Apple Juice!

Starting a farm is a fun but overwhelming endeavor. What does one start with? My first two entries on this blog ("From Our Wedding To The First 100 Chicks" and "Becoming Real Farmers" ) talked some about our process and how it was we ended up starting with chickens as our first, for-sale-off-the-farm product.

BUT, chickens won't be the last! And here is the second (sort of!): cold-pressed, organic apple cider. This is definitely the yummiest apple juice I've ever had, and I'm not usually an apple juice fan. It's so incredibly sweet that Milan and I usually water it down at least a third with water. It's great heated, too -- just add a little cinnamon, nutmeg and a squirt of lime or lemon juice. Pick up a jar or two when you come get your chickens on processing day (TBA, but pretty soon).


This is our 2008 bottling, but 2009 bottles are available, as well as frozen quarts from our 2009 pressing (they just don't look quite as nice). The benefit of frozen is that the juice is raw. Pasteurization to 180 degrees is necessary for bottling. Either way, though, it's still organic goodness!

Graduating

I'm a little behind in my blogging. We went on a road trip and I wrote, but couldn't post, while we were gone. This entry would be dated May 9th.

It's that time of year. Graduation cards are filling up card aisles at local stores. Yes, we're going to a couple graduation celebrations this year, but the most recent one here was anything but academic. The 6-week old chicks "graduated" to new quarters, specifically, we split the bunch into two, nearly-identical runs ("nearly", because Milan made several improvements to the design in building the second one).

You can see in the first image that the quarters were getting rather cozy. Chickens need each other, especially as chicks, to keep warm and for general camaraderie. But, they don't need this many friends all at once! Like all of us, they like to hang out in the sunshine (and sure wish we had more of it, lately!), so the "porch", seen here, is always the most crowded. When the runs are moved morning and evening, you can always tell where the sunny spots were: they're the thickest in chicken dung. This photo was also taken just before being fed, so they're crowding up to the front, eager for dinner.


The new run spot is down in what we call "The Girls' Field", as its where our two mares lived for quite a while. It's the field closest to the house that's not "lawn" or landscaping (... kind of. Those categories all seem to blur together here, depending on what's going on. For example, this Spring we paddocked the horses on the "lawn", moving the paddock every one or two days, because that's where the best feed was with the least likelihood of damaging the incoming grass crop). The chickens had to be moved down the lane, across a small bridge, and out a ways into the field, as the ground along the fence was too bumpy. The run needs flat, smooth ground. This allows it to sit pretty snugly on the ground and keep out small critters (mostly weasels). Milan got the new run all set up before starting to catch chickens out of the old run, including running 500+ feet of white poly hose from the nearest underground water box. The hose is white (poly hose is often black) to keep it from heating up the water, which flows into the automatic watering system.

The new run also has a system of removable plexi-glass panels for rain, snow and wind protection. You can see it also only has the one, long feed trough. The trough is set up to be raised and lowered according to the birds' height (see the photo with Jack grabbing at a wire with stoppers on it). It's made out of a 4" PVC pipe with 90-degree cut out from center (so cut at about 3/4 instead of in half) to hold as much feed as possible while still giving the chickens ample access. The 10-minute criterion (mentioned in "The Feeding Frenzy") still applies.




Next up, move the chickens! Milan caught up 23 at a time out of the run while I opened and closed the door on our large dog kennel and made sure Jack didn't get into trouble (I spend a lot of time doing the latter!). It was just the two of us, so we didn't get pictures of the actual carrying -- Milan on one side of the kennel with Jack on his shoulders, and me on the other, hauling the white birds down the hill. I was surprised at how heavy 23 of them are in one place!


And as usual, Jack wanted to be in the thick of everything.

It took some doing getting the second run, which still had 46 chickens in it, down the hill. It was quite a long walk for the birds, not to mention quite a job for Milan, who provided all the muscle in the operation. I was in charge of keeping the birds moving so that none of them would slip out the back or taken out by the moving run. We took lots of breaks and only moved a few feet at a time, for both the birds and Milan, but what we didn't think of animals' fear of weird, new surfaces, like gravel or a wooden bridge! The chickens have grown up on grass, so when we had to pull the run off the lawn and onto the drive, they all bunched up and tried to stay on the grass. Convincing them they could walk on the gravel just fine was a little comical and frustrating. Same deal with the transition from gravel to wooden bridge! Ah, the things we're learning!

We did finally get the second run in place next to the first. Milan connected the watering systems, which most of the slightly stressed and thirsty birds immediately appreciated, and gave them a little extra helping of food for the energy expended in the whole affair (also appreciated!).

Cash, our big, white Pyrenees cross, will be staked out at night with the chickens to keep any wild creatures from getting too curious.

