Starting a Family

To prevent a barrage of angry comments, I’ll get to the point as soon as possible.  Shae and I are not having children yet, but we are planning for kids!

On our trip back to San Diego during Christmas, we fell in love with a 6-year-old Nigerian Dwarf Goat named Essie, and couldn’t resist the urge to bring her back home with us.  Lately we’ve been thinking very seriously about getting a dairy animal of some sort.  We go through a lot of dairy and frankly we have to limit ourselves so we don’t ruin our food budget.

It’s fair to point out that neither of us are particularly enthusiastic about goat’s milk, and we had been trying to justify spending the thousands of dollars it takes to get a milk cow.  However, very slowly (and serendipitously) friends and neighbors began to allay many of our concerns with goats.  As it turns out the “goaty” flavor of goat’s milk is a function of several factors including the presence of a buck, the breed you are milking, and the freshness of the milk.  My dear friend Galen from Polyface sealed our fate when he told me about his experience with Nigerian Dwarf Goats and how their milk is the most similar to cow’s milk and even has a higher butter-fat content (yippee!).  If Essie’s recent exposure to a buck is as productive as we hope, Essie will be giving birth in May.  Her breeder gave us the exciting, although perhaps daunting, news, that we can expect 3-5 kids and roughly 2 quarts of milk per day once she hits peak production.  Coming from a goat that is no more the two feet tall, I am reminded of the adage about big things in small packages.

However, we didn’t stop with Essie.  A few weeks back, Shae and I visited TLC Ranch in Santa Cruz.  They have sadly gone out of business and we were interested to see what experience and perhaps equipment we could gather.  We spent most of our time talking with Jim and Rebecca, the farm’s owners, and getting an eye-opening lesson on the challenges they faced when trying to get a long-term lease on any piece of land, hiring reliable labor, and keeping up with the regulatory BS that saturates agriculture.  However, all that aside, we learned that their farm/family dog, Iris, wasn’t going to be able to come with them on their next adventure.  Iris is an Australian Shepherd and a true outdoor farm dog that needs not only plenty of space, but also a sense of purpose.  While Shae and I weren’t quite planning on getting a dog in the near future, it has been a goal of ours.  We talked about the cost of caring for her, where we’d put her, and all the practical topics that a responsible young couple should, but we overcame our lingering reluctance when we learned that none of TLC’s neighbors had room for Iris.  We couldn’t be happier with our choice.

Iris is an amazing dog.  She is well behaved, loves strangers, other animals, and scares the coyotes away at night.  She even gets along with Essie (…even though Essie doesn’t quite get along with Iris).  We are still working out the details, like my allergies, but we are thrilled to have such a well-trained dog/coworker helping us out.

As the last few hours of 2010 roll away, Shae and I are particularly grateful to find ourselves healthy and in good spirits.  In 6 months our lives have changed dramatically.  However, through all of it our excitement to share our lives with all of you has not diminished.  From the peepers, to Essie and Iris, to Shae and I, we thank you all for your support and enthusiasm and wish you a very Happy 2011.

Yin and Yang

As we've moved into a Winter schedule, a lot has changed.  There are so few outside and traditional farm jobs to do.  These normally fall into my domain and all through the season I enjoyed being the masculine lifter, cutter, builder, hauler, and wrecker on the farm.  It was very satisfying to feel like the success of the farm was literally being carried on my shoulders.

However, now that those jobs have disappeared, I realize how many other jobs there are the farm...and more importantly who has been doing them!

My wife, Shae Lynn, is the answer, and she is sensational...not to mention beautiful.  From sunrise to well after I've fallen into bed, Shae Lynn was the force that keept me and the farm going at the pace that let us meet all of our 2010 goals.  I don't want to bring the honesty of this post into question by assigning an undue or unrealistic amount of kudos to her, but the fact is I would not have achieved on my own anything close to what we did together.

In addition to doing chores with me every morning and evening, Shae Lynn managed our business, marketing, customer contact, inventory, dealing with feed and equipment suppliers, the construction of our website (which should be ready soon), sales, the home laying hen flock, the food at home, the data we collected on the animals, designing/refining our mobile livestock shelters, and handled the bulk of the research and work we did for the non-profit land trust PLANT! that we work with.  It fills with me with such a deep sense of pride to be able to share this because I'm just now seeing it clearly too.

To top it all off, just recently Shae began work on getting our bread business off the ground, which will hopefully help get us some income through the chickenless winter months.  After talking with the people at Pie Ranch and working out an agreement where we could use their wood-fired brick oven, she rushed out, bought her supplies, mixed the dough, and spent a day baking 150 loaves of simply delicious artisan bread as a pilot program (I particularly liked the roasted garlic and butter ciabatta).

