deadken posted:they lay 1-2 eggs a year + shit everywhere + keep getting eaten by foxes + are profoundly stupid creatures
The average chicken's egg production is supposed to drop after 28 weeks, down to 50% after 100 weeks. Here's a handy chart.
http://www.morrishatchery.com/mngmt_guides/ISA%20Brown%20Guide-Nov.%203,2010.pdf
The layman's law is that egg production noticeably drops after 2 years.
Chickens need protein and calcium to produce good meat and eggs so hopefully they have a big yard to run around and eat bugs in. You can also toss them fish and beef scraps for this. Don't give them poultry though.
If you're taking care of chickens you presumably have a garden. If you do you might as well start vermicomposting too and feed the extra worms to the chickens while producing fertilizer that's more potent than black compost.
Your parents chickens are probably old as heck though.
I like chickens. I observe that different chickens have different personalities, but they are stupid as heck. It's true.
tsinava posted:deadken posted:they lay 1-2 eggs a year + shit everywhere + keep getting eaten by foxes + are profoundly stupid creatures
The average chicken's egg production is supposed to drop after 28 weeks, down to 50% after 100 weeks. Here's a handy chart.
http://www.morrishatchery.com/mngmt_guides/ISA%20Brown%20Guide-Nov.%203,2010.pdf
The layman's law is that egg production noticeably drops after 2 years.
Chickens need protein and calcium to produce good meat and eggs so hopefully they have a big yard to run around and eat bugs in. You can also toss them fish and beef scraps for this. Don't give them poultry though.
If you're taking care of chickens you presumably have a garden. If you do you might as well start vermicomposting too and feed the extra worms to the chickens while producing fertilizer that's more potent than black compost.
Your parents chickens are probably old as heck though.
I like chickens. I observe that different chickens have different personalities, but they are stupid as heck. It's true.
they're not old as heck because they keep getting brutally murdered by foxes. being guardian readers my parents do a lot of composting & feed the chickens with vegetable peelings and so on, they don't lay much because they're bantams + are bred to look cute rather than be remotely useful. you're right that they have personalities but these personalities tend to range from vicious-stupid to brutal-stupid to docile-stupid
littlegreenpills posted:id be too nervous to lay eggs myself in that kind of new-statesman reading environment
laurie penny lays an egg on that magazine every week
as a young lad my parents had a particulary ugly and mean-spirited rooster who they kept because he was fucking huge and they wanted to breed for bigger meat hens but one day he decided that my little fiveyearold self was too much to bear so he started to attack me at every opportunity. fucker would come at my from behind every bush or around any corner like a feathery bullet and proceed to peck and spur the shit out of me till he drew blood. i hated that bird and lived in constant fear.
i got the last laugh though because onetime he got overly confident and came at me straight on and i was ready and i kicked him in the belly so hard his guts came shooting prolapsed out of his butt like confetti out of a party cracker. that was a fairly large surprise and i ran away screaming and crying. my dad saw the whole thing happen and that was the day i leaned to kill and clean a chicken. we turned him into coq au vin and it was delicious
but hens can be cute and cuddly. they are fat and clumsy and ridiculous and hold grudges and are hilarious drama queens.
dank_xiaopeng posted:roosters are mean-spirited and cruel and vicious. roosters are dime comic-book caricatures of swarthy virile immigrant pimp villains. they constantly chase hens down, pin them, and violently rape them.
as a young lad my parents had a particulary ugly and mean-spirited rooster who they kept because he was fucking huge and they wanted to breed for bigger meat hens but one day he decided that my little fiveyearold self was too much to bear so he started to attack me at every opportunity. fucker would come at my from behind every bush or around any corner like a feathery bullet and proceed to peck and spur the shit out of me till he drew blood. i hated that bird and lived in constant fear.
i got the last laugh though because onetime he got overly confident and came at me straight on and i was ready and i kicked him in the belly so hard his guts came shooting prolapsed out of his butt like confetti out of a party cracker. that was a fairly large surprise and i ran away screaming and crying. my dad saw the whole thing happen and that was the day i leaned to kill and clean a chicken. we turned him into coq au vin and it was delicious
but hens can be cute and cuddly. they are fat and clumsy and ridiculous and hold grudges and are hilarious drama queens.
one of the branches of my brown trash side of the family has a substantial amount of chickens. my brother and I came down to visit once when we were kids and thought this was crazy, so we walked over to check them out. Our older female cousins accompanied us because it fell within their cultural gender role to shepherd us around, even though poultry upkeep was mostly men's work. my female cousins, brother, and I walked in to see my uncles hooting and hollering at a rooster trying to violently rape every hen in sight. They jumped up, shameful and angry at the sight of womenfolk, and then immediately extradited the rooster in question out of the coop and extrajudicially slaughtered him on the spot in full eyesight of the coop. All the other birds loudly cried out in unison at his execution. We had chicken curry for dinner. I was 11, my brother was 9. The End.
deadken posted:don't talk about my friends that way iwc
lol please tell me you're joking
deadken posted:she's a fan of my work
i watched the video of starkey calling her a jumped up public school girl the other day, omg he owned her so much and she deserved it for her glib little high school debate style tactics: 'britishness means a lot of things to a lot of different people: I always think of it as fish and chips on brighton beach, wherea professor starkey might think of britishness in terms of playing xenophobia for laughs'
urgh
innsmouthful posted:like lol at making ag more labor intensive. if you wanna go manually detassle over 100 acres of seed corn in the middle of the summer, be my guest.