The Feeding Frenzy

I'm a little behind in my blogging. We went on a road trip and I wrote, but couldn't post, while we were gone. This entry should be dated May 2nd.

Okay, so thank goodness we don't have a feeding frenzy in the most scientific sense of the term (according to Wikipedia, it usually refers to predators, and more specifically, sharks and piranhas, that bite anything that moves (read: "each other") instead of the food that's amply available). But, feed time is definitely the chickens' most exciting time of the day. These photos were taken before we split the batch into two runs, which we did when the chickens were 6 weeks of age (see "Graduating").

Feeding this breed of chicken is a science in itself. The Cornish Cross (or Cornish X, or sometimes called "White Cornish") is bred to eat and produce muscle as quickly and efficiently as possible. They do this well, which is why commercial operations almost always raise the white, Cornish X's. Commercially raised birds are usually butchered at the age of 6 weeks or less because they can just grow so darn fast. This is great if you're a commercial chicken producer, raising them in 12"x12" cages where they don't do anything but eat all day. They're happy to do it, too -- eat all day, that is. They'll plop down in front of the feed trough and never move from there, except to waddle over for a drink, if they even have to move to get that.







Anyway, the point is if you want to free-range or pasture the white Cornish X (as opposed to the Red Cornish, a breed I'll mention again in a bit), you can't offer it "free feed", or have feed constantly available. Instead, you have to ration it to a certain amount per day. If you don't do this, their muscle growth so outpaces their bones, joints and organs, that not only would they never "range" around on the free range, they would start spontaneously dying at about 6 weeks of age anyway from heart or respiratory failure, inability to walk, and a host of other physical problems. They are simply bred (or genetically modified, if you want to think of it this way) to convert feed into muscle, or meat. They are the couch potato of the chicken world. This is why, during our initial research into the whole chicken-raising business, we wanted to raise Red Cornish. Red Cornish are naturally more slow-growing and robust than their white cousins, yet still offer similar quality meat. We didn't end up being able to get the Red Cornish chicks locally, however, so decided to try the rationing on the white Cornish X.

This just brings us back around to the fact, then, that when they are fed, it's a big deal! Before we split the group into two runs, two troughs were just barely enough to get everyone a spot at the feed trough (part of how we knew it was time to split the group into two runs was when they got too crowded at the troughs at feeding time). Milan was feeding three times a day, and the criterion was that the birds had to all be eating all together and finish the ration in 10 minutes.

So, how to fill the trough, when chickens are clucking and bawking and flapping all over, eager for food, became kind of a big issue. It was clear pretty quickly, especially as the birds got larger and larger, that filling the trough by hand was a hassle. To make feeding time easier (and to mitigate a lot of wasted feed), Milan created a special dispenser. A large tube at the top is filled with feed. A valve at the bottom of the large tube flows into a smaller tube. The trough itself is only hung on its ends, so there aren't any obstacles to navigate around to keep the smaller end of the tube in the trough.

Milan actually has to fake the chickens out at one end of the trough and then jump the dispenser tube to the other end to even be able to get the feed into the trough. Of course, Jack is often part of the process. He loves to hang around one side or the other and watch the whole thing.

Injuries!

It's kind of a way of farm life: you get a lot more bumps and bruises, cuts and wounds on a farm where you're constantly using tools and machinery than you would in "normal" life. Milan is always coming in with some new injury. This was the most recent:


Probably doesn't look too bad from the photo, but this was already at a day old. He basically took a chunk out of the end of his finger with a router. It bled like crazy and was a nasty-looking wound!

I manage to avoid the tool-related injuries, but still get my share. About a month-and-a-half ago now, my biggest horse stepped on my smallest toe. I think she crushed it, because it's hurt pretty good ever since.

But, you just suck it up and go on. Milan didn't even come up to the house after doing this one. When he finally did come in that night, he said, ever-so-casually, "Oh, I cut my finger."

"How bad?" I replied.

"Pretty bad," he said.

"Are you serious? Let's see it."

He had to be pressed to take the bandage off and the thing was still bleeding a lot, hours later. Both of us got a little queasy while cleaning and dressing it.

Healed up nicely, though! Milan's hands take such a beating and seem to rally amazingly well.

Building Our Pastured Poultry Runs

Milan's busy today putting the finishing touches on our second run. When we move the old run this evening, we'll split the batch between the two runs to give everyone more space and room at the feed trough. These are some pictures from earlier; the run's nearly completed at this point. The third photo is the top of the hover, which we use for the first 3-4 weeks of the chicks life to keep them warm. The little white rectangles are heaters. More on our run and hover design another day...

Another Snowy Morning

Some of you may notice that a recurring theme around here is the weather. My sister recently forwarded me an email from Coon Rock Farm, the CSA from which she orders produce in North Carolina. Here's what they had to say about it:

"I (like most farmers) have a fascination with the weather. It’s really the one thing that we have no control over on the farm and it is also the thing that probably has the most impact on whether we can produce a crop or not."

