My local eating habits have been dominated recently by chickens. As I briefly mentioned in my last post our chickens have begun to lay eggs. Two of them started laying around July 24th, and about two weeks ago two more have joined in the egg laying fun. We are now collecting between 3-4 eggs per day.

We were pretty concerned about the noise they make when they lay, and if our backyard poultry phobic neighbor would complain. So far, so good. She hasn't complained, and the neighbor on the side of the coop loves to hear them cluck in the morning. Finally getting such a tasty product from the chickens has made James warm up to them. He was really unhappy about building the coop and dealing with the angry neighbor. I think he thought the chickens were more hassle than they were worth. But now, we are getting excellent eggs and it's only costing us the cost of feed.

Speaking of feed, it is very difficult to find organic chicken feed in Nevada. I called three feed stores and they all laughed at me when I asked if they had organic feed. I can special order it from the co-op, but that order is once a month and I can't seem to remember to place it. I was lucky enough to drive by S&W Feed in Carson City the other day, where the nice cowgirls happily sold me chicken feed. They had chickens in front of the store, and didn't think it was at all strange that I wanted organic feed.

My backyard hens are not the only chickens in my life. I recently spent a day at Sod-Buster farm helping them process over 80 broilers. My friend and fellow locavore, Shelley, sent out a call for volunteers to help Cliff and Deb. Their chicken orders have nearly tripled, and they can't handle the increased workload by themselves. They desperately needed help processing their orders, and Shelley was able to rally five brave volunteers.

Let me tell you, processing chickens is not for the faint of heart. There's the killing, scalding, plucking, head and foot removing, and finally, eviscerating. I wasn't ready to station myself at the killing cones, so I picked up a knife and spent 6 hours eviscerating. Surprisingly, it did not get easier as I cleaned more chickens. I tried to psych myself up for the job by comparing it to cleaning fish. Cleaning chickens is a far cry from cleaning fish. I have serious respect for the hard work Cliff and Deb put in providing the only local free-range poultry. I don't know how they do it.

Processing the chickens made me reevaluate why I eat meat. I didn't walk away a vegetarian, but I did decide not to eat any meat from the industrial agricultural complex. Have any of you had similar experiences. Do you think it is a benefit to know exactly how the animals you eat lived and died?