I don't want this to sound like I am gushing, but it is just so easy for the blog I predominately write to seem a bit one-sided.  Maybe when Shae Lynn stops doing so much work she'll have time to blog!

P.S.  I am not sure how many of you subscribe to Gentry Magazine.  I assume roughly 80%.  I am more Pleb Weekly type.  Regardless, I also should note that Shae Lynn will be featured in a piece on women in business in the January issue.  Here she is during her photo session where the words "make love to the camera" were, in fact, mentioned.

Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving!

The production season is now at a close, and boy was it great.  We really learned a lot and are thrilled about diving in again next year.

Thanksgiving was a lot of fun and was just the celebration we needed.  We were invited by our neighbors Donna and Gene to come have dinner, and while we had our reservations about leaving the house at all (when we were in the thick of processing we promised ourselves that we’d recover by staying in our pajamas for a month and eat ice cream), the dinner was spectacular.   We had an Early Bird Turkey, and I was quite proud and impressed. 

The turkeys ended up being absolutely huge.  In addition to just excelling on the pasture and expressing that as physical growth, we received so many requests for processing dates closer to Thanksgiving that we let the birds go an extra 10 days while they were at their peak growth rate.  All of this will be taken into account next year, but what blew me away was that the large size of the turkeys did not diminish their tenderness or flavor.  Email after email from customers, as well as our own dinner at Donna and Gene’s, showed us that customers with the same concerns ended their Thanksgiving suppers satisfied and fighting with their guests over who got to have the leftovers.  That said, we still have a 28 pound turkey in our freezer for anyone looking to host a minor diplomatic gathering or very complete family reunion.

I don’t think I’m going to say much more today.  Shae and I are overcoming our obligatory “we can finally rest now” colds and I’d much rather be under a blanket right now (admittedly, though, I’ll probably do some farm finances or something while I’m there).

I’m not sure how often we’ll be posting on the blog over the Winter.  I suspect we can keep a once-per-week pace up, but that all depends on us having interesting things to say.  We’ll do all we can to be fascinating!

Have a great Winter.  Happy Everything!

Tread Softly...

I certainly don’t want to tempt fate by counting my turkeys before they are processed and sold, but with winter approaching it’s time to start making some plans.

Having a seasonally-driven schedule has some significant disadvantages, but it allows us to reset our minds and use the “off-season” to play around with projects and see how we can improve or expand the business.  This year has been truly wonderful to us and while we are still a little ways away from paying for the broiler and turkey business and rebuilding our savings, we have a few projects that we are planning for the winter that we’d love to share with all of you.  Your input, critiques, ideas, and even help are all welcome and encouraged.

Our winter planning board!   See all the ideas?

Rabbits- In 2011 we are planning to start a small rabbit enterprise on the farm.  Many restaurants and customers we’ve talked to have been disappointed at the availability of local and especially pasture-raised rabbits, and we are thrilled that we might be able to help fill the gap.  The project would likely be quite modest as rabbits don’t scale easily.  However, on a small-scale they are wonderful and can potentially bring in a nice supplemental income for the farm.

We are thinking of breaking from the Polyface Raken House (It really should be spelled Racken House) that combines Rabbits and Chickens on a composting floor to eliminate the dangers of concentrating rabbit waste.  Instead, we are considering combining the rabbits with a worm composting structure that will keep our hens out on the pasture and control the rabbits’ waste while creating some really valuable compost for our garden.
Garden- So this one is a bit of a pipe dream, but it’s an important one to me.  I have very limited gardening experience, but next year I’d like to produce 75% of the vegetable calories Shae and I consume.  In fact, I’d like to produce a heck of a lot more… like comfrey for the rabbits to eat and herbs to sell with chickens.  However, I think this is possible.  I am a devoted student of Steve Solomon (look up his books on gardening!) and I’m surrounded by truly gifted vegetable growers and a near-constant supply of manure.  Additionally, ShaeLynn’s father and mother are both now experienced gardeners, and would be amazing resources.  If I can’t get them out here to help by offering chickens, I’m willing to try luring them with grandchildren.

Bread Baking- A big challenge that we have to overcome is that our cash flow ends in the winter.  This is not completely terrible, but it does put some hefty pressure on the other seasons.  In the next few weeks Shae and I will be talking with some local farms and seeing if we can team up with their CSAs and provide them with a steady supply of artisanal breads baked in a wood-fired brick oven.  Sounds pretty great, huh?  Shae is an accomplished baker now and her curiosity and devotion to the craft are really exemplary.  In the end of 2009 and the beginning of this year she worked full-time baking these sorts of breads in New Jersey and frankly we haven’t been able to find anything like them out here.  The time commitment is quite serious, but as a winter business I think this is a great fit.  I can’t imagine Shae will be too unhappy in front of a roaring oven during the cold wet months and I can’t think of a single customer that wouldn’t be interested in fresh hearty breads to enjoy with a warm bowl of soup this winter.

