Eggs

by Bill Duesing

 

"Uncle Sam expects you to keep hens and raise chickens" is the headline on a USDA advertisement from 1918.

Beneath the headline is a drawing which includes a girl feeding a small flock of hens while the rooster looks on and a boy building a little shelter, all in an outside area enclosed by a fence. In the background is a simple chicken house which looks like a small country cottage.

Read the words on the ad!

Key points:

Two hens per person is a good ratio for fresh eggs.

Chickens will fit into most backyards.

Cost and time needed are minimal.

Food wastes can provide much of the food.

Children can care for chickens.

Eggs and Chickens

On the Old Solar Farm, we kept chickens for eggs and meat for forty years.  Sometimes we had just two hens.  For a while, we had nearly 100 and wholesaled eggs.  It is always nice to have a supply of fresh eggs.

Eggs are one of the most valuable and versatile of home grown foods, except for vegans and those allergic to them. Think fried, scrambled or poached for breakfast, hard boiled for a salad at lunch, made into a vegetable filled omelet or quiche for dinner and as custard for dessert. Eggs are full of protein, valuable fats and other nutrients.

Eggs are especially nutritious if the hens spend time outdoors where they get fresh air and sunshine and can forage on green plants, insects and worms.  Overripe or damaged garden vegetables and even many weeds are great chicken food, too.   Hens love those baseball bat sized zucchinis and cucumbers which ameliorates the guilt involved with letting those vegetables get too big!

One of at least six places within a mile
of our farm where we can buy fresh, local eggs.

We don't have chickens now so we are free to travel more, but thankfully over the past few years many of our neighbors have started raising chickens.  There are more than a half dozen homes within a mile of our farm with a self-serve cooler offering fresh local eggs by their mailboxes. Some use organic feed.  Others have a movable house and electric net fencing so it is obvious that the hens are pastured.

A chicken house on wheels and a portable pen so the chickens have access to pasture. Eggs from these hens have a beautiful deep orange yolks.

One indication of how far the organic movement has come is the current availability of organic feed.  When I first started with chickens, I had to go to a grain milling company in lower Manhattan to get organic feed by the ton. It was the grain and flour they couldn't sell to humans.  Now most feed stores carry it in bags and NOFA member farms in New York and Vermont produce it.

So we've come full circle!!  I'm sure many people in our rural town of Oxford kept chickens in 1918, because that made sense or because the USDA encouraged it.

What happened in between?

Several of Mr. Barry's chicken houses. 
They've been without chickens for several decades.

When I moved to our Oxford farm in 1972, Mr. Barry, a retired New York Times reporter, was raising chickens about a mile away.  He had three or four chicken houses set apart in a field, each big enough for 100 or more hens.  The houses faced south with lots of windows to let sun and air in and doors to let chickens out.  He sold eggs to corner stores in the nearby Lower Naugatuck Valley.

Not long after, another chicken business started up.  This involved a large metal building that held 50,000 hens firmly inside. Each day a dump truck carried away a load of manure the color and consistency of very wet concrete and a big box truck carried away the eggs.  After a decade, the business closed and the building was demolished.

Industrial egg production
facility in Eastern Connecticut
housing millions of caged layers.

By the 1980s, the majority of eggs produced in Connecticut came from a single large producer in eastern Connecticut with millions of caged layers. I got to take a group of high school students who were studying food and energy to visit this farm. Although there were a number of farmers at that time still raising eggs as Mr. Barry did, (and some still do) this industrialized egg operation was what our UConn collaborator wanted the kids to visit.

You have probably seen pictures of this kind of factory farm.  Rows and rows of small cages, stacked three or four high, each cage containing several hens. The system is designed so that eggs roll down onto conveyor belts for collection at one end of the long, narrow barn and manure drops to the space underneath the chickens.  University of Connecticut experts spent decades trying to solve the fly problem from all that manure that was trucked to area farms.

The chicken house we visited was dimly lit, very dusty and smelled of ammonia.  The students didn't want to be in there very long.   We also got to see the attached, highly automated egg processing facility and learned about some of the different uses for eggs.

However, the last I heard, the eggs from this farm now travel down I-95 to New Jersey for cleaning, sorting and packaging, before being shipped back to Connecticut so consumers here can buy these well-traveled eggs.  I suspect they are also sold in a number of other states.

At the time of our visit, this facility was locally owned by a farmer with a lot of connections to UConn.  A few years ago, I learned that that egg farm was owned by Moark (for Missouri and Arkansas), which is a part of the Land and Lake Coop.  I just read that this facility was recently bought by Sanderson Farms, one of the country's largest egg producers, a part of Cal-Maine company.

