Be Sensible, Not Common

“Common sense is that which tells us the world is flat.”

-Stuart Chase

Any time a politician tells you something is “just common sense” it’s time to lock up your daughters and hide the chickens, because the drivel that is about to follow will invariably place your personal safety at risk in a multiplicity of ways, from your economic welfare to your very physical wellbeing.

What part of this is "Common Sense" and what part requires someone
 to have made an observation not readily seen from the road?

The world is a complex place, home to myriad interlocking processes about which our five senses (six, if you foolishly include the “common” one) provide almost no direct information.  We seek simplicity, “straight talking” and “unmuddled answers” but the truth is that any simple answers are based on fable, and “straight talking” hardly ever has any evidentiary basis.  As for “unmuddled answers” the reality is this – honest answers to most questions seldom accomplish anything more concrete and settled than yet more questions.

E.M. Forster once quipped “beware of muddle” and, while he is one of our favorite authors, the fact remains that his advice is worthless outside the context of personal relationships, and even then relates only to the question of personal commitment.  In terms of certainty of knowledge?  Embrace muddle – it is the only refuge of truth.  Yes, we should rather betray our country than our friends… but we cannot say that we know with certainty anything for which there is not a verifiable testing framework, a way to validate the hypothesis.  When those hypotheses have been tested, however, for God’s sake, don’t ignore the results.

We are wading into these philosophical waters for a particular reason, naturally, and that is to attempt to bridge the gap between “common sensers” (climate change denialists, lawn care specialists, monocropping agriculturalists, etc.) and cold hard truth.

Merely presenting evidence frequently makes no impact upon the opinion of those who cling to the notion that truth should be “plain and simple”; the claims, for example, that global warming is a hoax (!) fly square in the face of overwhelming mounds of not only theoretical reasoning, but actual verifiable empirical measurements of air and (more significantly) ocean temperatures which are virtually incontrovertible evidence of the idea that global temperatures are not only rising, but rising at a rate never before seen at any point in the paleometeorological record.  Essentially, if you are politically conservative, you are statistically highly likely to ignore this evidence, regardless of your education level, and truth be damned.

Another excellent example of proponents of “common sense” ignoring the myriad complex processes around them involves anoxic waters, the so-called “Dead Zones” in our lakes, streams and oceans where a lack of oxygen causes nothing at all to live.  First reported by shrimp fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico in the 1950s, the phenomenon has grown dramatically over the years, such that in places like Lake Erie, there are only tiny slivers of water in which any fish at all live.

The phenomenon of an algal bloom, of course, can occur naturally due to dramatic changes in wind and ocean currents, floods or droughts upstream at the origin of freshwater streams which discharge into saltwater bodies, and a host of other variables.  However, these natural sources of eutrophication (the rapid increase in the nutrients on which algae thrive, which in turn depletes the water of oxygen) do not account for the massive increases in dead zones throughout the world, nor do they explain why the Gulf of Mexico has seen the occasional hypoxic area transform from a some-time and highly localized event to a permanent description of a vast area ranging from the Texas coast just south of the Brazos River discharge eastward to Mississippi and Alabama.

Vast sums of research dollars, hundreds and thousands of experiments, and a wide ranging array of analysts have been applied to the problem over the last fifty years, and the causes of the problem are now more than obvious.  There are numerous factors contributing to the creation of  dead zones throughout the world, but far and away the most noxious is fertilizer runoff.  The Mississippi River is the drainage zone for a little over 40% of the continental United States; much of that area is the so-called “corn belt” – and corn production is dependent almost entirely upon the presence of nitrogen in high concentrations in soil, a state which cannot exist in monocropped agriculture without constant yearly application of high quantities of industrial fertilizer, the very sort which is most likely to wash away disproportionately.

Corn production in the central U.S. has been increasing dramatically since the 1950s; nearly all the forested regions in the Missouri Valley, for example, have been stripped of trees and converted to corn fields, and thanks to the ill-conceived “Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007” still more will be converted to corn production for the purposes of ethanol production.  Even before this stupidity was foist upon us, 1.7 million tons of potassium and nitrogen were being delivered to the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi River every year.  The size of the Gulf dead zone has essentially doubled since the late 1980s; it is not likely to shrink any time soon, absent permanent and devastating drought conditions throughout the Midwest.

