小形風力発電

（English article is here.）

固定買取制度を通して、再生可能エネルギーの買い取りの対象として、風力発電があることを知りました。
太陽光発電に比べ、風を受け風車を回しての発電は故障が多そうだし、騒音もありそうだしとあまり良いイメージはありませんでした。

昨年の夏に偶然、風車を建てることができそうな候補地が見つかったため、ここに小規模の風力発電所を設置できるかもしれないと思い少し調べてみることにしました。

風車について

風車は自家消費用で発電する場合にはどの製品でも良いのですが、電力会社に売電をする場合は風車は規定の機関から認定を受けた風車でないとダメなようです。

2016年2月現在は13の風車が認定を受けておりその多くが海外の製品です。
リンク先の注にもありますが、調べていくと必要な風というのが風速5m/sということがわかってきました。


平均風速が5m/sの風況下では、例えば、リストにあるGaia-Wind Ltd. GW133というモデルでは、年間発電量が 27,502KWを見込むことができるというものです。

単純に 27,502 * 55 = 1,512,610 円の売電収入という計算になります。

もちろん、これに税金、監視費用、保険、年次メンテナンス（風力では必須）などの費用がかかってくるのであまり利益はないだろうという見方が一般的なようです。

風況について　

太陽光と違い風力は、当然ですが、どのくらいの風が吹くかにかかっくるので、風が吹かないと風車もただの置物となってしまいます。
候補地にどれくらいの風が吹くかを調べることが最も重要なわけですので、風況調査をすることにしました。

最低限求められるこの風速5m/s というのはどれくらいの風か調べると、木の葉が絶えず揺れ動く程度の強さの風ということでした。

その場にずっといるわけにもいかないので、風況調査のためのポールを設置し測定を開始しました。

ポール設置は以下の動画にあるような感じで施工してもらいました。

ポールの先端に、風況監視の風車を取り付けてあります。
Logic Energyというところから市販されているものでWindTracker/WindLoggerという製品で
す。これを使えば、風の向きと風速が計測できます。

安価である上に世界各地で実績のある製品のようで、同社にいる友達がブログで情報発信していますのでよろしければご一読いただければと思います。

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

私たちのSolar-Sharingも紹介してくれております。

これを使い約12日間風況を監視した結果が以下のグラフです。

結構ばらつきがあることがわかりました。風車にとってはあまり良いことではないようです。何より、平均風速が3.79m/sということで、5m/sに届いていないので難しいのかなと思いました。

その後、最低でも6ヶ月の監視期間が必要である、ということを耳にしもう少し様子を見ることにしています。

Occupied by chickens

There was a temporary rearrangement of animal powers on our farm.

There used to be two independent states on the farm: the Goat Kingdom and the Chicken Republic. 

Chicken Republic was more populated and had larger area, but the Goat Kingdom was greener and had more natural resources.

The news is that now, temporarily, the Goat Kingdom, abandoned by its Queen, has become part of the Chicken Republic. 

What happened is that it was decided that Natchan the Goat will not be coming to graze at the farm for a while - maybe until March. The reason is that there's little grass anyway and Natchan with big belly wouldn't walk or graze much. Natchan is all right, having good time at her home, where she gets a grazing time out of the shed every morning and evening. She will be back at the farm after her babies are born.

In the meantime, Natchan gave permission to the chickens to take care of her kingdom. Chickens are working hard to fulfill their duty.

So these days, the whole farm is occupied by lovely chickens. Don't expect any cute mammal, please.

OH, there is one! Recently spotted near the farm.

Although this one won't let you rub her neck, like Natchan the Goat would. 

I'd rather wait for Natchan to come back, and enjoy the chicken takeover in the meantime.

