It's About Time

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is finally doing some enforcement work to reduce pollution in the Chesapeake Bay. The EPA has told poultry farmers on Maryland's Eastern Shore that they must now apply for a permit if any of their manure is running off into local waterways.

The federal requirements are even stiffer than what Maryland state officials have proposed. Poultry growers will be required to submit comprehensive reports on how they handle and store the manure produced by their flocks, and list how much they're using as fertilizer on crops and what precautions they're taking to keep it from getting into nearby streams.

The federal regulations also could require many to change their farming practices. The rules sharply restrict the amount of time they can stockpile manure in their fields before working it into the soil and require them to leave much larger swaths of land uncultivated along drainage ditches and waterways.

Agriculture is the largest source of the nutrients degrading the bay's water quality, with runoff of manure and chemical fertilizers responsible for 42 percent of the nitrogen and 46 percent of the phosphorus. Nitrogen and phosphorus runoff each summer results in huge "dead zones" in the bay where fish and other wildlife are unable to survive because of algae blooms that deplete the water's oxygen.

Go here for a full report in the Baltimore Sun.

Winter's Revenge

Leigh Hauter said he never saw it coming.

"I didn't realize it was getting that cold," he said of the afternoon the Big Freeze descended. "We went for a walk and the water in the boiler was already frozen."

The wood-fired boiler in question is the one that heats farmer Hauter's greenhouse and his thousands of new seedlings. They represent nothing less than his spring crops for the coming CSA season. If he couldn't somehow get his frozen boiler working again in the face of a near-record March cold snap, he was looking at thousands of dollars in damage.

Leigh rose early the next morning and got to work trying to feed fresh water to the boiler. That meant hauling many hundreds of feet of fresh plastic pipe up Bull Run Mountain to the artesian well that supplies his water. The old 1 1/4"-inch water pipe was not only frozen solid after a night of temperatures dipping into single digits, it had burst open in several places.

Soon Leigh's water-soaked gloves were frozen as well, then his hands as he struggled into the second day to replace the pipes. A blast of wind ripped off his hat and made his work seem all the more desperate. Meanwhile, thousands of trays of seedlings inside the greenhouse were beginning to feel the effects. The potting soil was freezing. The seedlings were wilting.

After two days of this, the return of winter--in the form of a nasty cold front that had dumped snow from Birmingham in the deep south all the way to Boston--finally moved out to sea and Leigh surveyed the damage. He called a nursery in Indiana and placed an order for replacement seedlings that set him back at least $2,000.

But look here. As the greenhouse thawed again, there were signs of life where none could rightly be expected. Tiny seedlings, barely an inch tall, had managed to survive even when the soil they were rooted it had frozen stiff. "It's amazing, isn't it?" said Leigh as he reached down to inspect his little broccoli plants. "The sorrel wasn't affected at all," he says, pointing to plastic trays where hundreds of sprouts are growing.

So it is back to getting ready for a new year at Bull Run Farm outside The Plains, Virginia. Leigh continues to plant and water his seed trays. Meanwhile, his CSA subscribers are ready for a new season as well. Sunday was an open house wherein subscribers were invited out to the farm for tours and to collect their own eggs. Leigh has two busy chicken tractors in the fields. At one, the chicks that arrived last October just a day old are now full-grown and have started laying eggs.

Around the other tractor, the chickens mingle with geese strutting and honking around the enclosure, as well as several heritage turkeys that have formed a gobbling chorus. Leigh uses the geese to perform weeding chores on the farm. But apparently they also like to eat chicken eggs, so Leigh has the nesting area covered with a tarp. He pulls back the tarp and we collect a dozen eggs, all laid within the last couple of hours and still warm.

Leigh had expected a few visitors but instead several dozen subscribers showed up. He'd been giving tours all morning. I wondered if our current economic hard times had not discouraged CSA subscriptions and Leigh calculated that out of about 500 subscribers, a dozen or so had recently "come up with excuses to back out." But wife Wenonah said others are joining, and not because they are fanatic about local food but because "they just don't trust the food at the supermarket anymore and they heard about us."

The Hauters were a bit aggravated when the visitors drove their vehicles over newly planted rye crops. The rye is a cover to provide fertility for fields where Leigh plans to plant vegetables in June. It looks just like grass, which it is. On a sloping area outside the greenhouse Leigh's field of garlic is several inches tall, the little plants raising their heads above a thick mulch of hay.

Bull Run Farm is set back in a narrow, thickly forested valley. It's hard to imagine how Leigh and Wenonah grow crops on the mountainside. But as you walk about, you see clearings here and there where a plastic-covered hoop house abuts a field, indicating an area that soon will be planted with broccoli and Chinese cabbage and sorrel.

This day temperatures would climb over 70 degrees. The last blast of winter was already fading into memory.

The Truth about "Free Range" Eggs

I took my usual walk to the Dupont Circle farmers market on Sunday and was surprised to see that the West Virginia farm family from whom we buy eggs had dropped the price of a dozen 75 cents to $4.

"A sign of the times?" I asked the farm wife. I thought perhaps demand had fallen off because of the recession, nudging the price lower. She shook her head.

"Something like that," she said. "It really has to do more with the price of feed."

I just assumed she meant organic feed. Aren't all "free range" hens raised on organic feed? But again she shook her head. "Oh, these birds are all raised naturally out in our fields," she exclaimed. "No growth hormones. No antibiotics. But we don't use organic feed. Oh, no. The price would be way up here," and she raised her hand over her head to indicate a very tall price.

"So you just use the ordinary feed you get at the feed store?" I said.

"Yep," she said. "Just what they sell us at the local feed store."

