“Does Jason have any idea what it means to take care of animals?”
The directness of the question pulled my stomach to my throat, rolling an organ or two into a knot along the way. This, of course, was a legitimate inquiry. And as I’d opened my mouth to say I really don’t know what, he continued.
“And the farm, so far away from your house—on rented land—is that a good idea?” Clearly, he had concerns, valid ones, and I was stuck in the untenable position of defending a venture I was still trying to make friends with myself.
What I also found out on that long drive was that my father had worked with chickens when he was a teen. He’d been a farmhand at an egg-producing farm not even half a mile from where I grew up. My father never mentioned it before. At least that I can recall.
Driving by the same field, he pointed out where the structures had been, a typical late 1940s floor operation. Today this would be called cage-free—chickens stayed inside, freely roaming in the barn. This one housed several thousand birds on three levels.
When my father arrived in the morning, his first job wasn’t to collect eggs; rather he gathered up the chickens that had died overnight. There were several a day, which he’d take out to a field and bury.
Once back inside, my father did all the feeding and watering. Just a skinny kid, he’d swing hundred-pound bags of feed that weighed as much as he did over his shoulder and carry them up a ladder to the third floor. All this he performed for some thirty cents an hour. No wonder he was dubious on the topic of egg-related work.
Only after my father quit, when he was old enough to go into the carpentry trade, did the farmer he worked for install a freight elevator to motor the heavy feed bags to the top level. Nearly seventy years later, this fact still irritates my dad.
Looking through this lens, I see how bizarre this new farm venture was to my father. Especially as he and my mother had ensured my brother and I got educations, allowing us opportunities they never had. And here I was, making an about-face from progress.
I couldn’t shake my father’s chicken history.
Historically, agricultural operations flecked across not only Maine but the entire nation. Less than a hundred years ago, small to midsized food producers numbered nearly six million across America, the kind of operations that frankly would’ve been great mentor farms to a fledging operation like Locally Laid and could have easily hooked us up with a couple thousand birds.
Their vanishing made me ask—what happened? And this is where I attempt to cram seventy-five years’ worth of history into about seven hundred words.
The more I read about this subject, the more I now see that our nation’s entire food system pivoted on World War II. Picture the stern couple in Grant Wood’s American Gothic painting. You’ve seen it. Perhaps not the original oil rendering hanging at the Art Institute of Chicago, but surely you’re familiar with the much-parodied work of a balding, middle-aged farmer gripping a pitchfork, along with his dour, spinster daughter. The portrait was modeled by the painter’s sister, Nan, and his dentist, Byron, but humor me for a moment and let’s pretend they’re Mr. and Mrs. Gothic, prewar farmers.
You can see by Nan’s and Byron’s serious posture and the decisive pitchfork placement that they were living in the tough times of the Depression and the Dust Bowl. But surviving that, and coming into the 1940s, they’d likely have had a tractor to break up the land and help comb out the harvest. Despite this mechanization, there’d also have been farmworkers, many of them. Weed control was still largely a task done literally by hand.
Then Germany invaded Poland, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and, with America’s entry into war, most of the Gothics’ crew would have been drafted or enlisted, caught up in the zeitgeist of patriotism. In fact, the nation’s farm population declined by 17 percent, just as farms were expected to produce more. Food was needed at home, for troops, and even for starving Allied countries.
The only way to feed everyone was to leverage the labor force left behind—and produce more crops with fewer people. Ford-Ferguson saw an opening in the market and began producing a line of easier-to-handle tractors, advertising that even “children and old people” could operate them. It was an all-hands operation.
And here’s a neat fact: our Gothic farm couple at this time would have had money (perhaps tucked into Nan’s colonial-print apron) as wartime farm incomes nearly tripled. And when peace finally arrived, many used their profits as down payments on bigger, better, more efficient implements. They needed them to replace the many hands not returning to the farm, opting instead to pick up pencils the GI Bill bought for them. However, what did come home from war was the chemicals used to fight it. DDT and nitrate fertilizers, now made in former ordnance factories (often sharing some of the same ingredient lists), were promoted as yield-boosting, labor-saving options.
