The last few weeks have been particularly busy at Hereward. A key realization this winter was appreciating the fact that when your life is governed by the sunrise and sunset, the shorter winter days mean the work has to be crammed into a shorter period of daylight. Of course, all work is not of equal value. An informal analysis of the work activity on the farm so far identified three distinct types of activities: maintenance activities, progressive activities, and distractions.
Maintenance activities, as the name suggests, involve work that is required to maintain the status quo. This involves tasks such as feeding the livestock, maintaining equipment, mending fences, turning compost, weeding the garden, pruning trees, etc. Progressive activities are those that improve the overall farm operation. Examples include building a new fence, building a new compost system, working on an irrigation system from the creek, etc. As the name suggests, distractions are a more dubious activity. These activities start out with the best intentions but usually end up wasting time and energy or even creating more maintenance work. The typical day involves many maintenance activities. If these are not done it will result in distractions later. However, if the day’s activities involve only maintenance work then little or nothing has been done to improve the farm. Of course, any distractions should be minimized but distractions start out disguised as poorly planned or misaligned progressive activities.
Looking back on the last few weeks, much of the work either falls into the distraction category or maintenance work resulting from a distraction. A good example is the 16 Barred Rock day old chicks hatched on the 26th of November. The idea was sound – introduce another breed of dual purpose heritage chickens that would free-range in the orchard. Recognizing that winter is not the ideal time to be raising chicks, the full implications of this decision were not realized until it was too late. From the end of November until a few days ago, 16 chicks have been living in my office. Starting out in a small brooder under a 250 Watt heat lamp, the chicks progressed through a series of larger containers to the chick coop and eventually needed a mini-run built out of parts from a child-proof gate. All this was in my office. During this time the noise and odor were manageable but the one inch layer of caustic dust they produced became intolerable.
Out of desperation, two days were spent repairing the old chicken tractor that came with the farm and converting it into a run for the chicks that could withstand predators and the cold. So the chicks at around 7 weeks old finally went out this week and they loved it. I was finally able to reclaim my office after several hours of disinfecting and dust removal. Alas, it was a mistake to think the worst was over. The sub-freezing temperatures several nights this week meant trekking out to the tractor to collect the chicks and put them into a large storage container so they could spend the night in the laundry room (they are now banned from my office). In the morning they have to be let out again.
All in all, what would normally be a simple task of raising chicks involved many hours of extra work and much inconvenience. Most of this would have been avoided if we had waited until warmer weather. The good news about our Buff Orpingtons and Barred Rocks is that they will often go broody and raise their own chicks... Now why didn't I think of that?
Barred Rock chicks early on:
The ultimate "must have" for every office - an indoor chicken run
Finally outside (note the wire under the run for added predator protection). The chicks are locked in a coop within this run at night:
The chicks looking a little put out back in their outdoor run after spending a night in the laundry room:
