Morning Chores on the Farm in Fall

(So, I'm way behind on my blogging.  I've had this one in the hopper a while and decided to just finish and post it, despite it being at least a month "old"...)

Chores.  Everyone has them, but for some us, the word specifically means the daily tasks related to caring for the animals on the farm.  At the height of things, we're doing chores three times a day. These are repetitive, daily tasks -- certain things that need to be done at certain times.

In general, Milan does all the poultry chores, and since he's already "out there", often feeds the horses, too (the horses aren't "farm animals", in Milan's opinion.  They are my hobby, so I try to feed them myself as often as possible).

Jack often accompanies his daddy in the morning, and knows all the ins and outs of what has to be done.  Being three years old, he's still in the stage where he really enjoys helping out, for the most part. He especially loves anything to do with water, although we'll see if he's still as enamored with that portion of things as colder weather sets in!

I followed Milan and Jack out one morning to get a few shots of the morning chore routine.

And they're off!  Down the lane and around the bend to the turkeys they go!

Jack, looking intent (followed by our happy-for-the-daily-outing Pyrenees-Maremma mix, "Cash"). It's a good eighth-mile out to the turkeys, and another eighth-mile and back from the turkeys to the chickens. Not a bad start to the day for a three year old...

First, let them out of their night quarters.  Nowadays, the first thing they do is dance around, puff out their feathers and reestablish their pecking order.

This way next!

Milan carries the water can in and Jack gets to fill it.  The mornings are just starting to get brisk (it's been the most amazingly mild fall), so we'll see how long his love of all water-related chores lasts... although from what I hear from other moms, temperature is rarely a consideration against getting wet!

Milan carries in a full can of fresh water every morning.

It's a ways from the hose to the trailer! Gotta have at least as much determination and stamina as muscle to get that heavy can from Point A to Point B every morning.

Free range!  For a while they were *really* free-range, as in they kept escaping so had the run of the whole property.  Then we wised up and purchased 5ft kennel fencing and clipped their wings (oh yes, turkeys can fly -- can they ever!) so they would stay in their intended pasture.

A Narragansett hen in the foreground, a Bourbon Red in the background.

Next, care for the chickens (I failed to get a photo of Milan feeding the turkeys -- he fills the tube you see over his shoulder and pours it in the feeder each morning).

First, untie Coda.  We stake him by the runs every night to discourage nosy foxes, coyotes, raccoons, weasels, and even bears and mountain lions.  Wildlife is usually interested easy pickin's.  Coda's presence gives the impression that "it ain't".

Next, move the runs.  The runs are moved morning and evening to new grass.  This involves putting on and removing the wheels each time...

Coda's a big help training the chickens to move forward with the run.  At this age, the chickens mostly know the drill, but when they're first learning to move with the run, they often pop out the back, which, due to the wheel, is raised a good 6 inches off the ground.  Coda shoos them back where they belong.

Milan designed these pens himself, integrating the better parts of multiple pen designs he read about and saw online or in person.  His handle is a bar with cables off each end.  The cable ends are designed to mount into brackets on every corner of the run, meaning he can attach his handle on any side of the run and move it toward him.  Jack likes to help pull, of course, and behind, you can see Coda doing his job, running back and forth shooing the chickens forward.

After the runs are moved, Milan fills the feed troughs with another contraption of his own design.  The tube consists of a 6" funnel into a 4" pipe necking down through a valve to the inch-and-a-half pipe you can see really well here.  With the valve controlling the flow of feed, Milan can very accurately dispense the feed into the long, narrow feeding troughs.  The design minimizes waste and makes feeding hungry, pushy chickens flocking to the trough (and into the way of filling it) much easier.

 Once the chickens are moved and fed, it's on to feeding the horses.  Here, Jack helps feed Henry, a mustang we borrowed from a friend for a few weeks this summer.  

It's apple season, so in addition to their alfalfa-grass hay, everyone gets plenty of apples in the morning.

Jack just loves Henry, for good reason!  Henry is the most amazing horse I've ever met.  Our friend bought him in Texas at the Extreme Mustang Makeover, and he is just the gentlest, kindest, most careful and easygoing horse ever.

What a beautiful, fall morning!

After the horses are fed, it's time to head back in.  Jack got lucky this morning with a wheelbarrow ride!  Usually, it's hoofin' it out and hoofin' it back...

Oh, and a stop along the way for a few blackberries is always in order...

Around the bend and up the hill... here they come!

A stop to check on "Daddy's Whiskey", as Milan calls it.  It's actually hard apple cider in progress.

And to finish off the morning routine?  A back rub, Jack style!

"Ahhhh!" ... kind of. :)

Chicken Challenges This Time Around

May comes, and I fall off the blog roll. Spring is just such a busy time of year on the farm. It's hard to come in when the light keeps me outside, thinking I can do a little more weeding, a little more planting... whatever. It's amazing how time gets gobbled up just puttering around, doing what seems like nothing but really adds up to something when you put it all together (like shelving my garden tools so I can find them again next time).

Anyway, with that as a beginning, I've been meaning to tell you all about some of the challenges we faced with our most recent crop of chickens (acquired March 23rd, harvested last week, this coming Monday (June 6th), and again in another 10 days or so... you'll see what I mean if you keep reading).

The first wrinkle began before we even ordered our chicks. The hatchery we ordered from last year had gone out of business, so Milan made more than a couple dozen phone calls to various hatcheries and resellers trying to get a batch of 100 White Cornish X chicks. Of course, we could always order from Murray McMurray, right? Yes, but one of our values is "local", and although the term is now almost as over-used and diluted as "free-range", to us, Iowa ain't local. I know they are a great hatchery in many respects, but it's hard for us to think of 100 little chickens traveling 2,000 miles without food or water. Call us softies, if you like. That left us with few options for getting 100 chicks at once, so we settled on getting them through our local Grange Coop (still, their chicks come from some hatchery in Texas -- not so local, either).

