Spring is In the Air

It’s been gorgeous on the farm and the animals are really starting to change.  We now have our meat chickens out on the pasture, and they are loving these cool-season grasses.  The new slower-growing chickens we are trying are not living up to our expectations.  They are growing steadily and we can’t stop them!  We’ve tried restricting feed, but they are grazing machines and are getting so much nutrition from the pasture (and will taste so good) that we just have to accept that they will be a bit larger than we expected.

 

The new rabbits are thriving too.  We are experimenting with a new type of mobile pasture house for them, and they are working great.  Rabbits are tough because they are solitary animals that love to dig, which makes them downright hard to rotate on pasture.  However, our new “Bunny Porches” give the access to fresh greens, and simulate a dark safe space so they aren’t tempted to dig out.  So far they are working without problems.  We are also getting ready for them to live up to their species’ reputation for rampant breeding, although they’ve had a slow start. Today was actually the first successful and confirmable breeding, so look forward to some adorable Easter Bunny photos coming soon.

Shae, Iris, and I have also made sure not to lose track of how important leisure and rest are.  In addition to a wonderful picnic lunch we treated ourselves to, it’s not uncommon to find any of sneaking a nap in when we can.

Last, our first processing day of the year is April 16, and we are already sold out.  We are experimenting with weekly slaughters, so it’s not that great of an achievement, but we take what we can get!

Visitors

We absolutely love having visitors come out to the farm, but I admit I’ve been a bit foolish and never asked a single one to write on the blog.  Well, all that has been solved!  My dear friend Tony came for a visit a few days back and helped us do just about everything, including celebrating ShaeLynn’s birthday.  His schedule is pretty crazy right now as he is traveling the country, but with enough pleading ShaeLynn and I got him to send us his blog post that he typed up on his iPhone…


Dear family, friends and customers of Early Bird Ranch, this is Tony, a long time friend of Kevin's, writing to all of you after spending nearly a week farming with both Kevin and ShaeLynn. I am not a farmer but have a passion for cooking, nutrition, and physical health. My passions are a byproduct of having spent most of my adult life pursuing a career in professional soccer and dealing with two major surgeries. Currently, I'm traveling North America by sharing rides I find with people over craigslist and hitchhiking, spending, no more than 2 or 3 days in each location. However, when I arrived at Early Bird Ranch I knew this place was special and I had to stay longer.

I've known Kevin for nearly 16 years, and I never would have thought he’d become a farmer. However, I believe it's this very fact that makes both Kevin and ShaeLynn the amazing farmers that they are. They approach each day like a child ready and eager for all the new experiences that lie ahead. However, unlike the cliché farmer, they possess the wisdom and long-term perspective to care for their land and animals in ways that go beyond simple considerations of the balance book.

Fresh goat cheese!

One of the best parts of the trip was sharing the bounty of the farm! I may have been a farmer for the week but I ate like royalty. Having a chance to eat their premier birds was an experience, as was cooking with them. We even made our own fresh goat cheese for lasagna.  Having grown up with great Spanish cooks in my family in conjunction to my own culinary experiences in Spain I must say it was a pleasure cooking with such high quality ingredients. ShaeLynn gladly relinquished her kitchen so I could cook a couple meals, which came out delightful.  The highlight was the Spanish chicken croquetas, which were made with nearly 100% farm ingredients.  One thing I learned early on in my culinary pursuits is that a chicken is not one meal but the base of many. In the case of the croquetas we used the chicken stock, left over chicken shreds from the carcass, a bit of their goat milk to make the roué and their farm eggs to dip before breading and frying. I could truly appreciate what Kevin and ShaeLynn have been doing when I was able to take a little bit of everything of their farm to make something as simple and unexpecting as croquetas into the highlight dish of our evening’s supper.

It was truly a pleasure spending the week with them working on the land and helping them prep for their upcoming batch of birds. My time with them only reinforced my love and appreciation for what Kevin and ShaeLynn do. They live a lifestyle that is good for their health and the land, and have found a way to share it with the community around the—influencing people’s lives one bird at a time.

