Month: May 2009

Chckens vs. Tall Grass

Chickens like short grass and do poorly in tall grass. I can see this as I mow the pasture, because the chickens get excited about the foraging prospects of the newly mown swath, rushing around excitedly looking for bugs and yummy young plants revealed once the tall grass has been cut.

Grass has few calories but lots of vitamins and protein. Chickens can only digest grass if it’s young and it still bright green. Once it starts to fade, they lose interest.

Physically, tall grass is an impediment to them, preventing them from going where they want. It also triggers annoying behaviors like laying eggs in the grass rather than in the nest houses, and encouraging them to hunker down and hide rather than run when frightened, raising the possibility that they’ll allow the tractor to run them down. I’ve only ever killed one chicken with the mower. That was enough.

Back in the good old days, there was some research done along these lines, and mowing the grass down to two inches tested out as being optimum. Six inches was too high.

I’m a big fan of permanent pasture (never plow, never reseed), since it combines the minimum amount of work with the maximum amount of pasture-plant diversity. So I’m not up on which plants would be best if you were starting with a plowed field. In general, at this time of year you should plant a grass or clover that will stay green all summer and do well if mown down to two inches. In the fall, you want a grass that will stay green all winter and do well if equally short.

Hooray! The Regular Farmers’ Market Season Has Begun!

Memorial Day weekend is the traditional opener for farmers’ markets. Here in the Corvallis area, we open about six weeks earlier than that, but still, there’s a big upsurge in both customers and vendors over Memorial Day.

Saturday’s market was a tremendous success, with swarms of people taking a relaxed amble through the market on a beautiful spring morning. The Corvallis Saturday Farmer’s Market is set in Corvallis’ Riverfront Park, which is a wonderful setting, at the edge of Corvallis’ old-fashioned downtown.

The market gets better every year. Anchored by a few organic farmers who have been perfecting their craft over the past thirty years, and filled in with almost every kind of home-grown product imaginable, quality is always king. And while people in Oregon are almost ridiculously nice in general, at the market these things are raised to a new level in both customers and vendors. It’s what Saturday mornings in small-town America are supposed to be.

Some farmers’ markets are little more than craft shows in disguise, or feature supermarket-style product in a different venue, but this is the real deal. All the goods have to be things that were raised on your own farm. They don’t all have to be edible or anything — beeswax candles where the wax came from your own hives is perfectly okay — but it has to be local.

Interestingly, organic certification is losing its punch. There’s too much low-quality organic stuff out there these days, and every new purveyor of low-quality wares, lowers the value of the label for everyone.

(Not that I’ve ever been organically certified. One of my rules is, “I won’t join any organization that wants me to fill out more than two sheets of paper per lifetime.”)

If you haven’t been to a farmers’ market lately, give it a whirl. Try all the ones within range, because they very widely. It’s especially good if you attend in a lazy, “It’s Saturday and I’ve got all day” frame of mind. Throw a cooler into the back of the car so you can have lunch instead of rushing home with your purchases. Do a couple of liesurely, unnecessary things before you go. You’ll live longer.

The Fire-Hose Trick for Towing Vehicles

What do you do when your tractor is stuck in the mud and any vehicles that you use to pull it out is likely to get stuck, too? Put the tow vehicle on relatively dry ground and use an extra-long tow strap! We used a hundred-foot coil of old fire hose (1.5″). This stuff is lightweight, immensely strong, and not too inconvenient to use.

Actually, when I say “we,” I mean “my neighbor,” who appeared with two sons and a pickup truck to rescue my tractor. They loaded the pickup with some of my firewood for extra traction, and plucked out my tractor from the mud. It was nicely done! That tractor was dug in so deep that the wheels were grating on pagodas in China.

You can sometimes buy used fire hose on eBay. Presumably your local fire departments have it from time to time when they retire old hoses.

Or, if  you want something that packs down smaller, you buy a long, strong tow strap from Amazon, like this one:


Price War!

We’re dropping our prices this week. There’s no more room in the refrigerator, so we need to drum up some extra sales. Since there are other egg vendors at the Saturday Farmer’s Market, undercutting their cheapest eggs with our cheapest eggs ought to draw in some bargain-conscious customers.

Setting prices is a screwy business. Most farmers are too insecure to do it well, and end up setting their prices too low, increasing the odds that they will fail. Just the concept of, “What’s the right price?” is pretty much an imponderable: a question with so many ramifications that your mind can spin around in tight little circles forever.

So we let our refrigerator set our prices for us. The process is almost entirely brainless. It works like this: If our refrigerator is full of unsold eggs, it’s time to lower prices. If there are tumbleweeds blowing through an empty refrigerator, it’s time to raise prices. That’s all there is to it.

Once you let the prices float, your attention shifts to more important things, namely: “What can I do so customers enthusiastically help to empty my refrigerator in spite of high prices?”

Step One is to have the best eggs ever. Life is way easier if your customers stick to you like glue and spread the news by word-of-mouth because your product is so good.

Step Two is to get people to notice. Let’s face it, eggs have zero mindshare with most people. If your refrigerator is bulging with eggs, one effect of lowering your prices is to draw in some skeptics who wouldn’t try your product at the old price. If your stuff is the best, some of the skeptics will become converts. Sales are the simplest way to move this process along.

Step Three is to scatter instantly grasped indicators of what you are, so people get it. Wearing overalls and a straw hat at the farmers’ market, having pictures of happy hens on green grass, smiling, and not being a jerk to your customers are all good. (Don’t wear clothes that feel too much like a costume, though, unless you like that sort of thing. If you go all stiff and unnatural, it doesn’t help.) People have this range of mental images of what a farmer ought to be. If you happen to fit one of them, flaunt it.

But avoid slickness. If you live on a real farm, slickness tends to be outside your grasp anyway, because everything you own gets muddied, faded, and battered. Customers are aware of this on some level.

Tractor Stuck in the Mud

My tractor is stuck in the mud. Now what? (To skip ahead to how I got it free, read this follow-up posting).

How did I get stuck? Well, I lost some hens to predators. I figured that the thing to do was to fire up the tractor, mow next to the fence while keeping an eye out for game trails through the grass, and then move the fence slightly. It’s just a couple of strands of aluminum fence wire on step-in fence posts, so moving it is easy.

That would deal with the grass that’s shorting out the fence and perform a reconnaissance that might reveal where the predators were coming from. On the tractor, I sit up high enough that I get a better view than if I’m on foot.

Well, keeping my eyes peeled for predator sign meant I wasn’t watching where I was going, and I bogged down in some very soft ground. Now what? When a vehicle is stuck, I pull it free with the tractor. If the tractor is stuck, I got nothin’!

One of my neighbors came by, asking if he could borrow the tractor to pull out his pickup, which is stuck on his own field. He thinks he can borrow a pal’s 4WD tractor and pull out both vehicles. Let’s hope.

As it turns out, the predators were getting through because the feeder wire for the electric fence had burned through. If I’d checked that first, none of this would have happened!