Fair or Fowl, Harvey Ussery Knows His Chickens
by Sebastian Langenberg
Harvey Ussery’s path to his modern homestead wasn’t direct, but built upon his understanding of nature and self-reliance. Ussery grew up gardening with his father in North Carolina, but never had much livestock. His inspiration to keep chickens came from his grandmother.
“She’s been a tremendous inspiration for me,” said Ussery, also known to many as the Chicken Man. “She and Joel Salatin have been the biggest influences on me.”
Ussery also knows more about chickens than most. He’s now retired and spends his time between his 2 1/2-acre homestead in Hume, writing and speaking. His latest book, “The Small-Scale Poultry Flock: An All-Natural Approach to Raising Chickens and Other Fowl for Home and Market Growers” is available for those who want to start a flock.
His grandmother’s hearty chicken flock largely fed itself. Sometimes a hen would disappear and would return days later with all her chicks in tow. All his grandmother would do is throw kitchen scraps in their coop so they knew it was home. His grandparents lived on a 50-acre parcel, and even though his grandfather worked full time at a textile mill, he was able to farm the land and sell his crops.
Ussery attended Wake Forest before moving to California for graduate school. There he studied religion, ethics, and theology. After graduation, he said he lived “the gypsy life,” including a three-year stint as a full time resident at a Zen monastery in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. He helped run the center and was the head gardener, where he taught the monks how to garden.
Ussery then moved to Springfield, Virginia with his wife, Ellen, and worked for the U.S. Postal Service. He knew that he wanted to get back out to the country, and following in his grandfather’s footsteps, Ussery began his farm in Hume while working full-time.
Ussery looked to nature to learn how modern chickens can be more self-reliant. Chickens were not always managed and fed the way they are today.“ Chickens were traditionally managed as scavengers for resources that were free,” he said.
He lets the hens hatch their own eggs and take care of their own young. With this method, the mother takes care of their chicks and they’re able to leave the chicken house from day one. They’re very good at caring for their young, even in terrible weather.
One day Ussery was away from the farm when an unexpected storm hit. “It was a buttkicker,” he said.
Over an inch of rain came down in just thirty minutes. It even began to hail. When Ussery got home, he ran out to the chicken yard expecting to find dead chicks caught out in the storm. To his amazement, he found the mother hen, soaking wet and looking like a barnacle, but under her wings were her ten chicks, fluffy and dry.
Chickens freely running around the property might cause some people to worry about the stench ofchicken manure. Ussery again looked to nature to solve that problem.
“I always quote my mentor Joel Salatin,” he said of Salatin, the founder of Polyface Farms and a well-known proponent of the local farm-to-table food movement, as well as the work-with-nature style of farming. “If you are around any livestock operation, regardless of species, and you smell manure, you are smelling mismanagement.”
Ussery’s property, although abundant with chickens, has no smell, only fresh air. He sequesters the nitrogen with mulch that he spreads in the run. He then sows cover crops on top of this for the chickens to pick through. As the chickens scratch, they bury their manure into the dirt where it composts with the stalks of the plants that they eat.
The chickens are just one part of Ussery’s land. He and Ellen have lived in Hume for nearly four decades. They grow nearly all the food they need. About 85 percent of the food they eat they produce themselves or buy locally, and it’s never processed. They used to take trips to Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia a couple of times a year, but as the local movement has taken off, eating local has gotten easier.
“I can now get pastured pork within a few minute’s drive of here,” he said.
He also encourages people to buy local, and start their own gardens, as well. But it won’t be easy.
“The adult experience is having too damn much to do,” he said. “Sometimes it’s a choice between being out here and doing this kind of work, which for me is a lot of fun, it’s liberating, it’s good for the body. And that’s what I’m doing Sunday afternoon, rather than watching television. It’s a choice.”