This same farm is one of the few facilities in Connecticut that qualifies as a CAFO, or confined animal feeding operation. I suspect that the actual buildings have been changed and upgraded over the years, but it remains a very large, indoor caged layer facility.  The hens eat genetically modified corn and soybeans, much of it from halfway across the country. They are moved in when they are about five months old and ready to lay.  After laying fewer than 200 eggs, they will become a soup ingredient. You can read a defense of their caged layer system provided to the Connecticut legislature in 2009 here.  It was still Kofkoff egg farm then.

This recent report details the progress we've made in getting chickens out of cages thanks to consumer pressure. Keep it up!

Key points:

Industrial farms are capital intensive and controlled by distant

large corporations.

Hens don't see the sun, breathe fresh air, or eat grass or bugs.

Lots of transportation is involved for chickens, eggs and feed.

Based on a linear industrial model rather than a cyclical, ecological model.

Three approaches

At least three approaches to agriculture and feeding ourselves are illustrated by the examples above.  The USDA's plan in 1918 involves lots of people, educates children, reduces food waste and builds fertile soil. (When we had chickens in stationary pens, I'd keep the ground covered with leaves that I collected in the fall. The chickens' scratching broke up the leaves, mixing them with their manure to create a wonderful compost.) Chickens got to do their natural chicken activities in the sunlight and fresh air.

A larger scale, commercial operation such as Mr. Barry's can have many of the same benefits. (A friend in Vermont raises about 600 chickens on the food waste from a local school.) The chickens get fresh air and sunlight, eat a variety of foods and are close to eaters. Both home production and human scale farms fit into an ecological approach to food and our relationship with the earth.

However, note the many changes with the industrial model:  no more fresh air and sunlight for the chickens.  Most of the feed is from far away. Whether the grains are from Connecticut or the Midwest, this feed is inexpensive because the government supports its production with our tax dollars, farmers are not paid fairly and fossil fuels are plentiful and cheap. Unfortunately the environmental damage done by industrial scale grain growing is not paid for. Food wastes become a big problem.

I'd love to hear about the growing egg economy in your area.

Resources for raising chickens, organically.

CT NOFA provides some local sources for chicks and equipment.

NOFA-NY provides Organic PoultryProduction for Eggs.

NOFA Interstate Council published Humane and HealthyPoultry Production.

For a good overview of the varieties of chickens and chicken equipment check out this company's catalog or web site.

Protection from predators is one of the most critical issues for backyard chickens. Lots of animals like to eat chickens. Earlier this month my son took this photo in his Simsbury backyard. He said: "I was thinking about chickens this weekend and realized that my worst losses always came when they were under a tree. Red tails, ravens, and coopers."

Progress and a Different Paradigm for the New Year

by Bill Duesing

We've made good progress in the past year having our voices heard on the food and farming issues we care about: healthy food for everyone, support for beginning farmers, GMO labeling, food justice, fair wages for workers throughout the food system, excess nutrient pollution and climate change. We have also made progress in animal care issues. Some restaurant and food chains are planning to eliminate routine use of antibiotics for animals and gestation crates for sows.  Sellers of unhealthy foods and beverages are struggling; organic farmers have trouble keeping up with demand.  As consumers and activists, we are feeling our power to change the paradigm. And, of course, this is all good.   However, the news of the climate, environmental and/or social chaos in so many parts of the world shows that we are very far from the path to achieving a livable future for our children and grandchildren.

Taking a longer view can keep us focused on what is important. A paradigm is a model or a way of thinking. Unless we respect and use a cyclical, biological paradigm, as opposed to a linear industrial paradigm, we don't have a chance for a sustainable and fulfilling future.

For many years, the image above has provided me with a useful tool for explaining the kind of problems caused by and changes needed in the currently dominant, industrial paradigm.

The Industrial Paradigm

The industrial model is especially damaging in combination with an economic system focused on continual growth.  There are often distant and tenuous connections between the human and physical inputs needed to create a product or service, the consumer or user, and the land, water and air where the products and pollutants ultimately end up. Because of this, the external costs of this system, (the tax, environmental and human costs of production, transportation and disposal), are hidden from consumers. This results in lots of environmental and human health damage that the consumer doesn't see or directly pay for.

A biological paradigm, in contrast, provides essential connections between the inputs and outputs. This model provides greater transparency and encourages more localization and cycling of resources. This is good for communities but not so good for global corporations.

