Saving Egypt’s Farm Chickens and Their Farmers
I live on a farm south of the pyramids of Giza and have done so for about twenty years. I built the farm after my husband’s death primarily for my dogs, my horses, my parrots, and my need to live in a reasonable place, which was for me anything BUT the city.
Since 2012, the staff at my farm, our vet, and other vets and volunteers have been carrying on a program of outpatient animal care for our neighbours, most of whom are small farmers on very tight budgets. We treat minor wounds, do preventative maintenance such as worming or naso-lacrimal duct flushing to prevent habronema infections, and we provide information and suggestions about nutrition and basic care for animals in the area. When asked if our work is “animal rescue” I have to say that helping farm animals is also helping farmers, as these animals are the basis of any health and security for the farm families. Unlike industrial farms, the farms in our area are hands-in-the-dirt farms and their owners are at the ground level of all socio-economic status.
I moved to my area near the pyramids of Abu Sir in January 2004, initially renting a small house while I looked for a good plot of land to purchase. In February 2006, avian influenza hit Egypt hard. As the owner of six much loved parrots, I had been following the progress of this new avian disease very closely. In the winter of 2006 no one seemed to know exactly which birds would be affected by this virus, although for the most part it seemed to be those related to chickens, ducks, turkeys, and geese, all of which are essentially the birds that are domesticated. Egypt is an important flyway for migratory birds, but for the most part birds coming from Asia, as the virus was reportedly passing, travel through in the fall on their way to warmer places in the Africa. In the late winter/early spring, migratory flocks would be traveling from Africa back to Asia and northern Europe, so I was entirely astonished when the government authorities suddenly banned any shipments of poultry into the city in February 2006, sent massive truckloads of thousands of chickens back to the warehouse farms that dot the countryside, and informed the population that any poultry flocks within a kilometer of an outbreak would be destroyed. I had chickens in my aviary as janitors for the parrots who were extremely messy diners, and when I heard that there was bird flu in the neighbourhood, like a good citizen, I had my chickens slaughtered. By then it had been established that my parrots were not at risk, and that, once cooked, even poultry that was actively carrying the virus was no danger if eaten.
It was a strange transformation of the villages in my area, where I was in the habit of riding my horses daily, from our path being crowded with poultry to one where there was not a chicken, duck, turkey, or goose to be seen. The cull was catastrophic for farm families who relied on their flocks of chickens for eggs and meat for their families. Most families had a number of chickens, geese, ducks, and turkeys who were left to live free-range during the day and then collected into a room at night to protect them from predators. The poultry belonging to each family were generally identified by a daub of paint on the feathers of the back of each bird, with each family having a different colour. When the poultry came home in the evening, the women in the house would feed them some chopped greens, crumbled dry bread, and household leftovers to supplement the poultry’s foraging during the day. If there were a large flock, the family might buy a bit of commercial poultry feed to supplement, but the area around the villages generally contained plenty of insect life, the waters from the irrigation canals, the greens, animal, and insect life in and around the canals. I often admired the flocks as I rode by. Having lost their flocks to the governmental cull in the spring of 2006, families were extremely cautious about bringing in new birds, since all of the birds killed had been a serious economic blow to the families. I wondered what the families were doing for eggs and meat, and on chatting with neighbours I was told that quietly and slowly families were building rooms on the roof of their houses in which to keep poultry. That made sense to me and I didn’t think much more about it for a while.
During the years after the revolution in Egypt in 2011 that deposed Hosny Mubarak, it became clear that much of the governmental structure was more or less on sabbatical for a while. Many of the normal services that we had come to expect in rural areas (and they were very few, not providing water or sewage systems, garbage collection, reliable public schools and so on) were not available. Services from agricultural authorities were especially thin on the ground at the time. I had been working out how to cheaply worm horses and donkeys just prior to the revolution since I found myself with 20 adopted equines to care for and had discovered that it was possible to use medications sold in bulk for injection to worm horses and donkeys orally for a fraction of the cost of imported prepackaged wormers. Armed with some good volunteer veterinarians and this knowledge we started the Rural Wellness Initiative Egypt in 2012 to provide free services to our farming neighbours. While caring for donkeys was very important since they were the primary source of transport at the time, it quickly became clear that the villagers had returned to raising poultry in secrecy in rooms on rooftops.
There were two main complaints attached to the hens that we were seeing at our front gate and at the mobile clinics that we held weekly. The first complaint was that the chickens were not growing fast enough and the second was that hens were not laying. Once we had determined that these complaints were not due to respiratory infections or digestive infections such as salmonella, most of which, other than avian influenza or pox, can be managed with powdered antibiotics for the water, we were stuck with the problem that the flocks were dealing with malnutrition. Asking the families what the poultry were being fed, the answers were generally the industrial poultry feed (soymeal), corn, dried bread, chopped green forage like berseem clover, kitchen scraps, and so on. Not a very high protein diet for birds that used to be cleaning up all the cockroaches, beetles, larvae and so on that could be found around an Egyptian village. If I suggested that the chickens were in need of protein and calcium that they might have gotten from insects in the past, the younger wives who would have been children in 2006 were horrified that I might think that they had insects in their house or in the chicken room on the roof. Older women who could remember the free range flocks would ruefully admit that the flocks were short of bugs. So I began studying what plant materials could be given to the flocks to supplement calcium and proteins. Cabbage, kale, broccoli, and cauliflower leaves could help but clearly not enough.
