When Life Imitates Art

Several years ago I was gifted with what has become a cherished piece of art. After hearing about the tribulations I was experiencing with a neighbor across the street, the original drawing of the Free Range Chicken offered a small respite from the constant harassment from a residential homeowner who should have never moved into an agricultural neighborhood.It’s the same story over and over. City folks want to escape to the bucolic hamlets with farms making up the majority of the landscape, quaint ranchers dotting an acre or two here and there. The only problem is often reality is not to their liking.Functioning farms on which people derive most, if not all of their income are a far cry from the manicured and matching spreads seen in the likes of Garden & Gun or Modern Farmer magazines. Even the most immaculate farms have bone piles of old equipment for spare parts, compost piles or manure pits, and sometimes livestock, which can be loud and get loose. During busy harvest times, there is added traffic to sleepy back roads. A more recent contention between farming and non-farming neighbors is the addition of agritainment such as festivals, mazes, pick-your-own and event venues for weddings and such that might draw hundreds, even thousands of people. For some farmers, these have literally saved their multigeneration farms from bankruptcy and loss as prices of traditional commodity products like fluid milk and row crops (corn, soybeans, wheat) have remained stagnant while production costs rise. Even the uptick in traffic from customers patronizing a simple on-farm store can bring about law suits over zoning.As large holdings get whittled down into smaller parcels interspersing residential homes with operational farms there is bound to be occasional contention. There are cows in heat whose amorous bellows echo at all hours, the crowing rooster who can’t tell the weekend from weekdays, cackling guinea hens, goats who break out to prune roses and wandering piggies who rototill gardens prematurely.But in all my years of farming, the most grief and aggravation came from a single laying hen who would cross the street every day and lay an egg under the ornamental Japanese Maple next to the front porch of the opposite the farm. It didn’t scratch up the bedding plants or leave deposits on the doorstep; the little red chook just wanted to lay her egg somewhere different than the rest of the biddies.You would think that as coveted as farm fresh eggs are my neighbor would have been elated, but no. She called the township and the state police on multiple occasions. My trivialization of it all served only to inflame. The drama elevated when she began driving from her garage out to her mailbox--fifty feet at most--to collect her mail because she feared the too free ranging chicken would peck out her eyes.At first, this was an endless source of why did the chicken cross the road jokes in the neighborhood, but soon devolved into daily harassment. At one point, a state trooper suggested I should get rid of ALL my chickens just to restore the peace. I told him I’d give his name and telephone number to all of my egg customers so they could complain directly to him about his idea. Plus, I added that I was not charging her for the eggs which were in high demand.No amount of amps in the electric netting or wing clipping could keep that hen on her side of the street. One day my neighbor’s shrieking became unbearable and I dispatched the offending clucker in a grand public display in the middle of the road and then went on to pluck it in the front yard for all to see before heading inside to get out the stew pot. Nothing was going to waste. Within a few hours, a Humane officer was knocking on the front door. She was promptly schooled in Right to Farm laws in the state and I offered her a dish of freshly made chicken soup.The dream of having a nice little farm on the edge of suburbia had become a nightmare. My neighbors preferred shopping at Walmart. They even refused the farm fresh eggs I tried to give them citing their flavor too strong.Since those days I've relocated to a more rural and secluded farm away from residential neighborhoods and honed my chicken wrangling skills. However, when a big storm took out one of my portable hoop coops for the meat birds this past summer I became quite lax, letting them roam the big hay fields during the day and then penning them up at night to keep them safe from nocturnal predators which are in abundance this time of year.The meat birds quickly learned where my coop was and would congregate on the side porch pecking at the sliding glass door until I tossed them some feed. Before long, I was the one who was well trained. Each time I'd leave the house, I felt like the Pied Piper with my entourage in tow. When I drove in the lane, chickens would run at top speed from all directions, their wings spread out for balance like animated cartoon characters. I thought this is the life and openly laughed at my shenanigans despite having to power wash the chicken poo from the porch daily.In last week’s Dishing the Dirt, I shared how difficult it was to procure a new stove from a local business, but that was only part of the story. Without big strapping deliverymen to carry the new stove into the house I was left to my own devices. Calling on neighbors to help was not an option so I took a good look around and gathered a handful of items that would make MacGyver proud. Using two canoe paddles, a plywood market sandwich board, some rope and one of my favorite tools—a come-along that I anchored to the couch ratcheted the unwieldy box out of the van, through the front door and into my living room. How's that for chronic self-sufficiency!The final step in the ordeal was to dispose of the old stove. Easier to move that the new stove in the box, I muscled it out to the front porch until I could make a run to the metal recycling center. It didn't take long for the chickens to investigate. I could not resist getting out a fat tipped Sharpie and turning the scene into a reproduction of the drawing hanging on my wall. Now I can really say I have free range chickens!