This is not a thermal picture; it is a picture of areas where no fish
or shellfish or coral reefs, etc. can live -- red means dead.

Meanwhile, there is ample empirical evidence suggesting how dead zones may be reversed.  The collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of centrally planned economies in the former communist states of Eastern Europe caused fertilizer use in the nations bordering the Black Sea to drop to virtually zero.  The Black Sea dead zone had, prior to the 1990s, been the biggest in the world.  It shrank to practically nothing between 1991 and 2001.  Fishing – which had completely disappeared from the Black Sea in the latter half of the 20^th century (you can’t catch fish who don’t exist) is once again becoming a way of life in the region.  Likewise, the North Sea dead zone has decreased by about a third since nitrogen and other industrial emissions along the Rhine River have been cut.

Similar progress is not likely in the United States any time soon, however, for the simple reason that any attempt to salvage our ecology is met with incredulity and vitriol about how environmentalists are “out to destroy the economy”.  It is hard to see how it is “common sense” to argue that the economy of a dead region is much of an economy, but so it goes.  The Scots aphorism is perhaps apropos here:  “’tis an ill bird wha’ fouls its ain nest.”

In any event, the fishing economy of the Gulf of Mexico is on the order of at least $10 billion dollars.  Absent appropriate management of environmental policy (meaning banning fertilizer) all $10 billion of those dollars (and by all means, feel free to adjust for inflation) will simply disappear in coming decades.  Not trying to be hyperbolic here – just extrapolating from the data.  Science passes no judgments, it merely provides the tools for analysis, and very few of those studying the data have come to any other conclusion than this:  we ignore natural processes at our own peril.

The scope and scale of our impact on the world around us has always exceeded our ability to visualize and conceptualize, and that reality is becoming increasingly apparent any time we step back and attempt to understand any particular phenomenon.  There is a simple reason people used to believe that the world was flat – when you look from horizon to horizon, it seems flat.  Indeed, without the evidence provided by mathematical analysis of a series of observations and experiments, one would have to be a buffoon to believe anything other than that the world was a vast disk, immense perhaps, but certainly not round.

The truth was, is, and ever shall be much greater than what we can take in first hand.

Because of that “simple” reality, we have an obligation to toss common sense on the dung heap of no-longer-respectable notions, and take a long hard look at the impact we are having on the world around us.  What we eat, how and where we live, what we wear, it all matters. 

We at Myrtle’s place have railed against lawns for a while now, because they are bad for us all (killing bees, destroying soil tilth, causing nitrogen runoff, generally looking icky) but that’s really just a jumping-off point.  We are well aware that the vast majority of Americans think lawns are not only “okay” but that they are essential.  The same holds true for all sorts of other things that most folk take for granted, and giving up those harmful things will not at all seem like “common sense” to most people.  But it’s the only kind of sense that matters, if we want to continue living lives worth living.

And on that happy note…

Happy farming!

In Praise of Good Eggs

“Value of all egg production in 2009 was $6.16 billion, down 25 percent from the $8.22 billion in 2008. Egg production totaled 90.4 million eggs, up slightly percent from the 90.0 million eggs produced in 2008. In 2009, all eggs averaged 81.7 cents per dozen, compared with $1.09 in 2008.”
–Poultry Production and Value, 2009 Summary USDA  April 2010

Pulletpalooza was a rip-roaring success, considering that we did everything in our power to keep people from showing up, and about 30 intrepid chicken fans showed up anyway.  Part of the reason, we suspect, is that even though prices for factory farmed eggs have been coming down of late, dissatisfaction with factory farmed eggs (or, indeed, with any factory farmed foods at all) is driving a larger number of folks to consider backyard birds.

One of the most common questions we received related to production costs and return on investment.  This was a practical question, indeed, given that it was asked while small children were gleefully tossing popcorn at our hens and squealing “Chickie like popcorn!”  Clearly, backyard chicken ownership comprises both a practical and an emotional component.

