While many people are stressed about the heat, we are keeping our chickens cool with some natural air conditioning. The heat index is well over 100F degrees. yet our girls aren’t even panting. How do we do it? Simple! We planted a grape arbor that provides shade along the north side of a privacy fence. The grapevine provides a space of dense shade that stays pretty cool, even on hot days. Though they have access to a much bigger area, this is where our girls collect on hot days.

On super-hot days, like today, we put a sprinkler on low, under the canopy of the grape vine. The result is total chicken luxury, even in the worst of weather.

Chickens in the picture from right to left: Josephine (grey-colored Australorp), Daphnie (bronze and brown Welsummer), Beatrice (buff-colored butt above and to the right of the sprinkler) and Bernadette (if you look really close, deep in the grape vine just above the sprinkler).

As this is our first winter with chickens there were a lot of things we did not know coming into the season. Would the watering system work? Would the newly installed plastic greenhouse surrounding the coop hold up in strong wind and cold? Would the water heater keep the chicken water from freezing? Would the LED lights we set on timers provide enough light to keep the chickens laying eggs through the winter? So many questions, and it was not that long ago that we didn't have the answers to any of them. But, now, at the end of January, we can answer them all pretty well.

Will the plastic greenhouse work out? Answer: Absolutely yes! We love this thing! We zip it up at night and open in the AM when we open or close the chicken coop (which is inside the greenhouse). We are using deep bedding on the floor and the chickens LOVE it in there. They can and do come out a lot. But when cold, rain or snow sets in, they migrate quickly to the greenhouse and seem to have plenty of room to root around and scratch and with multiple perching spots at different heights. They go into the coop to lay their eggs and come out to scratch around, eat or drink. When zipped up at night the greenhouse captures a bit of heat from the house. Combined with the complete elimination of wind inside the greenhouse the captured heat makes for a remarkably comfortable space.

We modified an inexpensive, plastic greenhouse kit by moving some poles and cutting a hole in one side so that we could set it up outside one of our back doors to our home. This allows us to enter the greenhouse from inside our house. This means that we can tend to the chickens without even putting a jacket on. Collecting eggs is literally just step outside the back door. It has also - so far - held up very well in some extreme winter wind. It is tucked up next to the house and surrounded by high fencing that keeps the strongest winds off of it.

Will the "chicken party lights" keep them laying all winter long? Absolutely!

As days get shorter and colder in MN, many chickens stop laying eggs. The day/night cycle and the reduction of protein in their diets (chickens eat a LOT of worms and other bugs in the spring, summer and fall that they can't eat in the winter) they stop producing eggs. To keep the chickens' cycles going, people add lighting systems and add more protein to their feed. Before winter set in, we added some very dim, low watt LED rope lighting in and around the coop. We put it on a timer and hoped it would be enough to keep our girls laying through the winter. We were not sure the LED would provide enough light. But, it has worked out very well. We collected 4 eggs today from our 5 girls. The birds that are laying are holding pretty steady at one egg per day with one day of "rest" per week.

Also: the chicken water is not freezing and most of the other concerns we had about keeping chickens in winter have disappeared. It is remarkable how resilient the hens are to the cold. But, boy do they hate the snow!

We are thrilled to introduce you to Josephine (the Blue Australorp hen on the right) and Daphne (the Welsummer on the left). They are newcomers to our flock as of yesterday. They are settling in well and already learning the ropes around here.

After having lost a couple of chickens to a fox this spring, we wanted to wait a bit to ensure new predator proofing was working. We have had no issues since and finally added these two.

Also: after some traveling over the summer, our bakery is back and baking again. Thanks and enjoy!

We frequently talk about how much our chickens help with our gardening. One example: Earlier this year, when the snow was melting and all of the leaves from last fall were starting to be uncovered as the snow receded, our hens got busy doing their favorite thing: Digging and scratching through the leaf litter to find morsels to eat. That is because leaf litter is itself a diverse and interesting ecosystem of rich material, much of which is natural, healthy food for chickens.

In a functioning forest ecosystem, all of that leaf litter gets broken down by the fungi and invertebrates. Ultimately, all of this material goes back into the soil where it again feeds the plants that dropped the leaves to begin with. It is a beautiful cycle in which there is never any waste. Everything is used. Everything has a purpose. It is a system that results in rich abundance.

Chickens evolved from forest birds that fill the role in a system like that. In effect, chickens are wired up to process leaf litter in the forest and turn it back into food for the trees and other plants. They eat what they can, turning it into rich fertilizer. What they do not eat, they break up and bury doing their natural scratching and pecking behavior.

