Chicken Foot* (*-note)

So somehow I managed to leave the discussion of St. Croix Agrifest 2014 without mentioning my absolute obsession from that event. I am completely fascinated by and totally enamored with...wait for it...the chicken tractor. Yes, I said the chicken tractor.
Perhaps you, like me had never heard of such a thing.  Or even better, perhaps your brain is conjuring up a picture of a rooster driving a John Deere.  But no! A chicken tractor is in fact a system rather than a vehicle.  Every evening as I was leaving the fairgrounds I had to pass the chicken tractor. It was actually an open work mesh pen or enclosure with no floor and roosts built for the chickens.  I would pass this apparatus every evening as darkness was setting in on my way off the fairgrounds. It was home to several of the best looking, fittest, chunkiest chickens I have ever seen.  I marveled at
how plump and soft feathered they appeared when all our local chickens look a little tougher and
more sinewy.
And on the final evening when I slowed down to read the educational sign attached to the chicken tractor, I discovered the reason for their fitness was the design of the gizmo.  It was in fact designed to give them a better life. The fact that it has no floor allows the chicken farmer to move the enclosure from place to place so that the chickens will have fresh green grass, grubs etc. to scratch around in.
Oh, and it was called the chicken tractor because the group of chickens within the coop performed many of the functions of the tractor – aerating the soil, keeping the grass down, and obviously fertilizing the area.

So here's to the chicken tractor, and to the many innovations and ideas that changed hands and heads during this year's Agrifest!

Chicken foot*(*note):  if I wanted to get crazy with the metaphors as I am wont to do, I might say something here about what the chicken tractor means in the big picture. I have two theories about why this thing fascinated me:

1.   Perhaps despite being able to see the larger realm, we're each given our own parcel of life, with boundaries real or imagined. The trick is to make the very best of what we've been allotted, & improve it if we can.  Or conversely…
2.  Perhaps some of us are just waiting for the moment when the coop is lifted and we can make a break for it!