Back to Work

 The day-to-day schedule is quite fluid on the farm and it is hard to delineate between work and private time.  However, the difference between our production season and the off-season is quite dramatic.  Over the winter we’ve had time to recuperate, plan, and experiment. It has been great.  However, while it is still the rainy time of year and we are looking at several weeks until we are back in full swing, there are signs that the pace is once again quickening.

Our Nigerian Dwarf goat herd has already expanded.  The milk is a dream.  It is so creamy and sweet, and there is none of the goat flavor that Shae and I expected we’d have to grow accustomed too.  We might be overly excited, but our enthusiasm for this breed encouraged us to seek new friends for Essie and we now have the wonderful company of an accomplished, and quite regal, buck named Bowtie and a very young and dainty doe named Poppy.  The show-stopper, though, is Poppy’s 2-week-old son Tuxedo (Notice that our males are all named after men’s formal wear.  We are praying for twins: Calvin and Klein).  Tux is adorable and a genuine pleasure to watch.  He is still learning the finer points of balance and decorum so he spends his days romping around and chasing (or being chased by) the chickens.

We also have three new rabbits on the farm!  The two females and one male come from a great backyard breeder in Woodside and they will hopefully become the Adam and Eve(s) of a modest rabbit business.  The biggest hurdle right now is working out the logisitics for how we’d like to house the rabbits.  Rabbits are solitary and have a tendency to dig/burrow, so a free-range pasture net like our turkeys receive is out of the question.  We are currently working on a couple of special pens right now, but everything is in the prototype phase so I won’t embarrass myself by going into their designs before they have had a chance to be tested.

Last, we have begun an experiment with a slower growing breed of meat chickens called Freedom Rangers.  We have 100 of them in brooder right now and they look spectacularly healthy and active.  These chickens take longer to grow than the Cornish Crosses that we principally raise and thus require more feed and labor.  However, because they are older at slaughter and bred to be wonderful foragers, they develop stronger flavors in their meat.  The tradeoff, however, is that in addition to their higher cost, the birds do not have as much white meat as the Cornish Cross and, because they are older, they are slightly less juicy and tender.  Our plan with this experiment is to feed these birds an organic feed, and after running some numbers it looks like we will be selling them at $5.95 per pound (as opposed to our Cornish Cross broilers that are fed a non-medicated conventionally grown feed and cost $3.95 per pound).  We already have a number of customers who have unofficially claimed a number of these birds (we are planning to start taking pre-orders in a couple weeks), and I expect that this experimental batch is just the start of a full-fledged enterprise for us. I think the Freedom Rangers will be spectacular and they will give the business the invaluable opportunity to offer customers two superb, but distinct pastured chicken options. I’ll, of course, keep you all up to date on how it goes!

So there you have it.  We’ll be starting up full production of our pastured Cornish Cross chickens again in the beginning of March and that’s pretty much when we go back into full swing.  We are so excited and we’ve only been spurred on by the calls we’ve been getting from our awesome customers about how excited they are too.

Food or Fiction?

Buying good food is oddly complicated today.  Aside from simply choosing what you want to eat, there are dozens of certifications, food guru recommendations, and environmental issues that can be considered before you make your purchase.  While Shae and I are certainly a part of the sustainable food world, we get overwhelmed by the swarm of choices too.  What follows is the practical wisdom we have gathered so far on how to navigate the grocery store and farmers’ market.  This is certainly not an exhaustive guide, but we have had so many people ask for our opinions on this or that food, that we wanted to share how we approach grocery shopping, and hopefully hear back from some of you on what priorities you have when buying food.

Vegetables, Fruits, and Grains:
When we are shopping for flora, the biggest considerations we have are how local a product is and whether or not it was grown organically.  With plants these two factors are of particular importance because they can go a long way towards helping us predict the safety and flavor of a food.  To us, locally-grown produce is safer.  The fewer brokers and miles a product has to be traced back through, the better.  When farmers know that they are responsible for the quality of their product and that their lettuce will not be anonymously packaged along with lettuce from thousands of other producers, they tend not to cut corners when it comes to the health and cleanliness of the food they sell.  Locally grown produce is also more flavorful.  Transportation is particularly hard on fruits and vegetables and many varieties that you find in big grocery stores are selected for how well they travel or look, rather than how they taste.  If you need any proof for this just compare a home-grown tomato with one you buy at the store.

