Survival New Mexico Style: Food, Chickens … and Coyote

November 27, 2008

By Anna Moya Underwood

The difficulties in these times for many can be measured in dollars and cents. Leaders attempting to turn the economy around may be like the crew trying to turn the Titanic. Our southwestern sense of Coyote as a mischief-maker may change to the Wolf Behind the Door, an image used by many grandparents to describe the feeling of dread during the Great Depression.

In the meantime, it’s good to have a plan for self-sufficient living. If you have nutritious food for yourself and your family, you will likely have the strength and ingenuity to solve other problems. For example, you could keep a few chickens.

Caring for three to six hens in small spaces, for the purpose of cooking with and eating their fresh eggs is a new national hobby. It’s true that Las Cruces has not yet followed the example of Portland, Ore., San Francisco, New York, and many other towns and cities which permit from three to 20 hens in urban back yards. City Councilor Nathan Small, along with a neighborhood organization called CLUCK in his district, have submitted an application for a change in our city’s zoning code that currently forbids poultry. The city’s assistant manager, Robert Garza, and the city attorney are perusing the request.

Consider the high quality protein that comes from eggs. In an egg, you get all the essential amino acids – “essential” because we cannot make them in our bodies. Unlike meat, the protein in eggs is water-soluble and easy to digest. Even the very young, the infirm and the elderly, unless allergic to eggs, can digest them. (Babes-in-arms eat just yolks first.) The egg yolk also contains vitamin A, iron, essential fatty acids, and a plethora of other vitamins and minerals. A largish egg has about 7 grams of excellent protein. Egg has such complete protein that if you eat it with vegetable protein such as grains or legumes, the egg will supply the missing amino acids in those foods and greatly enlarge and enhance the amount of protein you get.

Some folks avoid eggs because of cholesterol in the yolks. One yolk provides about 200 mg of cholesterol. Our livers manufacture 4000 mg cholesterol a day. Now, after cautioning against eggs in the ‘80s, many nutritionists recommend them. Some medicos say if you eat an egg, your cholesterol level will go down. The choline and lecithin in eggs help move the cholesterol through the system. Still, you don’t want your eggs to be the products of crowded hens who have received medication, beak cutting and artificial moults. Pastured hens have more folic acid, more B12, more Vitamin E, and more carotenes than GMO-grain-fed, caged fowl. You want happy, healthy hens who roam around and scratch for bugs and get fresh greens and kitchen scraps (which cuts down on feed costs) to lay your eggs.

How can you be sure you are getting good eggs? You can visit your local egg producer and see if the hens are in movable pens or get to wander in pasture. You can look at the yolks: Are they a brilliant orange or gold and firmly mounded? Also, the taste of a fresh egg will be distinctive. Or, you can become a backyard poultry keeper yourself.

The last thing you need, you might be thinking, is a startling crow at dawn. True, roosters might be too noisy in the city and many codes exclude them. But you don’t need roosters to have eggs. Hens merrily lay regardless. And eggs without the presence of a rooster are just as nutritious as the “fertile” ones.

Building or finding a henhouse to protect the hens in cold weather is necessary. Old small sheds, discarded camper tops, even haybale-surrounded-doghouses will do. Some neighborhoods in other cities compete with imaginative tiny chicken houses and runs that look like a child’s gym. In any henhouse, creating a pit under roosts for droppings, which can then be aged, diluted and used as manure for your vegetables or ornamentals, takes care of the hens’ waste. If dogs or large raccoons roam your neighborhood, a movable “poultry net” plastic electrified fence that runs on a small D battery prevents predators from pouncing on your birds (www.premier1supplies.com).

Owning a few chickens does limit your freedom to travel at a moment’s impulse. You will need to show a sympathetic neighbor or friend how to feed and water “the girls” and collect the eggs (which he or she is often glad to keep).

If you live within city limits, the book Keep Chickens: Tending Small Flocks in Cities, Suburbs, and Other Small Spaces by Barbara Kilarski, Storey Publishing, 2003, glows with enthusiasm and lends practical advice. Two of her suggestions are particularly useful: 1) that you order from the local feed store baby chicks of different breeds and colors so you can always tell them apart, and 2) that you hold, stroke, and talk to the chicks daily; as adults they will come to you instead of squawking and fleeing. Backyard Poultry (www.backyardpoultrymag.com) is a magazine full of photos that inspires, gives ideas, and expertly answers all your questions.

Maybe the sound that you thought was the Wolf Behind the Door will prove to be a friendly cackle.

Anna Underwood lives in a suburb outside of Las Cruces in a solar (mostly) off-the-grid home, with an acre of fruit trees, a husband, a dog, two cats, and 12 chickens. She writes fiction and essays when apple harvest is past.

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