Yeah, it’s a sad truth.
Freighters carrying our conventionally grown kernels make their way to Asia as ships of Chinese and Indian organic grains fulfill our demand for more organically grown foods. In addition to the scads of food miles—some six thousand for Chinese crops—these imports have been viewed with suspicion and, at times, flagged for not meeting the organic standard under which they’ve been labeled. One has to wonder what organic really means when a crop is grown in some of the world’s most polluted nations. Is shipping sustainable feed halfway across the planet to make consumers feel good about the environment truly environmental?
Even author Michael Pollan has said, “Local supports a great many more values than organic—even when the local food is not certified organic.” He goes on to list them: the environment, less reliance on cheap fossil fuel, stronger communities and keeping nearby farms viable, saying that if these are your concerns, “… the choice is simple: buy local.”
That helps.
I also take solace in the fact that farmers in our region will be planting more lower-yield, non-GMO varieties of corn because we said we’ll buy it—and the money we spend on it will stay in our little part of the world. But even so, with all these solid reasons, I’m still dejected by the feed situation to this day. Just because I understand the “why” behind our feed choices doesn’t mean I don’t pine for better.
“And remember, Lu, that certification just refers to the feed. It’s not like organic eggs are from birds that go outside,” Jason said. “It simply means they get to eat organic feed inside their warehouse.”
I churned this all around in my head until I reminded myself that two chickenless farmer wannabes couldn’t solve it all. In fact, it likely requires the momentum of government subsidies. And before I get lectured on the harm of big government, let me remind you that we as a taxpaying people manage to fund food additives like high-fructose corn syrup, corn starch, and soy oils at the rate of $17 billion a year (that’s a number with twelve zeros) while 0.01 percent of that number, $261 million, is used to publically subsidize apples. Imagine how many organic feed mills we could build, how many organic certifications we could grant with just a small percentage of what we spend on, well—crap?
Why we don’t, I speculate, has to do with the toxic soup of big corporations, campaign donations, and lobbyists wielding political influence to keep those agricultural dollars directed exactly where they’ve been going for decades.
All this made me sigh. It seemed that starting the business was a series of disappointing compromises and heart-stopping leaps of faith.
Chapter 4
Over a nine-month period, Jason had taken business and farming classes and even visited a real pasture-raised egg producer in Maryland. Of course, I’d hoped he’d see the enormity of this poultry endeavor and decide, all on his own, that it wasn’t feasible. Instead it meant some additional knowledge for Jason and a little more time for me to acclimate.
But not enough.
He surfed Internet sites every night looking for acreage, which, following census trends, wasn’t easy to come by. Farmland values have steadily increased over recent years, some 748 percent since 1987 to 2014. U.S. land prices have bloated as countries around the world have risen in affluence; when a population starts to have more money to spend on food, they want meat. Meat takes corn; corn takes land. This cycle effectively shuts out cash-strapped new farmers from owning property.
We couldn’t afford to buy, so renting it was. And despite Jason’s trolling of Craigslist and real estate sites, he found land the way people have for decades. He went to the feed store and started a conversation.
That late winter, with gray skies pressing the wet snow to the ground, we drove half an hour south and turned onto a country dirt road. Another left later, we crunched into a rock driveway, the nose of our minivan positioned directly in front of an aging pole barn. Looking at it, I guessed that it was once an open-air structure that was later closed in with red-painted particleboard. Now it was regressing to its original state with the odd board missing—like a puzzle shedding pieces.
Jason gazed out the windshield with an excited grin and narrated the Technicolor movie clicking on his internal projector screen. And from his running commentary, it was as though we were seeing two different properties.
“We are so lucky there’s a barn. We’d really only be renting the land, but the landlady, she’s cool with us storing our construction materials in there while we build. Plus, there’s a tractor she says her boyfriend could help us use sometimes.”
I was underwhelmed, a quiet foil to Jason’s animated chatter.
“And you see how open the pasture is?”
He waved his deerskin glove to the right, indicating an expanse of open field, some 150 acres below a layer of unenthusiastic snow. “Just think of all the chickens we’ll have foraging out there.” He said this with a tangible longing.
Though I wiped the condensation away from the van window with my mitten and squinted, I couldn’t see them. I don’t think I wanted to see these birds whose existence would mean the end of any typical life I’d once envisioned for my family.
A wise philosopher, or it may have been an Internet meme, once said, “Choose your choices.” But try as I might, I still couldn’t quite embrace this farm that we were choosing a little more every day. Instead, I lived with it the way I imagine one lives with a grizzly bear in a campsite. Never looking straight at it, keeping it in that part of your vision just outside your center of attention and hoping it just might harmlessly lumber off in the underbrush. Or you know, get hit with a high-powered tranq gun and teeter off a cliff.
So a quiet part of me, one I revealed to few, still wished this whole idea of opening the first commercial-scale, pasture-raised egg operation in the upper Midwest might just drop off. That’s why I couldn’t tune in to the all-chicken channel Jason was watching on the snow-covered pasture.
Or maybe I couldn’t picture frolicking poultry because I couldn’t square up the unvarnished realities of a working farm with the bucolic barn photos in the free calendar on our refrigerator. Taking in this operation, a place with its fair share of deferred maintenance, the only thing I could make out through the dreary gloom giving into evening shadows was hardship.
Growing up in Maine, I remember driving past the peeling signs of an abandoned farm collective on a back road to the coast. It was part of the larger back-to-the-land experiment of the 1970s, when hundreds of idealists attempted to emulate Helen and Scott Nearing’s homestead, profiled in their bestselling books Living the Good Life and Continuing the Good Life. These were manuals really, outlining their self-sustaining and intellectual lifestyle along a picturesque bay in Maine. Many who followed failed miserably in their attempt to grow food in a climate where one wakes up to frost two-thirds of the year.
The descriptor miserably felt palpable to me.
I thought of the young and not-so-young couples who cleared land, built basic shelter, hand-dug a well, or put up cold frames to start seedlings in the early spring. Not surprisingly, divorce and poverty all but squashed this homestead campaign within ten years. This, too, was palpable.
However, the Nearings weren’t the only ones to write about the movement. Others have published books pointing out the famous couple’s advantages along their “Good Life” road. This included supplementing their cash crop of blueberries (and before that, Vermont maple syrup) with sizable inheritances, an abundance of volunteer labor from eager farm groupies, and a lucrative spot on the lecture circuit. The latter not only paid them but ferried the couple away from their stone farmhouse during Maine’s harshest months.
While we couldn’t count on trust funds or speaking fees, we did share one element with the legendary couple—an uncommon generosity of friends. It’s hard to tell if people were drawn to our project’s idealistic sustainability and largish scale or perhaps just the pluckiness of the whole darn thing.
Locally Laid’s elit
e “kitchen cabinet” convened around the dining room table of Gail Blum and John Erickson, architect friends with some farming background who took us on as a project, and included Rod Graf, a skilled carpenter and designer. Looking at the group, one could see these are people who know how to use their hands and smarts to solve problems, fix things, build things—to tackle situations Jason and I have generally bought our way out of. I cannot overemphasize their importance to the farm venture.
They were there to help Jason answer the manifold questions a project like this entails, many he did not even know to ask himself. They also wanted to ensure that Jason really knew what this big commitment was—the business equivalent of poultry matrimony.
Later Gail would tell me that Jason had to be educated. Influenced by books he’d read warning against spending too much money on any farm need, he’d suggest constructing things out of fiberglass cloth and duct tape, the materials from his sailing youth, but nothing that would stand up to the daily wear of agriculture.
The group resisted collective eye rolls and calmly explained the laws of nature and physics that prohibited Jason from doing things he wanted to do. I can only guess their generosity was out of quiet worry that without their counsel they’d be forced to watch us lose everything.
