Buckeye Chickens Thrive Through Coldest WI winter in 35 years

Our Buckeyes performed admirably through the coldest winter in SW Wisconsin in 35 years. Their set-up was a 12x20 structure with 3 walls and a roof and a partially closed off fourth wall. I put their mobile coop (which they use for sleeping and laying) inside on the West edge of the structure behind where the fourth wall was closed off - thus they were out of the wind. We attached our electric poultry netting to either side of the coop giving the birds just over 1/8 acre to roam. They also shared the coop with 7 turkeys and a dozen small wild birds.

I turned on the heat lamp if temps got below -5 F but it wasn't necessary - I did it mainly to keep egg production up. We had a day where the air temp topped out at -11 F and the wind chill was -30 or colder throughout the day and they had no problem with that (though they did look quite cold). I think having a 'coop within a coop' effectively limited wind while still allowing plenty of air to move through their structures - both the larger coop and the mobile coop are always open. Generally speaking, not much snow got in to the coop even though there was a 12 foot opening in the South wall - I think the wind had to be just right to push snow into the building - usually it drifted up about 2-3 feet south of the structure.

Toward the end of the winter (late Feb) we started to have an egg eating problem and one of the sex linked blacks got hen pecked pretty badly (she is missing feathers along her backside). I put this down mainly to stress. We had so much snow that they were pretty cooped up - they had open access but the snow drifts got up to five feet just a couple feet from their coop, effectively limiting their access to just the coop.

Successes:

1. 21 chickens and 7 turkeys survive coldest winter in 35 years with little auxiliary heating.
2. Coop was open on the South side, letting the sun into the coop.
3. Limiting wind and providing a place with no wind (coop within the coop) was an important element of the success in my opinion.
4. I used deep litter method - just throwing hay down on top of all the shit and detritus that would build up. I also threw fresh hay down on top of snow on the rare occasion that significant snow got into the coop (I think only once). I used a 3 day thaw in January as an opportunity to clean out the litter and start them on fresh stuff. It would have been impractical to try to clean out the litter more often as it was frozen in place.

Failures:

1. Snow drifts caused a big problem - it limited the flocks access to forage and space. I think next winter we might try to either cut down the flock going into winter or put them in a bigger space. Then again it is not likely we have another winter as bad as this one for a while.
2. Snow drifts and the depth of the snow also made the poultry netting ineffective for the latter half of winter. I tried digging the fence out of the drifts a few times but it became totally impractical to keep up with it, in addition to all the other shoveling I was doing. Luckily, it seems all the predators were deep in sleep during this time. I am currently quite nervous because temps have warmed but the drifts are still over the fence in several places (as of March 11).
3. Egg eating in the second half of winter. To deal with the egg eating problem, I constructed a nesting box from a five gallon bucket (click link for an example image) and attached it to our mobile coop. I will construct another one once we get some melt - all my other 5 gallon buckets are under several feet of snow still. The idea here is to just get the eggs out of high traffic area - out of sight out of mind - since I believe they are eating the eggs mainly out of boredom.

Other Notes:

1. All livestock eat a TON during super cold winters - poultry are no exception so we went through a lot of feed. A LOT of feed.
2. I don't really like the fact that wild birds are in the same structure as our poultry, mainly because of the risk of disease. Not sure what to do about this or how big a risk it really is.

Sexing Chickens - final count

As an update to my posts on our chickens from last year, I wanted to report on the final count of pullets and cockerels. We had 3 chickens die - 1 on the second day, and 2 from heat exhaustion in July (human error really). Of the remaining 23, 15 were pullets and 8 were cockerels - so we got lucky in the sense that we mainly wanted egg layers. We've also picked up 4 black sex linked hens. We ate 6 of the roosters and have 2 remaining, so our current flock is 19 hens and 2 roosters.

Cold Winter, Spring Plantings, Bayesian Inversion

Winter may be going out with a bang, but that hasn't stopped us from our first spring planting. The next seven days are all forecast to be more than 20 degrees below average, and Thursday Feb 27 is forecast to have a record low of -20 F. This will easily be the coldest winter since 1979 in Southern Wisconsin, and could well have been the coldest winter since 1935 or even 1901. I'm not sure how much of a "heat island" effect the city of Madison has - I know the temperatures at my house would qualify as the coldest winter since 1901 in Madison, but we've averaged about 1.5 degrees lower than the official site in Madison.

Anyway...as winter winds down we've germinated our first seeds - Datil peppers which is an exceptionally hot pepper - a variety  of the species Capsicum chinense.  From the reading I've done online, Capsicum Chinense varieties of hot peppers have an exceptionally long germination periods (12-25 days). Thus it was with some surprise that I noted more than 25% of the seeds had germinated on day 5. An additional 25% germinated on day 6 - I was going to be happy with 25% total germination in 25 days! For anyone interested, I used the "wet paper towel in a baggie" method and kept the baggie behind my wood stove laying on the bricks. I did go to the trouble of finding a place where the temperature varied between 65 and 90 degrees - most of the day it is between 75 and 85 on the bricks, and it cools down below 70 for only a few hours in the early mornings each day.