Practically speaking, the biggest investment vis-à-vis backyard flocks relates to housing.  Areas that allow free-ranging your birds give a tremendous advantage in this respect, since in such places, the only coop you need is a small cabinet-like space where you can lock them up at night.  This is traditionally what a chicken coop looked like, many years ago when practically every home had chickens; you’d let the birds out in the morning, and at night, your children would be responsible for searching your yard for eggs, and then just before dark, you’d put the birds back in the coop and lock it.

At Myrtle’s place, however, we have to keep the birds caged all day long, so we needed a bigger coop.  our structure is 10’ x 12’, with a large nesting box elevated on one end, and a 10’ x 2’ ‘run’ on top, giving our birds a total of 140 square feet in which to roam.  Our roosting poles are about 6’ each, and our birds have a choice of two on which to sleep at night.

All told, we have about $200 in materials invested in our coop.  We initially believed that this cost would be dwarfed by feed expenditures, and in fact, when we first started our little venture, that seemed like a reasonable assumption, since we would go through three to four $7 bags of lay pellets each month; throw in the gas we burned driving to Producer’s Coop ever week, and they seemed awfully expensive right out of the gate.

However, these costs were grossly exaggerated due to our inexperience.  We were totally unaware of how much we could save by feeding our birds table scraps and weeds.  Toss in the occasional grubworm, caterpillar, dragonfly, or (saints preserve us!) cockroach, and Myrtle and the girls are down to only a bag of lay pellets every month or so.  Given that an hour of sitting, sipping coffee, and watching the birds scratching in the leaves replaces a month of psychotherapy, and the $70 or $80 a year we spend on feed really seems pretty paltry.  I’m sure the American Association of Liscensced Professional Counselors would agree.

The flip side of the cost question is the question of return on investment (ROI).  This is harder for us to measure, of course, given how many benefits we get from the chickens apart from their primary output, eggs.  As alluded to, our chickens are also our primary means of composting kitchen leftovers, in addition to being excellent disposers of yard waste.

Still, the simplest means of evaluating ROI is to calculate expenses per egg.  This, of course, leads to another common question – “How many eggs do you get?”

The rate per bird varies wildly, as does the rate in each given season.  We have noticed numerous trends worth mentioning – first off, our chickens lay larger, healthier, tastier and more numerous eggs the more we ply them with weeds.  Lay pellets are fine, they seem to be telling us, but weeds are much, much better.  They also like stalks of sunflowers, broccoli, tomatoes, and the like, but even these tasty consumables pale in comparison to good old fashioned weeds.

We get, on average, 200 eggs per year, per bird.  Some parts of the year, every bird is laying virtually every day; some parts of the year, each bird only lays every other day or so.  On the whole, though, we are getting 0.55 eggs per day, per bird.

This comes to 1,400 eggs per year total for our flock of 7 birds.  Given that we are paying at most $84 per year on lay pellets, that comes to $0.06 per egg at a maximum, not counting initial capital outlay.  This puts one dozen low cholesterol, high Omega-3, hormone free eggs at $0.72 in production costs. 

This is cheaper than the nasty chemical laced factory farmed eggs with their potential salmonella infections and god only knows what other health hazards.  We are paying far less for our eggs than for the equivalent healthy eggs from a natural foods store, where you might expect to pay anywhere from $3 to $5 per dozen for eggs as healthy as those we get from Myrtle and the girls.

If you want to throw in the capital outlay for the coop, then we would be paying $284 in the first year, bringing the cost of each egg to $0.20, or about $2.43 per dozen.  This, obviously, is less than $3 to $5, and it is only capitalizing for one year.  Our coop will more likely last for at least ten years, and hopefully more like twenty, which would drop our cost-per-egg back down to anywhere from $0.08 to $0.10.

On the whole, then, we would argue that there is a fairly significant ROI on backyard chickens just from measuring their primary output – eggs.  We don’t really have the analytical tools to calculate the ROI on their secondary output, but we are fairly confident that the value of chicken-poop compost is at least as profitable as the eggs.  Given how much every plant in our yard loves the stuff, we suspect it is probably actually much greater.

And then there is the tertiary benefit of avian psychoanalysis.  Maybe we should replace our lawn chairs with outdoor couches.  “Myrtle will see you now…”

Happy farming!