Breed registries are a critical tool in promoting and preserving any type of rare or valuable animal.  If you want to buy a purebred puppy for a common breed you’re likely to end up with a dog registered by the American Kennel Club.  The AKC registers more than a million puppies each year.  Livestock registries are also common, and they serve the purpose of ensuring that individual animals are genetically similar and that the animals reflect the breed standard.  Registries also provide useful ancestral information that can be used to trace genetic defects and avoid inbreeding problems.  Zoos have also championed the use of registries for endangered species much for the same reasons as domesticated animals.

A few years ago we began breeding red wattle hogs at Greenfire Farms.  They’re a wonderful swine breed and arguably produce the best-tasting pork in the world.  The problem with red wattles was their sheer scarcity:  A few hundred red wattles remained on the planet, and breeding stock was difficult to find and often inbred.  The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy had created a red wattle registry, but all registrations and pedigree information had to be handled through snail mail; a process that was slow and cumbersome.

So, we wrestled with the idea of how we could elevate the well-being of red wattles. We finally hit upon the idea of creating an online registry database that would give red wattle enthusiasts instant access to family trees, photos of individual animals, breeders’ names, and allow users to calculate the inbreeding coefficient of piglets that would be produced from a hypothetical mating so that red wattle farmers could make better informed decisions when selecting their breeding stock.  Greenfire Farms was able to find Doug Meyer, a software genius, to write the program, and the ALBC was kind enough to donate all the data from its registry.  Then, working with the Red Wattle Hog Association, we opened the database to the public and waited to see what would happen.  You can see it here.

The result was nothing short of amazing.  The initial trickle of data became a flood, and today more than 1,500 red wattle pedigrees can be found online.  In a few minutes you can fully explore the ancestry of any given hog, and you can determine its inbreeding coefficient.  The availability of this information changed the entire discussion in the red wattle community, and now sophisticated and informed breeding decisions are made as a result.

Let’s turn for a moment to chickens.  Traditionally, chickens in America have not had a registered pedigree.  Some cockfighters kept meticulous ancestral records, but as a general rule in the United States the pedigrees of most chickens, even prize-winning show birds, have gone undocumented.  This probably stems from a number of reasons.  A single hen can produce a large number of chicks; maybe as many as 200 a year for some breeds.  Roosters are usually grouped with multiple hens in a breeding flock.  Sometimes there are even multiple roosters.  This group breeding approach makes it impossible to precisely identify the parents that produced an individual egg.  And, recordkeeping with old technology was a time-consuming a tedious affair that required organizing a large volume of records for animals that individually were not seen as particularly valuable.

Today, the reasons to ignore a chicken registry have all but disappeared.  With online computerized databases it is easy to assemble, manipulate, and distribute large amounts of data.  Some breeds of chickens are now extraordinarily valuable.  For example, a pair of Greenfire Farm’s white American Bresse sells for more than a pair of our red wattle pigs.  With microchip identification or even just an improved numbered leg band it is now easier to identify and track individual chickens.  And, since many chicken breeds are now being newly imported for the first time, it is possible to begin recording the pedigree of an entire breed literally from the time the first chick is hatched in the United States.  So, why not create an online registry in the United States for rare chicken breeds?

We can’t think of a reason why not.  This is now being done in other countries.  For example, Sweden has a gene bank of its rare native chicken breeds that contains a registry by flock.  There are strict rules for being in the gene bank including that all registered chicks have to be hatched and brooded by their mothers, not by mechanical equipment.  It’s an intriguing approach that promotes truly self-sustaining breeds.

In America, creating and maintaining a registry could actually give breed clubs something valuable to do.  Let’s do the thought experiment that someone takes the initiative to form the American Cream Legbar Club.  The ACLC selects board members, and a written breed standard is adopted.  For a period of three years the board leaves open the registry; it reviews applications from anyone who submits a cream legbar to be included in the registry.  Each submittal would require several pictures of the bird, and the board could determine if the bird came close enough to the written standard to merit inclusion in the registry.  Every bird included in the registry would be given a registration number and have a data file including its pictures.  After three years, the registry would be closed to entering unregistered birds (except in unusual circumstances like a newly imported cream legbar), and in the future only chicks that were the descendants of registered birds could themselves be registered.  Cream legbar hobbyists could register their birds online for a small fee (say, $3), and could access genealogical data about their birds.  Over a period of years an enormous database would grow with the valuable result of promoting pure lineage and avoiding inbreeding.

