Rising Action

The pace is somehow getting faster. I really couldn’t have imagined that being possible, but these adorable chickens are putting the screws to us.

I know I’ve talked about how silly it is to try and keep a schedule on the farm, but frankly old habits are hard to break. Based on the schedule I wrote last week (I’m holding it in my hands just to make sure that there was a time that this reality seemed possible) the chickens won’t be ready to hit the pasture until Tuesday or Wednesday of this week. This gives me plenty of time to build their shelters, shop for a truck, begin marketing, clean the house, and enjoy being married. Basically that idea is wrong…so very, very wrong.

So to begin with we’ve been a little behind schedule since the water system broke (and then broke again, and then one last time to make sure I knew I lived at its mercy) because that ate up some serious broiler pasture shelter building time while Shae’s father was here to help. However, these chickens, and I do not mean chicks anymore, are huge. They are way ahead of schedule and the brooders are looking smaller and smaller by the day. While the compost in there is finally looking nice, we are also starting to see some bad behavior because of the population density. The numbers haven’t changed, but just like children who have lived in the same room for years, these guys are pre-teens now and want their space (they have also developed terrible taste in music and a tendency to cluck back at us). We’ve set up two small hospital pens in the house to keep injured chicks away from curious beaks, which make small wounds into big wounds, and things are balancing out to be pretty good as long as we are vigilant. But, vigilance takes a lot of time and effort and is only a way to maintain the status quo, not improve it.

So we’ve been rushing to get the pasture shelters done, and we are thinking we will have 5 of the 10 shelters ready by tomorrow or Monday. Getting half of the group out, the giant half preferably, would be a tremendous release of pressure. We sent an SOS to our friend John in Santa Cruz and he came up on Friday to help build. Amazingly he offered not only an extra pair of hands, but some really awesome advice that helped us start building at some pretty impressive speeds. But to get the shelters down to the field and purchase some of the final supplies we need, we will need a truck, and that’s been an adventure in and of itself.

The Wattrod (my 2003 Accord coupe) is not a particularly good working car for rural life. As I am learning, our budget of about $5,000 for the purchase of a three quarter ton 4-wheel drive pickup and the first year of its maintenance is slightly comical. What has been so funny about this is that every truck I’ve seen has taught me that I can either have something reliable or something affordable. I used all of Thursday to go and see a truck that looked perfect for us only to learn, thanks to the mechanic I had inspect the truck, that the 74,000 miles being advertised on the odometer and Craigslist posting both neglected to let us know that the 5 digit odometer had rolled over at least once in the car’s life. So we are back to square one on looking for trucks.

Lastly, and I’ll keep this short for modesty’s sake, things are a mess. I’ve got chickens in hospital pens in the living room, all of my tools live now in a wheelbarrow so I can get to work faster in the morning, and I haven’t done laundry since my Dad was in town (feel free to check back on the blog to see how long ago that was). We are eating well thanks completely to Shae, and that keeps us energized and also lets us focus on cleaning the kitchen, but I think the last time I had a shower was on my wedding day.

This sure comes off as a laundry list of complaints, but I wouldn’t be taking the time to write something purely negative. I really like being able to share this adventure with all of you, my friends and family. I think that filling you in on the busy/hectic/scary parts makes the successes real and rewarding.

Wish me luck.

Nesting

I am so happy to say to you all that Shae Lynn and I got married on Tuesday! As I mentioned before, we are living off of our savings right now and can’t afford a reception, but we had a wonderful time being married at the county assessor’s office.

I am anticipating a large number of admonishments for this, but we started our day with building the prototype for our mobile chicken shelters. I had thought it would be fine to do farm work so long as we had an hour to get ready. At first I was a little skeptical when Shae asked to stop working a full two hours early, but I quickly was reminded that I should never doubt her when I saw how gorgeous she was.

We had to make sure the chicks were fed and safe before we left and a couple of trouble makers ended up getting us behind schedule. We also had to stop at the post office because Shae and I (really just me) had forgotten to get me a ring so we ended up ordering one online gambling that it could reach us with overnight shipping by the afternoon of the wedding. Amazingly it did, and after I was scolded by the postmaster for buying a wedding ring on the internet, we made it to the office on time.

The ceremony was obviously small, but we were amazed by how much of an asset that turned out to be. Having just the two of us there made us feel like we were saying our vows directly to each other. There was no audience and no expectations. It turned out to be very moving and something I’m really happy we did.