When our order arrived, we drove to Grants Pass to pick up 100 White Cornish X and 12 Red Cornish X (see"A Little Experiment: Part 1" and "A Little Experiment: Part 2"). At that point, it was clear that there were multiple ages of chickens in the box. Some were a good five-to-six days old, as they had lost their fluff and had their wing feathers in. Others were clearly only day-old chicks (as was the case with all 12 Red Cornish X birds).

The challenge of multiple ages is one that plagues the batch throughout its entire cycle. Plainly, older chickens are bigger and shove out the smaller ones to the point where the big just keep getting bigger and bigger and the small ones stay small because they can't bully their way past the bullies. This applies to both food and heat. We lost a couple of the smallest chickens early on to being crushed by their peers as they sought heat underneath the hover. Again, this was probably a result of multiple inputs: cold nights, not eating enough to get strong, not drinking enough to be well hydrated, etc., but then to be bullied out to the edge of the heat, well, that ends it. Chicks, and particularly the White Cornish birds, are anything but robust. Miss one element of their needs and it's curtains for them. They essentially give up, which comports with their manifested lazy nature as adults. It was such a striking contrast to me to watch the little Canada Goose gosling bounce back from his ordeal (see my post titled "One Little Gosling's Undesired Adventure"). A White Cornish X chicken would never have fought that hard to survive, and even if it would have fought to survive, would have probably crawled into a bush and died of exhaustion after being released.

As time passes, the big continue to get bigger, so they need to be harvested sooner. We harvest our White Cornish birds at 9 weeks. This time around, it meant we had to have two harvest days -- one last Sunday, May 30th, and one coming up June 6th. Actually, we'll even have a third harvest day to process the Red Cornish X birds, which don't grow as quickly and don't convert feed as well. Having them this go-round was an experiment on our part, and it's clear they cannot be raised with the Whites, which have to be ration-fed to even live to nine weeks of age (commercial facilities process their birds at 6 weeks of age because that's about when they start dying anyway, as their skeletal structure and organs begin to fail due to their incredible weight -- think of them as 200-lb human two-year-olds). The Reds, on the other hand, at 9 weeks of age and ration feeding, feel like the classic "rubber chicken" when you pick them up: the breast-bone protrudes way out and they feel like nothing but feathers. They need to be free-fed and grown to 10-12 weeks of age.

Setting up these harvest days is no small matter, so having to do three of them for one batch of 100 birds is deflating. We harvested the 50 oldest birds last Sunday, will do another 28 on Monday, and the remaining 10 Red Cornish birds... well, we're not even sure yet when we'll do those. Maybe in another 10 days or so, like I speculated in the beginning of this post.

The next and more depressing challenge we experienced with this batch of chickens was something we didn't even consider before we were faced with it. As I said, the first wrinkle was not being able to get our chicks from the same hatchery we patronized last year (Lazy 54 Hatchery in Hubbard, Oregon). Apparently, they had great chicks, because we never had a one with any obvious genetic issues. Well, that changed this time around. The genetics on this batch of White Cornish X was bad. We started to notice it around 4 and 5 weeks of age: more and more birds were turning up with legs turned out at crazy angles or crumpled feet. A few died for no discernible reason, so we suspect there were internal manifestations of their poor genetics to blame. Milan watched a few weaken and would always put them in the sick bay and give them special attention for a few days. Only two such chickens rallied; the others went down hill to the point that Milan put them out of their misery (did someone say farm life is "romantic"?!). In the end, we had over 20% loss for this batch, which is a horribly high number. Industry average is 10%, and we had less than 5% all last year!

White Cornish X with deformed feet.

Here's an example of the crumpled feet, and this isn't even such a bad one. The bad ones didn't make it past 6-7 weeks; this one is 9 weeks old (photo taken the day before harvest).

Suffice it to say, it's been a tough road this Spring. Even though we realize some things were out of our control, we feel responsible for the birds we lost, not to mention that it's hard to tell our customers we can't fill their orders this time around. We usually have 5-6 birds as back up, but we've long blown through those and are telling folks that ordered 5 to expect 2.  Not a message I like to deliver.

As a result of all this, we will probably move away entirely from raising the White Cornish X breed.  We were optimistic after raising them last year.  Some of last year's got as old as 12 weeks and were still up, pecking and scratching, hale and hardy, with all their feathers intact on their breasts (they're often featherless there because their breasts get so heavy they can't stand up, so their feathers fall out and don't grow back and as a result, the breast skin gets really dirty), but we must have just been lucky to get 200 really healthy ones.  This year was just a whole different story, and reminded us that the White Cornish X is a bird that's been highly bred and re-bred specifically for the Foster Farms situation: sitting in a cage in front of a feed trough (that's never empty) for 6 weeks of life.  Here's a good visual of how chickens have changed to meet the Foster Farms standard in the last 50+ years (courtesy of Nature's Harmony Farm in Elberton, Georgia):

White Cornish X at 68 days old in 1950, vs. 47 days old in 2008.

Pretty incredible, isn't it?

So, expect to hear more about Red Cornish X birds in the future, and maybe even Freedom Rangers at Sojourn Farms.  To all our loyal customers, thanks for sticking with us through our learning process.  We really are trying very hard to raise healthy, happy, free-range, organic, pastured chickens.  It's not always easy and definitely not glamorous, but hearing how much you appreciate our efforts means a lot to us.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!