At Greenfire Farms, we are taking a small step toward creating an online pedigree database for our breeding birds.  This experimental online record will be limited in scope.  We’ll record data for our breeding birds, and hopefully one day soon you can go to our website and click on the “Explore Pedigrees” button.  This will take you to a database that will allow you to see pictures and detailed information about our breeding birds and reveal a family tree of the chick you received from our farm.  The creation of the database and populating it with information will take time, but we hope that by the end of 2012 this online database will be operational.

How cool is that?  Perhaps this experimental database can be the seed crystal that inspires others to begin open registries for rare chicken breeds.  We see this as potentially the single best thing we can do to elevate the chicken fancy in America, and if you’re willing to promote the concept of registry databases, you can be an important part of it.

Of course, the visionary medical researchers at the Red Rooster pill factory keep good company with any number of people –and even nations—that have appropriated the rooster as a sign of virility.  As early as 1789 the rooster became a symbol of aggressive French nationalism during the time of the French Revolution.  In France and Portugal rooster images appeared on coins and official government stamps trying to draw a favorable association with the national character.

Their perception of the rooster as an animated emblem of virility is not misplaced.  If you own chickens of both sexes you know that a rooster spends a great deal of his day courting and breeding with hens.  In the jargon of the poultry fancy, roosters placed with hens are said to “cover” the hens, and that word accurately describes the mating practices of the constantly assertive roosters.

Roosters lack the more obvious reproductive organs often associated with mammals.  Instead of external plumbing a rooster has, like the hen, a cloaca –a vent at the rear of the bird.  (Cloaca is derived from the Latin word for sewer, by the way.)  As we’ve learned from caponizing our American Bresse at Greenfire Farms, a rooster’s testicles are fleshy yellow marbles hidden deep inside the body near the spine at the back of the rib cage.

The roosters’ testicles produce sperm, and sperm are easily destroyed by body heat.  Chickens have an internal temperature about 3° higher than humans.  But, roosters have the unusual ability to produce a large amount of two special proteins that repair or mark for elimination heat-damaged sperm cells.  In this way roosters neutralize the damaging effects of their own body heat.  Roosters also produce an enormous number of sperm cells.  Once they become adults roosters will produce about 35,000 sperm cells every second of their lives until death.

Through a series of internal tubes and glands sperm flows from the testicles to the rooster’s cloaca, and in a flurry a rooster will hop on the back of a hen, tread on her back, and she will raise her rear so that for a split second her cloaca comes in contact with the cloaca of the rooster.  (At Greenfire Farms, we often trim the feathers around the vents of the birds to remove any obstructions during this frenzied coupling.) This brief moment is enough to transfer the sperm from cloaca to cloaca where it can be stored by the hen for up to four weeks in special tubules within the oviduct.  The act of mating can be repeated by a rooster up to a hundred times a day.

Although roosters can be annoyingly persistent, it is the hens, however, that have the final say.  As reported last September in American Naturalist, Oxford University researchers found that hens can selectively eject sperm from roosters they disfavor.  This technique, bluntly labeled “sperm dumping,” allows hens to produce eggs fertilized by higher status (read that stronger) roosters and to largely control the genetics of the chicks they produce.  This essentially reduces the role of the rooster to a mere afterthought, a fact that may come as quite a shock to our friends at the Red Rooster pill factory.

For the past year I had seen another pitbull mix in the same area.  Despite the traffic he had learned to survive.  I once saw him cast a cautious glance over his shoulder, and when he thought nobody was looking (and I suppose I might qualify by that description), he slipped into a culvert that served as the modern galvanized equivalent to the rock cave his ancestors might have enjoyed a thousand generations ago.

