Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[BDutch]

Hmm. Well, in today's Tropical Chickies episode of "Bad things the so-called First World does to the Global South" -- you may be interested to know that post industrialized wealthy countries export millions of metric tonnes of plastic waste to developing countries, much of it illegally.

https://grist.org/equity/rich-count...o-the-developing-world-as-previously-thought/

Of course, a lot of it ends up in the ocean and other completely inappropriate places. However, some plucky people in the Global South are finding very good uses for it. In India, companies are recycling it into affordable shoes. Here in Ecuador, construction material companies are manufacturing "eco wood" by hyper compressing plastic trash into very dense and strong boards, vigas, columns, flooring, "tiles" etc. My partner and I just invested a bit of money in some for building a water tower, and it's great stuff. Anything built with wood in a tropical rainforest is a termite/mite/wasp/ant hotel unless constantly treated with chemicals -- and even then, they get in. Not to mention toxic molds and mildews. Bamboo does better and can be treated with lime or boric acid, which are better choices environmentally. But I'm all about using the plastic waste stream and this "eco wood" is really strong and durable. So... It depends on the plastic.

I love my earthbags/cob coop but I'm definitely planning to build another coop with the eco wood. And quickly too, with these baby roos growing fast.

Besides, what we call wood is really trees. And more of them need to stay in the ground.
View attachment 3536905
^"eco wood" made from compressed plastic trash

If you cut trees to build somethings that will last for a longer period than it needs to grow. Then using wood it not bad for the environment at all. This way it can diminish the greenhouse gasses if you plant new trees. .

Making new plastic is always bad for the environment, because its also a byproduct for the gasoline fuels. Using the waste for building things that last a long time, is good thing though.

There is a lot of greenwashing going on in recycling plastic. Especially the ones that claim they are made with ocean plastic. The trendy ocean plastic handbags are 100 % marketing strategy and 0 % ocean plastic. It just partly recycled plastic from recycling stations. In an interview with a critical reporter they claimed that they prevent it to becoming ocean plastic and they label it as ocean plastic because of that. Recycling ocean plastic is way more costly than recycling plastic from waste stations.

Source: broadcasted on our national TV: Keuringsdienst van waarde: Plastic, dinsdag 16 mei om 20.35 uur bij KRO-NCRV op NPO 1.

 

[BDutch]

That is interesting. It doesn't differentiate between new and recycled (eg on the sheet metals).
I was surprised by concrete which I thought had a much greater CO2 footprint.
I don't see the kind of recycled plastic we are talking about on there unfortunately.
I would love to see a more comprehensive analysis covering total environmental impact.

My husband’s work has to do with life cycle analysis (LCA). And the impact on the environment for the building industry. This is so complex. Its not possible to make a one size fits all.

Recycled plastic is probably too complex/different too to analyse it as a material group. It can be done for one product in one factory. But not for the plastic recycling industry as a whole.
I do hope we get more info soon on the environmental impact of reused plastics. For the time being: reuse is a way better than using new plastic.

 

[BDutch]

I'm totally a beginner at this, I'm watching a broody hatch for the second time, but I do have a sweet anecdote that I think I already wrote about here. In November 2021 I got my first roo, Théo, when we helped an old farmer friend Gaston rake his stables. He handed me a cute little cockerel in a basket so I couldn't refuse. Turns out our ex-batts are going to murder the little thing : he was only three or four months old, a cross bantam, and the first stranger chicken they had ever seen. The next day Gaston turns up at our place with a lovely little bantam, feet tied, saying she's company for Théo. He tells me with a smile "she's a bit feral, but she'll calm down once you let her hatch and raise chicks". We quickly understood he had found a good way to get rid of the trouble child because she raised hell with the other chickens and kept getting herself in trouble. The first day she was there she flew out of her isolation pen, attacked the ex-batts, then flew away and disappeared !
Anyway, six months later we let her sit even though she was the most hated feral hen of the flock, and he was right, she did change. She was the sweetest mama and she kept coming asking food for her chicks. And it lasted after she finished with them. She did not became a lap chicken, we still can not catch her, but we can hand feed her, call her by her name, and get her to go inside the run if we need to.
My partner gives her a piece of banana every morning from his breakfast and she runs to him and calls for him when he forgets.

Tax from the past : broody Chipie last summer.
View attachment 3537296
View attachment 3537292
View attachment 3537294

You are too kind for you neighbour taking over his chicken problems. They were no gifts imho. It was a gift from you to him to take over his trouble makers.

 

[Shadrach]

Or put a custom watermark.
They don't sell those phones here in the US so I have never had the chance to mess with one.
Shad is going to go after me for tax. Maybe my VAIO will appease him.

No it won't. I've got one so I know it's not a chicken!

 

[Ladies-Eight]

Ex Batts good morning one and all!

I have a wooden coop and I love it.

I live in an area that is very hot with high humidity.

Temperature is in the 70s.

Have a great day!

 

[saysfaa]

there are many different types of plastic - as there are different types of wood. Sweeping generalizations serve no one well.