看板ができました！

(English)

随分遅くなりましたが、農場の看板ができました！

こちらです：

新看板1日目(2016/2/15)

「とりの遊び場　放し飼い卵直売」だそうです。

看板は兵庫県の自然木工房さんに作ってもらいました。
自然木工房さんはとてもいいものを手ごろな値段で作ってくれました。お勧めです。

看板はプロに作ってもらったので私たちの仕事として残ったのは、看板を柱に取り付けることだけでした。しかしこの作業一つでも計画が必要でした。看板をつけるには2人が必要ですが、信夫と私が同じときに揃って作業できる時間は最近少ないです。一昨日の夜はやっとできました。

「動くな！」

看板のおかげでやっと、発電所の前を通る人　――だいたい犬の散歩などをしている地元の方々――　に、ここは何という場所で、どこに連絡すればよいかという情報が伝わります。

そこで、電話の殺到やブログのアクセス数のスパイクを密かに期待していましたが、何も起きませんでした。
この無関心は交通量のせいです。農場の前の道路を通る人は一日平均5人ほどです。あまり賑やかな道ではありません。

売上につながる効果は全くありませんが、それでも看板は嬉しいです！

ニワトリ達は新しい看板に全く興味を示しません。（それはそれでいいのですが。）
（2016/2/16）

記録のため、私と看板の写真：

New signboard

（日本語）

We have finally set up a signboard on the farm!

This is it:

New signboard day one (2016/2/15)

"Chickens' playground
Free range eggs"

The signboard was made by Shizenmoku Koubou, a woodwork studio in Hyogo prefecture.

Shizenmoku Koubou did a great job for reasonable price. Highly recommended if you ever need a wooden something.

So the signboard was ready and the only job left to us was to attach it to a pole at the farm, but even this simple task needed some planning. Two people are necessary to do it but recently Nobuo and I are rarely available both at the same time. Finally we managed in the evening two days ago: 

"Hands up Signboard!" (2016/2/14)

Thanks to the signboard, passersby - mostly local residents walking their dogs - know what this place is and how to contact us. 

With so much information out there, I expected to be overwhelmed by phone calls and a blog access spike. But nothing happened.
This lack of interest can only be blamed on traffic. On average, about 5 people walk the road in front of our farm every day. It's not really a busy road. 

So the signboard has no business-promoting effect at all, but it's still nice to have it !

Chickens showed zero interest in the new object. (Which is just as well.)
(2016/2/16)

For historical record, this is me and the new signboard.

Pure hedonism and other news

News of the week:

1. Overnight camping attempt in new location.

2. New forage opportunities!

3. State of the workplace report, with Egg song.

4. This is pure hedonism.

1. Overnight camping attempt in new location.

Two days ago, two chickens were missing when I came to the farm in the evening to close the coop.

After checking all the places that chickens had tried to use as a bedroom in the past (when they couldn't find way home),  I started to worry that they might have been kidnapped after all. It's not easy to find missing chickens in the dark with just a phone flashlight. I was about to give up, but the hand of chickenlord was upon me and I found them safe and sound, sitting quietly in the Special Grass Box, property of Natchan the Goat. 

Both chickens were promptly returned home. They didn't protest much. In fact they were relieved.

2. New forage opportunities! (Until the goat comes back.)

Natchan the Goat was scheduled not to come to the farm for two days so I let chickens use Natchan's space in the meantime. Chickens appreciated it. 

3. State of the workplace report

Our chickens have very flexible working hours and they work largely unsupervised. I believe this would lead to some terrible working habits in humans, but not in chickens! Most of them do show up in the office (nest) once a day and do finish their task. They are highly motivated and I would love to think that it's thanks to my leadership skills, but it's not.  I suspect it's the pay and the benefits they get - far above chickens' average in Japan - that keeps their working morale so high. 

They don't like to be disturbed at work, so I had to be quick to gather material for this State of the workplace report.

February 8, 2016

Check the nest Check the nest There's an egg there!

After work, our chickens often sing the famous "I laid an egg!" song. It seems they have an unofficial competition who can sing the longest and loudest. 

This video shows the same hen singing one very long song. I cut the middle part because it was too long. The melody is a bit repetitive - that's the chicken style.

4. This is pure hedonism.

One of the favorite activities of our chickens is a dust bath. 

Dust bath is a nice and healthy hobby (Chickens clean their skin and feathers - it's their version of a shower). For an uninitiated viewer, dust bathing might at first look like seizures, but in fact chickens are immensely enjoying themselves. So much that they look obscenely hedonistic.  

