Search Results for: feed

Corn in Africa

What’s interesting about corn as a food crop in Africa is how long it took to become truly dominant. For indeed there was a time, in the few centuries after its introduction, when corn was but one of number of — ehem — vegetable crops that appeared in many home and/or village gardens.

Because it was adaptable to many sub-Saharan African climates it was frequently planted between rows of other food crops like beans or peas. Because it produced ears so early in the growing season it was an ideal stop-gap food for growers who were waiting for their millet or sorghum to start producing. And because it wasn’t attractive to birds (at least until it dried out) it was reliable so long as the weather was good.

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Crop that Conquered the World

Corn is thought of as a quintessentially American crop. That’s true if by “quintessentially American” you mean that Americans have exploited corn’s industrial potential to a greater degree than anyone else. But of course corn didn’t originate in North America, and its popularity is by no means limited to North America, nor even to the New World.

Corn is grown on every continent on Earth save for Antarctica, most intensively in the American Midwest, western Europe and eastern China. On which note, I was watching a terrific BBC program called Wild China the other night. In one sequence on the subject of farm villages in Hunan province, I noticed that the ceilings of the homes there had bundles of dried corn hung from all their rafters. I did a double-take until I remembered that the farmers there — like most corn farmers around the world — think of corn as a traditional crop. It’s been around for so long, few are even aware that corn originally came from somewhere else.

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Spoiled Rotten

All this talk of egg freshness makes me thing again of my grandmother and the stories she’d tell about “winter” eggs when she was a child. That was about 1918. Back then fresh eggs were almost unheard of in the deep winter months. We don’t much think about it now, but chickens go through a natural period of molting each year. They lose old feathers and get news ones. It happens in winter, during which time hens lay few if any eggs. Nowadays commercial egg operations control molting by manipulating light and feed to bring it on quicker and get it finished faster. Whereas molting once took months, so-called “force molted” hens get it over and done with in just a couple of weeks. Which allows us to enjoy fresh eggs all year round.

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On Nest Eggs

Chicken feed, scratch, nest eggs. Why is there so much chicken-related money slang? I haven’t a clue. But then I guess there are quite a few garden-related money words: beans, lettuce, cabbage. I tend to favor bread and dough myself. But then I digress…no surprises there.

Most of us foodie types are at least peripherally aware of the rise in chicken-keeping as a hobby. I’ve noticed several small coops in my neighborhood here in the Louisville Highlands, and I often come across escapees running around in nearby parks. Indeed the missus and I nearly bought a house from a fellow who kept chickens and let them roam freely around his fenced-in yard, a big double lot. He normally kept six, but that particularly week had only five thanks to a hawk that had recently moved into the neighborhood (a small pile of feathers in the middle of the yard marked hen number six’s last known location).

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Egg Yellow

That was quick! Reader Sue asks: why do some eggs have darker yolks than others, and does a deep yellow color mean the yolks are more nutritious?

As far as I know a deep yellow yolk isn’t necessarily more nutritious than a pale yellow yolk. However I do know what makes one yolk darker than another: the diet of the hen. Chickens are omnivorous scavengers, which means they’ll eat all different sorts of things…pretty much whatever they come across. Hens that “scratch” in the barnyard (or the suburban back yard, as the case may be) eat everything from grains and legumes to grasses, leaves, roots, insects, worms, mice…even the carcasses of dead animals.

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