Locally Laid

by Lucie B. Amundsen

  Transferring the birds from tractor to coop was uncomplicated, except for Skip—a glossy, black sex-link (a bird crossbred to associate a certain color with its gender, to make chick sexing easier). She was named after a friend who’d once proclaimed backyard chicken keeping “the stupidest idea ever.” Poultry Skip was wily like her namesake and when I tried to grasp her, she’d dodge my snatches, unafraid to peck me. When I did manage a half purchase, she’d fidget out one of her wings and frantically flap it in my face until I was forced to unhand her. Then she’d bolt down the alleyway. This took what should have been a twenty-minute task of evening chicken chores—freshening up water, shaking more bagged chicken feed into their poultry trough—to an hour or more as the kids and I hunted among the trees and brush that lined the alley.

  Chickens, it seemed to me, were a bit of a bother.

  As the days piled into weeks, I took on additional sideline writing projects, like updating Jason’s résumé, writing daily posts on the CaringBridge blog about Brian’s health … and quietly typing out an obituary draft, just in case. And while always on the hunt for work for myself, I now applied for Jason, as well.

  Writing letters and electronically forging his name, I buoyed myself knowing that at least the farm fervor had been ground out of my husband. When we talked on the phone, it was clear Jason was spent from too little sleep and too much responsibility, all the while navigating the unfamiliar and strange world of Cambodia. From my perspective, he was a raw dangling nerve, primed for the next available carpeted chute heading to a climate-controlled cubicle, any cubicle, adjacent to an office-sized Bunn coffeemaker. Jason ached for the familiar and this Asian hospital had none of it.

  In that part of the world, family involvement in hospital care is crucial. While there are competent nurses, there are fewer of them and the patients who fare best have loved ones tending to them. Jason, one could say, grew into this role, while his mother was a natural as a trained nurse. He learned to change Brian’s adult diaper and sheets, grind medicines with water to push into his nasogastric (NG) tube, which ran up his nostril and directly into his stomach, and was constantly advocating for more aggressive treatments.

  Jason was recounting all this when I interrupted him before the phone card minutes ran out.

  “Hey, I know this is a little off topic, but one of the chickens laid her first egg today,” I said. Milo had found it in our backyard coop that morning.

  “Her first egg? A pullet! She’s early! I missed it! What color is it? What size? Who laid it?”

  Jason seemed to oscillate between feeling a rush of poultry pride and bereft for not being there for this first experience.

  I texted a picture of Milo holding out a light brown egg to the cell Jason had rented in Asia. Mimi would tell me later that he showed that photo to anyone whose English was nuanced enough to appreciate that this egg was from his own hen.

  While I didn’t relish picking up Skip the chicken any more than I did before, I had a sense of gratitude to the entire flock for providing Jason a small diversion, a blip of happiness in his otherwise medicalized world.

  About three weeks in, the news out of Cambodia was a roller coaster of tantalizingly positive tidbits—Brian was emerging from the coma! He was off his ventilator!—followed by tragic updates of rollicking seizures that kept Brian’s care team up twenty to thirty hours at a time. Eventually, his pupils went fixed and dilated—a symptom that often indicates injury to the upper brainstem and little hope of recovery.

  It was then that a medical staff member, not on Brian’s care team, floated an idea. What if Brian was given a small amount of the prescription drug he’d overdosed on? Brian’s physicians forbade it.

  This pissed Jason off. He was antsy, ready for action, and probably the fact that he’d recently been assaulted didn’t help matters. But it may have, inadvertently, changed everything.

  Just a few days before, Jason had been part of the noisy streetscape, trying to talk to his aunt Joyce back in Shakopee, Minnesota. To avoid the blaring traffic and techno music, he’d ducked into a quiet construction site, phone pressed against his ear, eyes on his shoes. That was when a hard punch connected with his cheekbone. The phone went flying.

  Probably the worst text I’ve ever gotten was the one line, Jason’s been mugged.