Well said. This is why, when I woke up to a snowy landscape this morning, a sight I usually enjoy, my heart filled with dread. How did the chickens fare through yet another unseasonably cold and wet night? How would they do once again moving them to now-not-just-wet, but snowy new pasture? Weather-wise, we wish several times a week we had waited to start this venture until May. Then again, who knows?! We have no control over it! The weather has been pretty wild this winter/spring, so what's to say we won't have a really bizarre summer, too?

This time, they all made it, and with an extra heat lamp (something we thought we had dispensed with after nearly a week of nice, warm, sunny weather), they're even surviving the wet grass. Whew!

Just A Fun Photo

Couldn't resist posting this one. Milan took this while inside the run the other day. Jack knows exactly what we're talking about when we say "chicken". Gee, wonder why! More photos of chickens and the farm (and Jack) in our Facebook albums.

Water, Water, Water!

Water is the basis of life, right? Making sure the chicks (which really, are now more like chickens as they're almost 5 weeks old) have 24/7 access to an ample and clean water supply is critical. We started off the day-old chicks with the classic, inverted-Mason-jar style waterers. Even the first few days, we changed the water 4 times a day, as they would kick shavings into it, poop in it, and backwash in it.

Around 2 weeks of age, Milan installed special, automatic cup-type waterers. Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of them, because they were only in the run a couple days: long enough for us to be 100% sure they were not working, or rather, the chickens didn't figure them out. The waterer had a little ball in it that we were told the chicks would peck at out of curiosity, and voila: water would automatically refill the little cup. That didn't happen. They would drink all the water out of the little cup without touching the ball, so the cups were never triggered to refill. Of course, we left the trusty Mason jars in place to make sure the chickens were still getting plenty of water.

Milan finally got a different automatic system going which is working great. It's a bowl-style waterer that hangs and automatically refills itself at a certain point.

You can see from the photos the working conditions for installing the waterers weren't the roomiest. Chickens are also pretty curious creatures. We have layers on the property here too, which are pretty skittish compared to these guys, who see us at least three times a day, usually more. They especially like Milan, as he's the guy with the food!

Here you can see the four-and-a-half week olds around the Mason jar waterer.









Even though Milan got in the run right after moving it to new pasture, it was pretty messy back there. When we move the run, the chickens go hog wild all over it for about the first half hour, pecking the clover and catching worms and bugs before settling into the sunshine near the front of the run. So, even though we had just moved it, Milan was still rolling around in chicken manure back there. Yuck! Talk about dirty work. And cramped! But Milan gets it done, usually with good humor.

Did you see the chicken on his leg? At one point, he was using rubber bands to hold something in place. One of the chickens discovered one that had fallen into the grass and thought it was a worm. The chicken made some sound that must have announced his discovery to the entire flock, because they basically converged right in Milan's face, squawking and bawking and flapping around trying to get the "worm". Milan managed to break up the party and successfully extricate the rubber band from the instigator.

It sure is a relief to not have to refill Mason jars 4 or more times a day. These little bowls are convenient and sanitary and they WORK!

If We Watched TV

We do not own a television, but if we did, there are a few things Milan and I would watch. Jamie Oliver's "Food Revolution" (airing on ABC) is one of them.

Go Jamie! Please help by signing the petition to "save cooking skills and improve school food".

Realities

This being our first farming venture, we definitely went into it romanticizing the lifestyle. In reality, the novelty wears off in a hurry. The chores are, well, chores, but the worst is losing chicks to causes we can only really guess at. We lost another one today, bringing the total number of losses to six.

We noticed this one when we moved the run, which we do about 2pm every day. I take up the rear while Milan hoists the front of the run with a handle. He pulls, and my job is to make sure the chicks move along as they should. I usually take a stick and wave it alongside the outside of the run to scatter them forward. I tell Milan what's going on, saying things like, "Slow down," "Okay, wait a minute", etc. This time, I hollered, "Stop!" At first, I thought I had missed seeing that one wasn't clearing out of the way and that we had dinged it. A second look, however, clearly indicated the bird hadn't moved for a while and wasn't in the mood to do so now. Milan then remembered having seen a bird under the hover at morning feeding (about 7am). He thought at the time, "Huh, that's one of the smaller ones," but didn't worry about it as the bird eyed him steadily and looked like any of the others do when they're resting.

By two o'clock, however, the bird was clearly weak and listless. Milan and I both felt a familiar sinking feeling. Having already lost 5, two that we force fed and spent the better part of the day trying to rehabilitate, we both dreaded finding that lifeless heap of feathers. We had to do all we could; we had to try to keep that little guy alive, even if we didn't think there was much hope.

