Friday, June 19, 2015

Taking Chicken Geekery to a Whole New Level

This past weekend was a new experience for me (Jason).  I am accustomed to being the chicken guy in the room.  I am accustomed to my level of interest in the general subject of chicken care and breeding being unusually high, and for that to be almost embarrassingly apparent compared to the general public.  I am not, however, accustomed to talking at length in front of a group about this (or any) topic, nor am I in any way accustomed to the room being full of people who are interested in chicken keeping and what I have to say about it.  A nice feeling to go from oddball to useful.

The context, as Janelle mentioned in the last post was a chicken workshop that I was graciously invited to resource at the Allegheny Mountain Institute (AMI) in Highland County, VA.  AMI is a program, as I understand it, designed to promote sustainable agriculture by way of training handfuls of "Fellows" in the basics thereof a batch at a time (one growing season per batch), then placing them with area school garden programs and sundry for the second year.  The hope, I think, is that this will be of benefit to the organizations they make placements with and also result in some reasonably equipped sustainable-farmers-at-large to be unleashed upon the world, several per year.

I had made the initial contact with AMI by following a whim and emailing To Whom it May Concern there a few months back wondering if they might be interested in providing their Fellows (by way of the presence of my person) with a little hands-on and theoretical chicken primer with a bent towards old-time chicken breeding, and if they might be interested in trying out a flock of my Allegheny chickens.  The program manager responded positively, and a few folks came here for a very pleasant visit one day, the upshot of which was the invitation to present there.

It went well!  I wasn't sure what to expect, since I couldn't at this remove gauge the level and type of interest we would encounter amongst the assembled.  Furthermore, I don't think of myself as the best discussion-leader type, nor the best of preachers.  But I had a few advantages in this case:

1)  It was a home game.  Not geographically, but theoretically.  Chicken keeping is my home turf.
2)  Part of it was hands-on, which is the kind of pedagogy I like best and that I am best at.
3)  My 2010 Permaculture Design Course gave me a leg up on the structure of learning.
4)  I had Janelle on my team, so we were organized, prepared, and on time.  It felt good.

We decided to organize it into three sections.  First (after an opening circle to take the pulse of the group), while the sun was yet low in the sky, we headed out to the coop, with the intent to demystify the chicken, get some people to try stuff with chickens that they hadn't ever, and take a quick shot at analyzing their setup in situ.  This was a success.  It was rewarding to see people's faces brighten as they felt with their own fingers what I meant when I referred to the distances between pelvic bones, broadness of frame, etc.  Several folks who'd never handled a chicken, much less caught one, can be proud to say they managed it very well with just a few tips to get them started.  I believe I can state that everyone who wanted to catch one did, and I think everyone wanted to!



Second, we headed inside (with the sun getting hot at that high altitude it felt good to get under a roof) to have a little Chickens 101, taking us on a breezy tour from the dinosaurs through the domestication process and development of breeds, then right up to the present.  We then looked at this procession with a Permaculture lens, and I took the opportunity to present my vision for ordinary people consciously reclaiming their communities' right to immediate (take that word apart: read unmediated by agribusiness) and meaningful relationship to salvaged or emerging landrace populations of chickens.  This implies a bunch of us greenhorns boning up on chicken management.

That was the purpose of part three, which occurred after a fine lodge-cooked lunch largely right out of the AMI gardens and cellars and such.  This section was information-intensive, since I was trying to give them the tools and principles they might need to design a healthy and productive chicken system for just about any situation they might find themselves in.  I had three and a half hours to accomplish this.  I knew if I just threw the information at them they could never maintain attention for that long.  Or I wouldn't have been able to anyway.  Also, folks usually need to be able to apply the info in some way before too much time elapses or it gets buried with other irrelevant info deep in their brains starting that night while they sleep.  So to increase the number of neural pathways leading to the same data, and to hopefully have a little mercy on their attention spans, we decided to assign the Fellows to each other in pairs and assign each pair a scenario (hastily concocted the week before) for which to come up with a workable chicken system.  Or the basic elements of it, anyway.  Then I divided my input into categories (management style, housing, pests and diseases, etc.) and tried to keep those input sessions short.  After each, we left a very few minutes for them to take a swipe at fitting the principles to their hypothetical needs.  The idea was that by the end of the afternoon they would feel some sense of empowerment; that they would feel something like capable of crafting a chicken system solution for any of a variety of circumstances.

Alright, that was a tall order, but I think we succeeded to some extent, which gratified me and seemed to please them.  I regretted how quickly the minutes they had to apply the principles flew by, and I also regretted how dense and scripted some of my input times came across, even to me.  If there is ever a next time, I'll make some adjustments in response to how that played out.  But they seemed to take to the process and in their feedback verbally and on a short questionnaire they remarked on how easily they felt they absorbed a large bulk of information.  That is a high compliment, in my book, and I was grateful.  They also took to the worksheet as a potentially helpful tool beyond the scope of the workshop, so upon our return we sent out a soft copy to them.  With some refinement I could see that being a pretty worthwhile item for regular people discerning their way forward with chickens.

I was spent by the end of the day...when have I ever produced for the public a summary of all of the knowledge of chickens I have assembled over these thirty years of unflagging interest?  Never, that's when.  But I was also energized and encouraged because of how they responded with some interest of their own, and because of how they seemed to quickly be making the connections to broader questions of food sovereignty, agricultural systems, health and nutrition, and human and animal rights that are of such keen interest and importance for me.  They seemed to think that I had something to contribute to the world and to them and their experience at AMI, and seemed to think they were able to access it pretty well.

Actually, they seemed to think we (Janelle and I both) had a contribution to make, as they astutely recognized that their ability to access things had as much to do with how well things were organized as it did with how things were organized.  Furthermore, they ended up being pretty interested in the bigger story of our little homestead and what we are up to with our life together.  We took a short rabbit trail to flip through the latest round of land and garden pictures with them, which seemed to make everyone happy and contributed to the forming of the notion that some number of them might like to come help/learn on a butchering day this summer.  We shall be in touch if interest continues and see what comes of that.

Truthfully, I am pretty excited about what we are doing together, too, and this past weekend was a nice reinforcement of the notion that we make a pretty good team!  It would be fun to have more opportunities like this.  It has been hard to imagine how the contributions I/we might have to make to the regenerative agriculture movement could get to their destinations...it was nice to get a little taste of one of the possibilities.  I hope the Fellows got as much out of it as we did.  Many thanks to AMI, its staff and Fellows for a great experience.

(you can read a short reflection from an AMI fellow at http://www.alleghenymountaininstitute.org/blog/seed-saving-and-chickens-selecting-for-a-resilient-future)

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