Soup and Chicken Stock- As I am not one to brag, I’ll simply say that the stock we make from our chickens is downright stellar.  With the rich and nutritionally-dense fat that our birds put on eating grass and clover, we can produce a stock that is thick, flavorful, and wonderfully healthy.  The best part about stock and soup is that it is a great way to add value to the chickens and empty our freezer (that is in cahoots with PG&E to destroy our budget).  Producing chicken stock or soup would be a great winter business as well and help to distribute or income a little more evenly.  Further, it would be a great way to cooperate and build relationships with the local vegetable growers whom I am sure would like to see aesthetically unsalable vegetables get purchased and used to feed people.

Slow Growth Broilers- The last project (although the list goes on) that I’ll put out there is that we’d like to begin experimenting with new breeds of meat chickens.  I love the Cornish Crosses that we raise.  They are efficient growers and produce at a low cost a meaty bird that we hope lets more families eat wholesome and local food.  However, they are not the only meat bird out there.  Other breeds bring other assets to the table and many of our customers have been interested in the slower growing breeds.  These birds take longer to produce and have mostly dark meat, but as a result are usually quite flavorful.  One of our big ambitions is to see if we can actually start a self-sustaining flock of these guys that we breed and raise on the farm.  Over time, this would allow to us experiment with breeding a meat bird that is specially suited to unique climate and pastures of the Cloverdale Valley.  Pretty exciting!

We’ll see how all of this develops.  Our model for growing this business is to expand the diversity of the farm rather than the size of any one enterprise.  We are also looking into getting a dairy cow (my cheese making skills are in desperate need of practice), starting a grass-fed lamb operation, and beginning to raise pastured pigs, but these enterprises might be too capital-intensive to begin in the winter and may have to wait until spring.

All that said, 2011 looks like it’s going to be a pretty formative year for the business.  As I mentioned above, we’d love to hear ideas, encouragement, warnings, or anything else any of you are willing to offer.  We really can’t thank all of you (friends, customers, family, and blog-readers) enough for helping us start and keep the farm going.  We wouldn’t have even gotten this far if it wasn’t for your cheering, advice, support, and friendship.

Happy winter!

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet,
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams

Fancy Shmancy

Here we are, as promised, coming up for air.

As many of you can guess (or saw when you came by the farm), we are a little bit run down by the intensity of the schedule we’ve been maintaining over the last two weeks.  However, we've made it over the substantial obstacle of processing our second batch of chickens, and we even got enough last minute customers to bring our chicken inventory down to something that will fit in our garage freezer!

Everything seems to be going great on the farm, though. We've been a little worried to hear that two farms run by neighbors and friends of ours are closing down.  Both farm operations were run using sound and even impressive methods, but regulatory and market-based challenges made the businesses and, more importantly, the quality of life unsustainable for the farmers.  This is obviously a real concern for us.  We are willing to sacrifice to get the farm started and off the ground, but I think we are shooting in the short-term for something a little more modest than 12-14 hour days.

With that in mind Shae and I cleared our schedules and threw worries of morning fatigue to the wind and had a spectacular night out.

For the past two weeks we have been waiting anxiously to go and try the amazing ways that Flea Street Café’s executive chef, Carlos, told us he’d be using our chicken.  We haven’t had a night out in quite a while and our dress clothes were looking dusty.  When Carlos and the restaurant’s owner, Jesse, came by in the middle of our 10 day processing marathon to pick up their order and invited us as their guests to come have dinner, we accepted immediately.  In the days that followed, while we were standing in the wet and cold, covered in chicken guts, Shae and I created a wonderful fantasy of how great it would be to go out and have dinner to celebrate being done.  While it would have been enough for the dinner to have just provided us with the energy and morale to make it through 500 birds, it turned out to be an incredibly special night.

What a team!

Perhaps the most important part of the evening was meeting everyone at Flea Street Café.  Before we sat down, we were introduced to almost all of the staff and had time throughout our dinner to steal small conversations with them as they darted from table to table.  What made this so important was that Shae and I really don’t want to have traditional customer-vendor relationships.  When we look for customers, we proudly blur the line between personal and business matters.  Part of what we love about farming is that we have the ability to use the business as a means to meet new friends and develop ties to the people/community that are nourished by our food and in turn let us continue to heal the land and care for our animals.  However, all this gushing might be a little much--I’m sure many of you are interested mostly in what we ate.

