First a bit of a commercial. My old friend Duffy, who is a very creative guy and a total axe-master has released an album with his band the Eggplant Heroes. Check out After This Time on their website.

The preceding has been an unpaid public service announcement. Now, on with the blog.

Another bullet dodged, although at this writing Congress hasn’t returned to finish up their Sit-Con on the so-called Fiscal Cliff so my relief may be premature. While Congress has not been noted for finishing up anything for, say, the past forty years, you, gentle reader, may get the same impression about me on the micro-farm. So, to avoid having you consider my rantings to be so much pot-calling-the-kettle-black finger pointing, I’d like to clear up the misconception that while I start many things, I basically finish none.

It is true that many projects are works-in-progress for their entire lives while many others have a definite divide – a celebratory cusp, if you will – between a building phase and an enjoyment phase. A point where incessant worry and strife over details of design and implementation gives way to a period of enjoying the fruits of our labors.

Such an occasion happened this week on the chicken-ranch. As you no doubt remember, the chicken project was to be the micro-farm’s cash cow, if you’ll pardon the interspecies metaphor. Build a cage, build a moveable tractor, stuff in some chickens, and watch the eggs pop out and the money flow in. Sounds simple enough, but then there was also the matter of keeping the chickens contained in their fortress safe from the marauding raccoons, coyotes, stoats, weasels, minks, bears, otters, hawks and eagles.

To name a few.

Nevertheless, we plunged in and, in the process, learned that there is a lot more to chicken than you would think.

And it all starts in a cardboard box.

When we got our first batch of chicks from Bay Hay and Feed – my favorite store – it was in a rush of panic. Was it possible to even keep the downy little puff-balls alive for the half-mile ride back in the overheated car. All the beginners’ books say that if environmental conditions are not kept exactlyperfect, your new flock will certainly die; a death brought on suddenly and completely by you, the novice farmer. A demise that, as you scoop up the tiny bodies, will surely break your heart.

By the time, one week later, we picked up our second batch of chicks, we realized that most of these warnings were a bunch of hooey; dire forecasts made by Chicken People. Yes, there are Chicken People and they live a life focused on the flock much like Cat People live alert to the incessant scratching of their herds in dark, smelly closets packed with stinky boxes filled with litter of indeterminate age. And like those Cat People, they too write books for beginners. While a Cat Book for Beginners may warn that the safest course of action, should Mrs. Pickle-Wickle even sneeze, is to immediately dial 911 (or whatever emergency shortcut is endemic to your land of residence), Chicken Books take more of a personal responsibility tack. They warn that if the temperature ever falls outside of a narrow range, which, oddly, is only a degree or two lower than the temperature recommended by the FDA for safe cooking, your little baby chicks will die immediately from everything ranging from dropsy to a panic molt, and it will all be your fault.

By the time we picked up the third batch of chicks, we had pretty much figured out that if you just dump them in the box and give them a bit of food, water, and light, they’ll do just fine, happily standing around in their own excrement patiently waiting for something to push into the front end to make more of same come out the back.

I can’t tell you how glad we were to get them out of the carport and into their new lives as free-range chickens.

To do this, as previously documented, we constructed a light-weight enclosure consisting of a screened run area and a Level-Four Nighttime Predator Exclusion Module all enclosed by a high-voltage, electric-net fence and which can be easily moved about the micro-farm to provide the chickens with fresh forage and the occasional change of scenery.

None of which sounds particularly portable, so I went back to the drawing board to make it better.

The first shortcoming to address was the fact that portable net fences are these fairly flimsy constructions which are mainly designed as temporary enclosures which meet end to end. This means to get in to tend the chickens, you have to take down a section of highly electrified fence, lay it on the ground, and enter, giving the chickens all the chance they need to make good their escape and manage their own forage areas and scenery changes. To obviate the need for fence deconstruction I built a gate. It’s just this big, wooden, freestanding gate. Like the Stargate, only with less chance of time travel when you step through. The ends of the fence attach to the sides of the gate and, when you shut the gate all the metal bits – chicken wire, latch, hinges, and screws are instantly energized with several kilovolts of predator-deterring potential. Perfect.

The next thing we needed was portable electricity.

That’s called a battery, you dope.

Yeah, I know that. But there’s a bit more to the equation than slapping in a couple of D-cells and calling it a day.

Because – as I’ve admitted here before – I’m a total cheapskate, I couldn’t just go out and buy the $300+ integrated battery/fence charger module because 1) it’s over $300 and 2) I know what all that stuff costs. So I decided to build my own. The first necessity was a battery (as you so ably pointed out): $26 at WallyWorld, and a fence energizer, the equipment that takes the El Cheapo 12-volts from Walmart and converts it into the coyote-zapping multi-kV charge for the fence: sixty-five bucks on Amazon. Then, because the cheap stuff isn’t really designed to be used out-of-doors, I needed a weatherproof enclosure for which a cammo-pattern ammunition carrier designed for 20mm anti-aircraft shells was pressed into service: $32 from Amazon. I stuck Velcro to everything to keep it from sliding around in the box, added a set of jumper-cables to hook up to the fence and, voilá, sparks!

But, while not large, the micro-farm stretches further than an extension cord so we needed a way to keep that battery charged.

Enter the Chinese.

Thanks to the manufacturing efficiencies of the slave-labor model it costs next to nothing to build things in China. That coupled with a world-class industrial espionage effort has allowed all of the technology of the West to vanish into the inscrutable highlands faster than you can say Yu Qiangsheng. This has given companies like Apple the ability to fill their coffers with unsightly amounts of cash or, if you can deal directly with the Chinese, allows you to keep your own ill-gotten gains.

Enter Amazon.

Buying directly from the Chinese through their Amazon store, I was able to pick up a brand new, 10-watt solar panel for less than the cost for an equivalent square-inch area of paper towels. And they threw in a charge controller for free. A couple of wire connectors and some used extension cords and I was done. Out the door and hooked up in the field for less than $200.

Done, but not quite finished.

It turns out that chickens need some assistance in the egg-laying department. Most birds are keyed by daylight. Their biological clocks tick at the time of sunset and sunrise and, more importantly the lengthening of the day lets the birds know it’s time to start laying some eggs. For chickens, this can be artificially induced with a light that stays on all the time (as they do in commercial egg operations) but that’s not too good for the chickens. I mean, we want lots of eggs, but we also want happy chickens. So for another eighteen bucks I scored a 12V digital timer and some LED light strips. I taped the LEDs to an old paint stick I had lying about, wired that to the timer, wired the timer to the solar charge controller, stuck it inside the coop, and, once again, voilá!

Project complete.

Now, unbeknownst to the flock, daylight hours are increasing by two minutes per day faster than they should; a trend that will stay in place until such time as they’re getting fourteen hours of light per day. After that, the lights will keep coming on at the same time until sunrise catches up. Then it will be all back to Mother Nature so the peeps get a break in the fall. Already there is a notable uptick in egg production. The one-to-three a day rate of a few weeks ago is now up to five-to-six a day; a number that is way more than we can eat and enough to allow the chickens to start making the payments on all the gear and food and treats we had to buy for them.

Next, we’ve got to go set up some kind of retail outlet to start moving the eggs and, after that, the other products of the micro-farm. But right now the eggs better start selling, and quickly too. After the past few weeks, I don’t think I could ever eat another egg.