We wish we had a fence that would allow our chickens to do this through our whole garden. Unfortunately, we don't. They only get to actively work in the back and side yards. For the front yard garden, we have taken to collecting the leaf litter and dumping it over the fence so the chickens can dig through that. Then, we take the resulting material and put it back out front when the chickens are done with it. (See video of chickens digging through a pile of leaf litter below.)

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/17f4b3_7fed800236b3481cafd93ac45dc93da2/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

This is one of their absolute favorite things to do. Even though they have a non-stop supply of organic, whole, natural food available in their feeder, as soon as we dump some leaf litter over the fence, the chickens come running and they get right to work. They will dig at the pile until it is pretty well worked into the top soil, the weeds and weed sprouts are all eaten, the top soil freshly loaded with all kinds of rich organic matter without a surviving weed in sight.

This is not only great for our gardening, it is wonderful for the chickens, and one of the reasons eggs from backyard chickens have so much more nutrition in them than store-bought eggs, including the following:

• Twice as much Omega-3 Fatty Acids

• Three times more Vitamin E

• Seven times more Beta-carotene from Vitamin A

• Fifty percent more Folic Acid

• One quarter LESS Saturated Fat

• One third LESS Cholesterol

• Up to six times more Vitamin D

• Significantly more B Vitamins

• Significantly more Antioxidants, like Lutein and others

It turns out that by taking better care of our chickens we end up taking better care of ourselves. This is a lesson we can (and should) learn to apply to more than chicken husbandry, because it helps us to understand and appreciate how connected we are to the natural world that is all around us.

The only marsupial found in the USA, the Opossum, is an interesting and relative newcomer to Minnesota. Back when we worked and volunteered at the Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic we would only rarely see them. The northern-most edge of their range was central Iowa. Occasionally, following a series of warm winters, their population would extend north of the Twin Cities, and we would see a few. But then a cold winter would come and their population would be frozen out, not to be seen again until the next warm stretch.

Since those days, due to climate change, Virginia Opossums (Didelphis virginiana) are now permanent residents here, which we find kind of delightful. For a brief time Mike worked as the Rehabilitation Manager at the HOWL Wildlife Center in Seattle, Washington, and we took in hundreds of Opossums there. We always found them unusually comical animals to be around. They have cute and funny personalities. Their giant, gaping mouths can make them look terrifying, but the fact that they almost never bite causes many wildlife professionals to classify them as harmless. In all of the countless Opossums we have handled we cannot recall one of them ever trying to bite, even when being captured. They will open their mouths and hiss or growl and put on a bit of a show. Or, they will go stiff and play dead ("playing opossum"). Other than getting into your garbage can at night, or eating some fruit or veggies out of the garden, that is about as much trouble as they usually cause, which is not a bad payment for the benefits they provide. (They eat a ton of garden pests and ticks, for example.)

As mid-winter has been settling in here, the neighborhood opossum have been taking a greater interest in our chicken coop. Because they are drawn to the straw we use for insulation and bedding as well as warmth and food that is always available there, we have seen a string of different opossum visitors recently.

Prior to having chickens the opossum would rarely come down into our yard. They were content to remain in the trees, or to walk along the top of the privacy fence to graze on grapes from the grape vines that grow on the fence on the south side of the house. A couple of times we needed to go rescue one the dogs had cornered. That usually was as simple as using a towel and a catch pole to lift them up to the top of the fence to safety. That has changed with the addition of chickens to the yard.

Reputable websites about opossum say they only "rarely" kill adult chickens. It is easy to understand why this is true. Opossum are not predators. They are very slow-moving and relatively defenseless. On the other hand chickens are relatively large, agile and pretty fast.

However, chickens do not see well in the dark and when hunkered down on a perch at night almost anything could walk right up and grab them. And, one thing opossum are very good at it is grabbing and holding onto things. A life of living in trees assures a solid grip. Also: while opossum are most certainly not hunters, they do love meat. It is understandable, therefore, that if the opportunity arose for one to grab hold of a sleeping chicken, they would likely take it. This is likely why credible sources avoid saying that opossum are of no risk to chickens and go out of their way to say they "rarely" kill them and not that they don't kill them.

That is all a long-winded way of saying that the conversation around keeping chickens around opossum is filled with important, and sometimes subtle, nuance and distinctions. Chickens that live 100% of their lives inside predator-proof enclosures are at zero risk from opossum. Ours, on the other hand, sleep inside a predator-proof coop but free-range our whole yard during the day, which would also not likely cause any issue with opossum, which are almost exclusively out and about after dark. A giant old oak tree canopies the yard where where our chickens live. It is ideal opossum habitat.

