I'm doing it! It's working! I, who never expected it to be working, am making chicks. Yesterday, I finally got tired of candling the large brown eggs and seeing nothing, so I broke one open, to find nothing but yolk inside. I was almost ready to abandon the project. But I also have about twenty small greenish eggs from Bantams and Silkies, and I have not been able to candle them with my makeshift candling device- a flashlight with my fist closed around the light. The shells are too thick. So I broke on of them open today, expecting nothing but rotten yolk, to reveal exactly what should be inside- a developing embryo. Sorry if it's disgusting. But this is what a week-old chick embryo looks like. I think it's kinda cool. See the dark blob, the eye, and the developing neural tube? Developing life is so amazing. It's too bad this one got cut short. But now I know what's in there!

It seems impossible that this should be working- I went to my mom's basement and dug out her twenty year old incubator, a styrofoam box that we used to hatch eggs that we ordered from a hatchery when I was a kid. Then I went to a neighbor's house and gathered up all the eggs that had been laid in the last two days by her motley flock of hens- about 36 eggs of varying shapes and sizes. Since her roosters are all Silkies, small fluffy birds with feathers on their feet and gentle, tame personalities, she had her doubts that they could even mount the heavies- large egg layers that are about twice the size of the Silkies- to do their thang and make the eggs hatcheable. I have since seen them try, but I have my doubts as well. Then I brought the eggs home. I at least knew not to wash them, since washing them removes the natural oils from the shells and makes them spoil faster, but leaving poop on them can also compromise them, since the bacteria from the poop can leach into the eggs. So I put them in the incubator, poop and all. As soon as I had them all marked with a sharpie- an X on one side and an O on the other, my mind finally settled on what was bothering me- I remembered what I was doing wrong- they are supposed to be marked with a pencil so the chemical from the marker does not soak through the shell. Oops. Then I put them into the incubator, all X's up, and left them for twelve hours. I remember only turning them twice a day when we used to hatch them, even though I hear a lot of people turn them every five hours. And two days later my mom asked me how the humidity was holding in the incubator. Humidity? Apparently eggs need a certain level of humidity to keep from losing too much moisture from inside the egg in the 99.5 degree incubator. My incubator had no water. I quickly ran out to the garage and poured water into the bottom of it, not realizing that it had holes drilled through it and all the water just ran out of the bottom and puddled underneath it, and it was two days later when I discovered this. I finally got the water in an old feta cheese container inside the incubator, where it has been keeping the small plastic windows nice and foggy since. So I can honestly say that if I am sucessfully making chicks, it must not be as delicate of a process as some try to make us believe.

I have a nesting hen who was also trying to hatch a few of her own eggs. (I bought 5 hens and a rooster from the same neighbor who sold me the eggs.) I spent an entire day working with power tools, erecting a heavy plywood wall in the barn to close off half of the south wing, and scoured the farm for scraps of wood and chicken wire to make a screen door. Late one night last week, I drove over and we entered her chickenhouse with flashlights and headlamps, and grabbed six sleeping birds who then awoke screaming and beating their wings as we pushed them into the cage in the back of my husband's Toyota Tundra. I closed the heavy wooden door on the barn that night, since i had not had time to fashion a latch, and the next morning, rushed out to check on them. I found them huddled in the middle of the barn floor in the hay. As soon as I pushed open the door allowing the morning light to stream into the cool darkness, the rooster jumped up, suddenly aware that he had overslept, and immediately stretched out his neck and launched into a manic series of crowing.

Since then, they have gotten over their stress of moving and have started leaving me about three eggs a day. I left the small eggs under the sitting Silky, hoping that she could do a better job than I of incubating them, and she kept them nice and warm...until day before yesterday. I went out to open the door for them to allow them to free range for the day and thouht I saw, in the darkness, that she had grown large, triangular gray ears. I took a closer look. Lady Mai, my lanky white cat, blinked her blue eyes at me, curled on top of the warm nest of eggs while my nesting hen watched balefully from a safe distance. After I removed Mai I waited to see if the hen would try to reclaim her nest but she hid from me in the corner, so I left. A few hours later I went back out to find the eggs rolled out of the nest and halfway across the barn floor, as cool to the touch as the floor they lay on, while the hen was scratching in the opposite corner. I lifted them into the actual nesting box I had so thoughtfully provided that had yet to be used. Later that day, I noticed the nesting hen was outside, scratching with the rest of her flock. I don't blame her. That was not right, what went down in the henhouse that day. Mammals should not be taking naps a fowl's nest. It just blew the poor bird's mind and killed her nesting drive. 

Speaking of chickens, my neighbor is raising fryers to eat. She is suddenly in a panic, because they are getting too big and I am to go help her butcher them this week. I do not recall signing up for this, but I am okay with it. I will take some of the dressed birds home.

