Posts Tagged: chicken

Two animal updates in the Merced Sun-Star

News about animals under study in distinct branches of UC Agriculture and Natural Resources were featured recently in the Merced Sun-Star. A female Pacific fisher being tracked in the Sierra Nevada by UC Berkeley scientists has established a den within Yosemite National Park, the paper reported. Meanwhile, UC Davis scientists are joining in research with Michigan State University to study the housing of egg-laying hens, another story said.

Researchers with the Sierra Nevada Adaptive Management Program Fisher Project track fishers, endangered members of the weasel family, using radio-telemetry. The Yosemite fisher was first captured in October 2009 in the Sierra National Forest and remained near the capture site for nearly a year. Recently, the fisher moved her kits to a den on the south side of Yosemite.

This is the first fisher that is part of the study to make a home within park boundaries.

In the chicken story, the newspaper reported that UC Davis and Michigan State received $6 million for the study from the Coalition for Sustainable Egg Supply, a group made up mostly of egg producers, purchasers and universities with major agriculture programs.

The research will compare three approaches to chicken housing:

• Conventional cage housing, now used by most U.S. egg producers.
• Enriched cage housing, larger than conventional cages and equipped with perches, nesting areas and foraging/dust-bathing materials.
• Cage-free aviary, a non-cage system that enables hens to roam along a building's floor level and have access to perches and nest boxes.

"The information gained will be useful to all consumers as they make decisions about what kinds of eggs to buy," the story quoted Joy Mench, a UC Davis animal science professor and director of the Center for Animal Welfare.

Pacific fisher, left, dens in Yosemite. UC Davis launches chicken housing study.

Marching to a different drumstick

Do happy chickens taste better? Some customers who buy poultry from Cache Creek Meat Co. of Yolo County think so. One of the owners, however, attributes the meat quality to the sunshine and fresh grass the birds enjoy on a farm that gives them even more liberty than so-called "free range" chickens, according to a story in today's Sacramento Bee.

Cache Creek Meat Co. specializes in "pastured poultry" – raising chickens outdoors and rotating them through a series of pens. The birds spend their first month indoors then they go out to pasture, where they are plumped with organic feed and build muscle roaming around their 100-square-foot pens.

According to the Bee story, "free range" can mean that a small door has been added to a barn packed with chickens. Not all "free range" chickens will actually take advantage of their freedom to go outside.

For perspective on the pastured chicken trend, writer Chris Macias spoke to Don Bell, the poultry specialist emeritus for UC Cooperative Extension.

"It's hard to do something like this for 100 percent of the market," Bell was quoted. "Organic feed has to be milled in a special mill. Some soy has to be imported from overseas."

He believes the premium price such producers can charge for the product is an issue of perception.

"If you can convince people to pay twice as much for meat, more power to you. But I don't think meat tastes different because it was raised a certain way," Bell said.

"Free-range" chickens

A chicken on every lot

Raising backyard chickens for food and fun was the highlight of a Contra Costa Times story published over the weekend that was based on a Point Reyes Station 4-H workshop held last week.

UC Cooperative Extension Marin County director Ellen Rilla told reporter Rob Rogers that the growing interest in chickens seems to be tied to enthusiasm for the "slow food" movement, which embraces traditional methods of producing food.

"I think a lot of people have become interested in local food production," Rilla was quoted. "People like to know where their food is coming from."

The chickens were said to be productive - each generating about an egg a day - plus easy to care for and entertaining. Workshop participants learned that feeding chickens oyster shells provides calcium for their own egg shells and that chicken's egg color can be judged by their earlobes. (Earlobes? I'm skeptical.)

Another bit of practical information came from workshop speaker John Pellham of Western Farm Center in Santa Rosa.

"My advice is don't name your chickens," the story quoted Pellham. "Things happen to them. It's hard, but that's part of nature."

I wish I had heard that word of warning before bringing home a chicken as a family pet (and for organic snail control.) "Amber" drowned in a neighbor's pool just a few weeks later.

4-H chicken project.

Media continue to crack egg puns

In the media coverage of Proposition 2's campaign and passage, reporters have made liberal use of puns. Here are a few examples:

Prop 2 . . .

• would crack the state's egg industry
• lays an egg for state producers
• is a study in cage fighting

There were many more, but Jim Downing of the Sacramento Bee came up with what I think is the best pun. In a story published last Saturday, he wrote:

"To a huge majority of California voters, it seems, the chicken does come before the egg."

For the story, Downing spoke to animal welfare expert Joy Mench, an animal science professor at UC Davis. She told the reporter it is unclear whether the risk of salmonella contamination is higher in caged or cage-free systems. Downing also sought comment from Dan Summer, the director of the UC Agricutlural Issues Center. Even if the cage-free movement spreads to other states (as proponents of the initiative intend), he said the California egg industry is facing steep transition costs and some farms will likely go out of business.

UC research snippets in the news

Here are three recent news tidbits on UC ANR research and extension in California.

Bees do the math
Newscientist.com reported that UC Riverside scientists believe honey bees make complex math calculations about flight paths to point hivemates towards nectar-rich flowers. "I find it remarkable that, with a relatively simple brain, they can do something so mathematically complex," David Tanner was quoted. Tanner and Kirk Visscher discovered that rather than picking a flight path based on the angle of any one waggle, the bees flew off in a direction that more closely matched the mean angle of several waggles.

Protein in rice may control leaf blight in Asian rice
Capitol Press reported that UC Davis geneticist Pamela Ronald identified a protein in rice that could help control the spread of leaf blight across Asia. Rice plants have different kinds of stresses, Ronald told the reporter. "There are environmental stresses like flooding, drought, salt, and there are other types of stresses like bacterial infections. XA21 applies to those stresses," she was quoted. When the XA21 protein and another protein are altered, they could enhance resistance to bacterial leaf blight.

"Underground" farmers get sound advice
The World Watch Institute Web site  turned to UC Davis poultry specialist Francine Bradley for insight on city dwellers raising chickens. The story says an underground "urban chicken" movement has swept across the United States in recent years. While not commenting on the legality of backyard chicken and egg production, Bradley does provide helpful advice for keeping the food safe. "Make sure the roof of the pen has a solid cover to protect birds from fecal matter that may drop from birds flying overhead," the story said, pulling a quote from (and attributing) a 2005 UC ANR news release. "We always tell people, don't let anyone near your birds who doesn't need to be there [due to fears of people carrying the virus]."

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