It's like humans spending a day in hot spa - they can't stop.

Hens in the video are accompanied by The-Not-The-Boss rooster, who is generally more approachable than The-Boss, who is basically just narcissistic and arrogant. 

Living in the moment - chickens certainly know how to do that!

Breaking news: New toy discovered.

As the year rolled into its second month, it's time to post a few fresh pictures of the chickens and the goat. Here are some photos from last week.

The pictures show breaking news: Chickens discovered a new toy! It's ice.

Ice on our farm is an outcome of 100% natural magic applied to a bucket of water on cold nights.

There are two ways how to play with bucket ice, depending on where exactly the ice is located.

1. Ice is still inside of the bucket.  

This version is well suited for individual game. (see pictures below.)

2. Ice is outside of the bucket.

The bucket ice can also be played with after it had been thrown out of the bucket. 

This version is perfect for a collective game. (see pictures below below below).

Version 1 (Ice is inside the bucket. Individual game.)

Ice bucket challenge.

For better demonstration, here is video:

Version 2  (Ice outside the bucket. Collective game.)

Rules are unknown.

 For better demonstration of collective game, here is video:

Unfortunately, ice is only available after very cold nights. For example yesterday, there was no ice, just water. No one can have every thing. 

31 January 2016. No ice today.

***** End of breaking news *****

Here is Natchan the Goat yesterday morning. Her belly is getting really big, everyone is looking forward to Natchan's babies!!

***** End of all news  *****

"Buy eggs" update

The Buy eggs section of this blog has just been updated.

It is not a sweeping update. You wouldn't probably notice any change if you checked it now. But I thought that it might contain at least one piece of relevant information (the "Part 2: New information" in this article) so I decided to mention it here.

The "Buy eggs" update has two parts:

Part 1: New picture 
(This is the unimportant part. If you don't have time, scroll down for Part 2, please.)

Chickens' playground's POP display in the Sakura store has changed (so I updated the picture in the Buy eggs section.)

This is the old display - the one you will not find there anymore.

This is the new display - the one that you will find there now:

What's the difference between the two? 

• New display is bigger. (Seriously. This is a noteworthy difference.) 
• New display has more recent picture of the farm (which is less green than the previous picture, therefore less attractive, but let's be honest and stop pretending that the farm is now as green as it was in September.  It's not green. It will be green again in 3 months.)
• Most importantly, new display has finally a text explanation of the farm. Which is super important because now the customers finally know why it's a good idea to buy our hens' eggs.  (As a natural consequence more eggs get sold.)

What's the same about the two?

• Both new and old display are only in Japanese. :(

You may have noticed that the POP display is disproportionately huge compared to the size and number of the products it is trying to sell.

This disproportion is not accidental. It leads us to the important part: Part 2.


Part 2: New information

The new information is: You will find fewer of our hens' eggs in the Sakura store.  

Recently we got many new customers who buy eggs directly at the farm. We are infinitely grateful for these customers because the farm could not exist without them.
It means, however, that there are fewer eggs to sell in the Sakura store, and they are delivered quite irregularly.
Personally, I'm happier to have direct customers who come to the farm and say hello to the hens, so I'm not too troubled about fewer eggs in the Sakura store.
I'm worried though that some people might go there trying to buy our eggs, only to find empty basket with huge POP display over it.
So my advice is (and this is the important thing that I wanted to say in this post):

If you plan to go to the Sakura store to buy our chickens' eggs, you might want to call to Sakura store 029 ( 857 ) 8290 first and ask if Chickens' playground eggs are there that day, so you're not disappointed. 
Or you can still order eggs directly via chickens' sales manager (=me. See Buy eggs page or Contact page).

So after so much writing, I finally got to the point. (↑This was the point.)

As a closing picture, here are today morning chickens:

"I'm tanning my tail!"
"And I'm tanning my face!"

Chickin' in the rain

It seems that everyone in Tokyo enjoyed snow yesterday, but here in Tsukuba we had something better! An impressive rain- and windstorm.