I pondered that as I walked to the other end of the market, oggling the sweet potatoes and parsnips along the way. A little something about my understanding of natural farming had suddenly been cast in doubt. I wasn't sure what to make of it.

I came to the EcoFriendly food stall. EcoFriendly was an original partner with the famous Virginia grass farmer, Joel Salatin, and sells pasture-raised meats to the most exclusive restaurants in Washington. In fact, you could call EcoFriendly a darling of the hip chef set. They are now moving product into New York City. They drive a long way to showcase their beef, pork, lamb and chicken to the upscale crowd at Dupont Circle.

On the table next to a cooler full of chicken parts were displayed many dozens of eggs. They looked identical to the eggs from West Virginia, except they were in spanking new cellulose cartons with no store labels, not the recycled Styrofoam cartons so many egg farmers use. The price: $5.30 a dozen.

"Do you use organic feed?" I asked, seeking to find out why these eggs were so much more expensive than the ones I had just bought. The sales clerk looked stumped. She turned to one of her cohorts for an assist. "Do these chickens get organic feed?" she shouted over the din.

"The chickens are all raised naturally. No growth hormones. No antibiotics," the other clerk said, turning to look at me.

"Yes, but is the feed organic?" I pressed. "Because your eggs are $1.30 more a dozen than the eggs at the other end of the market. It seems the price of feed has dropped."

"Yes," he said. "It was a lot higher before, with all the ethanol...."

"So is your feed organic?" I asked again.

He looked at me hard. I thought I detected a little nod, meaning yes. But he didn't seem very sure. We locked eyes for a moment, but he added nothing more. I walked on.

Hmmmm. Price dropping on eggs from West Virginia because of a drop in cost of non-organic feed. Eggs much more expensive at swank meat emporium, feed undetermined. I was confused, but knew I had something new to consider in my egg shopping. Not only did I want my eggs coming from chickens raised naturally in the great outdoors, I wanted to feel comfortable about the way they were being fed. What's more important, being "free range" or eating organic feed? Did it matter?

I posed the question to our farmer friend Leigh Haughter who grows organic produce for 500 CSA subscribers on his farm in The Plains, Virginia. Leigh also raises chickens and sells egg shares. As he explained, it's very difficult to make a profit selling eggs. He doesn't use "organic" feed either. Not just because it's more expensive. It's not readily available in his area.

"I don't see how anyone really makes money out of eggs unless they are growing their own feed," Leigh said. " Which means having the land to raise the corn and other inputs into the feed. Chicken feed is where the profit is made."

He added that "free range" also is open to interpretation. His chickens don't actually roam around the farm. They're confined to a "tractor," or a pen built on wheels or a sled. The pen is typically surrounded with electrified fencing so the chickens have an area they can explore, pecking at the ground for insects and grass and grit. It's that outdoor foraging that raises the level of valuable omega-3 fatty acids in the eggs and gives the yolks a distinctively rich, orange color.

"Now a real organic, pastured chicken operation is costly in that first you are going to have to raise your own organic feed, and secondly you are going to have a lot of pasture," Leigh continued. "Chickens destroy pasture quickly, and if you aren't constantly moving them, they will turn wherever they are living into a bare, manure laden barnyard."

As it turns out, chicken feed typically is made locally from whatever grains are at hand--corn, soybeans, flax--and possibly rendered proteins from area slaughterhouses. Even other chickens, since chickens are omnivorous and don't think twice about eating their own kind.

So the question is more complicated than just feeding yourself from the local farmers market. It may be about supporting a local farmer, whether or not he is organically pure. But to do that you need to know more about the farmer. You need to ask a lot of questions. And you need to know what to make of the answers.

Being a locavore isn't always easy.

Note: We later contacted EcoFriendly foods and were told they don't advertise their eggs as "organic" and can't be sure what the chickens are fed because they come from "multiple producers" who are not required to use organic feed. You'll just have to guess why their eggs cost $1.30 more a dozen than the ones from a family farm in West Virginia.

Urban Chickens: D.C. Update

As promised, we have been making inquiries about whether it is legal to keep chickens in the District of Columbia. It seems we are not the only ones interested. Through our network of contacts, this portion of the D.C. Code surfaced:

Except as provided in this subsection, no person shall import into
the District, possess, display, offer for sale, trade, barter, exchange, or
adoption, or give as a household pet any living member of the animal kingdom including those born or raised in captivity, except the following:

domestic dogs (excluding hybrids with wolves, coyotes, or jackals),
domestic cats (excluding hybrids with ocelots or margays), domesticated rodents and rabbits, captive-bred species of common cage birds, nonpoisonous snakes, fish, and turtles, traditionally kept in the home for pleasure rather than for commercial purposes, and racing pigeons (when kept in compliance with permit requirements).

To clarify the issue of whether chickens might qualify as a "captive-bred species of common cage birds," a call was placed to D.C. Animal Control. The answer came back, No, chickens do not qualify. They are not permitted in the District of Columbia.

Obviously, something we need to change.

Urban Chickens

Oh, I do wish we were allowed to keep chickens here in the District of Columbia. I can't think of anything that would bring the nation's capitol more down to earth. Plus, we'd have the benefit of some of the most nutritious protein on the planet.

Sadly, chickens are not allowed in this city. But they are in others. You can raise chickens in Brooklyn, for instance, and on Staten Island. There's even a website called Backyard Chickens.com that will tell you everything you need to know about how to start your own flock.

Now comes a proposed ordinance in Missoula, Montana, that would permit raising chickens there and it has folks all stirred up on both sides. Here's a short film documenting the controversy.