The turkeys in their barn pen, enjoying daylight and free access to pasture

I have written about building poultry pens in the 1940′s barn, converting what was left of stalls into poultry wire enclosed pens for the meat chickens, the turkeys, and a separate brooding room.  The brooding room is now home to 6 ducks and two geese.  The turkeys moved into their pen a week or so ago.

But yesterday, I mowed the pasture and set up the electric poultry netting fence as a perimeter for the birds to be safe (safer) from predators.  AT night, they can be secured in the barn pens.

Turkeys are interesting birds.  It’s not un common to read reports on the internet of them flying out of their fenced pens and into nearby trees to roost for the night, or to fly over a fence, only to then sqawk to be let back inside the confines with their turkey kin.  So as I opened the door to let them explore, I was prepared for nearly anything.

Pheasants, even at 4 weeks old, fly when released from their brooder box into the fly pen.  Some walk, some stay inside, but many take to the air.  The turkeys were slow to explore, preferring the known safety of their barn, but as they began to step out side, one of them took flight, down the length of the pen, over the fence and into the thick brush east of the barn.

Slowly, I backed out of the barn, walked around the barn and electrified fence, and began moving through the shoulder high weeds and brush in search of the eloped thanksgiving dinner.  To be honest, I had visions of each turkey “flying the coop” and taking both my  initial investment and future earnings with them as they took off for refuge in the habitat.

Electric poultry netting protects the birds from ground predators

What I found, when I found it, was a turkey who looked just as amazed that it could fly as I was.  I easily collected it out of the brush and returned it to the others in the pen.

All of which brought to mind the old television sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati.  If you don’t know the show, it featured Gordon Jump (later he became the Maytag Repairman in commercials) as a suit wearing radio station manager and a collection of misfits who worked at the radio station.  In one episode, they hatched a Thanksgiving promotion that included dropping live turkeys from a helicopter at a shopping center.  The radio news man, Les Nessman, reported on the ensuing carnage  of live turkeys crashing to the ground to their death and smashing car windshields and equated it to the Hindenburg disaster.

During the closing credits, the disheveled station manager Jump enters the office with all gathered around and utters probably the funniest poultry line in the history of television.

Although the rules governing organic food require health inspections and pest-management plans, organic certification technically has nothing to do with food safety.

via The ‘Organic’ Stamp – Does It Mean That Food Is Safer? – NYTimes.com.

Be sure to listen the “Backstory”  Multimedia audio link that accompanies this story.

When we decided to get ducks I could not have easily articulated my reason for wanting them. Now, I can: for breakfast this morning I fried two eggs over-easy that we had gathered only an hour before, and while I ate them I watched through the kitchen window as the ducks who laid them bathed contentedly (it seems to me) in their pool. That breakfast is what I wanted: good, rich, complex-tasting food from happy, healthy animals; a breakfast in context. I wanted to see the process of agriculture, from beginning to end; to participate in my own sustenance, but especially to know that it was made in a manner I believed to be right. It is not, on reflection, so much to ask. But that knowledge — intimate, personal, complete — is something I can’t get from a supermarket, no matter what standards my food meets, no matter how many agencies certify it with how many eco-labels. I wanted knowledge not labels; process, not product; stewardship, not standards.

Standards and Stewards | The New Agrarian.

While you are there, please read What’s a New Agrarian and this essay The Eightfold Agrarian Way

New Agrarianism, most importantly, is not about preserving a way of life or recreating the past; it is about building the future. These eight principles draw heavily on past expressions of agrarian thought, from ancient Greece to twentieth-century America, but they are not bound by them. Agrarians have few models but the past, and the past is valuable for the lessons it teaches, but each of us must live in the present and plan for the future.

The produce ranking was developed by analysts at the not-for-profit Environmental Working Group (EWG) based on the results of nearly 43,000 tests for pesticides on produce collected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration between 2000 and 2005.

The worst five:

and the best five:

Photo credit : Pamela Heywood (Secret Tenerife)