So, for a while, farmers enjoyed a bit of an agricultural bender. (I like to picture Byron with a noisemaker tucked in his overalls and Nan wearing a jaunty party hat.) And just like an infomercial, it somehow got better. The Marshall Plan, also known as the European Recovery Program, had the United States buying billions of dollars’ worth of produce to ship to rebuilding Europe.
Of course, binges never end pretty.
Eventually, Europe and Asia bent their swords back into plowshares to once again produce their own harvests. This effectively closed a large market for U.S. food. Add to that, crop producers were realizing a bit of a chemical dependency. Increasing amounts of nitrogen were being tilled into fields, with fewer returns.
So, while the fertilizer companies bathed in money, as farmers scrambled to increase yield to pay for those new tractors and combines and increased acres, farms went under. Push that famous house with the Gothic window right out from behind Nan and Byron.
And you thought they looked austere before.
The truly sad part is this: it wasn’t needed. The corn, that is. The Gothics and thousands of farmers were killing themselves (and their soil) to crank out a crop we had in abundant surplus. This leaves us with the obvious question: For God’s sake, WHY?
The answer was politics. Oversupply played a role in international relations, serving as a double-headed carrot-and-stick tool of diplomacy. Food aid became a reward to nations that served the interests of the United States and conversely could be withheld or used to undersell those who did not. What wasn’t wielded internationally was sold cheaply to domestic food processors, becoming the ubiquitous ingredient high-fructose corn syrup. Looking at our current obesity rates and other health concerns, we see how that turned out.
Things got more precarious when U.S. Department of Agriculture secretary Earl Butz—a man infamous for telling farmers to “Get big or get out”—dismantled Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs that had regulated commodity prices. With those protections gone, farmers were exposed to the caprice of the marketplace. Oversupply in the 1980s hit critical levels and prices bottomed out just as I remember Walter Cronkite on TV soberly telling the nation about all-time-high interest rates. Throw in a couple of droughts (and your Farm Aid T-shirt) and 1987 became the year that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recorded the highest number of farm bankruptcies in its history. Ever.
And that was why we were stuck getting chickens from the likes of Myron.
Chapter 9
It was around then that I began to suspect LoLa (our shorthand for Locally Laid and also the name of every chicken on the farm) was a thief, scalawagging off with my hammer, my drill, my sleeping bag, my flashlight, and, of course, my husband. Even my daughter had been recently relocated to the farm.
Abbie was a natural on the pasture, confidently striding over the flexible fencing to identify the smaller birds who’d been bullied away from the feeders. These were essentially long troughs made from PVC gutters drilled to two-by-four boards, a system Jason had seen when visiting a sustainable farm in Maryland early that spring.
What we later learned was that the setup was terribly wa
steful and beyond that, bad for bird harmony. One of the problems was that the gutters had no lip—a wedge of plastic to keep the hens from tossing out lots and lots of expensive feed on the ground as they picked through it looking for the good stuff, bits of sweet corn.
The other problem was that these gutter-style feeders led to competition. Because they’re essentially open troughs, they couldn’t refill themselves like an auto-feeder, a simple container above that would gravity-pour as it emptied. Thus the chickens became fierce about getting their fair share—and then some. Big chickens pecked away smaller chickens and literally ate their dinner, until those big birds morphed into visibly dominant hens and the smaller, now scrawny birds scarcely ate anything at all. Not nearly the four ounces of daily feed needed to produce an egg.
Abbie created a place for these runts by nudging more aggressive chickens with her tiny hiking boot. She was no longer squeamish about picking up injured hens, cleaning out the wounds, and then slathering them with ointment, sometimes butterfly-taping them shut with an adhesive medical bandage. I liked to watch as she plied her careful treatment, gently talking them through it. At age eleven, she looked like she’d been doing this all of her preteen life.