^^ This. I couldn't see how plastic could be better than wood, despite being able to see some wood options are much better than others (type of wood, where it comes from, and such). I can now see plastic can be better in some situations.

How are the mites in your wooden ones? What preservative do you use on it? Have the rats eaten it? I could go on.

No mites. No insects that I didn't carry in to feed the chickens other than:

• a few paper wasps try to build nests sometimes (3 so far). I would leave them but dh's family is deathly allergic to bee and wasp stings so he is phobic about them.
• a half dozen flies, maybe
• A few pantry moth larva in one partial bag of feed that I forgot about long enough for them to hatch. The chickens were happy to clean them up before they matured.

No chemicals other than direct shots of Raid into the wasp nests. If I see any more, I will take them down without chemicals before he sees them.

The only preservatives are treated wood for the three skids under the shed. And paint on most of it.

We just don't have the insect issues some other climates have. Wood will eventually rot if left alone enough years.

No rats. We get field mice in the garage in the winter but have had no rodents in the shed.

One ground squirrel per winter has made a stash of walnuts under the shed. I like watching him so have let him so far. He hasn't tried to chew into the shed. The first year, he made a shallow hollow but last winter he deepened it nearly as deep as the bottom of the cement blocks the skids rest on. So, I will lay the mesh apron before the walnuts ripen this year.

The wood is local except, maybe, for the three skids. My dad had loggers in to harvest the mature trees from two of the ten acre woodlots about every ten years. The young trees then have room to grow.

My dad also planted pines in plantations. These were thinning every ten years or so - usually the loggers took every third tree.

These two practices are how logging is done in this region most of the time. About half of the land in this region (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan) is timberland - not counting the forested parts that are not timberland.

Neither are remotely like clearing rainforest. Or managing trees in the UK, either, from the little I think I understand.

The third ten acre woodlot was never logged because my mother loved to look at it as it was. It was a mix of pine plantation and maples on hills that she could see from the kitchen sink. It stayed beautiful for at least sixty years. About twenty years ago, I tried to tell them that the pines in it needed to be logged; they were starting to die (that is when I found out why they had never logged it.) It is now about half dead - some standing dead trees and some fallen. It is a fire risk the way it is now - a bit of a sore point with all the smoke drifting across the region from Canada these days.

I took these pictures of the woodlot my mother loved in the early spring so it looks a little more dead than it is.

 

[saysfaa]

Taxes

 

[TropicalChickies]

If you cut trees to build somethings that will last for a longer period than it needs to grow. Then using wood it not bad for the environment at all. This way it can diminish the greenhouse gasses if you plant new trees. .

This is a completely false notion: "you can diminish greenhouse gasses if you plant new trees" naively believed by many people. This is an area where I am extremely well-informed from over seven years of both academic study and direct experience of living in a highly degraded forest. So please regard what I relate here as supported by ample evidence and simply what "I choose to believe "

Newly planted saplings cannot even begin to compare to a fully grown tree in regards to carbon capture, temperature and humidity regulation, evapotranspiration, soil formation, fungi interaction, and wildlife habitat -- to name only a handful of ecological functions performed by a full grown tree.

For just one example, a mature tree transpires about 10,000 liters of water per day. This means the tree draws water up from the ground through its roots, pumps the water upward via organs in the trunk, uses a small portion of it to perform photosynthesis, and "exhales" the rest through its leaves as vapor. This is why there is a cloud of mist overhanging a forest. This vapor rises to form clouds (along with important bacterias the tree also releases that allow the vapor to nucleate) which eventually fall as rain. Some of these clouds travel thousands of kilometers before falling as rain. Forests in one part of the globe feed rain to places in others. Droughts and wildfires in the Canadian plains are therefore a result of A.mazon destruction. Scorching heat and lack of rain in Europe is linked to deforestation in the Congo. See this excellent Foresight Brief for more:
https://www.unep.org/resources/emer...s-and-water-cool-climate-and-rehydrate-earths

How much carbon a tree stores is a direct relationship to its maturity and size. Cutting down a mature tree doesn't only mean the tree is no longer a carbon storehouse. The very act of cutting down the tree releases that carbon into the atmosphere. A tree is biomass. Biomass is carbon. When the biomass is cut and dies, the carbon is released. A forest felled for lumber isn't just a devastated ecosystem; it's a pollution and global warming source.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2214462120

Perhaps you don't know just how bad the global deforestation situation is, particularly in the tropics. It's really really bad.



To get to this point where they become full grown rainmakers and carbon stores, it takes at least thirty years for trees to mature. Right now, deforestation is occurring at a rate of about two soccer fields PER MINUTE. Billions of mature trees will be felled at this rate before even a tiny fraction of them can be "replaced"
https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation

Speaking of greenwash, this notion you put forward is precisely the justification large multinational corporations like Nestle, Cargill, etc use to justify the deforestation they cause: the claim that they "support" tree planting elsewhere. But the tree planting they support is done on monoculture tree farms, not diverse forests.

https://logic-bespoke.com/secondary_growth_timber_vs_old_growth_timber/

Wood for lumber and pulp mostly comes from these monoculture tree farms. A tree farm -- with identical trees evenly spaced does not form soil, fungal networks, or shelter biodiversity in any way comparable to a real forest.