It was a valid concern.
They made a plan for poultry houses that allowed for easy pasture access and the building of a processing facility to wash eggs to state standards. Jason would return from these meetings, often lasting upwards of three hours, adrift in details and under pressure to cobble together answers bereft of experience.
Gail even built a fantastic cardboard architectural model of a wooden coop, complete with nesting boxes cleverly accessible from little doors on the outside. It was one of the prototypes the group auditioned, and later even built, but the design was nixed for lengthy construction time and high cost.
To me, not nearly enough time had elapsed between my marveling over the charming model coop in the comfort of my Duluth living room in those early days of 2012 and starting to build real ones on that rented land in April.
I stood that cold Saturday morning shivering in the barn waving to our kind friends who had carpooled the thirty-five miles from Duluth to Wrenshall, parking on the gravel driveway. As they walked past the white two-story farmhouse where our landlady lived, I could see that their attention was drawn to the other side of the drive, where acres of field gently rolled out to a far-off tree line. We’d rented 10 of the 150 acres, some already let for beef cattle and hay production, allowing us scenic cow and grass views.
All the fields lay just beyond a set of two metal cattle gates. This setup created a fenced-in buffer zone between the pastureland and the driveway to prevent one from accidentally releasing a herd of cows into the rural landscape.
During the weeks since Jason had shown me the site, the pasture had transformed. The receded snow revealed hesitant chartreuse shoots peeping out from the overwintered grass, accompanied by an earthy pungency that one can almost taste in the air.
And he was out in the middle of it all. A good thousand feet beyond the metal gates, Jason was working with his own volunteer crew on open pasture, constructing the first of six hoop coops to serve as home to our brood. These rectangular structures, at 120 square feet, were smaller, portable versions of the temporary semicircular tarped houses that spring up overnight in grocery store parking lots to hawk annuals and perennials. It kind of looks like a tunnel made of tarp with chicken wire on the ends, tall enough to easily accommodate a people-sized screen door.
Despite the cold drizzle, which later turned into pelting rain, we watched a group of four men and two women wrestle one coop’s metal U-shaped frames into an upright position. These would be fastened together with others and later skinned with an industrial-weight white tarp to form the oblong shelters with room for some three hundred hens apiece.
Soon, the elements drove us into the barn. The early-spring weather was seasonal, which is to say damn cold with a 100 percent chance of craptastic. Off-and-on freezing drizzle punctuated with the occasional driving hailstorm: this is springtime in the Northland. Where we sit on the north forty-sixth parallel, just a few klicks down from Ontario, we’re slammed by both Canadian cold fronts and the capricious whims of nearby Lake Superior. Each on its own is formidable. Together, they’re a ferocious duo, turning a season known in most parts of the country for sporting light Easter dresses and frolicking among daffodils into cold, wet misery.
The building party probably should have been canceled that day, but there was a schedule to keep. Our first flock of nine hundred chickens was set to arrive in June, and the second, same-sized bird delivery would come approximately a month later.
So Gail, John, and Rod, along with a dozen other folks, gave up the comfort of nestling in at home to haul their power tools and hefty generators in the beds of their capable trucks. They spent the day framing out hoop-house kits we’d purchased, each seeming to come with a mysterious flaw only discernible during the build-out, often necessitating an unplanned run to the nearest hardware store some ten miles away.
Fortunately, the task that lay ahead for my group was seemingly more straightforward: building nesting boxes. We would attach thirty of these open metal boxes in each of the six hoop houses. Stacked two on top of each other in rows, these one-foot-by-one-foot open boxes would line the left side of the coop’s interior and later be filled with some straw. Chickens would then seek out these quiet, shaded places for the privacy preferred when laying their nearly daily egg. I say “nearly,” as a hen in lay will produce an egg every twenty-six hours, and at about day twelve, she’ll take a little production vacation. An eggless holiday. (A poultry professor I know claims that this schedule puts chickens into PMS for one and a half minutes every day, but I’ve seen no evidence of this.)