When Egypt began its economic descent into inflation last year, much of the imported corn and soybeans destined for manufacture into poultry feed got stuck in customs due to a lack of hard currency and the country had a major lack of poultry feed. The news that poultry producers were slaughtering chicks because they could not feed them pushed the government to ease up on the financial issues for the larger producers, but the villagers were buying their feed from secondary and tertiary sources where the protein content of the feed was being diluted while the price was increasing exponentially. The end result of this was that a farm family might have to spend a large proportion of their disposable income on poultry feed that would barely keep the birds alive, and would not be helpful at all for egg or meat production. This prompted me to do more thinking about what it was that poultry were eating when they were ranging free and egg production had not been a problem. One of the first things to come to mind was manure, most of which was horse or donkey in the villages, since the cattle were and still are taken to the fields every day.
The next step was to see if anyone had done any research on the use of equine manure for feeding poultry. Like most people around poultry, I had casually noticed that birds like to scratch around in manure, but I had assumed that they were searching for bugs in it, despite the fact that the piles they were often picking through were quite fresh. Too fresh, in fact, to have had the time to develop eggs, larvae, and adult forms of any insects. I went to YouTube to see if there were any independent farmers uploading videos, and one of the first videos I saw was a five year old film about a compost farm in Vermont that was raising chickens and selling eggs without the use of any grains. I found others and the one thing that they all agreed on was the importance of equine manure in the process, and I began reviewing my studies of the equine digestive system.
Horses have two stomachs: the first one being where ordinary digestive processes extract simple sugars and such from the food available. Ideally this food should not include much grain as this contains more sugar than the horse needs for energy, since the the second stomach, the hindgut, generally produces the short chain fatty acids that provide much of the animal’s energy. The hindgut is essentially a brewery where fermentation changes the cellulose of the grasses into products that the horse’s body needs from its food source which should be mostly grass of some sort. It stands to reason that a pile of fresh manure would also contain much of these products as well. So it wasn’t that chickens were looking for bugs in manure, it was that they were looking for manure. While all sorts of research has been done on equine digestion, most of it has involved the stomach rather than the hind gut. This is clear in all of the articles that are still trying to teach horse owners to back off on the amounts of grain that they are feeding and to concentrate on the forage, since too much grain in the stomach can spill an excess of sugar into the hindgut causing all sorts of problems from laminitis to Cushings disease. Oddly enough, as far as I can find, no one has tried to find out just what it is that is produced by a horse or donkey hindgut that is so good for chickens.
Our next step in our research was to take an old bathtub, fill it one quarter full of fresh horse manure from my farm’s horses, sprinkle a cup of poultry feed on top to attract the chickens in my aviary and then see what would happen. The results were startling. It only took about ten minutes before most of the hens in the cage were investigating the magic bathtub and within an hour or so, they were all scratching about and eating happily. Oddly enough, what they were eating was NOT the poultry feed but the manure. We had just installed a new flock of 15 hens and a rooster to replace our old flock who were about three or four years old and a few members had come down with avian influenza so we quickly added them to the soup supplies in the freezer. The new hens had arrived clearly believing that commercial poultry feed was the only thing to eat, as it took us a couple of days to get them to try old scrambled eggs, salad, macaroni, or even chopped chicken bones. Their demeanor and activity had improved with the acceptance of the additions but to be honest they were still a bit listless. On the day after giving them the manure, however, it was as though we had a different flock in there. They were much more active and attentive to their environment, happily attacking cabbage leaves that we suspended on baling twine from the ceiling. We added some calcium powder to the manure to help them to grow and produce eggs, as well as the crushed egg shells from the household consumption. Eggs are an important food in our household as well as in the villagers’. Any listless birds that were moping about soon stopped and one hen who had a case of pox, which is a virus and has no medication available, has been healing on her own. I began talking about the results of our experiment with some of the interested village women and showed them photos in the first week of the trial.
After three weeks of the manure trial we added fifteen hens to the flock. These hens, as well, adapted easily to the manure feed although they, like the first batch, were used to commercial feed. In this case they learned quickly about the bathtub through observation of the other hens. At this point we have stopped buying commercial poultry feed, which is at least a savings of two thousand LE per month for us. We have a few bags remaining still but as we are only using it as a supplement those will last quite a while. One of the interesting things for me is that on casual inspection, the feathers of all of the birds are enormously improved. Having spent ten years looking at scrawny bare chicken butts in the course of diagnosing diarrhea and other problems, I am amazed at the beautiful fuzzy feathery butts on my chickens. No patch of skin can be seen. I never knew that chicken butts could be so beautiful.
Now our job is to let the rural farmers (as opposed to the industrial farmers who have their own agendas) know that the saving of their flocks is not only free, but it is just outside their front door.