To celebrate, we had Shae’ brother chick sit so we could have dinner at Pasta Moon in Half Moon Bay. Pasta Moon is an incredible restaurant about 20 minutes up the 1 that really values and seeks out local and sustainable food. Further, they are going to be the first restaurant to serve our chickens and turkeys! When we arrived they had a couple of glasses of champagne waiting for us at our table along with several sincere congratulations from the staff. The owner, Kim Levin, was raised on a farm herself and has a genuine interest in finding food that has the full flavor she remembers. She has been so excited about our chicken and such a phenomenal supporter. The dinner was superb and at the end we were completely surprised to learn that Shae’s mom had called before we had arrived and paid for our meal. The gift made us both beam.

When we got home we were exhausted and had to feed the chicks again, but we made a point to turn up the car’s stereo enough so we could have our first dance under the stars in the driveway.
All in all the day was just a great reminder of how special small can be. We still want to have a reception next year, but it was really moving to be able to spend our day together.

P.S. We are having a great honeymoon. I dragged Shae out to this amazing retreat where city kids like us can spend some serious time learning about local agriculture and where food comes from by waking up early, feeding chickens, eating fresh food, and building farm structures all day.

(Shae is really tired right now and when I showed her this I got a slug in the arm. I am sure we'll find a time in the next 10 years to take a little honeymoon.)

Water, Water Everywhere...

Shae and I woke up this morning with the rare feeling that we’d be able to roll out of bed, casually do some chores, and then have a slow breakfast of sourdough pancakes that would lead leisurely into a couple of projects and prototypes we’ve been meaning to get to.

All of that changed when nothing happened...when I turned on the water faucet, and nothing happened.

This is an old ranch, and the home we are living in is way up on a hill and relies on this old ranch’s water system to get us water every day. It’s not really the most ingenious design, but it’s what we have to work with and today it wasn’t working at all.

We checked all of the pumps and the tanks and realized that the pumps were working fine, but that the tank that feeds the house was missing about 500 gallons of water. Where did it go?

We spent the better part of the morning pacing the heavily overgrown water line, trudging up and down the hill, scraping our way through poison oak and blackberries, and coming up again and again empty handed. Finally we turned on the system to listen for any leaks and right in the middle of the biggest and thorniest thistle patch I’ve seen there came, of course, a gurgling sound.

So out came the machete and the shovels and away we went. What was a bit frustrating was this leak was actually caused by a broken repair from god knows how long ago, and there were very clear indications that it had been fudged a bit then because there was debris and sand that had been added to the hole to keep the water line balancing in a specific position. Obviously that didn’t work.

The best part of the day was after soaking my pants and boots in order to learn that even when the pump is off water pressure will stick around, we found a second leak. What ensued was an inspired choreography set to the Benny Hill theme song where one break in the line would cease leaking and the other, which had just been fine, would explode.

I actually am not writing this to complain or garner any pity. The take away from this post is that we’d be without water, cold, tired, and frustrated if it wasn’t for our neighbor Laco, who gave up his day off to help us, and Shae’s father, Phil, who charitably stayed an extra day to see just how dirty he could get his clothes.

The basic fact behind all of this is that we need these people and all the people who have helped us and will help us. Put plainly and simply this is about as far from self-sufficiency as we can get. We are relying on a lot of people, but I know we are on the right track because every day people are relying on us just a bit more. It’s coming slowly, but it’s certainly there and I really must say it’s amazing to know that when someone comes to help me through a crisis, they know I’d do the exact same for them.

So instead, I am writing this feeling cold and tired, but with a relationship with my neighbor and father-in-law that’s a bit closer, a deeper understanding of plumbing and water systems, and the expectation of a warm shower. Who could ask for more?

P.S. I could ask for a bit more. Shae and I are off to the Court House to get married on Tuesday!

A Murder Most Fowl

Chickens are funny little creatures. Unlike cows and sheep, chickens are omnivores, a fact that injects a whole new set of considerations when they are raised on the farm. While it is rarely their first choice, these little guys have no qualms with eating their peeping peers when they are compelled to (Just look to the left at the family resemblance to their ancestor Tyrannosaurus Rex. Who are you calling chicken?). Cannibalism is such a concern that the industrial food system now burns off chicks’ beaks in order to prevent it, effectively removing their ability to eat anything but processed feed for the rest of their lives.

This, like all problems on the farm, comes down to management. Cannibalism is a function of stress. Either the birds are living in a population that is too dense, they are not getting enough nutrition from their feed, or they are bored. If you picture an industrial chicken house where birds are packed into a constantly lit space (sometimes in cages) with stagnant air filled with fecal dust and then fed an assortment of medications and hormones dusted with whatever commodity feed was cheapest that month, you can see how this could be a serious a problem.

However, the real mystery is why it would show up on little ol’ Early Bird Ranch.

(Warning: ShaeLynn thinks I should warn you that what follows is a poultry murder mystery that's not for the faint of heart.)