At our house we extend the chickens' awake hours by providing supplemental lighting in and around the coop in the evening hours. This helps keep their day/night cycles more steady and helps with their molting and egg production. It also creates a period of a couple of hours each evening where the chicken and opossum activity in the yard overlaps. We, therefore, consider the opossum to be of some potential risk to our chickens, though not a huge risk.

As a result of the increased risk to our chickens, due to the way we are keeping them, we recently posted a photo of one of our recent opossum visitors (who I actually caught building a nest right under our chicken coop) and sought input from other chicken keepers about what, if anything, we should do about it.

The post got some helpful conversation going. Among the helpful comments, however, were a shocking number of people screaming (sometimes in all caps with lots of exclamation points) "kill it." This was less surprising than it was saddening.

We've seen the behavior before. Whenever anyone posts questions about potential predators to chickens on these groups, like raccoon, fox or coyote, there is always a chorus of people who will scream, "kill it."

Admittedly, we are not chicken-keeping experts. Our first chickens are not even a year old yet. However, after working with wildlife for a few decades, there are some things we do know, like, for example, the fact that killing opossums that come into our yard will not stop other opossums from coming here. We also know that, as a prey species, opossum mothers regularly produce large litters of offspring.

Prey species, like opossum, produce a lot of offspring as their way of ensuring healthy populations in the face of predation. When one animal is killed, it simply leaves room in the ecosystem for another of the "surplus" offspring to survive. Even if we wanted to kill off the opossums in our yard (which we don't want to do) we would be unlikely to be able to. The number of offspring being produced by the animals in our yard, and our neighbors yards, and their neighbors' yards is pretty significant. Keeping opossum away from our chickens via lethal means, therefore, would require a community-wide extermination effort that would A) not be possible and B) would have profoundly negative consequences on our ecosystem.

People scream "kill it" as a solution to wildlife challenges, therefore, are exposing their ignorance of how nature works.

In the online chicken groups some of people who opposed using lethal means to try to manage our opossum concerns chastised those recommending death and instead recommended "humane" trapping and relocating. While those people no doubt had great intentions, they were equally as ill-informed as those whose knee-jerk reaction was to recommend death. Relocating animals is as ineffective as death. From a population perspective, there is no difference. Furthermore, studies on relocated animals show they have a very poor chance of survival being taken to a strange territory where they do not have food, water or shelter and where they need to compete with the resident population to try to acquire those things. Relocation is, therefore, often less humane than killing outright.

With our opossums we have chosen a different approach: We are teaching them that coming into our yard is not safe. They can stay in the trees and on the fence, but if they venture into the yard, on the ground, we catch them and give them a stern talking to. Then, we place them safely on the privacy fence, let our dogs bark at them for a few minutes and then leave them alone. In short, we are training our opossum to avoid our dogs and chickens and it seems to be working. None of the opossum we have caught have so far re-visited.

Whether or not this will work long-term we do not yet know. One thing we do know for sure is that humans are going to survive on this planet, we need to find ways of living with wildlife rather than giving into the mindbogglingly short-sighted and knee jerk reaction to simply kill anything that comes into our yards.

Opossums are here due to climate change. They are here because of us. We have been ignorantly and aggressively messing with the world around us for way too long. It is long past time to find a new way of coexisting and cooperating.

Whenever I share anything on social media about our chickens or their eggs, I invariably get yelled at by extremist vegans who ultimately accuse me of being "immoral" for raising backyard chickens so that we and our pets can eat their eggs. We are "exploiting" the chickens, I am told, "using" them. Doing so is morally reprehensible, they say.

Before getting into what these well-meaning folks get wrong, I will start by mentioning some very important things they get right, most importantly, the ways we produce food are killing the Earth and many of the living things on it. Huge swaths of the planet are devoted to mass-producing crops to feed animals that humans then eat in a system that is highly inefficient and destructive to the planet. Furthermore, the animals themselves are generally housed and cared for atrociously, creating a large-scale inhumane nightmare for the billions of animals trapped in that system. In short, the way we raise and eat animals for food is literally destroying the planet while causing immense suffering.

Unfortunately, when some people wake up to this reality, they take positions that are equally unhelpful and extreme and fail to recognize that some of the alternatives to animal products are equally or more devastating to animals and the Earth. Are vinyl, rubber and plastic humane alternatives to leather? Hardly! The numbers of animals killed through the extraction of natural resources consumed and the production and use of the chemicals involve these alternatives wreck havoc on entire ecosystems. It is also worth pointing out that conventionally grown produce is also devastating to animals that are wiped out when they or their habitats are sprayed with toxic herbicides, fertilizers and pesticides or their habitat is destroyed to make room for crops grown to feed humans.