Two pitbulls do not a trend make, but I’ve also noticed that gamefowl are by far the best survivors of any chicken breed in a predator-rich area.  They always operating at about DEFCON 2, ready to launch with any slightly heightened provocation.  In the evening gamefowl have the peculiar and effective strategy of working their way up a tall tree in a spiraling pattern, hopping higher from branch to branch over a period of ten or so minutes, until shortly they’re near the top of the tree.  Then, they hunker down near the center of the tree where they blend in against the background of bark.  Once immobile, they disappear.  This is a very effective survival strategy, and I’ve seen gamefowl live for years in this feral condition while more complacent chickens become dinner for coons and coyotes in a matter of days.  On the farm we have a beautiful pumpkin hulsey rooster who went native months ago.   You can see him here warily peering around our garden gate, constantly vigilant for threat and opportunity.

The unifying factor between pitbulls and gamefowl is that both were bred to fight.  Perhaps a coincidence, but one is left to wonder if there is a connection between fighting and surviving.  It isn’t so much the ability to inflict bodily damage –no rooster is going to physically intimidate an adult coyote for very long– but the cleverness and situational awareness that are often necessary for successful combat.  Fighters are in a constant state of threat assessment, prickly with a steady low-level adrenaline drip.   Surely this confers a powerful advantage when confronted with the constant threat of large carnivores.

There have been a number of interesting studies about feral populations of domesticated animal breeds.  At the head of this esoteric field is Dr. Lehr Brisbin of the Savannah River Ecology Lab in Georgia.  (Since the 1950s, the enormous and well-guarded site was used to refine radioactive materials to build atomic bombs, so there was conveniently plenty of empty ecology around to study.)  Dr. Brisbin conducted some loosely controlled experiments in order to discover how natural environmental pressures could change populations of common domesticated animals.  Essentially, he reverse-engineered breeds of farm animals so that they regressed to their primitive types.  He found, for example, that over many generations chickens grew smaller and darker as predators exerted their influence; fast and inconspicuous birds are more likely to survive to breeding age.  Even more remarkably, domesticated pigs undergo a physical transformation within a single lifespan, their noses lengthening in response to the demands of rooting in the forest floor.

Brisbin also discovered that a race of semi-wild dogs has lived on the outskirts of civilization since pre-history and have developed their own unique vocalizations and hunting methods.  These animals, neither fully dog nor wolf, avoid humans and have a varied diet of small game and fast food scraps discarded along our highways.  They live in an ecological netherworld on that border between civilization and nature; wraiths that rely on invisibility and cunning to survive.  Only recently recognized, for thousands of years they lived not just on the periphery of our settlements, but on the periphery of our awareness, too.  Brisbin calls these permanently feral canines ‘Carolina dogs,’ and whether you’re in New York City or Cairo, this landrace looks and acts the same.

Seeing the black pitbull mix that morning had set in motion a reverie about the strange pull of the feral life, and I pondered it on the drive to the farm as the road  changed from pavement to dirt track.  Along the way my truck passed sagging cracker shacks and and ramshackle singlewides tucked along the edge of fields and forest, no movement visible.  This was hunting season for squirrels, and I knew that in the dark before dawn most of the local residents had slipped into the woods with small-bore rifles and would sit silent at the base of a big oak, waiting for their prey to stir in the crown of the tree with the first light.  Alone and with eyes staring upward, made invisible by immobility and camouflage, they would lock on any small movement in the thin gray light between night and day.

It’s that lull between Christmas and New Year’s when the vital signs of corporate America drop to an anemic, thready pulse.  But, chickens don’t read calendars and cows never go on vacation so farm life rolls on.  It’s been an unusually mild winter in North Florida.  We’ve had one glancing freeze; that’s it.  It leveled the banana plants but barely caused a shiver in the citrus trees.  Today I took this picture of our Parson Brown oranges.