In the barn, where we could still see our breath in small puffs, we started our task by scrounging for battered sawhorses for makeshift workstations. Then we quietly set about puzzling through the cryptic instructions provided for the metal kits we’d purchased from a company in Kansas. It was quiet for a while as we examined the illustrations and tiny print—that is, until the person who’d assembled the most Ikea furniture naturally took charge. The expert was my neighbor Karie, who wiggled and wedged the metal sheets in unexpected ways until they formed a container a little bigger than a breadbox (sans door), plenty roomy for a chicken or two.
It was then up to the rest of us to wrangle bolts through slightly misaligned holes to fasten the whole kit together, finishing with an ill-fitting nut. Our fingers protested the precise movements in the cold with an ache that oscillated between a dull numbness and prickly burn. The repetitive movements may not have produced heat but did make for some colorful swearing.
“Gah! This damn thing is nearly frozen in place,” I protested while trying to straighten a would-be box.
“Yeah, but at least you won’t have to lie naked in it,” said Julia Singer, an accomplished poet and great observer of truth.
Production stopped as we all turned to look to her.
“Well, think of the hens,” she stated baldly.
In near unison, we turned our heads back to stare at the metal crates in front of us. Pulsing cold would transfer from the hard steel during our long winters, just as surely as the summer’s heat would singe feathers. I concluded that I wasn’t going to be the only female with complaints about this venture.
Despite these boxes being made of metal, it truly was a throwback setup with more in common with century-old egg production than modern operations. According to the Poultry Tribune, there were well over five million farms with egg-producing hens in 1900. By today’s standards, these flocks were small, minuscule—maybe a couple of hundred hens roaming the farmyard eating waste grain, weeds, insects, and food scraps. The egg income from these flocks, tended almost exclusively by farm women, was called “pin money,” so named for being attached to the inside of a dress bodice with a strai
ght pin. I like to think of it as the precursor to the modern “mad money”—cash hastily jostled into a bra before heading out on a date.
Of course, this was just cottage industry stuff. Birds were in a stewpot come late fall, as winter egg production wouldn’t even pay the cost of feed. It wasn’t until 1928 that research published in the Northwest Monthly, a publication issued by the Northwest School of Agriculture at the University of Minnesota, changed everything. Discoveries out of the small town of Crookston centered on the use of selective breeding and cod liver oil—an extract chock-full of vitamin D—mixed into the mash and supplemented with electric light. Hens would lay right through the dark months—a seismic shift that took eggs from seasonal luxury item to everyday staple.
Chickens need vitamin D to absorb calcium, a mineral that can make or break an egg-laying hen. They stash their supply in their hollow medullary-style bones—think of it as kind of a bone within a bone that serves as a mineral store. When a bird starts laying, her calcium need jumps fourfold and without enough, she’ll play the martyred mother, pulling it from her personal supply.
With this good news out of Minnesota, eggs now offered year-round profitability, and more attention was paid to the industry. Another breakthrough came ten years later when Milton H. Arndt, Illinois farm boy turned New Jersey inventor, created a stackable birdcage concept akin to a “filing cabinet in a modern office building.” It worked where others hadn’t, given that with vitamin D, birds, strictly speaking, no longer needed sunshine.
Arndt’s nearly century-old setup greatly resembles modern battery cage systems. Present-day cages often house five to ten hens (the industry tends to use Leghorn chickens, a smaller bird) in a wire crate often 2.25 feet by 2.25 feet and 14 inches tall. That works out to about 67 square inches per hen. For comparison, a standard piece of printer paper is 93.5 square inches. This isn’t enough room for a bird to stretch out; even a petite leghorn has a wingspan of 26 inches. Nor can they indulge in other instinctual behaviors like dust-bathing (essentially digging a hole and flopping into the cool dirt to soothe the skin under their feathers) or, you know, walking.
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