by Brian Brett
The Hubbards were bred to be raised indoors. Put them in a pasture and they’ll catch cold. Up to 20 percent will die after a few rainy days. The Cornish giants can still survive on a lower-protein scratch diet, which slows their unhealthy growth speed. Unfortunately, too many “free-range” farmers raise them on the recommended pellets. Cranked on this stuff, these overbred birds get a heart disease called water chest and fall over or have spectacular heart attacks, suddenly somersaulting into the air and turning purple. They’re dead when they hit the ground. They also grow faster than they can produce bone-building calcium. An unforgivable number of the poultry in “free-range” factories turn into Quasimodos, all bent up with twisted legs and inflamed and calcified joints. Yet North Americans have become so habituated to the Jell-O-like quality of meat in supermarkets that they recoil upon first facing the denser, darker meat of a real chicken. After a few bites of our old laying fowl, long simmered with sea salt, or one of our authentic free-range broilers barbecued on a grill, they understand what they have been missing.
We raise only a hundred meat birds twice a year, in spring and summer, fifty to a coop and field—one behind our bedroom and one alongside the entrance driveway. We’re still legally allowed to do this because we raise fewer than two hundred chickens a year, the current limit before you must buy a quota and become a factory farm. That’s also a good number for us to raise healthily.
WHEN I BEGAN WRITING this history, both domestic and wild birds were being called a worldwide threat during a viral panic ignited by the apperance of avian flu. Electronic communication has the ability to create these panics, mostly because modern corporate media thrives on fear and uneasiness. A potential international epidemic is hotter news than tales of feisty hens in the hen yard. Epidemics are natural to human populations, and they often arrive with the interaction of species in crowded, unhealthy conditions. Sometimes a virus or a bacterium makes a jump to a new host—such as us. This is the fear with avian flu. The difficulty is that transnational agribusinesses, utilizing their enormous lobbying powers and alliances with agricultural ministries, are pushing the world’s governments toward eliminating all free-ranging domestic fowl and thus ending our long natural history of living with birds, while the factory system creates disease vectors.
As far as can be determined, according to Andrew Niki-foruk in Pandemonium, the avian flu originated in a cluster of filthy factory farms in Guangdong province in China, where chicken sheds intermingled with pig sheds. Pig biology is close to human biology. The enormous volume of manure created at these animal factories was sprayed over the ponds of fish farms, providing high-protein feed to the fish sold in restaurants and grocery stores in many countries. This practice made those ponds an infection point for migratory bird populations, which rapidly spread the disease around the world.
Rather than dealing with the underlying causes of this potential pandemic, governments are considering banning chickens from the open air. Already in Canada, the factory farms are complying with a “voluntary” policy of keeping poultry in biosecure, closed systems with filtered, screened air. The government is kind enough to supply the specifications for the appropriate “voluntary” bird factory. This fits in exactly with the agenda of the giant agribusinesses (whose inhumane chicken factories have been increasingly undermined by the growing success of the slow-food and organic movements). They would like to see traditional farms regulated out of existence.
Almost as dangerous as the diseases are the panics that follow them, and our subsequent overreactive behaviour. In British Columbia 19 million birds were slaughtered in the Fraser Valley in 2004, to stop the spread of a milder variation of avian flu that wasn’t fatal to humans. I talked with bird lovers in the valley afterwards, and the carnage was disheartening. Hired amateurs gassed chickens badly. Lost truckloads of dead birds were abandoned to rot. Chicken factories were flooded with firefighting foam, suffocating the birds. This was so successful that many of the killers are advocating that all chickens be foamed to death. They also invaded yards and butchered family pets. There were reports of guys in white suits chasing ostriches with machetes. Rare and endangered varieties of birds being nurtured for their contribution to the gene pool were indiscriminately slaughtered, even those known to be not susceptible to the virus.
At the height of the hysteria there was foolish talk of killing all waterfowl in England in the name of bio-security. The authorities in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, began poisoning their pigeons and wild birds. Holland banned all domestic chickens from the open air, and Germany did the same, though that order was later rescinded after the uproar from organic poultry enthusiasts.