In other words: What vegans generally get wrong is in suggesting that all animal products are harmful and the alternatives are not. The reality of both is somewhere in the middle. Meat that is raised sustainably and in cooperation with nature is likely less damaging to the Earth than vegetables grown as mass mono-culture with toxic chemicals. Most importantly: It is impossible to raise crops without either farm animals or toxic chemicals.

The biggest mistake human kind has made with our agriculture system has been separating animals from our produce by moving them onto large, factory farms. By doing so, we have broken the natural cycle of the Earth in which animals provide a key part of the foundation of nutrition for the plants. The plants, in turn, nourish the animals. It is a magical system that works beautifully if you let it. And, therein we find one of the best aspects of keeping backyard chickens. Chickens consume much of our kitchen waste, help control garden pests and provide rich, nutritious compost for our garden. Sure, the eggs are great. More importantly, they help us to complete the natural cycle of the Earth on our little plot of land. They help us to leave a lighter footprint, making life better for us and animals. They also help us to connect more closely to and appreciate the complexity of non-human life. On September 22, 2020 a groundbreaking documentary film titled "Kiss the Ground" will debut on Netflix. It will delve into this topic, along with other aspects of sustainable agriculture. Our Urban Farm will be helping to host a local online discussion following a watch party for the film on that day. More details will be coming soon.

We can learn to live more sustainably and in harmony with the planet. That can and should include being better stewards of the animals. But it cannot mean cutting them entirely out of our systems and our lives. They are vital parts of it. We literally cannot live without them. And, we should not try to.

As we are writing this, we are thinking of the oxygen-starved dead zones in our world's oceans. We are also thinking about the most delicious eggs we have ever eaten. Stick with us and we will explain how those two things are connected and why we really are what our animals eat.

First the Eggs

When we visited New Zealand several years ago, we were delighted by the numbers of people who kept small flocks of chickens to raise for eggs, even more so by the flavor, texture and color of the eggs! We were accustomed to the typical store-bought eggs we get here in the USA, where even the organic and free-range chicken eggs have thin shells and yellow yolks. The eggs we had in New Zealand, on the other hand, had thick shells, deep orange yolks and a LOT more flavor than the eggs we got here. It also turns out that the eggs we ate in New Zealand have better protein and fat, less cholesterol and more vitamins.

Oxygen-Starved Dead Zones and Animal Feed

Oxygen-starved dead zones are areas in the world's oceans that can no longer support life. When fish or other sea creatures drift or swim into them, they suffocate and die. Often, the bottom of the ocean in these dead zones is littered with the bodies of the victims. The largest dead zone now measures more than 27,000 square miles and they are growing. Large-scale agriculture is largely to blame for these areas of mass death. The overwhelming majority of the agricultural land in the USA is used to produce animal feed. A whopping 41% of the contiguous US is used to feed livestock. And, because agri-businesses like to maximize profits, they usually grow these animal feed crops cheaply, unsustainably, and using copious amounts of fossil fuel-based and toxic herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers. This is largely true of the produce we eat, too, which is one of the reasons we like to say that vegans who consume commercially grown, unsustainably farmed produce are killing more animals than they might like to know.

Lessons From Our Chickens

With all that in mind, our goal when we got our chickens was to try to recreate the delicious eggs we experienced in New Zealand, by raising our hens to be as care-free and happy as possible and by feeding them as healthfully and naturally as possible. With that in mind, when we first got our chicks we purchased an organic chick starter food. As new chicken owners, we had little experience with different feeds and we got what we were told was a good organic food. However, we were disappointed when we opened the bag and found that it consisted entirely of processed pellets.

Since we do not like food to go to waste, we fed it to the chicks and they ate it and have grown beautifully. Wanting to feed a food that, well, you know, actually looks like food, we began doing some more research and began reading chicken feed labels a bit more diligently. We decided we wanted a feed that was natural whole grains, that was also organic, GMO-free and that came from sustainable sources. We settled on one we really like. Even though our chicks did not need to switch off the starter food, and we still had quite a lot of it left, we decided to buy some of the new Scratch & Peck Grower, and we have been mixing it in with the original food we bought.

The difference is obvious: Our chickens are picking out and eating the new, natural food and leaving the old, processed stuff. So, even though it is a lot more expensive (really, a LOT more expensive) we figure our girls are worth it. So are we and so is the planet.

What we feed our chickens will change the eggs that we eat and will have an impact on the planet in either a positive or negative way. Based on their preference, our chickens seem to know that, too.