I got out my coffee grinder and we powdered up some of the chicken feed. I made a slurry with warm water, and stole Jack's Motrin syringe. Milan dug through his hydroponic supplies (from his years in Palo Alto when the only "garden" he had was indoors or on the balcony!) and found some tubing. Off we went to force feed another little chick, hoping this time he would make it.

We both knew our jobs. Milan held the chick and gently pressed on the sides of his beak. I pried his beak open with my fingernail. Once open, I used a twig to hold it open while I got the tube in position. Thanks to the Rebecca and Meadow at Wildlife Images (our local wildlife rehabilitation and education center) for the instructions on how to force feed birds! The tube must go down the right side of the bird's throat (our left, if you're facing the bird). We fed about 2ml (or 2cc's) at a time, and did this at 3pm, 5pm and 7pm.

We also separated him from the other birds while the weather was good and the rest of the flock was scratching, pecking and relaxing in the sunshine. I can't really comment on what chickens are thinking, but by all I've observed, they certainly don't respect their sick siblings. They step on him, sit on him, jostle him, and make the possibility of convalescence pretty remote. Yet, chicks need each other, too. When we previously nursed a sick one here in the house, he perked up considerably when we brought in a couple friends.

With three successful feedings behind us, we optimistically marked the sick chick's head with a green marker: We hoped he would soon join his peers, where we wouldn't be able to recognize him without it. He couldn't stay separated at night; he had to go back under the hover. Milan placed him in a less-trafficked corner. We would be back again at 9pm for another feeding.

At 9 o'clock, Milan peered under the hover, saying, "Okay, which one of you has a green head?" I was ready, with syringe and warm gruel in hand.

"Oh, no," Milan said, and I knew: the chick had died.

People say, "It's just a chicken!" or tell us that up to 10% loss (over the course of time of raising them from chicks to slaughter) is "normal", but right at that moment, it doesn't feel like it's "normal", or "just a chicken". This was a life, a tiny, possibly-insignificant life, but it still had breath and blood and motion and senses. Now, it was a heap of flesh and feathers. It causes me to ask again, what is life, anyway? We believe that God gives it, but what IS it? Physiologically? Cosmologically? I don't know that I'll ever get a good answer.

Of course, my thoughts and perplexity may seem a little ironic in view of the fact that we're raising these birds specifically to be slaughtered. The difference in my own mind is that, when their time comes, it will be a humane, quick and purposeful death, not a random, unexplained, untimely, slow and probably painful demise.

No doubt, we're being initiated to the harsher realities of farming. Animals die, and sometimes you have no idea why. Did he not eat enough? Drink enough? Was there something else wrong with him that predisposed him to become weak? I felt when I first saw him at 2 o'clock that he wasn't going to make it. We've been told that by the time a bird looks sick, he's pretty far gone, because they disguise it until they just can't anymore (an instinct to keep predators away). Also, I have in my head that a "real" farmer has to make decisions based more on the bottom line than we do at this point. It certainly doesn't make economic sense to spend hours of our time trying to rehabilitate one chicken that's unlikely to make it anyway. But, in our situation, we can "afford" it, and so we do it, because of who we are and what we believe about life: it's precious; we have to try to hold onto it; once gone, it's never coming back.

The Ugly "Chickling" Phase

I have always heard of "The Ugly Duckling". It's a literary fairy tale by Danish poet and author Hans Christian Andersen. I'm vaguely familiar with the story, but the expression it coined has made its way into our vernacular. Most people have heard the term, even if they don't know where it originated.

The chickens are now three and-a-half weeks old, and now I know why they call it "the ugly duckling" (or "chickling", in this case) phase. Boy, are they ugly little guys (and gals)! They're half skin and half feathers, with some baby fluff still in there in spots. I can't wait for this stage to pass!

More Snow!

Chores are chores and have to be done no matter what the weather! These photos were taken April 5th. The chicks aren't quite 2 weeks old.

Chicks in the Sun

We had a few rays of sunshine last week and a few again today. What a relief for all of us -- the chickens and the humans, too!

These photographs were taken March 31st. The chicks are one week old. That big, orange contraption is our wood chipper. As Joel Salatin says, "If you say you're organic, show me your carbon piles." We've got a few around here...

March Madness: Snow And Chicks Don't Mix!

The crazy weather has made for crazy chick duties here at Sojourn Farms. Needless to say, we're learning a lot! We have a list of improvements planned for the next iteration of run and hover design. Our initial design catered to more mature birds in more friendly conditions. We weren't quite prepared to care for chicks in gale force winds, icy rain, hail and snow from all directions! We scrounged around the farm for ways to protect the chicks from the wind, which was the worst for them. The wind whipping in would suck all the heat out of the hover and cause it to swing on its hangers. You can see what we found -- tables, chairs, boxes, boards, an old door (left).