Like all agricultural products and interesting people, Parson Browns have a history.  Parson Brown oranges were developed in Florida shortly after the Civil War, and they trace their lineage to a single tree cultivated by the parson himself and later sold to a fruit entrepreneur named Captain J.L. Carney for the scandalously high price of $80.  Upon this tree the modern commercial orange industry was launched in Florida, and Parson Browns became famous for their delicious, sweet flavor.  They had their moment in Florida’s agricultural history but later were supplanted by more modern commercial varieties.

A few years ago nobody would have thought to be raising Parson Browns a mere ten-minute drive from the Georgia border, but at Greenfire Farms we have two things working in our favor:  a great local plant nursery called Just Fruits in Medart, Florida, and climate change.  Just Fruits has been around for decades, and they specialize in fruit trees of a stunning variety grown specifically for this climate.  The fruitmeisters at Just Fruits are geniuses at their art, and with a pickup truck and a little cash you can walk away with an olive grove, a vineyard, an apple orchard, about a dozen varieties of peaches, or flora as beautiful and tasty as mulberry trees and kiwi vines.  Over the years we’ve planted dozens of fruit varieties, and now in almost any given month you can cruise around the farm and grab handfuls of rich and delicious fruits like Asian pears, apples, key limes, grapes, mulberries, and blackberries.

As for climate change, the other day I had a fascinating conversation with Dr. Thomas Barnett, a Harvard educated Megamind-type who orchestrates global strategic analyses for some of the world’s most powerful governments and corporations.  (Despite the intimidating CV he’s a fun guy with whom to hoist a beer.)  You can read one of his analyses here.  Dr. Barnett believes that the resource wars of the 21st Century will be fought over food, not oil, and the smart play is to buy good farmland in the northern United States and southern Canada where global warming is opening up fertile prairie for larger grain harvests.  I can’t say whether his predictions will be accurate, but I can say in support of his general theory that on New Year’s day I will have about 500 key limes ripening on trees could not have easily survived the cold winters here a couple of decades ago.

Dr. Barnett and Parson Brown oranges each in their own way remind us to hold close our agricultural heritage.  When will we once again call into service the exotic and valuable genetic gifts of our livestock on Greenfire Farms?  They’re not quaint artifacts of a slowly receding past.  They’re the quickening pulse of a rapidly changing future.

Around every circle another circle can be drawn.   Under every deep another deep opens.

(Apologies to Ralph Waldo Emerson.)

That’s why at Greenfire Farms we have an ongoing program to not only import new breeds, but to improve them over time by diversifying bloodlines and carefully selecting for desirable traits.  This doesn’t mean that every bird we hatch is perfect, but if done properly, it should mean that our breeding flocks improve over time.  A case in point is our experience with cream legbars.

Greenfire Farms is the importer of the first cream legbars into America, and the initial generation of breeding stock included a large, friendly rooster that was disease resistant and sired healthy chicks.  He is, in essence, the father of our “A” bloodline of cream legbars.  He had many positive traits and the few flaws he had were cosmetic:  his comb was not as erect as called for in the written breed standard and, depending on whom you asked in England, he may have had a little too much chestnut color in his neck hackle feathers.

This rooster sired a group of hens from which we selected the best for establishing a second breeding group.  To this new breeding group we added a completely unrelated rooster –also imported from a UK bloodline– that had traits that addressed the weaknesses in our original rooster.  You can see him here with his more erect comb and less chestnut color in his neck hackle.

In 2012, this rooster and his group of hens will produce chicks –our “B” bloodline– that will once again be subjected to a rigorous selection process, and the best of these chicks will become breeders for 2013.  Also, at some point in 2012 we plan to import an unrelated pair of cream legbars and introduce them into the breeding program at Greenfire Farms.  We’ll be looking for birds with bright yellow legs and clearly defined feather crests on their heads.  They will be our “C” bloodline. By tracking the pedigrees of our birds, selecting for positive traits, and introducing newly imported bloodlines over time (although this comes at a high cost), we strive to continually improve our birds and keep them genetically diverse.