I've now transplanted all the seeds into wet soil, and they will remain on the bricks, covered by saran wrap until the first shoots break the soil. Then I will move them under a grow light where they will remain until late May.

Since we bought many of our seeds from a place with mixed reputation this year, I might try the paper towel method on a wide variety of seeds just to see whether I need to re-order any seeds. This is where a Bayesian Inversion spreadsheet would come in handy! If I only need to be 95% sure that 35% or more of the seeds will germinate, than I can do a trial on just two seeds - if they both germinate, I can be 95% sure that 36.8% or more of the seeds will germinate. Likewise if 3 of 4 germinate I can be similarly confident of a 34%+ germination rate, and even 3 of 5 gives me 95% confidence that 27%+ will germinate.

Update on lake ice...

Lake Wingra froze on November 27th according to the UW AOS website. We went down there on the 28th and the ice near the shore was about 1.5 inches thick but it was gorgeous - clear, dense, and flawless - perfect for skating. Probably strong enough for a dog but definitely not for a human. Now I'm just hoping the snow holds off until the ice gets thick enough to go skating on; since we have another arctic front moving in late this week it could be as earlier as Saturday or Sunday.

As far as Monona and Mendota ice, I'm moving my best estimates back a few days: December 7th to December 12th for Monona and December 13th to December 31st for Mendota. My best guesses for the two lakes are December 8th and December 17th.

Predicting Madison Lake Ice 2013

I made a model to predict when the lakes in Madison, WI would freeze this year. This could be an interesting calculation, particularly if you like ice fishing or ice skating:)

Given current temperatures and weather forecasts I predict Lake Wingra to freeze sometime next week, between Saturday, November 23rd and Thanksgiving (Nov 28th). My range of uncertainty is much greater for Monona (Dec 8- Dec 25th) and for lake Mendota (Dec 15-Jan 11th). My best guess for the three lakes are 11/24, 12/13, and 12/23 respectively.

You can see surface temps of lakes here: http://www.infosyahara.org/

I built the model quickly so my level of confidence is therefore low but it I am pretty confident we can be out fishing about 20 days sooner than last year - freeze dates last year were 12/21, 12/31. and 1/14. I think this years dates will be closer to long term averages.

Figure 1: Red Line - surface water temp, 2013, Blue Line - surface water temp, 2012. Approximations done with calculations based on air temps, not observations.

Lakes act as a thermal mass, and the larger (primarily deeper) the lake the more cold it will require to freeze. Actually it is probably more accurate to think of the lake as heating the air, then the air cooling the lake - but I guess that's more of a philosophical point. In one extreme, a body of water will freeze almost immediately (think of a puddle or a film of water on a cold surface) so a few hours with air temperatures marginally below freezing will suffice. On the other extreme, a large enough body of water in a region where the average annual temperature is above zero would never freeze. Lake Michigan and Lake Superior are examples although even these large bodies of water will freeze on cold years.

The freezing process can be thought of in three phases - the whole lake cooling to 39 degrees, the surface cooling to 32 degrees, and the surface fusion. Cooling only takes about 1.2 % of the energy of fusion (1:80) but the cooling process down to 39 degrees cools the entire lake while the fusion process just freezes the surface. This is because water is most dense at around 39 degrees and so water from the surface of the lake will displace deeper water until the whole lake is at 39 degrees. Thereafter, it is a quick trip down to 32 degrees, and then takes a relatively long time to freeze (fusion).

For deep lakes therefore, the warmth of the summer is an important consideration since it will take longer to get down to 39 degrees. The three Madison lakes are relatively shallow (9 feet, 27 feet, and 41 feet) so the consideration is not great.

Relieving Suffering, Utility Curves of the Rich, and Resource Constraints

There are several concepts in here that I'd like to develop into full-blown posts - I think they are relevant to macro-economic decisions and decisions on the environment and future of humanity. They could also be cast from a "How to Measure Anything" perspective (for example, there might be some common determinants for whether someone is likely to become rich).

The possibility of a low or negative time discount rate could be the most important conceptual problem that we currently face. The implication of a real negative rate but a working real positive rate would be a mis-allocation of resources on a global scale that would result in a major die-off in humans - a sort of Malthusian moment. A negative real interest rate is a conceptual problem because humans are biased toward valuing the present over the future. A self-imposed negative personal discount rate is likely impossible - but we can probably achieve a synthetic negative personal time discount rate by demonstrating that future suffering will be greatly alleviated with low cost decisions made in the present.

Why do we prefer a $ now to a $ in the future?

1.       1) Because there are things I’d like to do with the $ now that will produce a stream of benefits – if I had the  dollar now as opposed to $ a year from now, there would be a year longer of benefits to enjoy.

2.      2) The younger I am, the more acute my senses and so the greater the sense of enjoyment I get.

3.       3)There is a chance I will die before the benefits would come.