We can begin to understand the differences between these two paradigms using an agricultural example:  how we get nitrogen out of the air and into the soil to nourish plants.  All nitrogen comes from the atmosphere which is nearly 80 percent nitrogen.  Nitrogen in the air can be converted (or fixed) into a form plants can use by either industrial or biological systems.

In the current industrial model, developed intensively over the past two hundred years, nitrogen-bearing substances come from far away: in the 19th century from mineral deposits in Peru and Chile.  Since the early 20th century, nitrogen fertilizer has been produced through the Haber-Bosch industrial process that now begins with fracking the earth for natural gas which is then used to make hydrogen.  That hydrogen is combined (under great pressure and high temperature) with atmospheric nitrogen to make ammonia. Then that material is converted to another form, packaged and shipped to its point of use on a farm, garden or lawn. From there, some of the nitrogen is taken up by plants but much of it is moved by water either into the ground, where it makes well water dangerous to drink, or into streams, rivers and eventually into estuaries.  Higher nitrogen content makes it much more difficult to process river water for drinking. (See Des Moines' water supply problems.) It also encourages eutrophication of estuaries by encouraging the growth of algae.

In contrast, a biological approach involves using cover crops (e.g. clover, hairy vetch, alfalfa and field peas) to capture nitrogen from the air with the help of bacteria living on their roots. Other more local sources of biologically-fixed nitrogen include rotating leguminous crops (such as peas and beans) through the growing area, rotating animals through crop land and applying compost from local manures and other organic wastes.  All of these methods can provide the necessary nitrogen, especially if harsh and toxic chemicals and most tillage are avoided.

NOFA

Much of NOFA's work since its founding has been informed by the development and understanding of the benefits of the biological paradigm developed over the past century.

In 1971, a group of organic agriculture and healthy food pioneers came together in Vermont to start the Natural Organic Farmers Association.  That organization is now the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) with chapters in seven states and almost 6,000 members, including farmers, gardeners, homesteaders, landscapers, scientists and educators. 

The autumn of 1971 was a time of domestic turmoil over race, the Vietnam War and the environment.  However, these (mostly young) people were concerned with two things: how to grow food without toxic chemicals and with getting healthy food to those who needed it. One of NOFA's first projects was trucking organic vegetables from New England farms to day care centers, women's shelters and food coops in New York City.  (Note 1). A year or so later, the focus changed to more local markets as the need for good food was discovered closer to home.

This occurred less than a decade after Rachel Carson's Silent Spring documented the damages that pesticides were doing to human and environmental health. At that time, unless you were connected with the chemical or the agricultural establishment, it was natural to be concerned about spreading toxic pesticides on our food.  Hence the interest in organic farming. It is very instructive to read the Wikipedia entry for Silent Spring.  The dynamics of environmental issues haven't changed much. Corporations which profit from the industrial paradigm by polluting the environment and damaging human health use bought science, scientism and shady, despicable tactics to discredit the honest messenger. They also use their ill-gotten gains to buy cooperation from their friends in government. Cigarettes, pesticides, GMOs, flame retardants, fossil fuels, hedge funds, lead in paint and fuel, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and synthetic fertilizers are just some of the areas where this pattern has played out since Silent Spring.

Aside from the turbulent times and the environmental issues, many of these enthusiastic young people who founded NOFA were inspired by books from earlier in the 20th Century including:

1.  Soil Scientist FH King's Farmers of Forty Centuries (1911) which describes his visits to Korea, China and Japan in 1909 to learn how those countries managed to feed themselves for over 4,000 years from small land areas. (Spoiler alert: Intensive cultivation, multi cropping, cover cropping, composting all organic wastes and human labor were the keys to their success.)

2. Sir Albert Howard's An Agricultural Testament (1940) describes his work in India beginning in 1905.  He was sent there to teach farmers proper British agriculture (fertilizers, pesticides and the whole industrial approach). Instead, he learned from the Indian farmers about making and using compost. From observing the health of villagers and their soils, he learned that "the health of soil, plant, animal and man is one and indivisible."

3. Louis Bromfield's Pleasant Valley (1945) and Malabar Farm (1948) describe what happens to the dust bowl ruined Ohio farms he bought in 1930s as a result of using cover crops, compost (inspired by Sir Albert Howard) rotational grazing and sustainable forestry. Springs that had dried up started running again as soil health improved and natural water cycles functioned again.

4. Edward S. Hyams' Soil and Civilization (1952) connected the dots between the way a society cared for its soil and its long term success or failure.

The Biological Paradigm

The early 1970s were full of reasons to move toward the biological paradigm. The first Earth Day was held in 1970. In 1971, Barry Commoner's The Closing Circle, Nature, Man and Technology was published.  It increased interest in ecology and inspired many of us with Commoner's Four Rules of Ecology:

1. Everything is connected to everything else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms and what affects one, affects all.

