power plant, but these days only Natchan comes.
This is Natchan and Kaakun on a walk two weeks ago.
These days Natchan comes alone because Kaakun got an assignment elsewhere (He's attending an event for families with children. I hope he's doing well, not overwhelmed by the children.)
So Natchan comes alone for a few hours every day. She copes with the heat better than chickens. Shade from the panels is helpful too.
Natchan grazing in the panel shade.
I sometimes take Natchan for a walk. She always enjoys it - being able to go wherever she wants. But for me, walking a goat has at least two challenges (other than people giving me strange looks):
1. Goats don't make a difference between weeds and hedge trees and vegetables. Natchan's most favorite leaves are our hedge shrubs, soybean leaves and green pepper leaves, and she's perplexed when I don't let her eat those. I feel bad, it's like denying a child an ice-cream without explaining her why.
2. Goats are very curious creatures. I thought goats are into grass, but Natchan likes to sniff and chew everything. I don't mind here chewing on my trousers, but when she starts chewing polystyrene foam boxes and metal screws, I have to pull her away and she gives me the"why are you denying me the only fun thing around?" look.
This is Natchan on a walk:
I thought goats like grass. In fact they like everything.
So that was a quick update. In other words, everything's great!
Frogs at our power plant taught us a new game called "Find a frog."
It's very exciting game so I thought I'd share it with you.
(Caution: not recommended to people with ranidaphobia)
Rules are easy: Look at the picture and try to spot a frog.
1.
Can you see a frog?
If you can't see a frog on the first picture↑, try the next picture↓:
2.
Any frog there?
Can you see a frog? If you don't spot the frog until the second picture (above), you lose the game.
You need more training in frog-spotting.
Check the next picture.
3.
I'm here.
The frog is subtly smiling. She just won the game.
4.
The winner.
Here's next round:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Did you win?
Final round:
1.
2.
3.
This was an introduction to "Find a frog" game.
Once you master "Find a frog", you can move to the next level "Catch me if you can."
After a streak of rainy days we have a nice heat wave.
With temperatures over 34 °C and 60 % humidity in the past week, it's Japanese summer at its best.
Our chickens are torn between the feeling of being happy about the sun and being too hot because of that sun.
Chickens don't like hot weather, and it's not just some subjective feeling. There are at least four reasons why chickens are disadvantaged when it comes to really hot weather.
1. Chickens have high body temperature - about 40-41 degrees. They maintain their body temperature by losing heat into the air around them. But when the air around them is already hot, how can they lose their own body heat into it?
2. Chickens don't sweat. They don't have sweat glands to help them regulate the body temperature.
3. Chickens have a thick feather coat that makes for great insulation in winter, but inhibits heat loss in summer. It's like people wearing a thick coat on a hot day. It must feel terrible.
4. Chickens usually don't have access to air conditioning.
In other words, chickens cope with heat worse than people.
But they have a cool cooling strategy!
The first point of their cooling strategy is quite obvious: hide in the shade.
Here you can see our chickens hiding. Not a single one is outside on the sun:
Once in the shade, they lie down on the ground and take a nap. Sometimes they spread wings and do some magic that makes them feel cooler.
Second point of their cooling strategy is again similar to humans: drinking a lot of water.
Third point is panting. Chickens open their beaks and pant.
Panting, or "gular fluttering", is a cooling mechanism of many birds. If I understand it well, birds rapidly flap membranes in their throat. This vibration makes water in the throat evaporate. Evaporation helps dissipate the heat and reduce body temperature. In other words, it's birds' way of sweating?
Here are our chickens performing their cooling strategy: hiding in the shade, drinking water and panting:
The best time chickens have these days are early mornings and late evenings, when it's sunny but not hot yet. That's when their new perch gets busy:
Overall, our chickens are coping with the heat with exemplary stoicism. Who taught them that?
Past 10 days were the rainiest time I remember in my 9 year history of living in Japan.