If I die, then does the value of a $ drop to zero? Well I think we can safely assume somebody else would receive that $ instead of me – it would come from somewhere so either the entity giving it to me or one of my heirs would receive the $ instead of me, so the value of the dollar doesn’t drop to zero, but it becomes a little bit hard to conceptualize.

So we go from something easy to conceptualize (a $ now versus a $ one year from now) to something difficult to conceptualize ($ now versus $ benefit to the human race/my progeny in the distant future). It might be a little easier to conceptualize if we think of the enjoyment we get from $1,000 – so it would $1,000’s worth of utility now versus $1,000 worth of utility in the future. We could also translate it into some real object – say 10 barrels of oil or 300 gallons of gasoline.

And we might be able to get a sense of utility curves related to after death by asking questions about utility going anonymously to strangers: if nobody was aware of your decision would you rather give $1,000 worth of benefit to 10 strangers or get $1,000 of benefit yourself? What about 100 strangers? What about 1,000 strangers? What about 10,000 strangers? 5 billion strangers? Keep in mind that the $1,000 would probably mean the difference between life and death for some of these strangers.

Additionally we can get some idea of how much people care about giving money to their progeny by comparing $1,000 benefit to self versus $x benefit to children…$x benefit to grandkids…$x benefit to niece/nephew…$ benefit to niece/nephew’s children?

Children = 50% genetic relationship…grandkids = 25% genetic relationship….niece/nephew = 0-50%, BE 25% genetic relationship…niece/nephew kids = 0-25% BE 12.5% genetic relationship

Another interesting experiment would be to see how people changed these answers depending on their perception of who was receiving the $. Are they relieving suffering? Are they increasing suffering? If you give the $1,000 to a self-absorbed consumer addict or a meth addict could you actually be increasing suffering?

And thus I think we arrive at a bit of a problem – there are individuals (self-absorbed consumerist or meth addict) who perhaps increase their suffering by having more resources but who are also the least likely to perceive a value in giving their resources to others who might decrease their suffering with it.

Also, the choice of people to give anonymously to those who are suffering would be surprising unless you consider that people are incorporating how much suffering they are relieving – that is the utility of the recipient into their decision.

One other interesting thought – the rich are often those who can delay gratification, usually through a combination of a lack of consumption and an ability to work hard (i.e. do unpleasant tasks in the present). These are the same people who (generally speaking) would be most likely to intelligently marshal resources, or put another way their marginal propensity to save is high – that is the poor are often those who would immediately increase consumption. In a resource constrained world, a large increase in real spending power for the masses is simply a physical impossibility. 

How (not) to Catch Roosters - running to exhaustion

Well...today is the day we are thinning our chicken flock. We wound up with 8 roosters and 17 hens, and that is about 5 times too many roosters. The roosters had already isolated and terrorized one of their own - a rooster we nicknamed "freedom ranger" as he would hop the electric fence to avoid the other roosters. Poor guy. He also sealed his fate by biting my finger three times - alas because I was kind of fond of the guy. So freedom ranger was the first bird in the cage - partially to keep him from being terrorized by the other roosters, and partially to save our garden since he was happily pecking through our tomato and cucumber crops in his escapades outside the electric fence.

We figured we had to thin an additional 5 roosters, since leaving more than 2 roosters would be cruel to the hens (Rooster = middle school boy, but with unlimited sex drive). So we started noting which roosters gave us attitude (dragging feathers, doing the rooster dance toward us, or mating a hen directly in front of us) and which roosters were good shepherds to the hen - one good shepherd in particular stood out. It is hard to mark a rooster though because you have to catch it and these roosters are fast (note that they are well known for their mousing abilities). So it is really akin to trying to catch a cat on a 1/8 acre course. So, well, we only got paint on one of the remaining 7 - a particularly offensive and aggressive rooster.

We decided we would shut the chickens up in their mobile coop/roost last night and that would make it easier to get the roosters in the morning. So the big morning arrived and we trooped down there as a family to catch the remaining roosters. Unfortunately, we only were able to get 2 of the remaining 7 roosters coming out of their house! Somehow 5 roosters managed to get by 2 humans even though the opening from the coop is only about 18'' by 24''. So this meant we still needed to catch 3 more roosters.

Catching the remaining 3 roosters was a challenge - and among the three we wanted to catch was the attitude laden chicken, Mr. paint tail, who was essentially an Olympic chicken athlete. We struggled for 30-45 minutes chasing the chickens in vain as our kids got increasingly bored and agitated. Finally, I remembered that an essential strategy that humans have historically used with game including big game like deer was to run them to exhaustion. So, picking one rooster I began to focus on just keeping him running for as long as I could. It worked! After 5-6 minutes he cornered himself, exhausted, under our turkey box. In the process I had exhausted myself, but we now had a working strategy. Emily and I then tag-teamed the remaining 2 roosters - taking 1 minute turns keeping the chosen rooster running. Invariably they would become exhausted in 3-6 minutes, although mr. green tail was truly impressive in both his speed and stamina.

So, I think this is really how not to catch roosters. The only advantage this strategy had was that it allowed us to interact with the roosters and pick the best behaved ones - but next time I think I'll just catch them at night when they are sleepy.