Hahahah look at this dumb piece of shit who doesn't know anything about properly growing food, yet is employed by some huge company in Industrial Ag.
This is the main problem here.
tsinava posted:innsmouthful posted:like lol at making ag more labor intensive. if you wanna go manually detassle over 100 acres of seed corn in the middle of the summer, be my guest.
Hahahah look at this dumb piece of shit who doesn't know anything about properly growing food, yet is employed by some huge company in Industrial Ag.
This is the main problem here.
you don't eat seed corn lol
innsmouthful posted:tsinava posted:innsmouthful posted:like lol at making ag more labor intensive. if you wanna go manually detassle over 100 acres of seed corn in the middle of the summer, be my guest.
Hahahah look at this dumb piece of shit who doesn't know anything about properly growing food, yet is employed by some huge company in Industrial Ag.
This is the main problem here.you don't eat seed corn lol
Here's what happened. You're stupid and you didn't read the thread so you just assumed that when I started talking about organic methods that meant that machines wouldn't be used.
You're like any other brainwashed idiot from the current industrialized ag system who waves around a strawman of organic farming accusing the whole concept of luddism.
BUT yeah permaculture forest gardens are ill-suited to growing grain and seed crops on a large scale because of the high human labor inputs required
i doubt most realistic pictures of a sustainable future for farming that don't feature massive famines include mechanization in a very central way. luckily all the smart + cool aggie homeboys that grow grain use intensive ground cover + intercropping, crop rotation, and no-till methods to grow kkkomodity kkkash kkkrops like corn soy and rice with no chemical inputs, increased soil fertility, reduced erosion, and only moderate changes in farm machinery.
this (i know, mother jones, lol, but still) is a p good laymans article on notill agriculture
permaculture wierdos don't always like this sort of thing because it doesn't jibe with all-or-nothing deep green ideology tho.
summary: tractors are cool and id rather burn a thousand-odd gallons of biodeisel a year than douse my soil in poisons and ruin waterways with terrible runoff. vroom vroom chuggawuggitachuggitawuggita brroovrrooom beep beep beep
innsmouthful posted:yeah I didn't read the thread but not for any of the reasons you stated lol, also geez a bit harsh calling me trash, don't you think?
Well yeah it is. That's why I edited the post.
I still believe you are trash though. Don't misunderstand.
I'm gonna drop this now and bury the hatchet and start over. I know you are too. We are better people.
yeah average calorie consumption in cuba dropped a lot after the loss of russian petroleum and agrichemicals but there were no famines, things are working p good now
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUWces5TkCA
That's just to whet your appetite. Reading about it is a lot more fascinating.
tsinava posted:innsmouthful posted:yeah I didn't read the thread but not for any of the reasons you stated lol, also geez a bit harsh calling me trash, don't you think?
Well yeah it is. That's why I edited the post.
I still believe you are trash though. Don't misunderstand.
hmmm then let me put my real objection this way so you can understand where I'm coming from. in my view, we have adults in our country who can't even write or read. this to me is an unacceptable position. however, instead of going out into the community and making an actual effort to change things for the better (for example, teaching these adults how to read so they can get employed, function independently, etc.) we sit around, tut tutting about big ag and how evil it is, and how we could all be better off if we practiced local, organic farming, as this will free us from the constricting yolk of global capitalism. this seems incredibly abstract to me and kind of useless, because if my goal is to help people and actually make the world a better place, the absolute last thing I want to do is make food less avaliable to people and force them to spend all of their time growing their own produce that is difficult to store, takes away time from other wealth generating activities (bc if your growing your own food you sure as shit ain't selling it, which means you're not making a profit and this won't be able to buy jack shit under our current system of production and therefore are considered worthless), and that does not work to tackle the underlying attitudes towards material consumption that have led to many of our sustainability problems in the first place. I'm no fan of industrial ag, really, though I work for it, but I feel that at this point going after it is not something that people are necessarily ready for. hth.
tsinava posted:I mean you're posting in a cool thread about organic methods and some asshole comes in and completely misrepresents everything and is like "I work for big ag". That's your first impression on me innsmouthful.
I'm gonna drop this now and bury the hatchet and start over. I know you are too. We are better people.
this is the rhizzone way lol. make a bold claim, don't support it, pretend you're better than everybody else. I'm just trying to be the best poster I can be
I'm trying to discuss actual methods in this thread and you're not reading it and you're shitting it up with your stupid crap.
Your argumentative posts in this thread are superfluous they hold no useful information as of now. You should read the thread.