It's rainy season so rain is to be expected. But even a rainy season usually has the decency of letting a few sunny half-days break the monotony. Not this time.
So how does the rain affect our power plant and its inhabitants?
Thanks to the rain, our power plant turned into a pond.
The reason why there is a pond is because the power plant is built on clay. I have dug many holes in order to plant 60+ hedge trees, so I know that when you start digging and get through a thin layer of topsoil embroidered with weed roots, you hit a layer of crushed stone (which is itself extremely fun to get through with a shovel). After that, you find a fine layer of heavy clay soil. On dry and sunny days, it's hard like stone and impossible to dig. On rainy days, it's gooey and you can carve it in slices and make shapes like playdough. This clay soil is virtually leak proof and helpfully keeps all the water for the weeds. Two days of rain and we have a nice pond.
Chickens don't like rain either. In fact they don't care, but if it lasts too long, the ground gets muddy, their poop gets smelly (I'm sure they find it smelly too) and generally it's not fun. You can see it on their faces.
What's worse, because of the rain, we can't work on the fence to enlarge chickens' playing area.
As expected, the 20 square meter plot we opened for them 2 weeks ago is by now completely void of grass.
Chickens' playground two weeks after opening.
No grass left, only the one I bring in.
The only greenery is the one I bring in twice a day . Chickens devour their portion of salad in minutes and in the next moment are hungry for more.
Not much fun outdoors - chickens spend more time indoors:
Their favorite indoor activity is meditation on perch:
Fortunately, there is one group of inhabitants that is thriving thanks to the rain: frogs. Another name of our power plant could be Frog Paradise. Here are some frog siblings having siesta before breakfast:
Weather forecast says the rainy binge should end tomorrow. Sun will prevail!
Here is a summary of the monthly performance of our power plant from December 2014 (the first full month of operation) until June 2015.
The best performing month so far was May with 6231 kWh of electricity produced, and the worst month was February with 4460 kWh. An average Japanese household consumes about 300 kWh of electricity a month, so our power plant produced enough electricity for 14 households in its weakest month (February) and for 20 households in the strongest month (May).
But some months have more days than others. When we take that into account and calculate average amount of electricity generated per day in a given month, we'll find out that the worst month in fact was not February (28 days) but April (30 days) - an average of 148.8 kWh was generated a day. The best month remains May with average daily performance of 201 kWh. See the graph below:
The size of our power plant is 40.71 kW in terms of installed capacity of solar panels (354 panels x 0.115 kW), and 38.5 kW in terms of maximum capacity of inverters (7 inverters x 5.5 kW).
The question I am interested in is: How many kilowatt hours of electricity does each 1 kW of installed capacity generate per year?
As our power plant has been in operation for only seven months, I don't have a twelve months worth of statistics yet. But if I assume that the same trend will continue for the next four months, I can extrapolate data from the seven months introduced above.
Power plant Oo generated a total of 35 022 kWh of electricity in the seven months from Dec. 1, 2014 until June 30, 2015. This gives us average performance of 5003 kWh/month.
This multiplied by 12 months gives us a prediction for yearly performance.
5003 x 12 = 60037 kWh/year
When we divide this yearly performance (prediction) by the installed capacity 40.71 kW, we'll find out that 1474 kWh of power will be produced annually per 1 kW of installed capacity.
60037 kWh / 40.71 kW = 1474.76 kWh
This is very good result.
Actual performance depends on many factors so it's hard to make simple comparisons, but just for reference, Japanese makers of solar power systems such as Sharp, Panasonic and Toshiba estimate annual energy production per 1 kW of their products somewhere between 1000 and 1200 kWh. (Source: Eco-hatsu {in Japanese}). In the light of that, our power plant's estimate of 1474 kWh per 1 kW of installed capacity per year is an excellent outcome.
So why is it important to push performance to the maximum?