The weather also forced us to clean out the shavings and re-bed the chicks' "nest" under the hover. Our design didn't "plan" for this -- we intended to move the whole run, hover included, to a new patch of grass with a new nest all set up in the right place. But, with the grass covered with snow, that wasn't an option. So, in Milan went. Talk about a nasty job, huh?

Outdoor Chicks

We are so glad for the last few days of sunny weather! What a break for us and for the chicks. The forecast shows PM showers again tonight, with rain tomorrow and the next day, and the next day, and the next day...

From that first morning when it was pouring at 4am (read about it in "Got Chicks!"), the weather has really proven our biggest challenge and hassle factor. Our original plan was to have the chicks on pasture from the moment they arrived home, but putting day-old chicks on wet grass is sure to result in a high mortality rate. Most chicks are kept in a brooder for at least three weeks. The brooder is usually set up indoors -- somewhere out of the wind, rain and cold. It also needs to be secure from predators: from coyotes and raccoons to weasels and even large mice, which have been known to kill small chicks.

On Sunday, March 28th, the chicks were four days old. We got a little break in the weather and decided to go for it. Here, you see Milan and his dad bringing the chicks out and placing them in the run. The white structure inside with the shiny-underside door is the "hover". It's essentially an outdoor brooder. There are heaters and a heat lamp affixed to its ceiling. The whole hover is attached to wires and suspended from the ceiling of the run. It can be raised and lowered for cleaning, and also to accommodate the chicks' height. We placed an old sheet of 4'x8' plywood underneath the hover and bedded it down with dry shavings. We put down all the shavings and turned on the heaters before leaving for church so that it would dry everything out and warm it up before putting the chicks inside.

So, if other operations leave their chicks in the brooder for 3 weeks or more, why were we so eager to get ours out, especially considering the weather?

First, our research found that to successfully pasture-raise chickens, especially this breed of chicken (Cornish X, or "Cornish Cross", the classic, white chicken raised for meat), you need to get them on pasture as soon as possible. Getting the chicks out on grass early helps them become comfortable on pasture and learn how to effectively scratch and peck. If they spend three weeks in a brooder, that's a lot of time their instincts for pecking and scratching aren't kicking in. It's also three weeks they don't get the nutritional benefits of legumes, grass, bugs and worms, and the physical benefits of room to run, exercise, and good, clean, Oregon air and sunshine. Well, maybe not the sunshine just yet...

Second, they were clearly a little crowded in the horse trough we set up for their initial homecoming. We were adding pine shaving bedding twice a day to deal with the smell and keep the chicks warm, dry and clean, but it was clear that unless we set up another trough situation, they were going to outgrow it really fast.

So, at four tender days of age, out they went. Milan's dad came and helped move them while Jack and I manned the camera. It sure is fun having a wide-eyed, interested-in-everything little tyke around. He daily reminds us to marvel at things we probably wouldn't notice or spend much time thinking about.

You can see from these photos that it was still pretty wet outside. We got the chicks out between rain showers. We knew they would be warm under the hover, but the weather the week following their outdoor placement definitely put the whole run and hover design to the test.

Got Chicks!

What would be your first thought if your phone were to ring at 3:52am? My initial thought was, "Oh, no. What's wrong?" I didn't actually get to the phone in time to find out, so at 3:53am on Thursday, March 25th, I dialed our voice mail box, wondering if whoever it was had left a message. Of all the thoughts going through my head, it didn't once occur to me that it would be the Medford postal distribution center, letting us know our chicks had arrived in Medford. Did we want to come get them or should they go out to Cave Junction on the 6:45am truck? We opted for the latter, mostly because even if we had run out of the house still in our PJ's, we couldn't have had them home much sooner than they would arrive at the local post office (8am).

It was 3:55 in the morning, and we were in a bit of a pickle. After a crazy and anticlimactic Wednesday, which we spent both preparing and waiting for the chicks' arrival, we still weren't quite ready, because we had forgotten about one, extremely major consideration: the weather!

Welcome to the world of farming, right? Milan is used to working with software and machines, which are very, very predictable, once you understand their inner workings. If you take the time to carefully research, plan, design and redesign, a first-shot-out-of-the box attempt is usually successful. There's little you can't be prepared for or plan in advance when working with machines. But, the elements? Animals? We have no control over the former, and less than we think over the latter! So when it was absolutely pouring buckets at 4am, we knew we needed to scrap the original plan and come up with a bad-weather solution for these little, barely-24-hours-old chicks.