  Recounting it later, he would say his military training must have kicked in.

  “Before I could think about it, I’d kicked the legs out from under one of the guys.”

  And that was when he said it. Jason uttered a phrase so outrageous, so utterly shameless, it can be used only once per lifetime, and until then stored in a special box sternly labeled, In case of emergency, break glass.

  “It’s terrible; it’s right out of a Steven Seagal direct-to-VHS movie,” he admitted, as I coaxed the story out of him again. “Well, I mustered up my army drill sergeant voice and I barked, ‘Motherfucker! You want a piece of me?’”

  Jason claims the second it came out of his mouth, he was already embarrassed. Embarrassed in front of what turned out to be teen boys, kids really, who clearly didn’t speak English. They ran off with his phone and Jason found his way back to Brian’s hospital room with a headache, a purple contusion, and a strong will to get his brother well—and the hell out of Asia.

  This fiery vigor motivated him to ring up one of his oldest friends, a medical doctor. They had a lengthy conversation about whether Brian should be administered the suggested, yet forbidden, medicine, and the phone call ended with Jason riding the back of a moto (the bastard offspring of a moped scooter and a BMX dirt bike) to a street pharmacy across town. There he bought the drug with cash.

  And like he’d been doing for weeks, Jason ground up the pills, mixed it with water, and shoved it up Brian’s NG tube. I can only guess that if he’d done this in an American hospital, he would’ve been arrested.

  No one can say with certainty the effect of giving Brian those meds, but it was after he received them that his recovery started. It wasn’t long after that Brian just sort of woke up. And it was everything anyone could have wanted. He was shocked and overjoyed that his mother and brother had come all this way to help him. He couldn’t believe he’d ever take so many pills. Brian was delighted to be alive.

  The three stepped off the plane at the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport at 10:32 p.m. on August 5, over a month since it all began and an hour and half before I entered my next decade. Jason, though clearly tired, looked strong and confident.

  He’d become leaner during the ordeal, and while he had dark circles under his eyes, there was something that sparkled in him. Something present. I’ll admit, for an old married guy, he was pretty hot.

  As we walked out to the minivan, holding hands, he turned to me. “Bird, Cambodia really showed me one thing. We’re all going to die anyway, so why be afraid? And before I go, the only thing I want to do is—open that chicken farm.”

  As I looked up at him, my head worked against this new knowledge, the undeniable fact that Jason, this newly invigorated man standing in front of me, was never going to fit back in an office. It was clear he was completely and utterly non-cubicle-able.

  And behind my smile, a seven-syllable version of the F-word bellowed in my head.

  Chapter 3

  One early morning in that planning winter of 2011, Jason’s frustrated groan reached me back in the kitchen. It was the sad sound of a man trying to procure chickens.

  I’d been refilling coffees as he read e-mail, seated at his antique secretary—a piece of furniture acquired specifically to keep Jason’s unruly paperwork out of sight, but which no longer closed given all the poultry-related books and papers stacked on it.

  He leaned back in his chair and absentmindedly pulled his hair with both hands.

  “Hit another dead end for pullets,” he said.

  Pullets are the tiny first eggs of a laying hen, but it’s also agricultural-speak for immature chickens not yet laying eggs. We were looking for just un
der two thousand of these young lady hens to be raised to around sixteen weeks, the cusp of sexual maturity known in the industry as “the point of lay.”

  “Can’t we just raise them from babies?” I asked. Naively, I’d thought we’d be getting chicks, as we had for our home flock, picturing the children playing among heaps of chirping yellow fluff balls. There are mail-order companies that will dispatch peeping parcels directly to your post office, I told him.

  “No,” he said, taking his mug from me and setting it on a spate of papers titled State Rules for Egg Processing and Sales. “We’re not set up to brood birds.” He explained the huge equipment investment, starting with a good-sized barn, all insulated and rigged with heaters and fans and sensitive alarms that go off when the temperature varies by even a degree.

