We kept chickens when i was a boy. If you expect to get enough eggs for a normal sized family (we were four children and three adults), you gotta have a sh!tload of hens. The eggs (brown and white) are "dirty" when they come out of the chicken. The ones you buy in the store are washed, which is why they need refrigeration. If you don't wash them, they'll keep for several days without refrigeration. Once again, though, you need lots of hens to produce a lot of eggs, and free-range is a joke--you gotta feed 'em. The expression chicken feed is a fraud, chicken feed adds up when you're tryin' to keep 30 or 40 hens. We produced most of the food we ate, vegetables, fruits, chickens, geese and eggs. It was a lot of hard work, and considerable expense. Vegetables and fruits pay off big time, but chickens, geese and eggs represent only a marginal savings, even if you don't count the cost of labor. We bought sugar, flour, salt, spices and meat. We got a deal on meat, and our next-door neighbor was the town butcher, which meant an additional savings. No one should make the mistake of thinking that producing one's own food is easy or cheap--it ain't.
cyphercat wrote:
What's wrong with being concerned with all of the above?
Absolutly nothing!
oh dont get me wrong!
Im not saying anything ABOUT either side in general.... except that it frustrates me when I see people knowingly ignoring human needs, when all it would take is a simple gesture to help.......
but if i run mymouth anymore about this, I will dig myself into a hole I wont be able to get out of.. because I see how my comment came off.. and that was a bit wrong.. but it would take alot of back peddling to make it right..
soz- I once read something years ago that there was much less obesity (and the related health conditions of obesity) in China. Naturally, that was before western cooking became more prevalent there.
The deal was, that since the Chinese of that time did not have much meat, their diet was basically vegetables and rice, with meat used as a flavoring. That sounds like a good idea to me.
I used to go to this ashram, where the food was vegetarian. The stuff was simply scrumptious, but at the time, I was working, and it took a lot of time to prepare the kinds of dishes that they served there.
shewolfnm wrote:sozobe wrote:
Anyway, we're semi-demi-hemi vegetarians in that we don't eat that much meat -- not nothing, by any means, but probably far less than is average. When he cooks he'll often put together something like potatoes and beans and a salad.
HA!
thats our house almost exactly.
Tofu, beans , rice, veggies, grains..
and once a week we have a meat based meal with random pieces of 'animal' products during the week.
Maybe an egg for breakfast
or cheese on a salad..
That's all I wish people would do....I just don't think we're helping anybody, ourselves included, by eating meat every single day. We might be adapted to have some animal protein (although I'm not really convinced, since we can't deal with the cholesterol and saturated fats like omnivores and carnivores can), but certainly not to have it in the amounts we do.
If people just ate a bit more naturally, then demand wouldn't force farmers to use factory farming. Even though I still wouldn't eat meat personally, I'm not one of those people who wants to convert everybody to do what I do. I'm not even against hunting-- as long as it's for subsistence. ****, I'd be thrilled if people hunted for their meat again, it'd be better for all concerned.
Setanta wrote:We kept chickens when i was a boy. If you expect to get enough eggs for a normal sized family (we were four children and three adults), you gotta have a sh!tload of hens. The eggs (brown and white) are "dirty" when they come out of the chicken. The ones you buy in the store are washed, which is why they need refrigeration. If you don't wash them, they'll keep for several days without refrigeration. Once again, though, you need lots of hens to produce a lot of eggs, and free-range is a joke--you gotta feed 'em. The expression chicken feed is a fraud, chicken feed adds up when you're tryin' to keep 30 or 40 hens. We produced most of the food we ate, vegetables, fruits, chickens, geese and eggs. It was a lot of hard work, and considerable expense. Vegetables and fruits pay off big time, but chickens, geese and eggs represent only a marginal savings, even if you don't count the cost of labor. We bought sugar, flour, salt, spices and meat. We got a deal on meat, and our next-door neighbor was the town butcher, which meant an additional savings. No one should make the mistake of thinking that producing one's own food is easy or cheap--it ain't.
This is the same exact setting my mom grew up in and I learned first hand that if you want organic, you're gonna pay for it.
It cost me a pretty penny to build my garden up with all organic soil, but having organic veggies is important to me, so it's worth it.