We decided to start the chicks indoors in a brooder setting, much like what you see at Grange Coop during chick-buying season. We trooped outside and started with the only empty horse trough on the place. Luckily, it was sitting upside down, so the inside was dry, and the outside nicely rain washed. We brought it inside the sun room, cleaned out the cobwebs, and bedded it down with dry pine shavings. We rigged in two heat lamps to start warming things up. We brought in bricks out of the garden and put them under the wood stove to dry out before placing them under the water jars (the extra lift off the shavings keeps the water cleaner). We filled the feed troughs with organic chick starter and a sprinkle of cherry stone grit, and the water jars with a warm, vitamin and electrolyte water solution.

Like clockwork, our phone rang again at 8:05am. "Your chicks are here!" announced the postmaster, their wild peeping unmistakeably audible in the background. Milan dashed out the door to go pick them up, while I hurriedly fed Jack.

At 8:20, Milan was back with very loud box! In the upper right corner of the box, you can see a stamp: "Hatched MARCH 24 2010 8:00am". I blogged a little about shipping live animals in the last few paragraphs of a previous post, "The Final Hours Before The Chicks Arrival". Milan and I were both a little nervous to open the box; we were steeling ourselves for the possibility of finding a dead chick or two. Off came the lid. Wow, what a little mass of fluffy yellow peepers! And, glory be! All 100 seemed in fine shape.

One by one, we plucked them out of their shipping box, dunked their beaks in the vitamin and electrolyte water, making sure they each got a couple swallows, and set them free in their new environment. Here, you see Milan doing the pluck-dunk shuffle (Jack had been told a stern, "No!", when it came to touching the chicks, so meanwhile he busied himself with the fly swatter. We made sure he didn't swat any chicks!).

So, we have definitely "Got chicks!" I would say we are now officially embarked on our chicken-raising adventure.

Questions You May Be Asking

If you received our "chicken letter", we included a sheet that provided much of the below information about our operation here at Sojourn Farms. Please feel free to contact us with additional questions. We look forward to hearing from you.

Are these chickens organic?
Yes. From the first day the chicks arrive from the hatchery, they are supplied exclusively with certified organic feed. We use a combination of locally produced Rogue poultry mix, and whole grain wheat. The birds also graze on our 100 acres of clean pasture. While the pasture is not certified organic, Sojourn Farms' fields have been both herbicide and pesticide free for the nearly 20 years the farm has been the in the family.

What is pastured poultry?
Simply put, “pastured poultry” describes birds that spend their life out on pasture. Pastured chickens typically consume 20% of their diet in fresh grass, legumes, and bugs, all of which satisfy their natural appetite. They can scratch around, pull worms… in short, be real chickens.

Is this “free range”?
Yes. The government standard for “free range” only requires that the birds have access to a small yard area for the last two weeks of life. There is no requirement that the birds actually ever see the light of day or touch a blade of grass, and in fact many never do. Our methods go beyond this standard by raising them on the range within 48 hours of arriving from the hatchery.

How does our product compare to store-bought chicken?
Most poultry that you buy in the supermarket has been chilled in a water bath causing the skin and meat to absorb up to 12% water. In contrast, our birds are air chilled, giving you more meat for your money. Proportionally, our chicken will have same large breasts and thighs you have come to expect. The meat is similarly white, but typically moister and firmer due to better muscle tone and less water. Our broilers are delivered chilled in a shrink-wrap bag ready for the freezer or cooking.

Why is our price higher?
Raising a chicken on quality organic feed and whole grains costs more than one raised on pellets. Moving them daily to fresh pasture takes more effort than shutting them in a stationary pen. We also allow our birds over 50% more time to physically develop, avoiding many of the health problems that plague mainstream practices. In order to cut costs, commercial animals are fed an unnaturally rich diet, causing them to attain slaughter weight within the first 6 weeks of life. This pattern of growth is so unhealthy for the bird, that often, had the bird not been slaughtered young, it would have soon died on its own. Our method is more labor intensive and costs more, but we feel it is best for the animal, the environment, and our customers.

Do you use antibiotics or arsenic (trade name Roxarsone)?
No. Both of these additives (antibiotics for disease control and arsenic for rapid growth) are answers to problems that do not exist in our method of husbandry. Instead, we rely on nature’s recipe for good health. We provide our animals a diet rich in fresh greens and whole grain. Their bedding is changed daily; they have plenty of room to exercise and time to relax in the Oregon summer sunshine.

How are the animals processed?
Butchering takes place on the farm where the chickens were raised. This is most humane for the animal, and eliminates the off taste that transportation stress can cause in the meat. At the time of slaughter, the bird is humanely knocked unconscious with a specially developed electric pulse. Once dressed, they are quickly cooled using modern sanitary equipment.

