Demolition, Tree Planting Prep, Bird Flu
A beautiful start to the week followed by a windy return of winter. Although I love the change in seasons and am definitely ready for spring, I wish I could press pause on the calendar and cram 6 months worth of work into the month of March. We’re a few weeks out from chicken season and a lot to do between now and then.
A few demolition projects took priority this week, tearing out some old fences and such. The kids wondered off exploring as they often do and wound up half naked, playing in the creek.
More wood cutting. Also tree related, in addition to cutting up fallen trees, we spent an afternoon doing tree planting prep work with plans to plant trees throughout the pasture. We try to rotationally graze our cow herds best we can, but access to shade, especially in the summer, makes forming paddocks somewhat of a challenge. Of course it’ll take years for a tree to grow into a source of shade, but hopefully on down the road this will prove to be a good investment of time. We’ll see.
With chicken season around the corner, the bird flu and reaction to it (or overreaction I should say), has been concerning to keep up with. As many of you know, our pasture raised chickens are proudly “Aunt Peggy Inspected.” My Aunt Peggy sent me an interesting conversation about the Avian influenza from the America Out Loud PULSE podcast, Q&A 145 with Dr. Peter McCullough and guest Nicholas Holcher in response to the bird flu and the USDA throwing billions towards “the unnecessary killing of healthy flocks of chickens.”
“If you let the virus run its course, they’re going to get natural immunity and this virus is going to go away faster than if we just slaughter all the chickens as we currently are. And so, this whole thing is a disaster, and mass culling has to stop, and they have to stop shelling out $$$ billions on this reckless practice.”
“This is a money machine for them [big chicken and egg producers]. And it’s really an unacknowledged one. Nobody really knows that they might be making money off of killing their chickens… how wasteful this is for taxpayer dollars.”
“They don’t care if these initiatives make more virulent strains because that will only extend their profit window… They roll out one vaccine, they get all this money, another mutation happens. Well, then they can roll out the next vaccine for the next mutation, the next strain that was caused by their vaccine.”
“It’s going to raise the cost of poultry because it’s going to be expensive to vaccinate all the chickens. And if the government picks up the tab, the public may think that poultry and eggs are less costly, but in fact, they are paying for it with their tax dollars.”
“The real answer through this wave of bird flu is population natural immunity. It’s always the answer. Bird flu has been around for decades, probably centuries, and the answer is always natural immunity… We’re not going to eradicate bird flu.”
Another answer is to not depend on these big ag producers with their bureaucratic ties. Get your eggs and chicken from a real farm. Or raise them yourself.
“And they taste better. I don’t know about you, but I feel like they taste better than massive factory farm eggs.”
Have a good week.
Will