I also deal with some damage from pests because I won't use chemicals on my plants.
There are only 3 of us here and my son and I don't eat a lot of eggs. Mom usually eats 2 eggs a day and my son and I only eat a few eggs each a week, so 3 eggs a day would be enough.
How many eggs does the average chicken produce?
Well, if you aren't giving them the feed which is intended to make them lay faster (and that is hard to find and expensive), then you can expect about 25% production per day, based solely upon my anecdotal experience in childhood. Which is to say, if you want two egges a day, you need seven or eight hens.
shewolfnm wrote:cyphercat wrote:
What's wrong with being concerned with all of the above?
Absolutly nothing!
oh dont get me wrong!
Im not saying anything ABOUT either side in general.... except that it frustrates me when I see people knowingly ignoring human needs, when all it would take is a simple gesture to help.......
but if i run mymouth anymore about this, I will dig myself into a hole I wont be able to get out of.. because I see how my comment came off.. and that was a bit wrong.. but it would take alot of back peddling to make it right..
Oh, Shewolf, I didn't think it was a big deal! I just thought I'd point out that we aren't limited to caring about
only animals or
only people.
Quote:Oh, Shewolf, I didn't think it was a big deal! I just thought I'd point out that we aren't limited to caring about only animals or only people.
I know.
Im speaking about the specific people
I know who ARE like that
but I wasnt specific enough and it sounded like I was jabbing vegetarians and vegans in general.. and that wasnt my intention.
Quote:and free-range is a joke--you gotta feed 'em
From what I understand about the chicken
is that they are naturally lazy animals who will NOT graze.. as some may imagine, and they almost literally have to be jabbed in the arse to get them out of the coop ?
I wouldn't be interested in rushing the eggs, just in keeping them fed with the best feed I can find and keeping them happy.
I wouldn't be happy if my chickens weren't happy ;-)
7 chickens sound like a nice little family indeed :-)
Off to do some research on how to build a coup that would keep chickens all safe from the frisky neighborhood fox family and our kind of new and recent falcon family neighbors.
You're so sweet, Montana! <smooch>
My last post was not completely clear--the feed which
does not make chickens lay faster is hard to find and expensive.
Wolfwoman, we kept the chickens in a run--a fenced in area on one side of the coop. When it's feeding time, they'll come out of the coop, no problem. "Free range" chickens like to find a place to roost, and stay there. Where i came from, stealing someone's free-running chickens was known as hunting "roof rabbits" because they often like to roost on the roof of a shed or the house.
Answers-dot-com wrote:The U.S. Department of Agriculture requires that chickens raised for their meat have access to the outdoors in order to receive the free-range certification. Free-range chicken eggs, however, have no legal definition in the United States. Likewise, free-range egg producers have no common standard on what the term means. Many egg farmers sell their eggs as free range merely because their cages are 2 or 3 inches above average size, or there is a window in the shed.
I would point out that chickens will find food for themselves if you don't provide it--and they will range further and further away, and have less and less of a concept of the coop as their home. They will lay their eggs wherever they like to roost, so if you don't coop them, you'll have to spend a lot of time hunting for their eggs.
shewolfnm wrote:Quote:and free-range is a joke--you gotta feed 'em
From what I understand about the chicken
is that they are naturally lazy animals who will NOT graze.. as some may imagine, and they almost literally have to be jabbed in the arse to get them out of the coop ?
Oh, I don't know about that. I use to spend lots of times on farms when I was little and I remember the chickens were always pecking at the food on the ground.
Peck-peck-peck-peck away they did
[gnawing on at least my third piece of beef jerky since this thread began]
I hope all of you who are anti-meat because it's cruel don't wear any leather(including your shoes), fur, use cosmetics tested on animals, or buy clothes from countries that use child labor...I'm sure you've got that all covered. Hell, now I think of it, you should go burn down some abortion clinics.
You just violated the legal limits of freedom of speech in the U.S. PM me your address, so i can report you to the thought police.
Right now, i'm cooking hamburgers from meat which i took out of the original packaging about ten days ago, and re-wrapped, then put in the fridge. Now that it has aged to the point that it's starting to turn funny colors, it's prime for a big juicy hamburger. YUM YUM ! ! !