2. Everything must go somewhere. There is no "waste" in nature and there is no "away."

3. Nature knows best. Humankind has fashioned technology to improve upon nature, but such change in a natural system is, says Commoner, "likely to be detrimental to that system."

4. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Exploitation of nature will inevitably involve the conversion of resources from useful to useless forms.

In 1972, we first saw a photograph of the whole earth from space.  So, it was hard to be content with a linear industrial paradigm after that.

Fast Forward                        

Now well into the 21st century, with the new challenges from climate change, we can see the advantages of using the biological paradigm.  It turns out that organic methods of soil and fertility management are among the best strategies for both mitigating and adapting to climate change.  Careful organic practices can return carbon to the soil while also resisting the increased droughts and downpours a changing climate brings.  Industrial nitrogen fertilizer not only releases nitrous oxide (a very powerful greenhouse gas) when it is applied, it also encourages the decomposition of organic matter, impoverishing the soil ecosystem and driving further climate change.

Keeping these different paradigms in mind should help us create a more just, sustainable and resilient food system. They will help us see the differences, for example, between systems which consume electricity to provide light and run pumps indoors to grow leafy greens and those that use sunlight, soil and compost to grow food nearly everywhere.

In the new year, we need to continue to use our buying power as well as our actions (i.e., gardening, cooking, supporting farmers markets, joining CSAs, talking to legislators) to effect the changes we want to see in the future. 

Note 1. Organic certification didn't exist at that time but organic growing methods were based on the books listed in this essay and the publications of J I Rodale.  Rodale was inspired by Sir Albert Howard's writings to start an experimental organic farm in 1940 and Organic Farming and Gardening magazine in 1942.  His How to Grow Vegetables and Fruits by the Organic Method was published in 1961 and provided important guidance to early organic growers.  Organic certification began in the 1980s with NOFA chapters and other organizations developing state standards.  CT NOFA certified farms from 1989 until the USDA took control of "organic" in 2002.

How Science is used as a cudgel to advance political and corporate agendas

 By Bill Duesing

Science is the way we study, learn about and organize information about the world we live in, building a body of knowledge that may help us understand the ways of the physical world. However, Science is ongoing; it keeps discovering more big picture concepts and important details about the way things work.  Even after centuries of scientific research, some areas of our world are still largely unknown - the soil and the human microbiomes, the details of cancer and of climate change. However, too much reliance on Science can lead to an unwarranted and dangerous hubris, especially among non-scientists with an agenda.

Recently, Science has also been used extensively as a weapon to convince us of the validity of a specific corporate or political agenda. (Remember the doctors who promoted a brand of cigarettes in the 1950s and the experts who told us we'd be better off eating margarine or using chemical fertilizers.) This strategy involves Science that is very reductionist and applied to extremely complex systems - and the notion that Science has the final answer. It was easier to promote smoking, hydrogenated fats and fertilizers as scientific before we understood about microbiomes, cancer and climate change. Yet, without knowing the Scientific explanations, many traditional cultures intuitively nurtured those microbiomes with compost and fermented foods.

I first noticed this manipulative use of Science when CT NOFA was working with our partners to pass a law prohibiting the use of pesticides on Connecticut school grounds.  Of course, the folks who apply pesticides wanted to keep applying them.  After all, that's their business model.  They planned to work with the scientists at UConn College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources to get "science-based" answers about the use of these pesticides to maintain school grounds.  But those answers would be in the context of horticulture, because that is the expertise of this branch of UConn.  They likely wouldn't include the very complicated science of how pesticides might effect children and their rapidly growing bodies differently from the healthy adult males used as the threshold for pesticide safety. Such a science-based study wouldn't include the effects of the so-called "inert" ingredients  that make up most of those pesticides because they are trade secrets, even though they may be more toxic than the active ingredient. Science can't really provide the whole risks and benefits picture of using pesticides on school grounds because so much of Science is narrowly focused on part of a system with lots of variables- timing, weather, skill of applicators and human behavior, especially children's.  It just doesn't make sense to apply poisons where young people play.  Yet, narrowly based Science can say otherwise.

Science of GMOs

Genetically-engineered seeds or GMOs is an area where the corporate and political backers are using "science-based" research to belittle those who question the wisdom of the genetically-engineered foods experiment which now has most of our food plants sprayed with at least one herbicide. Soon two dangerous herbicides will be applied.