I remember one particular day in late June. The chickens still needed to be ushered out of the coops in the morning and marshaled back in and roosted at night. The earliest layers were beginning to give their very first pullet eggs, usually a robin-sized offering. There were not yet enough eggs to start official processing and sales, just the very start.
Abbie opened a chicken OB-GYN practice of sorts, helping egg-bound hens with what amounts to ovum constipation. There had been a spate of such troubled birds. They’d sit in the nesting box, hunched up, feathers ruffled, and display their discomfort by contracting their feathery back ends and wincing—a facial expression that crossed human/avian lines.
After consulting Dr. Google, Jason showed Abbie how to identify the hard knot of an unpassed egg with her fingertips. Then, using a gentle pushing motion toward the bird’s vent, she attempted to stimulate the shell gland, the equivalent of a poultry uterus, to push out the lodged egg. Careful not to apply heavy pressure that might break the shell and risk infection, she’d rub down the chickens. It was not unlike the tummy massage Jason and I did once on baby Abbie, swirling our hands around her abdomen in an attempt to relieve colic.
This seemed to work about as well on a crying infant as it did on an egg-bound hen, which is to say not very. When a stuck egg refused to be dislodged, the father-daughter team would sterilize a tool, say a slender screwdriver, and try to break the stuck egg with one clean puncture before the hen’s straining caused prolapse.
And prolapse is bad business. Very bad business.
According to The Chicken Health Handbook, prolapse is when a hen’s oviduct is pushed inside out and protrudes from its vent. Colloquially, it’s known as blowout. It presents as a bright pink fleshy bulge under a bird’s tail feathers and makes me grimace with labor empathy.
When Abbie would find a blown-out bird, she knew to immediately separate her from the rest of the flock, or truly the worst would happen. The angry color of the exposed organ would attract pecking. (You recall that chickens, omnivores through and through, are drawn to peck anything bloodred.) This pecking would lead to tugging, which would eventually haul out the bird’s intestines. This meant more exposed flesh, more blood, and more pecking until the chicken died under the sharp beaks of her sisters. No matter how sweet a hen was, the pecking order and its mandate to keep the flock healthy and strong would be upheld. The laws of nature allowed for no weakness.
However, if that injured bird was put into her own space, the wounded area cleaned, and the organ gently pushed back with a gloved hand, she might make it. Maybe. We’d never seen prolapse with our home flock, but it can be a symptom of a number of things from feed blend to early maturation. One reason, we’d been told, might have been that the type of calcium mixed into their feed was too fine for proper absorption. It’s a nutrient needed to stimulate the pushing action that safely pops the egg out the vent. I’d heard Jason on the phone changing to a more expensive vitamin mix with a coarser form of the mineral. At this moment, we’d have paid anything to avoid these gruesome deaths.
I’d also read that prolapse was a problem in underweight birds, like the ones we’d received from Myron. The difficulty is that the hens would sexually mature before their bodies were physically ready to handle it. I wish we could have fixed this with a simple outlay of cash.
Abbie had also been out rotating pasture with Jason, no easy task. What made this a formidable chore was twofold. First, while the flexible fence is light, hauling a good hundred feet of it isn’t. It gets unwieldy fast, especially as it’s dragged over uneven terrain or through longer grasses. Second, unless you really think through your strategy, wily birds will spot a gap as you wriggle the fence along—and bolt.
These were our early days, when we were still developing our best-practice techniques. Now we know to walk behind the hens, ushering them along, moving fencing behind them as we create a new, fresh “petal” of enclosed paddock off the stationary hoop coop. But back then we were stumble-tripping along. And by that, I’m saying we chased a lot of chickens.
