Back in December I wrote a post about our poultry shed project. The predator-proof poultry shed is now complete (except for painting, a project awaiting warmer and drier weather).

And the ducks have arrived, special delivery by U.S. mail, 19 day-old ducklings squashed together for warmth in a 12 x 10 x 6 cardboard box. Here they are – seven Pekins, six Rouens, and six Khaki Cambells – in their new quarters in the brooder room of the poultry shed.

In addition to the ducklings, you can see the heat lamp for warmth, the automatic feeder, and the plumbing for the automatic waterer (hidden behind Zooey the duckshund). We’ll have six Muscovys arriving in late May or early June.
Zooey has never shown much interest in the sheep, but she’s fascinated by the ducks. Her new assignment, when the ducks get old enough to be outside on their own, is going to be to round them up every evening and herd them back into the poultry shed for protection from night time predators. We’ll see how that works out.
You may ask, why bother to raise a few ducks? It’s most certainly not going to provide an income stream worthy of mention.
John Michael Greer has a post this week that helps explain why it’s not only worthwhile, but an enriching endeavor. It’s all about reinvigorating the household economy.
Here’s a chart from Wikipedia, showing how the labor force participation rate changed from 1948 to 2006:

United States' Labor Force Participation Rate 1948-2006. Source: United States Bureau of Labor Statistics
And this chart from a post at Calculated Risk breaks the labor participation out by gender:

A good part of the gain in per capita GDP over the last 60 years is the result of increased labor force participation, especially by women. Americans have been abandoning the household economy for the money economy. And as Greer describes, people are often worse off as a result of the trade.
What’s all this got to do with ducks? Ducks are hard to find, and expensive. Check out Willamette Local Foods: ducks range in price from ~$30 for a small one to ~$45 for a large one. Duck eggs are expensive, too – $7.20/doz. Ducks and duck eggs are a luxury we could seldom afford, if we had to pay cash. But we can raise them ourselves, and live richly.
Same thing goes for lamb. Leg of lamb goes for ~$8/lb, and lamb loin chops even more. We first raised sheep ourselves because we can’t find good lamb at local supermarkets, and we couldn’t afford it if we could find it. Now we raise a little, sell a little, and live wie Gott im Frankreich.
And then there’s wine. A decent bottle of Pinot Noir fetches ~$15/bottle. We grow our own grapes, make our own great wine (if I do say so myself), and have a bottle on the table every night, plus plenty to share with friends. That adds up to a minimum $5,500/year – way more than we could afford, in after-tax dollars, if we had to buy it from a wine shop.
Plus we don’t have to commute to work, we don’t have to do shit work, we don’t have to put up with bosses, we don’t have to worry about getting laid off or fired. We get to putter around the farm most of the day, enjoying the sunshine or the rain, the fields and the woods, and the company of each other and our critters.
Now, if we could only raise doctors and nurses . . .