While agribusiness and governments conspire to eliminate real free-range poultry around the world, they are ignoring the fact that their systemic inbreeding of domestic fowl has damaged the birds’ immune systems. Combine this with overcrowding, stress, and processed diets, and they’ve created exquisite breeding conditions for disease. That’s why, although droves of wild birds have died, their percentage of fatalities is less than for birds in factory farms, where up to 80 percent of flocks of sixty thousand birds can die in a few days. The health authorities should be banning the raising of more than two hundred chickens in one location, rather than punishing those who grow two hundred poultry or fewer in a traditional manner. But since corporate agriculture has the greater influence, that alternative is unthinkable. More crucially, it is uneconomic in today’s world, and would lead to chaos and famines if done abruptly. Our sole choice today is to develop a hybrid system of factory farms and revived traditional farming, and then move gradually back to the future of traditional farming.
MEAT CHICKENS ARE REGARDED as dumb creatures. I’m nervous about considering any animal dumb. One year we had a variant flock of Cornish crosses—intrepid, smart, strong-boned. They weren’t the usual slow, fat, and stupid meat birds. They were as lively as layers, and they took to roosting on the perches, which most modern broilers can’t do because they’re too fat and weak. Everything looked good, except they kept shaking their automatic watering dish loose. It would fall onto the floor and flood the coop, so I quick-fixed it with a football-sized rock on top of the pipe to steady it and prevent the chickens from roosting on the board holding the pipe, and then I forgot to properly repair it. One day I went out in the early morning after Sharon had gone to work and checked the coop’s feed and water. They’d gummed up the water dish again, somehow unscrewing it.
With farm tasks you can go beautifully blank as you perform them, intent only on the task—the moment farming you. Fiddling with the dish, I was suddenly struck on the head, and I blacked out. I awoke lying on my back in the shit and the shavings, stunned. The chickens were gathered around me like ghouls at a funeral, or were they sizing up my eyeballs? I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed, and the pain was excruciating. I’d been struck just above the forehead, and blood was running down my face and the back of my skull. I couldn’t organize my thoughts until I saw the big rock lying beside me. Oh no! They’d still managed to roost on the pipe and had loosened it so that when I fiddled with the water bowl, the rock came down on my head. I heaved myself up to a sitting position, scaring the chickens back for a moment. I don’t doubt that if I’d lain there unconscious for longer, they would have been at me. I was reminded of the story my dad told me when I was a child—about a farmer who fell into his cement pigpen, and all they found was his boots.
I crept to my feet, my head throbbing, blood pouring down. As I staggered out I realized that even raising chickens can be a fatal operation for the stupid, especially if your chickens are trying to kill you.
LIKE MOST FARMS, WE keep dogs for flock protection and herding, and cats to check the rodent population, though the cats sometimes develop a taste for songbirds, which causes us anguish. Still, every farm needs a barn cat, although they can be more trouble than they’re worth. Blame it on the Egyptians. Four thousand years ago a smart farmer by the Nile noticed that mice disappeared when Fe
lis silvestris libyca showed up. Otherwise known as the Libyan wildcat, this sharp-witted and needle-clawed feline soon had the farmers offering plates of milk and fish. It’s been like that ever since. Cats became regarded as manifestations of the god Bastet, which caused one wit to remark: “In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods. They have never forgotten this.”
We named our latest tom the Emperor Wu. As imperial in manner as his name, he’s a dynamic, graceful predator. One night, when we had laying hens, I ventured out to lock up the coop. In the dark I started counting the heads on the roost because we’d been having raccoon trouble. There was one head too many. This is not common, as anyone with chickens will agree. I muttered and counted again. Then I realized the extra head belonged to a cat, Wu—or, as he soon came to be known, “He Who Sleeps with the Chickens.” Chickens will huddle on their small, round branch perches, keeping warm and emotionally comforted by the touch of their neighbours. Wu had joined the crowd once he realized that rats had bored a hole into the coop and were sneaking in at night to raid the grain feeder. The last thing the rats saw was a “chicken” leaping into the air with its claws out.
