News Now is weird, fun, and all things poultry.
Written by Kenny Coogan and Carla Tilghman
A duck changes one man’s life
“The first thing I missed when I became homeless was having a pet,” Dave Hughes told NPR News. Hughes became depressed and homeless at the start of the epidemic. After being robbed twice and threatened several times, he finds a community under a bridge that crosses Brush Creek in Kansas City.
His muscovy duck popped out in the middle of a sea of Canada geese. And the duck, who was soon called Ahmed, began to visit him under the bridge. Hughes arranged a small home for her using donated clothes and other items he came across. Ahmed arranged some things and moved in.
Hughes calls the winter, spring and summer he spent with Ahmed “the golden age of vagrancy”. After moving to a more stable place to live, Hughes still returns to visit Ahmed daily. He would collect and eat her eggs and spend hours visiting her.
On March 9, 2022, Hughes was unable to find Ahmed. He searched the creek and nearby ponds daily, but Ahmed was never found.
“Ahmed gave me this gift of seeing what the birds do, what their whole job is,” Hughes told NPR. “But there’s this whole world, love, death, reproduction, everything that’s going on, all around you. And you don’t really realize that until you kind of stop and look at it.”
Hughes is now a brush creek faithful bird.
The system turns chicken droppings into stable compost, captures the methane, and recycles the water
Researchers at the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station have assembled a prototype system that could help mitigate the problem of excess nutrient run-off into watersheds from poultry droppings. It’s the first of its kind in the United States, says Jun Zhu, director of the Center for Agricultural and Rural Sustainability. Historically, poultry manure handling methods have not been environmentally friendly or economical. This system uses anaerobic digestion in which methane gas can be used for heating and cooking fuel.
Another benefit of anaerobic digestion is that it removes bad odors. The stable biological product, called struvite, is an environmentally friendly fertilizer because only a small percentage is soluble in water and releases its nutrients slowly.
NutraMaize is receiving a $650,000 grant from the USDA to darken the color of egg yolks
The objective of the Phase II project, titled “Nutritional Enhanced Orange Maize: A Natural Local Source of Antioxidant Carotenoids for Poultry Improvement and Consumer Welfare,” is to demonstrate the health and pigmentation benefits of feeding orange maize to poultry on a commercial scale. In the first phase, they showed that the health benefits of carotenoids include “reducing the incidence and severity of footpad dermatitis, a common health problem for poultry, and significantly enhancing the depth of color and the health-beneficial antioxidant carotenoid content of egg yolks,” NutraMaize CEO Evan Rochford said. .
“We are particularly interested in working with organic egg producers because they have limited disease management options and typically spend much more on expensive carotenoid supplements to ensure the yolks are the dark color their customers expect,” said Rocheford.
The company’s antioxidant-rich orange corn is currently available to Americans through its line of premium ground products marketed under the Prof. Torbert’s Orange Corn brand, which is a non-GMO product with a distinct nutty characteristic.
Fighting a cold? Try the Chicken Soup Martini?!
In the 1950s, Campbell campaigned for Soup on the Rocks! Today gaston rodriguez from Very good drinks! Martini chicken soup. You may have come across his other drinks, called brothtails on social media.
For Mirepoix Gin:
• 30 grams of carrots
• 30 grams of onions
• 30 grams of celery
• 10 grams of olive oil (getgraza)
• 8 ounces gin (we used @fourpillarsgin Olive Leaf Gin)
To prepare the chicken stock “brine”:
1 tablespoon of roasted chicken base (we used betterthanbouillon)
• 4 ounces or 120 milliliters of hot water
A large pinch of kosher salt (about 3 grams)
• A pinch of MSG (about 0.75 grams)
For brine:
Dissolve 20g of kosher salt in 100g or 100ml of water.
For the drink:
• 2 ounces of Mirepoix gin
• ½ ounce manzanilla sherry
• ½ ounce of brine chicken stock
• 2 to 4 drops of saline solution (to taste)
Garnish with carrot strip and extra virgin olive oil.
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Image received with permission from Jazzton Rodriguez Very good drinks!
The United States begins testing bird flu vaccines for poultry
After the worst bird flu outbreak in the country, killing more than 58 million poultry and waterfowl in the United States and hundreds of millions of
Birds are dying around the world, the USDA is testing four vaccines against highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI). The USDA says that if the trials are successful and if they decide to continue development, it will take at least 18 to 24 months for the vaccine.
It matches the current virus to be commercially available.
A 13-year-old girl solved the problem of duck overcrowding in her town
Eighth grader Renee Tucker was assigned a public speaking project. She takes up the overpopulation of ducks and geese at the local pond but then goes on to talk and solve her town!
In Lake Virginia, in addition to migratory birds, people housed domestic geese and ducks. With so many birds in one place, feces were flooding the pond and birds were venturing out and polluting the school’s practice field. Renee spoke with her father, Brian Tucker, in front of a city council meeting. With a background in poultry, they offered to remove poultry, as it is illegal to trap and transport migratory wild birds. Using the barn system, they were able to capture and rehouse 20 geese and a dozen pet birds.
resources
• https://www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1173247386/how-a-wayward-duckchangeda-kansas-city-homeless-mans-life
• https://www.uaex.uada.edu/media-resources/news/2023/april/04-28-2023-ark-poultrylitter-digester-update.aspx
• https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2023/Q1/nutramaize-receives
$650,000 grant for research on orange and corn peels that improve poultry health, egg yolk health, and egg yolk pigmentation.
• https://verygooddrinks.co/chicken-soup-martini/
• https://kansasreflector.com/2023/05/12/the-us-isundergoing-its-worst-bird-fluoutbreak-ever-is-a-poultryvaccine-the-answer/
• https://cardinalnews.org/2023/05/02/a-13-year-oldgirl-solved-her-towns-duckoverpopulation-problem/
Originally published in the August/September issue Backyard poultry Journal and is regularly checked for accuracy.