I could go on and on with this. My point is, the idea is not true and is a greenwashing in itself.

You've stated a preference for wood. That plastic is not your thing. That's fine. Everyone has preferences. But let's not justify an aesthetic or personal preference by helping corporations responsible for ecocide to commit their crimes.

And in no way do I support making new plastic. At the rate we're going, humans will drown in plastic on treeless wastelands. There is more than enough existing plastic in the so called waste stream to build a deluxe coops for the billions of chickens on the planet already.

 

[TropicalChickies]

I'm totally a beginner at this, I'm watching a broody hatch for the second time, but I do have a sweet anecdote that I think I already wrote about here. In November 2021 I got my first roo, Théo, when we helped an old farmer friend Gaston rake his stables. He handed me a cute little cockerel in a basket so I couldn't refuse. Turns out our ex-batts are going to murder the little thing : he was only three or four months old, a cross bantam, and the first stranger chicken they had ever seen. The next day Gaston turns up at our place with a lovely little bantam, feet tied, saying she's company for Théo. He tells me with a smile "she's a bit feral, but she'll calm down once you let her hatch and raise chicks". We quickly understood he had found a good way to get rid of the trouble child because she raised hell with the other chickens and kept getting herself in trouble. The first day she was there she flew out of her isolation pen, attacked the ex-batts, then flew away and disappeared !
Anyway, six months later we let her sit even though she was the most hated feral hen of the flock, and he was right, she did change. She was the sweetest mama and she kept coming asking food for her chicks. And it lasted after she finished with them. She did not became a lap chicken, we still can not catch her, but we can hand feed her, call her by her name, and get her to go inside the run if we need to.
My partner gives her a piece of banana every morning from his breakfast and she runs to him and calls for him when he forgets.

Tax from the past : broody Chipie last summer.
View attachment 3537296
View attachment 3537292
View attachment 3537294

That is a really sweet story, and thank you for sharing it. It helped to put a smile back on my face. I'm very interested to see if Tina, or perhaps Patucha, can step into the "flock pacifier" role, because with Cleo not here I'm without a true senior hen and it's pretty chaotic out there all of a sudden...

 

[TropicalChickies]

^^ This. I couldn't see how plastic could be better than wood, despite being able to see some wood options are much better than others (type of wood, where it comes from, and such). I can now see plastic can be better in some situations.

No mites. No insects that I didn't carry in to feed the chickens other than:

• a few paper wasps try to build nests sometimes (3 so far). I would leave them but dh's family is deathly allergic to bee and wasp stings so he is phobic about them.
• a half dozen flies, maybe
• A few pantry moth larva in one partial bag of feed that I forgot about long enough for them to hatch. The chickens were happy to clean them up before they matured.

No chemicals other than direct shots of Raid into the wasp nests. If I see any more, I will take them down without chemicals before he sees them.

The only preservatives are treated wood for the three skids under the shed. And paint on most of it.

We just don't have the insect issues some other climates have. Wood will eventually rot if left alone enough years.

No rats. We get field mice in the garage in the winter but have had no rodents in the shed.

One ground squirrel per winter has made a stash of walnuts under the shed. I like watching him so have let him so far. He hasn't tried to chew into the shed. The first year, he made a shallow hollow but last winter he deepened it nearly as deep as the bottom of the cement blocks the skids rest on. So, I will lay the mesh apron before the walnuts ripen this year.

The wood is local except, maybe, for the three skids. My dad had loggers in to harvest the mature trees from two of the ten acre woodlots about every ten years. The young trees then have room to grow.

My dad also planted pines in plantations. These were thinning every ten years or so - usually the loggers took every third tree.

These two practices are how logging is done in this region most of the time. About half of the land in this region (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan) is timberland - not counting the forested parts that are not timberland.

Neither are remotely like clearing rainforest. Or managing trees in the UK, either, from the little I think I understand.

The third ten acre woodlot was never logged because my mother loved to look at it as it was. It was a mix of pine plantation and maples on hills that she could see from the kitchen sink. It stayed beautiful for at least sixty years. About twenty years ago, I tried to tell them that the pines in it needed to be logged; they were starting to die (that is when I found out why they had never logged it.) It is now about half dead - some standing dead trees and some fallen. It is a fire risk the way it is now - a bit of a sore point with all the smoke drifting across the region from Canada these days.

I took these pictures of the woodlot my mother loved in the early spring so it looks a little more dead than it is.

Hi, nice to meet you here, thanks for your comments. I'm the crazy rainforest lady on the thread, btw. What you observe in your area is true for the most part. Temperate forests in the northern US and Europe are actually making a comeback. Many areas are actually thriving. But that's the result of being able to import food and raw materials from the Global South. But the comeback isn't enough to offset total forest loss overall because deforestation in the tropics -- mainly as a result of resource extraction from the Global North -- is so rampant and unchecked. I appreciate having your perspective to round out the discussion.