The story of our cream legbars is but one example of this process.  There are many others.  Twice we have imported Swedish flower hens; the groups are unrelated.  In the fall of 2011, we imported two unrelated hedemora to boost the diversity of the flock we first imported in 2010.  We are also breeding two distinct bloodlines of chocolate Orpingtons; ditto our white Bresse and our breda.  In 2012, we plan to import more unrelated Swedish flower hens, black Bresse, Olandsk dwarfs, and a number of other breeds to continue our ongoing program of ensuring the genetic diversity, and thus the long term sustainability, of the breeds we’ve selected to introduce to the United States.  (We also intend to import show quality silver appenzeller spitzhauben to help improve the American gene pool of this breed; it is currently almost impossible to find high quality examples in this country.)

Our commitment to these breeds is to import them, but also to improve their genetics over time so that eventually America is seen not only as a haven for these rare breeds, but as the place where the best examples of these breeds can be found.  Imagine this bit of heresy:  In twenty years poultry hobbyists in the UK are importing into their country cream legbars from America.  (This is not a completely crazy notion:  Today the Japanese are importing the best examples of Japanese breeds from Germany.)  Who knows?  It could happen if we can muster the commitment and discipline necessary to produce superior birds.  This will be a time-consuming and expensive undertaking, but one that offers these breeds a promising future, and also one in which you can play a pivotal role.

We impart the difficulty of our workday pretty explicitly on the site.  It’s true, there are lots of plates spinning around here.  But , thankfully, most of those plates are engaging, rewarding and fun to keep in rotation.  Take for instance shipping day.  I never get tired of unloading birds at the PO and getting the myriad questions about ‘what I’m shipping,’ ‘how I do it,’ ‘where the boxes are going,’ etc.  People seem pretty astounded by what we do, and really, it’s pretty astounding.

Our day-to-day operations definitely have an element of the ‘weird’ to them.  Most of my friends still think I’m a whacko for some of the things I do with such casualness.  So, when you get your pairs or your baby chicks, try to keep in mind that this is a livelihood.  There are people manning it full-time and doing a lot of bizarre, unconventional things to make it all come together.  To give you a window into our bizarre world, I thought I’d let you in on a bit of the import process.

Imports are convoluted from the start.  There’s the paper pushing, the number crunching, the scheduling, the endless e-mails, the updates, the letdowns, and all of the other stuff in between.  The most hilarious part is that even though we’ve gone through the process several times-streamlined it some-made some mistakes-had some close calls-etc., we still somehow cannot manage to have the birds shipped to FL at a reasonable hour of day.  Which is fine.  If I’m going to pick up birds from the airport, I want to pick up birds at the airport at the shadiest time of night, looking sketchy and a little road weary.

If the people in the PO are incredulous, you can imagine what the people at Delta Cargo think when I’m picking up several dog crates filled with chickens, the likes of which they’ve never seen before.  Bear in mind, they think it’s even more insane when they see the declared value of said funky chickens.

THE PROCESS OF RECEIVING A NEW IMPORT

STEP 1: RENT A MINI-VAN

Do not tell the rental company what it’s for.  Somehow, they always ask.  One time, I was honest, which resulted in me having to explain to the location manager how I was taking extra precautions to prevent any damage to the car (i.e. laying down a heavy duty tarp).  Incidentally, the location manager was a farm boy from Iowa and I smiled just so and we bonded over the new farmers’ plight.  I promised him there would be no signs of chicken by the time I returned the vehicle.  So, now when I pick up a rental, I just casually say, “I’m going to a breeders’ conference in Jacksonville.”  No one needs to be the wiser.

STEP 2: DRIVE TO JACKSONVILLE

It’s about a two-hour drive, which is hardly anything to balk at, but when you’ve been up since seven, lived to tell of another day of farm work and you’re now hitting the road at five, knowing you won’t be back until 1AM with birds to install in the dark, the task seems a little more challenging.  That two-hour drive is pretty unremarkable to boot. So, with the seats all folded down in the mini-van, you remind yourself that you will be returning with some pretty incredible cargo, cargo that only a few people in the country have had the privilege of handling before you.