In terms of organics, we think that plant foods are usually worth the added costs.  Organic fruits and vegetables are first and foremost not grown from genetically modified seeds.  Health concerns alone make GMOs worth avoiding, but from a political standpoint they are absolutely repugnant.  While I could spend a whole post reeling about the mistreatment of farmers and the travesty of allowing living organisms to be patented, I’ll simply leave this point by reflecting that the companies that produce GMO crops are the true standard bearers for an agricultural philosophy driven by “conquering” nature, and we choose not to support them.

The organic certification also limits the amount and types of poisons that can be used to fight pests on food crops.  Anyone familiar with the story of DDT will see that the assurances that certain agricultural poisons are safe that come out of the USDA, EPA, and FDA are at best occasionally misinformed and at worse routinely corrupted by the financial and political influence of the giant agribusinesses that produce these poisons.

    Dairy:
Dairy is a tricky issue.  So much goes into producing biologically active, delicious, and healthy dairy that I hesitate to provide a list of what to look for because things will undoubtedly be left out. 

The most curiosity about our farming experience is usually derived from our work at the dairy where we made 100 % grass fed, raw (unpasteurized) cows’ milk cheeses.  Working with raw milk was a radical shift in our food consciousness in a very positive way.  There are two reasons we like raw dairy products.  First, they are easier to digest.  The active cultures help a calf digest the milk, and that benefit is passed along to our digestive systems too.  Second, the purpose of pasteurizing milk is to create a biological “clean slate,” and unfortunately that’s very close to a petri dish.  The natural bacterial cultures in raw milk create a healthy bacterial defense that, given the right conditions, has the ability to fight off bacteria that would be harmful to us.  Pasteurized milk doesn’t have this defense, and so is extremely vulnerable to the incursion of any harmful bacteria.  That said, both raw and pasteurized dairy products have the potential to carry serious food-borne illness, and as such we respect any choice about dairy that comes from a thoughtful place.

The first thing I look for is cleanliness.  Dairymen are rumored to be the original inventors of sanitation and I can certainly understand why.  While working in cheesemaking it was obvious that what we were doing was simply manipulating and cultivating bacteria.  Dairy is full of beneficial live cultures that lend different tastes, textures, and even digestibility to each product.   A lapse in sanitation or vigilance can mean that the wrong cultures (the dangerous ones we haven’t co-evolved with) will grow in the product instead and get people sick.  As such, I look for a dairyman whose habits border on OCD.

In terms of how the animals are raised, I think 100% grass-fed is the best way to go.  It’s out there if you search hard enough, but sometimes it’s just too far away to be a practical part of your diet.  Grain is certainly not the enemy.  Many superb dairies still feed grain as a small percentage of their herd’s diet to meet the high calorie needs of their animals.  This is not a particularly terrible practice and in many ways is absolutely necessary with certain high-producing breeds.  All-in-all, I’d say look for cows that are predominately grass-fed and appear lively, clean, and healthy.

The last note on dairy is regarding rBST, also known as rBGH.  These are artificial hormones given to cows to increase their milk production.  While the official FDA stance is that these hormones are safe, several reputable studies have shown that these hormones are incredibly dangerous for human consumption, as well as devastating to the health of the cows that are given them.   While ShaeLynn and I do the best we can to buy grass-fed dairy products, the one things we do not compromise on is rBST-free.  You can tell a dairy product is rBST-free if it says “rBST/rBGH/Hormone free” or sometimes ShaeLynn thinks it’s easier to look for the “*No significant difference has been found” phrase, which the FDA requires grace the package of any product that also says “rBST-free”.

When we have a chance we’ll add some information about how we choose our meat products.  We’d love to hear your priorities, or answer any questions you might have.

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!