When one accidentally released hens, it meant jogging over to the four-wheeler, grabbing one of the fishing nets, and chasing the birds through the open prairie. Jason was best at this, returning to his Minnesota hockey roots, treating it like another puck drill. The time this exercise would take depended greatly on your (and your birds’) athleticism; it could mean a minute’s romp or up to ten before a bird was swooped up, multiplied by the number of times you let her escape.
Fortunately, this labor-heavy effort of pasture rotation holds an immediate payoff. Once the chickens are shown their fresh field, it’s nothing short of poultry jubilation. Seeing the verdant grasses, they’re in full pursuit. They tuck their wings tight against their bodies, canter forward, and rapidly pick up one foot and then the other for intense speed waddling. The bobbing articulation of a chicken’s momentum, jutting her head forward, then waiting for her body to run underneath it again and again and again, well—that’s entertainment.
Sometime between that morning’s feed haul, hemming in a fresh paddock, and playing Prairie Bird, MD, Abbie didn’t just get hungry; she was ravenous. The granola bar and banana Jason had brought for her wouldn’t come close to satisfying that. This called for a trip to town.
And that was how Abbie traumatized a small child.
Our daughter found herself in a sandwich shop wearing her Chester Bowl sweatshirt, not only boasting of our neighborhood ski hill but now also splotched with a terrific bloodstain and patches of feathers. Of all our family members, Abbie is the best hand washer, and she tried her best to clean up the spatters of farm life from her arms in the small public restroom. But there was nothing to do about the garment.
“There was this little girl there that I’m pretty sure I’ve mentally scarred,” Abbie told me later. “She just stared at me with giant eyes, like I was some monster that she couldn’t let out of her sight.”
I’d have felt terrible about this statement if Abbie hadn’t shown a slight smugness with her grin, a little light in her eyes. There was an underlying tough pride to her that I quietly loved.
Milo, however, was not as comfortable out at the farm. Like, not at all. We share a slight coordination disorder called dyspraxia, which makes us a bit grace impaired. In short, we’re genetically clumsy—really, a cruel joke for a kid whose family now owned an egg farm. He’d accidentally tip feeders and trip up fencing, releasing dozens of birds. This caused him to flush with frustrated shame. We decided to limit his time there, at least until he was a bit older. I had to constantly remind myself that he was still a little guy, only nine.
Milo’s farm role was taking over the backyard chicken duties at our house in Duluth. He was responsible for the five home hens and, in return, he sold their wares�
�for personal profit. He’s always been a boy of unusual interests and for as long as I can remember, desperate to be an entrepreneur. In first grade, he’d cried about having to go to school, where he wasn’t learning anything that would help him become “a captain of industry.” Though his end goals seemed to skew more toward robber baron, I didn’t dispute it.
I’d like to tell you that Milo was modeling the venture of Locally Laid, or even me with my decade of freelance writing (though my “gal with laptop will ‘wordy pole–dance’ for you” business setup wasn’t that complex). But in reality, Milo had been inspired by documentaries on the Rockefellers and Carnegies and the reality television show Shark Tank.
This spurred my son to start his own budding egg-pire. Wanting to drive sales, he had an idea to put something “value added” into his cartons, like cereal companies do with cheap toys. However, when I explained that he’d have to buy the object and that would come out of his profits, he blanched. He figured he could create something instead. Milo wrote out knock-knock jokes from library books and clipped comics from the newspaper, tucking them into each carton of his home-laid eggs.
Thus, Milo’s Yolks and Jokes was born.
The part he liked most (and was best at) was the sales. He developed a flyer (copying each by hand), knocked on neighbors’ doors, and made handshake deals. Later, Milo expanded his income stream by adding advertisements to the top and inside of his recycled egg carton lids. Friends Andy and Katy, who run a local acting theater, graciously purchased a few announcements for upcoming shows. Abbie drew the ads (Milo paid her a small sum) and stuck them to the cartons heading out to his customers. No one complained about the eggs and spam.
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