On Monday, Shae came running in the house to get me because she saw a turkey running around the uphill brooder with a severed chicken leg in its mouth (We have two brooders- the uphill and the downhill. The difference in elevation is a foot or so, but it helps us to have names to call them by.). Right away we started looking the chick that the leg belonged to, but we couldn’t find the body. This to me pointed pretty clearly to a potential predator problem, and we went about setting trap after trap and plugging hole after hole, but we quickly learned this wasn’t going to do anything.

Like any good mystery or horror story, we realized the shocking truth that we were on the wrong track…effectively we learned that "the call was coming from inside of the house!"

At first, and just to be safe, I decided to give the chicks some extra protein in the form of some ground beef we had in the house to see how they liked it. I have been varying their diet with goodies like fruit, weeds, and grass clippings whenever I can. How they reacted was the first clue that something was not right.

The lower brooder chicks accepted the treat calmly and happily and finished their pieces after slowly investigating them first. The uphill chicks literally were leaping off the ground to catch the pieces of beef before they could hit the ground and then chasing each other in order to get even a tiny bite.

I immediately got on the phone to order some beef liver to supplement their feed with. Liver is fantastic because it is rich in protein, fat, and has an amazing load of vitamins and minerals. I’ll skip to the end because this post is quite long already and say that any and all signs of cannibalism disappeared in less than a day after we started giving the chicks a slice of liver in the morning. However, we were still scratching our heads over why only one brooder would be showing signs of nutritional deficiency. The brooders are identical in construction, proportion of turkeys to chickens, total population, feed ration, and every other variable we could think of. At least that was the case, until I stopped thinking like a methodologist and started to think like a farmer.

The other day I was talking about all the great benefits of the liver as I was proudly spouting off all the benefits of the extra Vitamin B12 and riboflavin the chickens were receiving now. Suddenly it hit me like a ton of bricks that the composting floor of the brooders provides those same nutrients with all the flora and fauna that thrive in it…once it begins to compost. In a rush I started to investigate the floors of the brooders and amazingly there was a distinct difference between the level of decomposition in the uphill brooder and the lower brooder. What is so striking about this is that the cause of this difference looked inconsequential to even our trained eyes just a few days ago.

The bedding for the brooders came in large part from a generous farmer up the road that does a lot of lumber work. His bedding was new and clean and looked and smelled great. However, two trash bags worth (less than 5% of the total needed per brooder) came from a trip Shae and I took to a recycled lumber yard during our first few days here, and the stuff had to be scraped off the floor and separated from all the dirt that had accumulated under it over the weeks it had spent on the ground. So here’s the part that would make Inspector Poirot proud: those two bags went into the lower brooder.

So amazingly, while the compost in the brooders really aren’t supposed to get going until the second or third batch, just a dose of old rotting wood shavings in one brooder inoculated the bedding to an extent where there was a significant enough nutritional difference to make one brooder an Eden, and the other…not.

I don’t want to get too high and mighty here, but as a big fan of compost and sustainable agriculture I am not surprised in the least that composting is a keystone in how to solve our nutritional woes and take us one more step away from the brutal chick-eat-chick world we’ve created.

P.S. We are happy to report that only a single chick was lost cannibalism. We check these guys 5-6 times every day and with the help of our specially designed hospital pen, we were able to take any chicks with injuries out of the general population and let them heal in peace. They are now back in with all the others and doing great.

Polyphase Farm- The Farm of Many Phases

Without missing a beat, we have moved on to phase two of our adventure. Our next objective is to build the mobile pasture shelters that will house our chickens out in the field. This phase is a bit more of a race because we need to have them done by the time these chicks are large enough to leave the brooder. This means that we have anywhere from 2-3 weeks, and as you may have gathered from the previous post, even a couple hours can make all the difference!

We have budgeted a bit of time for recreation, though. Yesterday Shae Lynn, my father, and I went out to a remote part of the ranch to test and fine tune the aim on one of the farm’s rifles. With only a tin can as a target it was hard to get a feel for how the rifle shot because my dad and I kept missing it completely…that is until Shae Lynn, or should I say Ms.Bullseye stepped up. Without missing a tick, Shae put hole after hole in that can and all with a sly smile and lady-like modesty that came with the cool remark, “Oh, this is nice, it isn’t one of those guns that hurts you when it jumps.”

We have also had a time to get some projects done at night now that we don’t have to monitor the temperature in the brooder every hour. Last night I got to finish up some prototype nipple waterers for the brooders. The $2 bucket waterers we’ve been using have been fairly successful at getting water to the chicks, but they are a bear to change and keep clean and get all of the bedding around them wet. The nipple waterers will let us change the water outside of the brooders (which are only about 4’ 8” tall) and will stay nice and clean for the birds. They are definitely worth the extra money.

