Sorry if you all felt that was sexist....just my experience that some menfolk don't see the nitty gritty....ask their wives how good they clean house and you will get the low down. I'm, of course, not referring to all men....just the majority that I have known and known of.
Buster, your statements about my experience are patently untrue and your bias towards Salatin is clear and you have made it quite clear in earlier posts. I'm really not here to argue with you about those items and I have a right to post my opinion on this man's farming practices, which I have seen and you have only heard of.
I have pics. I visited his farm in April. His cows were squirting liquid feces...and I do mean liquid. I asked how long they had been on pasture and if their stool was likely to firm up(challenging? I think not. According to this man's book, he provides hay for his cattle when the grass is new so that they will not get scours from the new grass. He also goes into a lengthy description of what a healthy cow pat looks like, so think this was a fair question and not a bit challenging.) The man merely answered~very tersely~that it was rich pasture and they had been on it since Feb/Mar. Well...duh! I knew that it was rich, I have eyes...it just intrigued me that they had been out on pasture since Feb/March and still were squirting liquid feces and not a hay bale in sight to balance their rumens...as he described in his book.
His chicken tractors? About 75 birds to a 8 X 10 tractor that gets moved once a day? There is a small square in the corner of this tractor that lets in sunlight and the birds are given continuous feed. The grass under their feet was very trampled and covered in feces...I can't imagine that these birds had ingested any of this badly soiled grass, even when it was first relocated to fresh forage. Too many birds, too much poop, not enough grass. Sorry, but I don't exactly called that pastured....yeah, they were out ON a pasture, but were they eating any of it? I didn't see one bird foraging, just pushing and shoving against each other or lying down.
The Racken House? Severely overcrowded with Black Aussies who were in varying stages of baldness....evidence of lots of feather picking and no wonder....WAY too crowded. About 60 nest boxes for about 200 birds...they were crowded three deep in the nests, some were laying into the deep bedding, I saw one poor bird huddled under a feeder and she looked dead. I nudged her with my feet and she moved a little...she had been lying on a clutch of very dirty eggs. All these birds had pale combs, dull feathers and appeared unhealthy to me. The waterers were encrusted with algae growth. There was a dead rabbit in one of the cages along with live ones.
The pastured layers? Same issues. A portable coop that was too small for the number of birds, evidence of many bald birds-clearly not the time of year for molting, so this is not it~ and dull plummage. Great forage but dismal living quarters and total health appearance.
You really can't see just what I saw more closely in these pics. I just snapped a few because I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I didn't go that place to see the faults...I was excited and had planned for that day for a long time. I respected the man and his methods. What I saw took that esteem down a far notch or two. These short descriptions are just the iceberg of what I noticed on my trip...a brief overview of just why I feel the way I do about it all.
