Category: Farm/Country Living

Jack and the Magic Beans: A Modern Fairy Tale

Once upon a time, there was a lad named Jack. Jack lived with his mother, and they were very trendy. One day, Jack’s mother said, “Take the cow to the market and sell her, because we’re vegans now.”

Jack protested, because he was fond of the cow and liked milk, too, but his mother insisted. So he went down to the market and traded his cow for some magic beans. The magician had a beard and a tie-dyed robe. He told Jack that they were as perfect a food as a bean could be.

“How perfect is that?”

The magician replied, “Like, they’re just beans, you know? But everybody’s like freaking out over them, can’t get enough of them. Haven’t seen anything like it since those brownies in the Seventies, you dig?”

“But aren’t they magic?”

“Oh, yeah! They grow really big, really fast, and that’s groovy. Still, have you ever eaten tofu?”

“Yes,” said Jack glumly.

But he bought the beans anyway, and took them home to his mother. They planted the beans, and soon they had a huge bean garden in the old cow pasture, with plants so high they almost reached the sky.

Jack’s mother and her friends were thrilled. They could make anything out of the beans: bean milk, bean meat, anything. One even had a recipe for making corn out of beans! True, the beans didn’t taste like milk or meat, and didn’t have the nutrition of milk or meat and were more expensive than milk or meat, but everyone agreed it was better.

Jack missed his cow.

Then one day Jack’s mother said, “Jack, we’re not vegans anymore.”

“Hooray!” said Jack. “I’ll go and buy a cow!”

“No,” said his mother, “You will not. All this is the fault of the giant corporation, and we’re using our money to fight the bean industry.” And she explained how they were going to use political pressure to change the world to be a better and trendier place.

Jack asked, “Can’t we just buy a cow? I liked our cow! Cattle give us milk and meat, and we aren’t dependent on anybody.”

But Jack’s mother was adamant. She and her friends planned a protest march on the giant corporation’s castle, where they would trespass and chain themselves to railings and such, until the giant corporation gave in, or perhaps ate them.

Jack decided that if the law was to be broken, it ought to be broken right, so the day before the protest march he went alone to the giant corporation’s castle, stole a magic harp, and fled far away from retribution and his mother. He bought a farm and some cattle and lived happily ever after.

THE END

Let’s Open the Farmer’s Market on Earth Day

When picking a date for the first day of the farmer’s market season, could you find a better choice than Earth Day?

(Okay, technically Earth Day isn’t until Thursday, but the big blow-out was Saturday, and it was great!)

The market opened in beautiful spring weather and attracted swarms of happy customers. It was like being hit by a cheerfulness bomb! You should have been there.

As usual, the other vendors outdid themselves. Imagine the kinds of produce that ought to be ripe by mid-April, and the quality you’d expect for such early produce. Then multiply it by ten. That’s the Corvallis farmer’s market. All the aging hippies who’ve been in the organic produce biz since the Seventies have gotten really good at it! Competition for quality, variety, and earliness is intense. There were even some local strawberries — six weeks before the regular season.

I sold out of chicken in about ten seconds. Customers know we’re the best! Once we’re in full production, supplies ought to last longer. The eggs held out better, and I sold about 60 dozen, which is excellent for an opening day.

The day was enlivened by the Procession of the Species, a parade that’s always held on Earth Day in Corvallis, featuring kids and adults in animal costumers. That was great!

The Corvallis farmers’ markets are something special. Wish you were here!

Side-by-Side Testing: This is the Age of Science!

You have to make a choice: Do you want the truth or your comfortable illusions?

Frankly, I think most people prefer illusions, because of their comfort value, but there’s a lot to be said for truth, especially when the future is riding on it! One of the most useful ways of getting at the truth is the side-by-side test, which has lots of applications in everyday life. I’ll talk about farm-related ones here.

I frequently tell people that I have “the best eggs ever.” Is this true? Well, so far it is! But I don’t just rest on my laurels. Once in a while, I go out and buy other people’s eggs, then cook them up in exactly the same way and do a taste test. Ideally, this would be literally a blind taste test, since my eggs tend to have very dark yolks compared to other people’s. In a blind test, you don’t know whose eggs you’re tasting, so your preconceptions and wishful thinking are kept in check.

So far, the results have been very encouraging — nobody’s eggs taste better than mine — though as a side effect I discovered that many of the bad things that people say about supermarket eggs just aren’t true. I’ve heard a lot of claims that supermarket eggs are old and have weak yolks, so I was surprised by the results of my first test, where the el cheapo eggs from the supermarket were just as fresh as mine and had really strong yolks, too. So don’t believe what you hear from others. Test, test, test!