As always, the farm turned into a huge pool of water.

Row row row your boat
gently down the puddle ...

.... merrily merrily merrily merrily
chicken will give you a cuddle.

Chickens didn't mind the rain and their bad looks due to a ruined hairstyle. 

Chickin' in the rain.

But at some point, even chickens got tired of the endless, cold rain.

"Can you hand me a towel please?!"

So after a while, their playground looked a bit empty.

"Life sucks."

The run was empty because chickens gathered under the quasi-roof of the old coop, now used as a barn, to endure the rain. (They could have gone back to their coop, sit on a perch and have a nap, but for some mysterious reason they didn't.)

The Boss with his harem on the right side, The-Not-The-Boss alone on the left side.

That was yesterday. By today morning, the situation was much better - a huge water pool shrank into a small puddle.

Look, my feathers are fluffy again!

That was a glimpse into the less glorious moments on the farm. You would hardly find this kind of pictures in promotional pamphlets (or websites or blogs). So these pictures in fact have some documentary value. But chickens would kill me if they knew I published photos of their rain-ruined looks.

Tiny news

Last week was rich in tiny news. On its own, each piece is too small to count as "news", but all together they make for a pretty exciting week (from the chickens' perspective). (For those who don't know, chickens love to spend their day just in the same way as every other day - as long as it involves foraging, dust bathing and general pecking around, it's a happy day. No need for big adventures. But any occasion that promises more of their favorite food or more fun things to peck is a welcome diversion from the routine! Hence Tiny news 1.)

Tiny news 1: Special treat!

Chickens got a special treat. It was a big hakusai (Chinese cabbage).

Special treat being devoured.

There is nothing unique about hakusai at this time of the year in Japan. There is plenty of Chinese cabbage everywhere. The special thing for the chickens was that this time it was not a leftover, but a proper, huge, fresh head of Chinese cabbage intended for human consumption. They enjoyed it enormously.

Chinese cabbage: The center of chickens' universe.

Natchan the Goat watching the chickens with envy.
Usually it's the chickens begging for Natchan's grass, this time the situation reversed.
(It could have been sweet revenge, had the chickens noticed Natchan's look. But they didn't.)

Chickens also showed us how to eat the cabbage in the most efficient way possible. Their method requires no cooking/cutting and there are no dishes to wash. Useful information for all the anti-cooks of the world. Dear anti-cooks, this is the anti-recipe for you.
All you need is one strong beak.
※　In case you don't have a beak, teeth will do.

Tiny news 2: Frost

Proper winter finally arrived. Below-zero temperatures at night are more frequent. My fingertips freeze more often. Chickens seem that they don't really care (neither the cold nor my fingers).

The coldest night so far was four days ago when the farm thermometer read -5 °C early in the morning. Here in Tsukuba at a latitude 36°North - about the same as southern Spain - this is The Winter.

From grass to the panels - everything is coated with frost.

So how does the frost-coated clover taste?

Water in the buckets (chickens' drinking water) was frozen in the morning,
and so were the water faucets.  Below-zero temperatures do bring some inconveinences to the farm life.

Tiny news 3: Chickens camping out.

Some chickens frequently fly to Natchan's area.

Trespassers are red-circled.

Trespassers' identity has been confirmed: Christine, Beckie, Aoko, Vashka (hens) and The-Not-The-Boss (rooster). Luckily for them, they stop there, not going further out of the farm.

But occasionally some of the trespassers forget to go home in the evening and decide to camp in Natchan's shed. Without Natchan's permission and without paying for their accomodation.

Vashka trying to camp in the goat's shed which is vacant at night.
(Natchan the Goat uses this shed only during the day.)

The-Not-The-Boss trying to camp in the goat's shed.

This activity is not only illegal (under our farm legal system), it is also dangerous for the chickens. Many chicken enemies are lurking around in the night's shadows.
Any chicken found camping in the goat's shed is returned home immediately.

The-Not-The-Boss was navigated home after a failed camping attempt.

That's it. Your understanding of the current world affairs has improved substantially after reading this report. Congratulations!