Up and Running

Well we are on the new farm (more on this very soon), and things are great.  All of the animals are thriving.

The rabbits are multiplying, as can be expected, and we are really impressed by how their pasture homes are working.  We are observing some pretty considerable feed savings, in some cases upwards of 50%!  We are expecting 5 moms to give birth to bunnies during the week between my birthday and the 21st.  What a gift!

The goats and hens have taken to the move as if nothing happened.  The only noticeable change was that for the first few days Essie and Marigold spent their days bleating at all the new people they saw, but after everyone got properly introduced things quieted down.

We are trying a new rotation with the animals.  First, the hens are now following the rabbits.  This is a great combination because the hens LOVE to pick through the rabbit dropping.  Chickens being omnivores don't have the digestive hardware to tackle eating grass only, so they relish the chance to eat pre-digested alfalfa and grass the rabbits leave behind.  We are also doing a tighter rotation now with the goats.  We have scaled down their enclosure, but decided to move them more often.  This leads to a more even and complete graze, which will ultimately encourage some great re-growth.  Our organically-fed slow growth broilers are then put in the same net as the goats (right after they move onto new pasture) to clean up any bugs or small weeds.  It's great to see!

Speaking of the slow growth broilers, we just put them out to pasture 2 days ago and I can't articulate how excited I am.  They are grazing non-stop and have so uninterested in their feeders.  These guys are chasing bugs all day (something that speaks to the fertility of the new pastures we are on!).  Simply put they will be amazing.



So that's about it.  We are planning to get some pictures and videos up of the new farm pretty soon.  It's all going wonderfully, but we are obviously quite busy getting everything back up to production speed.

The Littlest Grazers

We’ve made a real effort to cram as much as possible into the past week or so.  In fact, in order to find the time to update the blog, Kevin has promised to work twice as fast while I (ShaeLynn) write.   We’re moving (more on that in the next post!), we had my family out for a visit, we’re selling the last of our chickens, we’re building another brooder—and we decided to pick this time to expand our rabbit enterprise.  Our supplier of breeding stock is a gentleman from Basque country in Spain who raises hormone and anti-biotic free rabbits in his backyard hutches.  If the significance of this find hasn’t hit you let, I should mention that in the early years of Joel Salatin’s rabbit operation, they lost a lot of their bunnies because the rabbits weren't accustomed to life free from a daily regimen of anti-biotics.  It took them years to get a heartier, and select for rabbits with a consistently solid immune system.  So we really hit the jackpot since we got to skip all that.

The main project that goes along with new rabbits though, is rabbit housing!  After they reach sexual maturity, rabbits can’t be housed together because they become very territorial and will actually kill each other.  So each adult needs its own house.  Plus, rabbits are prone to digging if left to their own devices, so open floors are challenging (though not impossible!).  We wanted the rabbits to have access to pasture during the day, but be securely closed up (including a slatted floor to prevent digging) at night—and voila!  The Bunny Scoot.

Obviously, the chickens are also quite fond of them.  During the day, the rabbits have access to both sides.  The enclosed end gives them a shady “hole” to hide in when they want, and it has a slatted floor so their waste doesn’t accumulate  This is doubly helpful because chickens LOVE the rabbit's droppings because they are just pre-digested plant matter.  The open end gives the rabbits plenty of grass to eat during the day, plus lots of fresh air and sunshine if they want it.  At night, we take the roof off the open part of the Bunny Scoot, and use it to gently push them into the enclosed area and shut them in.  That way they spend the night protected from predators, and unable to dig out.

We’re still tweaking the design a little bit, but the idea is that they will go out on the pasture near the broiler shelters, and get moved onto fresh grass each morning.

Our rabbit operation is also expanding because our babies are growing up.  Here they are enjoying their Bunny Scoot.  They are growing so fast!  We have more bunnies due next month, it's really exciting.

Last Batch for a Bit

So right away I think I should update you all and say we still haven't found the missing buck. It's not certain he's dead, but my theory that life on the outside would send him running back to us has been undermined by late rains. The farm is currently surrounded with a near-endless supply of lush succulent rabbit food, so we are getting ready to replace him. His children, though, are beautiful and healthy. In fact, it's really neat that they are doing so well because I realized today they are the first animals we've had born on our farm! We've been very lucky too because the mom they were born to has been incredibly nurturing. They are even starting to learn to eat the weeds I bring her, which is a great indicator that they will enjoy a life on pasture.