The food was downright amazing.  Shae and I both get a great deal of pride from taking the time to cook delicious meals at home and experiment with different ingredients and preparations, but the food we had was just a great example of what years of culinary experience and training can produce.  The care and creativity that Flea Street Café put into their menu was really apparent.  We are usually a pretty cheap date, and as good guests we were planning to just have two modest entrees, but the people at Flea Street Cafe had a different plan.  Through taste after taste of exquisite food that they sent out to surprise us, we found ourselves a little overwhelmed, but supremely happy and satisfied.

Here’s what we had: squash ravioli with an Early Bird Chicken ragu, housemade lamb sausage with spicy peach compote, friend green tomatoes with corn relish and chipotle aioli, harpooned San Diego swordfish topped with crab, slow-braised grass-fed short ribs, pasture-raised duck with a bacon sherry vinaigrette, black mission fig bread pudding with bourbon cream carmel sauce, and chocolate almond cake with rum peach ice cream.



I meant to take a picture of the beautiful presentations, but I kept getting distracted.  Everything, with absolutely no embellishment, was awesome.

I swear it looked great.

Our wonderful waiter Steve, who couldn’t have steered us towards better choices, masterfully calmed all of our fears by reminding us that pre-industrial agricultural peoples usually needed twice the daily calorie intake that we consider normal today.  That was a big relief because it means Shae and I were only overeating by a factor of 4 rather than 8.

But here’s what really made this blog-worthy, the night was inspiring.  The time to rest was important, and the food was amazing, but meeting the staff and seeing their passion for real and high quality food reinvigorated our tired spirits.  Shae and I spent most of the night gazing into each other’s eyes… and brainstorming what breed of hogs we’d like to raise and doodling sketches for a mobile rabbit/worm compost structure.  It was as romantic you’d imagine.

So we’re back to our schedule, but things couldn’t feel brighter.  I suppose though, it’s easier for us to recover from being tired and overwhelmed.  This is the one job where the grass is greener where we are. 

This is our first slaughter spot in front and our second in back. Amazing.

Still Alive

Shae and I just wanted to check in and let all of you know that we are still chugging along.

We are in the middle of a seriously demanding processing schedule, and our aching bodies and faltering minds have just about reached their breaking points.  However, each day we are a little closer to finishing and we've been helped and encouraged by scores of friends, family, customers, and combinations therein.  It's keeping us going.

I'm writing this while we are taking a quick breakfast right before rushing out to do chores and start today's batch.  We won't be back up to our house until sunset, but I promise we'll have an update (complete with a picture or two) posted on the blog some time soon!

Oh yeah, We Have A Blog!

I realize we’ve been away from the blog for a while.  I actually wasn’t planning on posting even today, but we are in the middle of a rain storm with 25 mph winds so I thought this would be a good use of our time in between bouts of frantic running to check on the hens
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I think the standard “things have been busy” introduction is becoming a bit cliché, so I will lead in saying things have been hectic.  We are processing the second batch of chickens this week (500 in all), which as I sit here shivering is great to say is the last of the season.  Demand has slowed, but we are doing what we can to get the birds sold.  This batch was ordered before we processed the first batch and decided to shrink our numbers to a more manageable size.  Of course, the agricultural gods think they are quite humorous and this hard-to-sell and way-too-big batch is having record low mortality and was even sent from the hatchery with 15 extra chickens.

To help get some new customers, Shae went to the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival last week and setup a small booth for the farm.  The festival is the largest event in the city and we were blessed to have an amazing friend who lives right on Main Street and let us use her driveway for our booth and dodge the booth rental fee of $5,000.  We brought a couple of live turkeys to show off, and they were a huge hit.  Kids seem to be as enchanted as we are by these silly guys, and it gave parents a momentary respite to talk about the farm with us.  We met some great people and got about 30 new customers out of the day.

Another big help has been that our restaurant customers are phenomenal.  About 150 of our birds have an invitation to dinner at Café Gibraltar, Pasta Moon, or Flea Street Café.  This is a huge relief, and we are always excited to see what amazing preparations these stellar restaurants come up with.  In terms of helping us avoid buying more freezers, Jesse (the owner) and her executive chef Carlos at Flea Street Café have been downright amazing, though.

Flea Street Café has been deeply committed to local food for decades, suffering through the years when it was not trendy.  When they heard through the grapevine that we had about 200 extra birds, they called and told us that they’d find/rent extra freezer space and buy all they could.   While I certainly don’t want them to feel obliged to do so, just the offer made Shae and I feel amazing.  This obviously helps us, but it also means that they will have pasture-raised chicken through the Winter after we stop production for the rainy season.  It is another reminder for us that small and locally-based business models creates significantly closer and stronger relationships that can get either party through a short-term hardship.

Well, I just heard a large wooosh of wind and a crash.  I guess it’s time to head back outside.

 P.S. As I promised, I have more pictures of our effect on the land.  Here's an update of our mobile processing shed's impact.  Hint: we processed on the green spot!