Food, Companions, Buffoons, Soil fertility-cycle jump starters, Farm fillers, Compost makers, Garden tools, Guinea pigs, Friends.
Chickens yield so much life in so many unexpected areas.
I can confirm that getting a few hens going and tying them ever more closely to your growings is a marvelous combined first and second step. In fact, it's almost another reworking of the great chicken and egg quandry. Plant life depends on soil life depends on animal life depends on human life which depends on plant life.
Anyway, in praise of the humble yardbird, and for other cottage agriculture seekers here's why. Later posts will give a description and some ideas as to the how.
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Before we'd had our first egg "the girls" had more than earned their keep. (but that first meal of fresh scrambled eggs was awfully good)Humans need to eat. They could get everything they need by foraging and by growing - harvesting - cooking -eating - and digesting vegetable crops. But because of the relatively modest calorie, protein, and essential-fat content of vegetable matter they'd have to be eating machines.. Think all-day, everyday.
Instead, we've hired animals to be our eating-machines, turning a fulltime job into a much richer part-time one. Think of animals as mobile funnels concentrating and in some ways improving the chemical energy that once was solar energy.
Now, of all the different animal helpers, the chicken is not only (arguably) the best, but (easily) the easiest to get started with. Henrietta weighs seven or eight pounds, takes up a square foot at most, and every ~26 hours proudly cackles as she brings a single, manageably packaged, easily and versatilely cooked, perfectly digestible, eminently storable, source of concentrated energy. The egg.
At the end of her healthy life (after providing her own replacement) she becomes either a part of the farm directly or (supposedly) the most wonderful broth, the oldest and best cure for the common cold.
Henrietta, of course, has a brother, his name is Sunday dinner.
Companions come in all sizes..
Working a hostile patch of dirt into any kind of a living is hard, and often, lonely work. The solitude is, at times, beautiful, and there's no substitute for another human, but a few chickens are the next best thing. There's a saying that a dog grovels and looks up at you, and that a cat sneers to look down on you, but that a pig (atleast I think it was a pig) looks you right in the eye as a peer. I'm not sure I'm cofmortable with potential pig peerage, but a chicken comfortably will stand shoulder to shoulder (or atleast, toe to ..er.. toe) with us.
Chickens are lively, curious, often friendly, self-sufficient creatures who'll come and go at your feet or skip off pursuing their own interests (if you free-range them) They fill up their pen like your own self-contained soap opera. (Like almost all semi-social animals, chicken flocks are a microcosm of human life, with all of the hijinks, little of the hysteria, and twice the humor..)
Buffoonery on parade
Their liveliness and curiousity is not to be confused with intelligence. At least, not by anyone save the chicken, (whose stateliness and self assurance (and yes they do seem to think they possess these) somehow survive a thousand hapless encounters with the banana peels of life.
There's a flipside of course, if you let a part of their repetitive antics under your skin they're noisy smelly stupid and troublesome. Like everything there's a glass is half-empty side to them. It's just that being nearly brainless and yet richly endowed with personality the bias is much more towards the cup overflowing - with humor.
Soil fertility-cycle jump starters
Chickens need to eat too. Nearly everyone starts their chickens with a vision of them scratching a living in their backyard - happy, maintenance free, carefree, and healthy. But no one has a backyard that can do this. At first..
There's a learning curve with chickens, like everything else. One of the biggest things that makes chickens the easiest and most bang for buck animals to start your microfarm are the result of that learning curve.. To mix two mechanical images into a useful metaphor, the training wheels for chickens as they are being used are repairing, cranking, fueling, and supercharging a trusty old seized-up engine back to life. (This is probably the biggest and least subjective aspect of how chickens dovetail so perfectly with the life of a small family farm. As such it will probably rate it's own soliloquy soonest.)
Farm fillers