The bravest and most dapper man in town.

Our bee adventure has been progressing well too. The hives are really starting to establish themselves and it's great to see them all tending the the clover in the field and the roses by our window. I've been doing all the reading I can on beekeeping, and I even got a surprise shipment of bee books from my mom! The more I learn I about these guys, the more I realize that we do not "own" them or "raise them," we are simply enticing them to stay and work with us. It's a pretty cool relationship.

Last Friday we hosted a chicken slaughter seminar as part of Pie Ranch's educational partnership with Pescadero High School. It was a blast for Shae and I and we got to meet a lot of our teenage neighbors. All of the students were genuinely interested and caring. In addition to our talk about our farming methods and thorough exploration of chicken organs with Shae, a few of them chose to jump right in and learn in a hands-on manner where their food comes from. After the slaughter, the kids made an amazing chicken lunch with some freshly gathered Pie Ranch greens and brick oven-baked flatbreads. We were paid for our time, but as you can probably tell, it was hardly a chore!

The slightly sad news is we are coming up on our last bunch of chickens for a while. We've held off on buying new chicks until we settle onto a new farm, so we are quickly running out of broilers. It's a bit of a shame because the grasses right now are incredible, and the chickens are being pampered by all the choices they get (something that is clearly showing up in the meat!). Here’s a picture of Bowtie and Tux trying their best to graze the grass down so the chickens aren't too overwhelmed. We have one more fresh pickup day planned and then after that a couple of weekend buying club drops. I'm hoping we can get on the ground soon so there's no perceivable gap in supply.

Well, I can smell the pizza Shae is baking for dinner and it's getting hard to concentrate. Marigold is producing milk faster than we can consume it, so Shae made mozzarella and ricotta for our pizza from all the extra. There's even some chicken liver on the pizza, which I know sounds strange, but when it's seasoned and slightly browned, there's nothing quite as good.

Take care!

May Flowers

 It’s been a silly few months, but it looks like things are slowly coming back to normal.  Through all the chaos of relocating, it's been great to have all our friends and family come and visit, especially Shae's mom and dad who helped us take apart the brooders and go on an all-day cleaning/packing rampage respectively to get ready for our move.

We are thrilled to report that the search for a new farm may finally be coming to an end.  Without counting my chickens before they hatch (something we do all the time in this business), it looks like we are going to be able to team up with a local grass-fed beef producer and graze the chickens behind their herd of cattle.  It’s a wonderful fit that will benefit not just both business, but the land and animals as well.  Expect me to make a big deal once it finalizes!

The farm has plugging along too.  We had our first bunny birth last week and so visitors and friends have had plenty to swoon over.  The rabbits are all doing really well in their “bunny porches,” but there are still some kinks in the design to work out.  While we’ve cut feed consumption dramatically just by letting them have continuous access to weeds and grasses, we did have an escape yesterday.  Our one and only buck decided that a pampered life with two lovely girlfriends and regular feedings wasn’t the right fit for him and he slipped out during the night.  We are holding out hope that once he gets a taste of the real world, he’ll come right home.

We also just added two bee hives to the farm to help bolster the pasture’s health…and hopefully produce some great honey.  The project really excites me, but at the same time it’s probably worth noting I have a mild phobia of bees.  It’s been a fun mix of emotions to check on the hives and beam with delight as I see how well they are doing and then spend the next 20 minutes after I’ve walked away being sure that I feel something crawling on the inside of my shirt.

 Another addition to the farm has been our new experiment with buying club drops as a supplement to on-farm sales.  Our truly amazing friend and patron-saint, Jesse Cool of Flea Street Café, invited us to deliver pre-purchased frozen chickens to customers in her restaurant’s parking lot in Menlo Park.  In less than 24 hours after sending out the notice, we sold out of everything in our freezer and filled up a second drop day as well.  It was a great way of helping customers get access to good food and we really enjoyed ourselves.  All of the customers were genuinely excited about the chickens and even gave us some spectacular recipes to try.  We are doing all we can to work out the details so we can make the drop a more regular part of our week.

So that’s basically it.  We have a lot on our plate, but that’s the reality of the lifestyle I suppose.  We’ll keep you all in the loop as things progress!

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.