  “Plus someone has to be up checking on them, around the clock. The truth is we need birds close enough to laying so that we’ll have cash flow as soon as possible.”

  And we needed this cash flow, because by late summer Jason would be giving up his job. He’d been working at our local nature center writing its grants. It wasn’t quite full-time and not quite forever, either. It was grant-funded itself, and layoff was imminent. As far as Jason was concerned, this was the perfect scenario as the farm ramped up.

  I was still trying to convince myself that any of this was perfect.

  Now, it’s easy for someone from Big Ag or, in our case, Big Egg, to purchase, say, thirty thousand point-of-lay chickens. Just like it’s no bother to go to the feed store and snatch five chicks from under a heat lamp for an urban flock. But what’s not so easy is to find a brooding house willing to work with bird numbers between the tens of thousands for industrial-scale egg factories and the literal tens wanted by small-scale hobby farmers. We knew because they’d all turned Jason down.

  Nor could we call on the broad network of midsized farms that would have the know-how and space to raise a couple thousand hens for us. Back in 2011, this simply didn’t exist.

  We were stuck in the middle.

  This theme of being too big or too small for any of the conventional paths would haunt us over the years to come. We were still several years out from discovering the middle niche we occupied and its economic and social importance in the agricultural spectrum. Back then, we weren’t champions of rebuilding rural America. We were simply screwed.

  Given that Jason’s plan required 1,800 nearly mature pullets by midsummer, the only option was to find a freelance operation willing to contract with us. After exhausting all the contacts of his contacts, Jason took the great pullet search to the Web. And while there were a few places in Pennsylvania with mature hens to sell in smaller numbers, here in the Midwest we came up with exactly one guy—Myron, who sold farm equipment in Iowa and raised birds on the side. He agreed to brood our hens and we, the insecure chief officers of the newly named Locally Laid Egg Company, breathed a sigh of relief.

  But that serenity didn’t last long.

  After Myron agreed to our order and cashed our check, he wouldn’t return our calls. Jason would leave messages, texts, e-mails looking to get some basic questions answered, or an update, and … nothing. Among the many business phantoms that would wake us in the night, Myron began playing a starring role in our nervous pillow talk. We may not have known much about starting a farm, but we understood it would be tough to launch an egg operation with no hens. I mean, it’s not like we required a photo album with baby pictures of these chickens (okay, we actually would have loved that), but we had some questions, and a simple reply, any reply, would have gone a long way. This worry drove Jason all the way to Iowa—literally.

  As he tells it, he pulled into the driveway to a chorus of barking dogs in kennels and the rural ornamentation of broken machines and vehicles. With no one around, Jason walked the property, taking in some of the open barns filled with poultry incubators and bird netting.

  “Eventually, Myron came out of his house,” Jason said, describing him as a man caught off guard despite all of the efforts to announce the arrival.

  There was a defensive flurry of excuses why all the messages were lost. Myron even blamed his assistant for not alerting him to Jason’s missives. He took Jason inside his office and pulled out our file, where Jason’s letter sat on top.

  Fortunately, Jason is a talker. He can befriend a store mannequin and makes me, an ebullient lover of people, look like an introvert. His animation stems from a sincere interest in everyone’s story and a love of asking questions. Often, too many questions. For this excited quality, I call him the Golden Retriever of Husbands, and sometimes I must gently remind him that our new acquaintance is not on trial and that he should let him or her finish answering his last query before asking another. Fortunately, Jason’s good nature shines through and like a bounding happy dog, one can’t stay annoyed with him for long.

  Myron and Jason then crossed the yard, passing large warehouses until they reached a smaller building, a brooding space. There, Jason met our hens.

  As idealistic as he’d been with our backyard flocks, a collection of chickens that perk up at his voice, land on his shoulder, and, I’ll say it, flirt with him, it’s hard to overstate this moment.