They say get with the GMO program or you are anti-science and denying the facts. Never mind that those facts are skewed and limited.

If the GMO folks want us to think about Science, perhaps they shouldn't design a system which is bound to fail if nature's ways are taken into account.  Of course, if you spray the same herbicide year after year on the same field, weeds will become resistant to that herbicide and evolve into superweeds. This genetically-engineered, herbicide-tolerant system is doomed to fail as it demands more and more herbicides.

Altered Genes, Twisted Truth

Steven Druker's remarkable book, Altered Genes, Twisted Truth: How the venture to genetically engineer our food has subverted science, corrupted government and systematically deceived the public, got me thinking about the use of Science as a propaganda tool. Jane Goodall calls this book "one of the most important books of the last 50 years." 

Druker documents nearly four decades of the arrogant use of selective Science to promote a political and corporate agenda which favors biotechnology. From the early discussions in the 1970s of whether this technology was safe and could be contained in a lab, through President Reagan's deregulatory push in the 1980s, to the discussions of whether the products of genetic engineering were safe to release into the environment or for people to eat in the 1990s, there has been a clear pattern of generalizing biotech safety to the whole field from very limited data. Dissenting scientists have been ignored and others who question this technology or the safety of genetically-engineered food have been discredited.

A public interest attorney, Druker initiated the lawsuit that forced the US Food and Drug Administration to release its files related to genetically-engineered foods. He found that the FDA ignored the concerns its own scientists had about the safety of foods made from GMOs.  The FDA actually violated the law when it declared that GMOs had a "Generally Recognized as Safe" (GRAS) status and therefore could be included freely in our food system, without longitudinal studies to determine their safety.

The author details how after a small, select conference in the 1970s found that adding genes to one kind of bacteria seemed safe, folks with political and PR skills used that limited finding to declare that genetic engineering of other organisms must also be safe.  He also details how the finding that a specific novel protein made by bacteria in a lab is safe to consume (at least in very short term tests these decisions were based on) leads to approval of that protein when it comes from an engineered corn plant sprayed with glyphosate. Scientists who dealt with whole organisms and with ecological relationships were largely excluded from the decision-making process. Holistic methodology was ignored.

The Alliance for Science organization at Cornell University is one organization which has been using Science to promote GMOs and diffuse the opposition. It is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to promote biotechnology around the world. Major newspaper articles generated by the Alliance earlier this year linked GMO skeptics with those who deny man-made climate change and evolution.

However a very recent article by Steven Druker recounting his visit to the Alliance for Science suggests that there may be an opening for a more thorough and honest discussion about GMOs there. Let's hope so. The Bioscience Resource Project arranged this visit.  The project also publishes IndependentScience News. Both of those sites are good sources of information.

However, late October produced another story of the influence those who want to sell pesticides have over government researchers, in this case a USDA scientist who faced retaliation after publishing a study of the dangers of neonicotinoid pesticides to monarch butterflies. Read this whistleblower story here.

While an appeal to Science is used to push a toxic corporate agenda, organic agriculture is often deemed not scientific, even though is it much more respectful of the way nature works.  Jill Richardson describes the scientific support for organic agriculture in her recent essay.

What can you do?

You should support the efforts to keep the Senate from passing the Safe and Affordable Food Act which would prohibit state and federal laws requiring GMO labeling. You can see why it is more commonly known as the Denying Americans the Right to Know or DARK Act. Read here about the Senate hearing on this bill which the House has already passed.  If it is passed in the Senate, our last hope is that President Obama, who once promised to label GMOs, will veto it. If the DARK act becomes law, our CT Labeling Law becomes illegal.

If the DARK Act doesn't become law, there is reason to believe that in the next legislative session we can pass a Connecticut law which will reduce the requirements (called the trigger) needed before our state law goes into effect. Currently, it requires four states with at least 20 million people to pass similar laws.

Things are different than they were when the law was passed two years ago. The Vermont labeling law goes into effect next July. Maine has a law similar to Connecticut's.  Massachusetts and Rhode Island are close to passing labeling legislation.  We also know more about the dangers of glyphosate than we did then. We know that soon many of our foods will be sprayed with 2,4-D (half of Agent Orange) in addition to glyphosate.  So there is no reason we shouldn't have the right to know what is in our food now.  Get the fact sheet on why legislators should remove the trigger here.

If you are interested in helping make this change a reality, there are several things you can do now.

1.    Call your state representative and senator and talk to them about removing the trigger.  Let them know how you feel and explore their thoughts.

2.    Find local farms, businesses and organizations that will support us in this effort.

Get involved.  This is important work that effects the future of our food system.