GOOSE AND DUCK, TURKEY and chicken, and guardian cats and dogs. These are all stories on a mixed farm, the digressions and “teaching tales” we’ve been telling ourselves since that first seed was kept over winter and the first goat corralled—each story a part of another history—all intertwined and endless. Our minds can’t encompass the multiplying intersections of a farm’s diverse interactions: it’s a mystic star map whose interconnections are larger than human imagination and certainly beyond the reductionist mind trap of the logic that led to the thrills of gobalization. You can live well among those mystic connections only by using equal parts of tradition, intuition, and science as guides, along with a good dose of common sense. But my chickens are shut up for the night and the dogs sprawled on the deck, keeping their nonlinear guard, and for now I can sleep with that story.
15
PEST CONTROL
SYNDROME
WEEDS ARE EVERY gardener’s nightmare. One way to avoid weeding is to eat the weeds. Your weed is often my salad—dandelions, miner’s lettuce, purs-lane, chickweed. Then there’s steamed pigweed: delicious. Nettles make a stunning pesto. Eat them if you can’t beat them. Wilding—eating the native plants and fungi—has always been an important pleasure of rural life. After I talked Sharon into her first suspicious sampling, she turned into a real weed eater too.
Apart from never having enough time to weed, we long ago learned that the best pest control, apart from eating the weeds, is usually another pest, or providing the environment for every inhabitant to fulfill its natural inclinations. Weeds can also be homes for beneficial insects, such as lacewings or ladybugs. The greater part of farming is weighing the scales of harm and help. Too many weeds will suck up the life of a plant and leave it stunted—a target for predatory insects or disease. Besides, there’s a reason why we say, “They’re spreading like weeds.” Weeds invariably reseed at alarming rates, so they’ll drive you twice as mad next year. That’s why I constantly remind myself of Voltaire’s aphorism: cultivate your garden!
THE GARDEN IS RICH and vibrant today, the longest day of the year, lush and overgrown with weeds—pigweed, buttercups, Queen Anne’s lace, thistles, nettles, chickweed, burdock, and others. This abundance is not due to any calculated effort on our part. There are so many it can be depressing if you let it get to you, but it’s merely a symptom of traditional farming: “When’s the best time to weed?”
“When you have the time,” says Mike. He has the same advice for pruning, chopping firewood, seeding, and most any other farm task. Weeding is not a duty; it’s a way of life—a practice, like meditation. If you have a goal in a garden, you’re doomed.
I WAS HAULING SOME bags of apples into Mike and Bev’s cooler one autumn evening when I noticed a humongous wasp nest in the rafters of his covered deck. “Whoa,” I said, “look at that mother of a nest!”
“Don’t go messing with them or you’ll regret it,” he said needlessly. This comment made me remember back to my university days. A friend had a massive wasp nest on his third-floor apartment balcony. Since I had a reputation for being hard to intimidate back then, he asked me if I could deal with it.
“Sure,” I said. “Where’s your hockey stick?” He handed it to me, and I told him to stand behind the sliding door and slam it shut as soon as I leaped back inside. Then I stepped onto the balcony and drove the nest with an overhead slapshot out to the lawn far below. I nimbly stepped inside while my friend slammed the door shut. Not a wasp followed me. We cockily observed a mass of them banging against the glass, and congratulated ourselves on that excellent solution. It was time to celebrate with a drink.
Then we heard a crash from the apartment below and a lot of screaming and thumping. With horror I realized that the occupants beneath us must have had their windows open. Since there was nothing we could do we just sat down and were very silent, pretending that nobody was home, while the crashing and banging carried on for several minutes until it finally died down. Since then I’ve never messed with wasps unless they messed with me first, though I have to kill them if they get in the house because Sharon is allergic. But I was surprised Mike would leave a nest in his carport through which his entire family, including his grandchildren, passed regularly. “Why don’t you spray it?” I asked.
