winnowing

The hens start each day with scratch.  Then they bustle over to the bank of yard clippings topped with kitchen compost to take account of our recent deposits, and to make withdrawals of any bite-sized visitors unlucky enough to have dropped by during business hours.


All this gets the day off to a swell start, but for real sustenance, they turn to the pellets filling the little bin in the coop.  The bin is a simple, but clever contraption that automatically refills the trough in its base by means of gravity & friction. Unbelievably, it functions perfectly without a timer or any LED’s.


Lately, I’ve noticed fine dust collecting in the trough, as if something has changed in the production or transporting of the pellets.  I didn’t like the idea of the hens feeding from a dust bin.


I remembered from grade school the description of settlers winnowing grain, separating wheat from the chaff by tossing baskets of grain into the air so the wind would carry away the chaff.  Wind power, why not?


I filled a bucket with pellets, climbed on a low stump, and poured slowly into a second bucket on the ground.  It might have worked better in Oklahoma (where the wind comes sweeping down the Plains) but a little plume of dust trailed off downwind from the cascading pellets.  A qualified success, new entertainment for the hens, and thanks to our rural setting, no witnesses.


I’ve tested a number of variations since then.  I’ve learned to check for an actual breeze before starting, and to hold off if the stump is slick from rain.  It’s been a while since I’ve positioned the lower bucket upwind from the stump.  The persistent, still unresolved problem is how to remove the pellets from the second bucket, which has to be more wide-mouthed than the first to catch all the pellets.


All good lessons, even if a coarse strainer turned out to be a better solution.  Another simple device, gravity-fed, and battery-free.


Coo, coo, ca choo.