Chicken run!

As anyone who has read a farming memoir will tell you, there is no limit to the range of activities that can be accomplished with the aid of a tractor. Various attachments allow farmers to plow, cut grass for hay, haul things, or cut vegetables (such as onions) at the root so they’re easier to harvest. But I arrived at the farm the other day to witness a use that I’m not sure anyone ever thought of before: herding chickens.

Since a laying hen’s life consists of eating, sleeping, making eggs, and, well, eliminating chicken waste, the mobile chicken house is periodically moved to an, um, cleaner place. If Katchkie were a biodynamic farm the nitrogen-rich chicken poop would absorbed back into the farm as fertilizer, a process beautifully described by Michael Pollan in his discussion of Polyface Farm) in his book The Omnivore's Dilemma. But it’s not, and the chickens can’t really be allowed to run free because they’d get picked off by predators. So instead they have their own little chicken condominium, complete with a little run under a trap door in the floor that allows them to get down to the ground whenever they want. The entire condo building gets moved after the ground has endured a few weeks of chicken use.

The trouble is that chickens can get out of the enclosure when the fences are taken away in preparation for the move. When I arrived, Karen, her fiancé Matt, and Bob had already finished moving the chicken house, and four errant chickens were running around free, thoroughly enjoying themselves as they pecked at the bugs in the dirt around the children’s garden.

And, so, reluctant to chase the chickens on foot, Bob decided to employ the tractor. Picture it, if you can: a big, green farming machine—tires with a diameter of approximately four feet, by my very imprecise estimation—coming up behind four running, clucking, occasionally fluttering birds, who definitely have the advantage, as they simply run behind the flowers planted at the edge of the children’s garden and stymie the behemoth in its oversized tracks.

Karen finally managed to corral one of the chickens the old fashioned way—she dove for it. She then carried it, clucking imperiously, back to the enclosure. At that point Bob gave up and drove off to tend to vegetable harvesting. Karen, Matt, and I spent the next half hour or so replacing the fence, during which time two of three remaining runaways wandered back toward the chicken coop to be with their friends, which was really all they wanted in the first place. (Chickens like to form cliques, which anyone who graduated from an American high school will find a little traumatic to witness.)

We caught the other one later in the day, when it was tired, hungry, probably dehydrated, and definitely thinking that the wide world is a little too big.

And the point of all this running around, corralling chickens, feeding them organic feed and oyster shells so that they’ll get enough calcium? They’ve been laying eggs like crazy.

I took a couple home over the weekend and Jeff cooked them into an omelet with fresh parsley I’d picked from Katchkie’s herb garden and—the crowning glory—oyster mushrooms I’d picked up at the farmer’s market. Much to my surprise, I’d learned that oyster mushrooms actually can be cultivated—I’d thought they had to be gathered. But these babies were so far beyond the pathetic button mushrooms that pass for the real thing for most people that they should be assigned another food group all together.

Oysters come in big bunches (see picture), and one full bunch was enough for a good-sized omelet that fed both of us. They were slightly more elastic than most mushrooms I’ve had, and I was surprised at how little water they gave off when I sautéed them. The eggs themselves were, as expected, a darker yellow than you’d expect from store-bought eggs, as most organic eggs have more beta-carotene and other vitamins than eggs laid by feedlot chickens. Just as important, they actually had flavor. (Michael Pollan writes several pages about eggs’ “elasticity”, a quality that I don’t really feel qualified to comment on.)

Combined with the faintly earthy flavor of the mushrooms, this omelet provided the kind of pleasure we just don’t get from food very often anymore—sort of like sex on a plate.