“You crazy?” he said in his usual blunt way. “That nest is cleaning out every aphid within a half-mile.” Mike is old school. Rather than destroying the beneficial nest, he figured children soon learn to keep away from wasps.
Until then I’d never thought much about wasps feeding on aphids, but of course they do. Now I’m happy to watch the wasps hunting our garden like gunslingers, cleaning up insect pests better than any insecticide over the long term. We even plant nasturtiums every year, which aphids prefer, creating a permanent feeding ground that maintains the wasp population. There’s much truth to the folklore of companion planting, where you grow different plants close together. Some companion plants attract beneficial insects, while others repel noxious insects. Nature is always creating checks and balances, feedback mechanisms, and if you follow its teachings, you will do well. We used to be religious about intermingling companion plants with our produce, but we’ve grown lazy and tend to merely stick them in where there’s room. That often works, and when it doesn’t we eat fewer cabbages or cucumbers. Acceptance is the hardest work of a gardener. The second-hardest work is learning to recognize that pest management is relatively simple: don’t ask how to eliminate pests—ask why you are attracting them.
Healthy plants generally don’t attract bugs. Unhealthy plants succumb to every kind of disease and bug passing by. If the plants are living in the mixed ecosystem of our garden, they have an excellent chance. But it’s not a perfect world, and strange insects and diseases come flowing over the hills. They arrive on the winds of winter, and my lovely pecan tree will suddenly wilt and die in the spring. That’s life in the garden of the world. Raging against disease can lead to raging against health, and if you cultivate a garden you can’t treat one illness in a way that causes other illnesses. You must learn to accept some losses rather than damaging the whole system. Our species has turned to chemical farming because we prefer impeccable fields and high yields rather than doing our best and appreciating the results. The compulsion to achieve perfect gardens is the real disease. I call it pest control syndrome.
Since Salt Spring Island is in the vanguard of the organic and local-food movement, almost all the gardens are organic—only a few chemical-using dinosaurs lurk among us. This means the wild flora and its fauna are stable, including the beneficial insects that regularly rescue us from plagues of harmful insects. We helped the process at Trauma Farm by planting bird-and-insect-attracting plants as soon as we arrived, so our ecosystem has many checks and balances. For instance, during the winter we often encounter woolly aphids in our houseplants int
roduced from florists, but once we put the plants out on the first of June, the young wasps and ladybugs soon clean up the aphids.
Knowing the tricks of the garden is what makes older farmers and gardeners important. They’ve been through the wars and have developed innovative strategies for survival. Just as the pen is eventually stronger than the gun, garden gossip with knowledgeable neighbours is stronger than herbicides and pesticides. For instance, we live in a region that suffers from carrot maggot. Because of our temperate climate overeager and uneducated gardeners plant their carrots early, during the rainy season, which washes the seeds away more times than not. If the rain doesn’t get the carrots, they begin maturing as the fly hatches. But we plant late, in May, and harvest before September, missing the two hatches of the flies, and our carrots are untouched by their maggots. If we want winter carrots, we mulch them heavily and don’t pick any from that crop until late October, when the flies are dead. Every time you pick a carrot you break hair roots. The fibres left behind release a scent that attracts the flies. If the ground is undisturbed, they don’t know the carrot is there. And as a last resort, if we’re greedy for carrots every week, we cover the row with remay cloth, a gauzy, tight-knit cloth that the flies can’t penetrate. But we have to bury the edges, as the sneaky little devils will crawl under the cloth.
The only sprays we use are lime-sulphur, mineral oil, and fixed copper, and maybe soap-water or diatomaceous earth for thrips on the gladioli and onions. In past extreme situations I’ve used “organic” pesticides—rotenone or pyrethrum—but I haven’t used them or copper spray for a decade. I’d rather the produce meet its fate; I know that by not interfering I am creating the environment for a healthier crop next year. We are also safe because we don’t plant too much of any crop, though we are growing dangerously close to having too much garlic. But then how can you ever have too much garlic?