  This was the first time Jason had met unsocialized birds. Chickens who’d never been handled, much less enjoyed, Beatles songs sung to them. Having had minimal people contact in the warehouse, these birds had bonded only with each other and functioned in a sort of neglected collective. It’s a safe guess that there weren’t a lot of independent thinkers in that building. For these pullets, resistance was futile. If one chicken moved, they all moved. And when you’re talking numbers in the thousands there’s a natural delay of movement that mimics a swell in the sea.

  We have friends whose daughters went to elementary school with our children. Katherine and Rachel, bright girls, have decided that each of their five backyard hens has only a fifth of a brain, evidenced by the behavior of those who lose track of their group. These chickens become agitated, flap their wings, and squawk ungracefully to get back to their think tank of sisters.

  Following this poultry math, the chickens Jason met that day had 1/1,800 of a brain, and it showed. When he walked in, the birds backed away on a wave of undulating terror swelling around the dimly lit room.

  Beyond the cacophony, what Jason noticed was that these chicks had no food and water. It made his throat bitter to see this poor stewardship of our paid-for chickens. Not caring if it was bad form, Jason stepped in and started pulling the empty waterers and feeders to refill. After a minute of watching, Jason said, “Myron got the message and joined in.”

  Later, while driving home, Jason phoned. “If we don’t brood our own flock next time, I think I’ll find someone else.” I remember resisting those words, not wanting to start at square one of finding a farmer willing to deal with us.

  “Really? I know how hard it was to find Myron.”

  “Yeah, I think we’ll go with someone else next time around.”

  This was said in a flat manner that told me Jason was wrestling with thoughts, ugly ones, and protecting me from bad news. I opened my mouth to press further but at the last moment decided to wrap myself in the blissful Snuggie of ignorance he was offering me.

  It seemed there was always something about the farm startup that required comforting in those days. I was still coming to terms with the unhappy fact that our flock wasn’t going to be served organic corn—rather settling for a locally grown, non-GMO variety. This standard of sourcing and selling locally would prove to be more far-reaching than I ever could have imagined, but at the moment I was stuck on what we weren’t. And that was certified organic.

  When Jason had gone out looking for like-minded farms to help plan Locally Laid’s model, he learned about two small egg operations with organic pastured poultry.

  “Great!” I’d said. “When can you go see them?”

  That was when he told me the disquieting news that they were both out of the business. Word on t
he street is that fluctuating cost and availability of organic feed was to blame.

  My first thought was: Wait, we live in the Midwest. I mean, this is the earth’s grain epicenter. Why would there be shortages? Apparently, like everything else associated with doing the right thing, it’s more complex than that.

  It starts with the rare crop farmer who’s gone through the three-year rigor to become certified. It’s a commitment that requires writing a series of checks, ones to regulators who travel to inspect the operation and others for the registering organization, all the while wading through a paper-heavy and often costly process as the land transitions into an organic farm. It’s strict and I’d argue that it should be; it just means there are fewer folks willing to take that path. In fact, only about 0.7 percent of the roughly two million farms in the United States are certified organic.

  Following a certified organic harvest, these grains must go to a certified mill that won’t commingle organic with conventional crops. In our northern-tier location, that would mean dispatching a truck nearly nine hours round trip to the farm to fill feed bins twice a week—releasing a Riverdance of carbon footprints on our low-food-miles ethos.

  And that is, when it’s available.

  What would a farm like ours do if we couldn’t source organic one week? This explains why there are regular shortages of organic eggs in the supermarket. The idea of ensuring that what’s laid during a week of conventional feed ended up in cartons with accurate labeling and bar codes would be a stomach-churning, logistical whirl. But putting aside the food miles and the factual labeling, the biggest sticking point is this: most of the organic grains used to feed animals in this country are—brace yourselves—from China. India, too. Despite the breadth and depth of America’s breadbasket, we import as much as eight times as many organic grains as we grow.