The Chickens are Coming!
Ben Zimmerman
The chickens are coming! Not tomorrow but soon and ten times more than I’ve raised in the past. The fifty or sixty layers will provide food for the farm, manure for the garden and a small income stream selling eggs locally. They’ll be the first animals on the farm that won’t qualify as four-legged free loaders and they’re going to need a place to live.
Fortunately the old barn on my property has a dilapidated milking room that is just the right size and even shows signs of having housed chickens in the past. It needs some cleaning up of now rickety home carpentry and shoveling out of several years of bedding. I don’t know a lot of the details surrounding the history of my property but it is obvious that it spent a couple of decades in slow and steady decline without much care or repair to its out-buildings.
Unfortunately as soon as my shovel got below the top foot or so of bedding there was a crunch. The noise and feel of it was distinctly not rocks or sticks but glass. Strange, I thought, broken glass in the milking shed. But I soon discovered it was everywhere. Laid down, as best as I can figure, by a farmer decades ago to punish brutally any animal that might try to dig into his chicken coop. There were larger pieces that seemed to be strategically placed under the supporting beams, the first a digging animal would encounter, but mostly there was a definite layer of broken glass throughout the whole area. A few whole bottles and tin can lids rounded out the buried treasure I had uncovered.
I knew I wouldn’t be able to just cover it back up or ship it all off to the dump. Part of the reason I’m farming at all is a deep desire within me to know well and heal a piece of earth. Leaving all this wickedness lying in wait for someone else to discover in another generation felt far too corporate to contemplate for more than a few seconds. Up went the quarter-inch screen, hung from a couple of rafters by rope and the reclamation began. A few hours at a time over the next month or so I’d head to the barn for sifting meditation. Shovel in the bedding, dirt, and broken glass. Kneel before the screening frame and rhythmically shake it back and forth letting the good stuff fall through and holding back the glass, rocks and metal bits to be gathered up for banishment.
The process fells like a blend of love and healing for land and self and a huge time suck when there is much else to attend to. Thirty hours of screening generated about four yards of beautiful sifted bedding compost, lots of mental contemplation, a nice little bottle collection and a chicken coop skeleton picked clean. The compost is heading to the new asparagus rows, the bottles will someday display flowers around the house and the coop will house the chickens that are soon on their way. Bad juju dispelled, the space already feels much better to be in even though, as far as building a coop goes, I’m still at square one. This healing of land and self, caring for Earth and animal, is for me, at my core, what makes farming so worth all that it demands.
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