A Day So Bad, I Want to Throw Up

I woke up a bit blue due to some personal issues, which no doubt colors the rest of the day.

Phil was going off to buy animal feed, so before he left, I quickly calculated the cost of our broilers. I had hoped to sell them for about $12 per bird, processed, but when I totalled the feed and the initial purchase price, the total was about $12 per bird. Just for expenses. That would be nothing for infrastructure, nothing for labor.

Might as well do nothing for nothing as something for nothing.

Non-GMO feed, without soy, is just flat-out expensive. Fine. We'd have 49 chickens for our personal consumption over the next year. Plenty for uber-healthy chicken stock for winter colds, and one or two meals a week of top-quality birds.

After Phil got back, we noticed that Bethany's udder expanded a lot, just since this morning. The cows were all panting, so we sprayed them, and tried some homeopathic Aconitum for fevers. I sprayed Bethany's nose with a Caulophyllum homeopathic remedy, good for labor preparation.

As we headed back to the house, Isaiah had a broiler in his hands, and he was shaking it rather vigorously.

"Isaiah, don't shake the bird; it might kill it. Or ... is it already dead?"

"Yeah," he replied. "And there's lots more of them!"

He opened the door of the horse trailer and we saw a wall of dead birds.

As I write, Isaiah and Abraham are spraying the few remaining with Belladonna homeopathic (good for heat stroke) in water. I think about 20 are confirmed dead right now, leaving us with somewhere between 20 and 30 living.

To say that I was upset would be an understatement. I think I had a nervous breakdown (if that means a person hyperventilates and wails and wants to die). I plunged my head under a cold shower, and that helped a bit. The temptation to walk up the driveway and keep walking until I died was strong.

And that's melodramatic. Sure.

But the reality is, we took into our custody three weeks ago a box of 53 cheeping babies. Almost half of those babies died today due to our neglect. Ignorance, of course. Oversight, yes. But whatever we call it, they died because of our mismanagement.

We can make excuses about how we didn't know how hot it was. I peeked in on them earlier today and they were panting, but no more so than they have at other times I've seen hot birds.

But in a deep way, it makes me question our decision to be on the farm. If we can't take care of the animals we have, we shouldn't have animals. It's a mockery to sell "happy chickens" when the ones yet breathing barely escaped from roasting alive.

At the end of a year when we've lost five lambs, one goat, two hives of bees, a couple dozen trees, our entire patch of strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries, several guineas and all but one keet, and almost everything I've planted in my garden, the loss of a few dozen birds we were hoping to eat is almost more than I can bear.