Last, I want to give my sincerest of apologies to you all. It has come to my attention that my last blog post completely neglected to make any sort of joke about the farm’s name and the unexpected arrival on Tuesday (instead of Thursday) of our 400 chicks. Although, I wrote the post in near total exhaustion, there is no excuse for missing that opportunity. While we are recovering well from the surprise, a ranch by any other name, though, might have been nice.

Farming on a Schedule

Goodness gracious.

Farming on a schedule is a bit of a joke.

Tuesday was a scheduled as a leisurely day when we could finish up the wiring on the brooders, get the roofs on, and just do what had to be done so we were ready when the relatively small batch of 100 turkeys arrived on Wednesday.

Well, things in agriculture are pretty bad at staying within rigid human time frames. Instead, on Tuesday morning right as I was starting what I trust would have been a lovely breakfast, the post office called to let us know that our 400 chicks had arrived. What resulted was the closest feeling I can say I have felt to sheer and utter shock.

Shae and I took a deep breath and burst into a sprint to begin doing whatever we could so we could house, feed, and keep warm 400 newborn chicks. 48 hours early is pretty darn early and we had budgeted to use a substantial chunk of that time to prepare ourselves. We ended up having to split ourselves into three teams with Rodney and I picking up the chicks from the post office, Shae rigging a temporary brooder in the living room that could house the chicks until the outdoor brooders were ready, and my father picking up last-minute supplies in Half Moon Bay.

The noise that 400 chicks make in a house is unbelievable and we spent two hours fussing over the design of our impromptu brooder to get the temperature just right. What’s great is that chicks let you know pretty well how they’re feeling. The biggest danger is that if they get cold or scared, they will crowd into corners and when that happens chicks can get suffocated or crushed. However, this behavior did let Shae and I know when we hit the sweet spot in regards to their brooder's heat levels, because almost immediately after making some final adjustments, the chicks began walking around, playing, and eating.

The final brooder preparations are a bit of blur in my memory already, but it took me, my father, and John from Santa Cruz a good chunk of time to finish them up, while Shae, Janina and her daughter, and John’s mother watched the chicks in the house.

Everything ended up going pretty well. The brooders are warm and safe and my last minute addition of a reptile thermostat has been effective at maintaining the temperature and keeping the energy costs down. Even with having to wake up several times during the night to make sure the heat was still on, I’d say that this has been a great experience so far... even though this is officially only Day 2 of batch #1.

Here we go.

Fruitful Family Farming

This post was written on July 19:

The gravy train is still yet to arrive, but the feed truck showed up today with the very first shipment of my farming career (sadly a whopping $1,200 bill came too). We are continuing to rush in order to get ready for the Wednesday and Thursday arrival of the 400 chicks and 100 poults, but one BIG item is now off my to-do list. We were so lucky to find this producer too, it is exactly what we want. We’ve gotten a few people giving us questioning and even judging looks when we tell them we are not certified as organic, but to us, the largest gains in the quality of life for the animal, the care we give to the land, and the health of the food we produce comes from raising chickens outside where they belong.

We don’t want to produce food just for the rich. I think that the cost of organic certification has gone beyond the actual costs and now the price includes a good chunk of government red-tape and trendy hype. For Shae and I, giving the chickens plenty of wild grasses, bugs and fresh clover to munch on as well as a natural feed free of genetically-modified ingredients, synthetic hormones, and pharmaceuticals, means our pasture-raised Early Bird Broilers (good name for a product, don’t you think?) are a going to be a delicious, healthy, and affordable option for families and individuals who want real food that’s worthy of their table.

I realize that reads just like a marketing pamphlet, but that’s why I love farming. I don’t have to switch on a “marketing” switch in order to talk to customers. The pride and enthusiasm comes free with the territory.

The farm’s staff has continued to grow this week. Because of a bit of over-zealousness on my part, I may have given myself a hernia during a particularly fast-paced and long day. To keep us on track (and provide a wealth of emotional support) my dad came up early to help out on the ranch. So all together it has been Shae, Shae’s Uncle Rodney, my father Alex (in the blue jacket to the right), and me working an average 11 hours per day with pretty regular visits from our friend John from Santa Cruz. That means that in one day we can accomplish what would take me more than a regular corporate working week to do alone. And what’s awesome is that everyone feels useful because out here we good at everything from electrical wiring to financial management. As such, every age and background has something they can teach and it’s even helped me to connect with friends and family (including those who haven’t visited the farm yet) as though I am meeting a whole new side of them.

I can’t think of a profession that values more the natural diversity of skills and experience that exists in families and circles of friends. What a blessing.