The Final Hours Before The Chicks' Arrival

With 100 little peeping chicks scheduled to arrive on Wednesday, March 24th, we were scrambling to have all our ducks in a row. Milan's day started at 7am with a teleconference call for the W3C. From there, it was on to a typically-full Nuance Tuesday. At 5pm, he dashed out the door, barely allowing the frozen burrito he grabbed on the way out enough time to thaw, let alone cook in the microwave. Devon arrived a half hour later, his rumbly, black, diesel Dodge announcing his arrival. He didn't stop at the house, but went straight to the shop. That's where the action was.

The two of them spent the evening and most of the night welding the 1" x 1/2" wire on to the sides of the chickens' 12' x 10' run. Here you see them hard at work, with Devon's little Jack-dog looking on.





















I took dinner down around 8pm, and cookies and coffee around 11pm, knowing it would be a late night. I went to bed around 2:30am. I heard Devon's rig leave around 4:30am. The next thing I knew, it was 7:30am, Jack was making his typical, I'm-getting-up-soon squeaks, and still no Milan. Yup - he pulled an all-nighter. He finally showed up here at the house around 8:30, wild-eyed and energetic, excited to be "so close" to being done.

Around 10am, our good friend John Harding and his assistant, Kelly, came to mow the lawn (well, the "front yard", that is) and work on the landscaping. Before getting started, we all marched on down to the shop to see this magnum opus chicken run.

It is quite a structure. Talk about being prepared -- Milan spent weeks researching and designing our runs. He made several, major design changes to what you would think is a typical, pastured poultry run. First, it's constructed of steel, not wood, making it much lighter to move. Since it will be moved daily, this is a huge consideration. Secondly, it has a peaked roof, which provides the chickens a sunny "porch", but significantly complicates the design. Here you see the first page of design sketches and calculations. Remember all that math you learned in high school, wondering the whole time who the heck ever uses this stuff? Well, Milan did! Arc tangents, cosines, sines, right triangles... all of it. Wow. I certainly never thought I would ever see these formulas again!





But back to our day.... After admiring Milan's creation, John and Kelly headed off to do the mowing. I returned to my duties as a wife and mom, part of which included preparing lunch for three hungry men, not to mention myself and Jack.

It wasn't until sometime after 2pm that I began to think the Cave Junction post office only gets so many trucks a day; surely they would know what time ours would pull in with chicks on board. I called, and sure enough: had they been coming on schedule, they would have arrived at 8am.

In addition to being completely anticlimactic, the news was disquieting: were our little chicks en route somewhere, only to be stuck there until the next truck left for Cave Junction (which we found out only gets one truck a day -- at 8am)? This whole business of mailing chicks baffled me right from the beginning. I've heard stories about how only the most robust chicks survive to arrive at their destination, and that if they are en route for more than two days, expect to lose 10% of them! It seems rather a cruel and callous way to be initiated into the world. They're only a few hours old when they're shipped.

Thankfully, I called the hatchery and learned our chicks had not yet been shipped. They were scheduled now to go out in the 4pm mailing from Hubbard, Oregon. I then called the postal distribution center in Medford to find out what time they could be expected there. They didn't know for sure, but estimated about 1pm on Thursday, March 25th.

So, one more day to go! It gave us a reprieve in finishing the run and the brooder/hover. After 34 hours straight without sleep, Milan finally crashed at 5pm. I did the evening chores (horses, egg chickens, dog, cat), gave Jack a bath and put him to bed, cleaned the kitchen and headed for bed at nine o'clock.

We were ready... or so we thought.

Becoming "Real" Farmers

Why in the world do we want to become real farmers anyway? I say "real", because there are lots of folks these days that live on some property, have a horse or some livestock, maybe some chickens and a garden, and call their little place a farm. I guess the term generally applied in such a situation is "hobby farmer". But it's different to truly be a farmer. To me, a "real" farmer earns a good portion of his living by farming (kind of a "duh", I know).

Currently, Milan is a software engineer and works from home. I'm a stay-at-home wife and mom who is blessed to have the opportunity to keep one foot in the career world by doing a little marketing consulting, also from home. So, "inside", we have this one life going. It's a good life, too! Very comfortable, especially for me. I have to say that, on paper, it's about perfect.

For Milan, however, software is not fulfilling. Sure, there are days when it's exciting and invigorating within its own little bubble. Even then, Milan has a hard time finding any real, lasting value in what he does for 8 hours a day. Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that software engineers aren't doing good things. I'm summarizing Milan's perspective. To him, being a certain kind of farmer has more lasting value than whether United's voice-prompt reservation system is fool proof.

That certain kind of farmer is conscientious, honest, hard-working and humble. He sees to the welfare of his animals, ensuring them the best quality of life he can give them. Even if they are going to be steak or chicken cordon bleu, he wants them to be able to be "real" cows or "real" chickens while they're alive. He values greatly his environment and works very hard to balance the ability to make a living with earth-friendly, sustainable agricultural practices, and if he can't viably raise something without compromising core values, he doesn't do it. He (or she!) believes in maintaining the land so that it will still be rich and fertile for generations beyond his own (Ever wonder why the "Fertile Crescent" is now a desert? Hundreds of years of unsustainable farming techniques).

