"The Joy of Keeping Chickens:
The Ultimate Guide to Raising Poultry for Fun or Profit"
By Jennifer Megyesi
Photography by Geoff Hansen
Skyhorse Publishing, 256 pp., $14.95
Keeping Chickens
Royalton Author Knows Her Poultry
By William Craig
For the Valley News
Conosco i miei polli, the old Italian saying goes, "I know my chickens."
Most folks used to, back in the day. Chickens used to be so much a part of our lives that chicken-derived wisdom — such as, "Don't count your chickens before they hatch," "Scarce as hen's teeth" and that barnyard koan, "Which came first...?" — wove its way into our understanding of the world.
Twentieth-century American lifestyles took most of us far from familiarity with fowl, but a medley of 21st-century concerns — including food safety, "green" ideals and the current economic debacle — have hatched a new generation of poultry enthusiasts. Hatcheries across the country report they can't breed chicks fast enough to meet demand. And all of us Americans hoping to eat well, do right and save money have one thing in common: We don't know as much about chickens as our great-grandparents did.
I keep chickens, and I can testify to both the fascination and the frustration of caring for what are surely God's most endearingly — and on occasion, irritatingly — stupid creatures.
If you've ever thought "I wish my dog could speak," imagine dealing with critters so dumb they make ol' Barky look like Rene Descartes. Why are the hens picking on each other? Why are their feathers falling out? What does it mean when they won't go back in the coop? Chickens don't seem to know why they do anything, and they sure can't explain themselves.
Luckily, Jennifer Megyesi knows her chickens. Want to understand the etiquette of introducing new pullets to your flock? Need help determining the right roost height? How can you tell which hens are broody? Just invest in a copy of Megyesi's The Joy of Keeping Chickens: The Ultimate Guide to Raising Poultry for Fun or Profit.
Megyesi, who with her husband, Kyle Jones, runs Fat Rooster Farm in Royalton, is the right chicken-book author for our times: A small-farm owner and veterinary technician, she's well informed and plenty practical. Can you make money with a small flock? Will your chickens pay for themselves? How can you keep hens happy and healthy without turning them into pets? She shares the straight answers, but she's also aware that animal husbandry is — or should be — more than just a matter of dollars and cents.
There are many ways and reasons to keep chickens, and The Joy of Keeping Chickens — with photographs by Valley News staffer Geoff Hansen — celebrates almost all of them. From backyard coop to small commercial operation, and from a few fresh eggs to show-winning exotic birds, Megyesi knows the methods and motivations. Her how-to prose is clear and compelling, and she has a real gift for organizing information.
But as her first chapter, Why Keep Chickens, makes clear, there is one type of chicken farming that Megyesi deplores, and that is the way the great majority of chickens live and die in today's commercial farming operations. She describes a chance encounter with a truck transporting hundreds of such hens to slaughter, a confrontation with the realities of factory farming: Confined to crowded cages, their beaks cut off to prevent cannibalism, their toenails grown up into hooks for lack of earth to scratch, factory hens are fed medicated feed by assembly line; their eggs roll onto another conveyor belt until their short, miserable lives are processed into canned soup.
After rescuing a chicken plucky enough to have escaped the death truck, Megyesi pledges "to stay aware of why I have decided that I must raise chickens. If I am to eat meat and eggs, then I need to take responsibility for caring for them in a humane manner, from start to finish."
These days, many Americans have learned that taking responsibility for what they eat has benefits beyond a clearer conscience and better-tasting food. Like gardening and hunting, raising chickens connects us to the earth, to our fellow creatures and the cycle of life, death and renewal.
Megyesi is a fine storyteller, and her practical advice on everything from plucking meat birds to diagnosing common diseases is leavened with artful narratives that make those connections clear.
Sitting up a night with a varmint gun to shoot whatever is preying on her chicks; remembering the wonder and confidence she and her sister found in the chore of collecting eggs; doing the calculus of feed cost to meat and eggs, making decisions to cull and butcher: the experiences Megyesi describes are all a lot richer than the routine of throwing another shrink-wrapped pack of frozen, antibiotic-laden factory meat into the shopping cart.
Real, rich experience may sometimes be bittersweet, but it's the stuff of wisdom — of lessons learned, of archetypes from Chicken Little to Chanticleer. And those who know their chickens know that the sweet, dumb clucks are a lot more likely to make us laugh than cry. They are, as the book's title promises, a source of joy. And you can trust this well-written, handsomely illustrated source: If you're raising chickens now, or are thinking of starting, Megyesi's book is the guide to get.
— Valley News, published March 28, 2008
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