No squawks from hatcheries about backyard flocks.
Submitted by Dick Wanner on Tue, 08/04/2009 - 10:24am.
Urban and small town back-to-the-land foodies spurred an uptick in backyard flocks two or three years ago. They were looking for better eggs, better poultry meat and bragging rights for their enlightened whole-earth points of view. And they are still among us.
But they are now being joined by a group less concerned about the taste of grasshopper- and worm-fed eggs, and more concerned about surviving hard economic times. In a New York Times story yesterday, reporter William Neuman says hatcheries are struggling to keep up with the demand from backyard flockers, and the the postal service said that in the first six months of this year, it shipped 1.2 million pounds of packages containing chicks (mostly chickens but also baby ducks and turkeys), a seven percent increase from the comparable period last year. That volume equals millions of birds, as the average chick weighs slightly more than an ounce.
Lloyd Romriell, who manages a feed store in Annis, Idaho, started keeping chickens as a hedge against job loss. "If you lose your job, you've still got food," he told Neuman.
Jasmin Middlebos raises her family's chickens in a rural area outside Spokane, Washington. She has 26 birds and sells her surplus eggs for $2 to $3 a dozen. She recently started tracking her income and expenses, and has taken in $457 from egg sales, but she spent $428, mostly on feed. Her books don't account for the cost of buying chicks at $2 apiece, nor the $1,500 she spent on a coop.
Backyard flocks may not fly in a spreadsheet, but it's a phenomenon that doesn't seem about to go away. You can read the NYT article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/business/04chickens.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2&th&emc=th
A dairyman speaks out about price gouging, no punches pulled, on our editorial page this week. He is Nate Wilson, who farms in Sinclairville, N.Y., and asks the question: Why, when the average retail price for cheddar cheese rose from $4.61 to $4.92 per pound between February, 2008 and February, 2009 , did the Federal Class III farm milk price plummet from $20.60 per hundredweight to $9.31 in the same period? Where did the money paid to processors go, he wants to know, if consumers were paying more and farmers were getting less?
Cledus Judd and Toby Keith tell you how to milk a cow. Sort of.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5oYVsQTD-c&feature=player_embedded