In addition to seeing farming as an inviting way of life, we believe it's important to know where your food comes from. Locally grown food, whether strawberries from the farm stand or whole milk in glass bottles from a dairy in the next county is usually healthier and more sustainably produced than what you routinely get off the grocery store shelves. What's more, being in touch, on a local level, with how and where your food is produced and with the farmer that produces it, makes you more appreciative of the food and all the inputs that went into raising it. As a nation, we have completely lost touch with the fact that those chicken nuggets came from a living bird, or that those potato chips were spuds from a farmer's field. I could go off on multiple rabbit trails, at this point, about how knowing where your food comes from could be fundamental to lowering obesity statistics, heart disease, adult onset diabetes... I'll leave that for another blog, another day.

Lastly, why chickens? Why not beef, which seems easier and, in my mind, at least, is so much more glamorous? For that matter, why not anything else? Hops and bison were two other crops we seriously considered.

It came across in Milan's reading and research that any mono-crop farm is fundamentally not sustainable. This is hard to swallow, as specialization is what generally leads to greater profit. But to have a truly sustainable, eco-friendly farm, you have to be diverse. The model we're essentially mimicking is that of Joel Salatin's Polyface Farms, located in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. For us, that means starting small. We don't intend to be "chicken farmers"; we're just starting our farm business with chickens. We hope to offer eggs, beef and possibly pork in the future, and who knows what else: apples? pears? raspberries? They're all here already, in some form or another.

For us, being this certain kind of farmer pulls together our values and moral ideals about life and how it should be lived. I guess it does sound romantic. In reality, it's going to be a lot of long days of dirty, tiring and even gut-wrenching (butchering?! Hello!) work. But, we look forward even to that: good, hard, character-building work!

That's why we're doing this. Or at least, it's a start!

From Our Wedding To The First 100 Chicks

It's amazing all that happens in three and-a-half years. Since before we got married, Milan and I have been working toward having a "real" farm here at the 100 acres on Caves Highway.

We started with basic clean up in January of 2007, five months before we said, "I do". We both love our big (48' x 72'), old (circa 1900), dairy barn and were sure it would be a snap to clean it out and make it reception-ready. A new east-side foundation, a new roof, about a dozen new footings beneath the floor, umpteen boxes of miscellaneous junk from probably the last five property owners, a good 40 yards of decades-old animal dung, who knows how many no-longer-baled bales of hay, a zillion "minor" hammer-and-nail repair jobs, not to mention just the general dirt and dust of the ages... well, that was just the beginning. We took out the stalls on the west side aisle, leveled the hard-packed, pitted ground and laid 1" rubber mats. We removed the wood shop and another small room, the purpose for which I still can't figure out (small, dark, low, hard to access?). And then, we decorated.

It turned out amazing, and our wedding reception will always be an incredible coup of an event for so many reasons. Both Milan and I remember having the best day of our lives that day, trumped now only recently by the birth of our son, Jack.

The frenzy of preparing for the reception kicked off a slew of farm improvement projects that just kept snowballing into bigger and grander plans. We bought a tractor, a tiller, and a ripper. Fence wire, fence chargers. Another tractor, a horse trailer (okay, so not exactly farm related), a 24' flatbed, a 16' mower. The plan was to renovate the long-neglected pastureland. Milan planted several strips of test cover crops, which we watched grow and bloom last Spring, right around when Jack was born.

Enter Jack on the scene, and the pace of renovations slowed considerably. Actual dirt moving and fence-building turned into Milan spending a lot of time reading and researching how to proceed with a truly viable farming operation. Sometime last Fall, it all came together: we would raise chickens! Meat chickens, for now, with egg layers a possibility in the future.

From there, the path became a little more direct. We've learned more than we thought we would ever know about chickens -- the animals themselves, conventional raising and processing (wow, scary!), and how to raise them organically and on pasture. Our first batch of 100 little chicks arrives next Wednesday, and we'll be ready! Milan's down in the shop right now, welding and building their brooder, which will be placed out on pasture from the moment we pick them up from the post office.

If you had told me when I first picked up a shovel in January 2007 (to start moving out those 40+ yards of dung) that in three years I would be a mom and expecting 100 little chicks next week, I would have looked at you wide-eyed and dumbfounded. I'm sure I would have laughed nervously and maybe even secretly wished you to be wrong (I still don't think of chickens as glamorous, and I do miss what I sometimes wistfully remember as a more "glamorous" life not as a farmer's wife). But now, I wouldn't change a thing. I'm excited to see how this goes -- our first, real business venture together! We look forward to sharing it with you.