STEP 3: PICK UP AT THE AIRPORT

Now, I have to count my blessings, the planes have always arrived as scheduled, and there have never been any unbearable waits.  I can even time it so that by the time I arrive, the birds are ready to be handed off without any hiccups.  Interestingly, they’re pretty fastidious about the names on the documents.  One time, I had to do some tough convincing that I was in fact picking birds up on Paul’s behalf and that it wouldn’t be a great idea to call him at midnight to confirm.  I guess it seemed plausible that no one else in their right mind could possibly want to be hauling 30 chickens in the middle of the night.

STEP 4: RETURN TO THE FARM

So, as you might have imagined, the drive back is even more unremarkable than the drive there.  The sweet thing is all of the cooing and chicken noises you get to hear in the background.  It’s nighttime, so most of the birds are quiet, but you do hear an occasional hen settling in or moving about.  And the smell?  I always get this question.  It’s not so bad and frankly, I know a lot of show goers that travel with way more birds and don’t complain of the stench.  Crack a few windows, get the radio going, it’s easy to overlook.

STEP 5: THE INSTALLATION

So, back at the farm, things get a little weirder.  We don’t have any lights where the chicken pens are so that we don’t disturb their sleep.  It’s a nice notion but completely crazy on nights when you’ve got to figure out which pens which chickens are going into.  Up until this point, the only acquaintance I have with these breeds is through pictures, and these are younger and not looking totally like they do in the pictures.  So, with lantern in hand, you pull birds out one at a time, guess to the best of your ability and of course, coming from USDA, they’re packed at random, so you might have a chocolate Orpington rooster with a Legbar hen in one crate and a completely haphazard pairing in another crate.  There’s not much reason to the madness but after an hour or so of switching and swapping, you end up with 5 new breeding pens of really gorgeous, road weary birds, sleeping in fresh hay in new, clean pens prepared just for their arrival.  It’s really a sight.  And the best part is the next morning, when you get to the farm and they’re all somehow already up and about, scratching in the hay and getting acquainted with their new digs.  I will never get over the fact that they have no idea they are thousands and thousands of miles from where they originally hatched.  And with that, another successful import lands at Greenfire.

That first morning, the crew stands around for a little while, watching them and we all pick new favorites.  We always remark to each other how thankful we are for the opportunity to work with birds that no one else in the country has had the chance to observe and get to know yet!  And we are definitely always thankful for the ‘weirdness’ behind what we do.

We also contacted the local electric utility to get temporary power to the site.  Kind of bummed that we had to do that, but independent power for the barn is still at least a few months away.  And, since the per-watt cost of solar power is rapidly dropping every month, in this case delay also carries with it the prospect of buying cheaper solar panels a few months from now.

Reasonable projections show that if market trends continue in about 2015 the cost of solar electricity will reach parity with grid power.  If so, this will be an inflection point in the energy history of America.  Everything changes.  It creates a new paradigm for self-sufficient living that offers both low expense and modern convenience.  You, dear reader, need to absorb this lesson and prepare yourself for a new reality.  Your house and even your car will be powered by the sun for less than you’re spending now on electricity from your utility.   Revolution is in the air.  Rise, America, and unplug from the grid!

The container has now been accepted into the pineywoods cattle herd.

After a short career of transoceanic service schlepping Happy Meal toys from China, the 8′x20′ shipping container that is the first module of our solar barn has arrived on the farm and will be repurposed for a more historic role:  the ultra-luxe global headquarters for that titan of agriculture, Greenfire Farms.

Here’s the official birth certificate showing our box…err…barn to be only two years old.  A mere toddler.

Stored temporarily on elevated wooden blocks, the next major steps are to run grid electricity to the site and pour a concrete foundation for the container’s final resting place.  The concrete pad will be minimized to reduce the area of impervious surfaces and allow the natural percolation of the soil –as opposed to building an elaborately engineered system of drains– to handle stormwater runoff on the site.

And, we’re on the hunt for an air conditioning unit that is easy on the electricity but über-rugged and effective at beating back hellish temperatures;  an air conditioner that, say, that might have been used by a SEAL team in Afghanistan.  Stay tuned….