Of course on the individual level there is financial incentive - for me, each kilowatt hour produced means a few more yens earned. But it's important from the global perspective as well: Solar power systems take a lot of energy to manufacture and install, and they have to "pay" this energy back. The more energy our power plant produces, the shorter is its energy payback time, and the higher is its net energy gain.
Energy payback time is the time it takes a solar power system to generate the same amount
of energy that was used for its manufacture and installation. So how long is that time? On average, it's "between six months to two years, depending on the location/solar irradiation and the technology," according to this 2012 article from the Center for Life Cycle Analysis at Columbia University. That's already quite short. But it can always be shorter.
Let me introduce you to the cutest weed cutter in the world:
Natchan (front) and her friend Kaakun (back)
Her name is Natchan. Natchan and her friend Kaakun come to our power plant almost every day to help out with an otherwise daunting task of weeding (that is, weeding a thousand square meters of land). I would love to use a friendlier expression like "lawn mowing" instead of "weeding," but what really grows at our power plant are weeds, not a lawn, and the activity we engage in is the War on Weeds. War is sometimes brutal, but however strong the enemy might be, the one thing we want to avoid is chemical weapons (=herbicides). So we fight with traditional armaments: a sickle and a scythe (for me) and a weed cutter (for Nobuo). But with two goats joining our ranks, it's an easy victory.
Talking so much about weeds might seem like too much fuss about nothing, but if you ever experienced Japanese summer in the countryside, you know that if you don't interfere, weeds soon grow over your head (literally). So much as I admire the vitality and ingenious survival skills of Japanese weeds, I have to fight them back. And I am grateful for our goat-friends' help.
Here's Natchan at work:
Natchan is not only the cutest but also the most enthusiastic weeder I've ever met. She never complains of working too hard or having eaten too much of the weed. For comparison - Nobuo starts whining after 5 minutes of weed cutting and takes a break after 10 minutes (sometimes never to resume again.) Who would you take as a team member on a weeding mission?
Here's Nobuo exchanging weeding tips with Natchan:
Nobuo (right) chatting with Natchan (left).
Natchan and Kaakun are our neighbor's goats. Our power plant is located in a rural part of Tsukuba, with many fields around. There's a lot of grass and weeds everywhere, most noticeably on the sides of the rice fields, so it seems that our neighbor wouldn't have to bother to come to our place to graze her goats. The main reason why she comes here and not elsewhere is the chemical weapons - we don't use them, but most farmers around do. That makes our power plant a safe place for goats (and frogs and sparrows....) to graze.
It's a truly win-win situation. Goats are happy to have fresh grass for lunch and we're happy to be exempt from the weed cutting task. I hope this collaboration will continue for very long time.
Our chickens can finally play on the grass outside the coop (click on picture for enlargement):
2015/6/22 morning. Chickens on their new playground.
(Visual distortion on this and other pictures is due to the fisheye lens of our Sony action camera)
Here are their first moments out of the coop:
On their new playground chickens are busy pecking everything that comes in their way, eating grass and chasing bugs. And digging ground for more bugs and seeds and other yummy stuff. Before, they used to flock around me when I came to feed them. Now they hardly notice when I come. Which I take as a sign that they're happy on their own.
This is view from outside:
2015/6/22 morning. View from the south-west.
2015/6/22 morning. View from the south-east.
The fence is made of metal lattice panels that we got for free from a new local friend of ours who happened to have an old fence he didn't need any more. We're happy that we could reuse something instead of buying new stuff. Reusing old fence also made it much cheaper for us.
To put up the fence we needed fence posts, for which we used supporting poles of the power plant. This is one of the instances when having a solar sharing power plant on your land is more convenient than not having one. The fact that we didn't have to erect new fence posts saved us a lot of time.
But this playground is still too small for our 30+ chickens. With chickens pecking all day on an area of 20 square meters (that's the current playground size; the size of coop is not included), my guess is that the grass and insects will disappear within next 7 days. We plan to enlarge chickens' playing area to at least 10 times the current size. We just have to build a new, much longer fence - next task on our To do list.
