Farm Friday

It rained this week. As a result I spent a great deal of time indoors. To keep myself from going insane, I started researching some interesting topics- alternative methods of raising pastured poultry, and open pollinated corn.

All of my greatest research discoveries (three, to be exact, all of which led to an epiphany) have included a research paper dating back to 1950 or before. One of these led me to find that Lactobacillus Acidolphus prevents pasted vent in chicks. Pasted vent decimated devastated my laying hen chicks. Another study started me on a search for open pollinated corn. This particular one was just a part of a 1936 USDA publication. It listed Open Pollinated (OP) corn varieties suitable to all of the corn growing states, including Alabama. In searching for the varieties listed for my state, I found that only one out of eight were available from seed companies, even from heirloom or preservation seed companies such as Seed Savers Exchange and Sandhill Preservation. I had already decided that I wanted to grow open pollinated corn from reading the Northern Farmer blog and seeing the work of Mr. Dave Christensen with his Painted Mountain corn, which is absolutely amazing. The fact that the varieties I wanted were rare just spurred me on. Since then I've found two more of those corn varieties, one from a man near Mobile, who advertised in the Farmer's Bulletin, and another from a local feed store(!).

The only problem with the idea of growing it was finding a use for it. You can only eat so much corn meal in a year. Then another research paper providentially showed up- this one about pastured poultry. A few weeks ago, my feed prices nearly hit breakeven. That is, the price of feed and of the chick that produces a chicken was nearly equal to my selling price. Since then it's dropped rapidly by a few dollars a bag, but this research paper opened a whole new dimension of pastured poultry production. This one, from 1949, was a favorable report about grazing chickens on Ladino (big white) clover and feeding only corn, which I could now try growing, and minerals. This would cut my costs drastically and actually makes pastured poultry look like a lucrative business again. It would also be a very sustainable production system completely independent of purchased inputs except for the minerals. I'm getting ready to try out the idea next year, and am praying that it will work.

Have a great holiday weekend, and don't labor too hard,

Sherlock