This is a strange issue for me, since I do not really eat meat. But I do serve it, since I live with someone who does eat it, and because of that I will occasionally have a bite. I am very adamant about one thing, and it is something that I can never get anyone else to comprehend. If you are going to eat meat, you must be willing to kill. You owe it to the animals. The biggest crime in our food system today is not only that we eat cruelly slaughtered animals, it is that we do so lightly, glibly, completely disconnected from the living animal it once was. My experiences with butchering chickens when I was a kid have put me in good stead for the rest of my life. Some of my little friends who's parents brought them to our house to play under the same trees that their parents set up the slaughter assembly line still have nightmares of being chased by headless chickens, but even at my young age, it was just a part of life. I admit, it was even a little deliciously macabre when a headless chicken made a lunge at my ankles, but it was dead already, and I understood that it was just biology, the body making a last-ditch effort at holding onto life as it's impulses went haywire. My parent's lifestyle was organic in the truest sense of the word- nothing that was natural was censored. At six years old, I was familiar with a chicken's digestive system. Then I was eight years old, elbows deep in the guts of a freshly-stuck pig hanging in the garage on a cold fall evening, trying to find it's heart, it's lungs, it's liver. When I was an 18 year old newlywed, I was shoulders-deep in the guts of a buffalo, showing it's magnificent, vibrant, intricate, healthy insides to my new husband as he turned an unprecendented and puzzling shade of green. I have never been able to understand someone who is perfectly willing to eat meat but horrified at the thought of butchering an animal.

The other night I was trying to explain this to my sister in law after she expressed horror at killing a chicken. I asked her, "But you eat chicken! How can you not be okay with killing it if you eat it?" I already knew the answer, it is because we are so disconnected from our food that meat is not even seen as living muscle tissue anymore. But I wanted to hear her say it. "Oh, I am fine with eating it. I just want someone else to kill it for me." Exactly. No surprise there. It was the way she, and everyone else who makes a similar statement, said it that bothered me. As if it is just this fun, adorable little quirk of theirs, this squeamish side to their personality, that they are too gentle to ever want to kill a living creature. But after it is this sterile, chilled, pink, plump piece of food, it is no longer "gross", it is just comforting. Soon-to-be grilled nourishment on one's plate beside one's asparagus. My other sister in law agrees with me, because meat, in it's slimy state of rawness, grosses her out. I am proud that she recognizes the fact that if something is repulsive to you, it is okay to not try to make it more appetizing just so you will enjoy eating it. (I repeat this conversation not because it was unique to sister in law #1, it was just the most recent one i have had on the topic. Actually, I have yet to meet anyone who does not feel this way. I feel this was as well. It isn't like I enjoy killing. I would much rather buy my meat already killed and avoid the mental trauma of killing it myself. That doesn't mean it is okay to do so all the time and accept the disconnect between life and food.)

I know this is a horrible referrence, and I am certainly not comparing people who eat meat with genocidal dictators, but I wonder how many genocidal dictators have personally killed hundreds of people? It it easy to imagine the Hitlers of history saying, "The subhuman race must be annihilated! I am fine with having them killed, I just want someone else to kill them for me." And the idiocy of our world is that people do it. Even I do. Because I know that my sister in law and my husband and the vegetarian-phobic guests that sit at my table will be happy and feel loved eating the homegrown, organic, free-range chicken that I bring home, long after I dig the blood out from under my nails, wash the bloodied feathers out of my hair and the stink of guts from my clothes, long after I stop hearing their terrified screams in my head, stop seeing their small eyes blink uncomprehendingly, their beaks silently screaming in their decapitated heads when I close my eyes at night.

I know this is a gory post, but there is it. The reality of our food. I was raised on the saying, if you don't work, you don't eat. But in adulthood, I have begun to take it a step further. If you don't kill, or if you don't comprehend what it means to take a life, you shouldn't eat animals. If a society lived by this saying, they would still eat meat, but factory farms, slaughterhouses and processing plants would cease to exist and the ground that provides feed for the animals in them would be repurposed for human consumption. In the resulting abundant production of food crops, we could produce enough food to feed a billion more people than currently live on this planet. Food prices would stabilize. Heart disease, obesity rates would drop. Rainbows and butterflies would suddenly flutter out of places the sun don't shine. Inanimate objects would break into spontaneous song. Strains of harmony would play in the background as flowers unfolded at unusual speed. Bees would hold hands. Well... at least heart disease and obesity rates would drop.

In the future, when this small organic farm has grown into a large project in sustainability and I can begin bringing in interns (yes, this is a dream, one that may or may not ever happen), I plan to incorporate this belief. If someone is vegan, they may work exclusively in the gardens if they wish. If one eats eggs, they can be involved in caring for the chickens. If someone drinks dairy, they can milk the goats. And if someone eats meat, they will be required to, at least once, pull the trigger, put a bullet through the brain of an animal if it is large, cut off it's head if it is small, and physically cut the muscle tissue from that dead creature before they cook and eat it. No more lies or omissions about our food source. As it did when I was growing up, organic does not only mean the absence of pesticides. It means that what is natural is not hidden, censored, or dressed up. Blood is not something that should be hidden from anyone who takes their nutrition from the tissue that blood once flowed through.