With broilers, the results have been more mixed. Our non-irrigated pasture browns off in the late summer, and in one late-summer taste test, our broilers were not as good as another pastured poultry outfit’s, one which I suspect grows their birds on irrigated pasture. And some of the faux free-range chicken from California was surprisingly flavorful, considering that their “outdoor access” was more or less mythical. Normally I expect that it’s green pasture plants that give the chickens their flavor, but I suspect that there’s another way of doing it…

One interesting side-by-side experiment we made happened when Karen took a Poultry Science class at Oregon State University. One lab involved butchering chickens from the university’s broiler barn. Karen butchered the chicken using methods that were equivalent to what she uses at home, but this well-cared-for confinement broiler tasted far blander than a grass-fed broiler of the same age that we tested at the same time, and the confinement broiler had an unpleasant manure-y aftertaste that could only be blamed on growing conditions, not processing. Ewww!

The reason people don’t do more side-by-side testing is that it raises the possibility that their cherished beliefs will be proven false. Of course, this is exactly why you should do it! Great ideas only get you into the ballpark. You’re probably up in the bleachers somewhere, not on base at all. But it’s a start. You get on base when you get the details right and drop some of the baggage that we all bring to a new venture. You’re going to lose your illusions one way or another, either by refining your ideas until they actually work, or by failing. Using denial is the more natural and comfortable option, but it sends you straight down the road to failure. Testing and refining are less comfortable at first, but they reveal the path to success — reliable, ongoing success — the path that leads to a reality that’s far better than any illusion.

If you look around, you’ll see many opportunities to use side-by-side testing. The experiments are often very easy. For example, it took me less than half an hour to test half a dozen kinds of coffee, from which I discovered (to my surprise) that I don’t appreciate fresh-ground, gourmet coffee — something that has saved me a lot of money over the years.

Go forth and test! This is the Age of Science!

Off to the Big City I go

I’m spending about a week in California, on a visit to my day job, Citrix Systems. At one point I was flying to California every week (which was exhausting!) but tight budgets have kept me at home for nearly two years!

That’s left me more disconnected than is good for my work — I write the user documentation and kibitz on improvements in our super-spiffy network accelerator, Branch Repeater (and if you were wondering, no, I didn’t write the product description the link points to).

Actually, I’ve spent my whole career in something of a stealth mode — a computer engineer by training, technical writer (or writing manager) by job title, general guru and architect by inclination. When I was at Activision back during its glory days, my job was discovering all our game designers’ design secrets, duplicating them, and distributing what I’d learned to our other designers. Heaven! Pretty soon I wasn’t just writing up what had already happened, but was making things happen. And it’s been like that ever since.

(Trivia note: I wrote the last piece of code for the Atari 2600 game system ever shipped by Activision.)

Karen will be holding down the fort while I’m gone. I used to live in the Bay Area, where Citrix is, and I’m sure I’ll be hooking up with some old friends.

Raccoons Cause Trouble, For a While

If you’ve had chickens for a while, you loathe raccoons. If not, you will. Here’s why:

A while ago we started losing 1-3 chickens a night. Some were completely eaten, others barely touched. This is one of the more infuriating aspects of predators: they don’t have an “off” switch. Instead, they keep killing until they run out of targets.

In the wild, their prey scatters and the predators only get one or two victims. But a fox or a raccoon that squeezes into a closed henhouse will kill your entire flock.

That’s one reason I use open housing — no doors, and one side open — so the chickens can scatter. (Open-front housing has other advantages, which you’ll see when you read Fresh-Air Poultry Houses.)

How did the raccoon get in, in spite of my electric fence? Different ways, it appears. There was only one well-defined game trail, but when I adjusted the electric fence so that anything using it would surely get zapped, the losses continued. Raccoons have no fear. A dog or coyote that gets zapped by an electric fence will never come near it again, but raccoons will prowl it endlessly, looking for spots where it can squeeze under. They can squeeze pretty flat, and if you put the fence wire too low, it shorts out. Farming sounds so easy! But I’m sure  you agree that farming is no panacea.

When adjusting the fence didn’t work, I set snares. Snares are pretty easy to use, and by placing them only on game trails heading towards your all-night chicken buffet,  you can see how they can be very selective,  nabbing only the miscreants. After a few nights of nothing, we caught a single raccoon. And the losses stopped.

All that carnage from one smallish animal? Don’t tell me Nature is kind!

In the bad old days, there was a Federal bounty on just about anything that moved, including raccoons. And old-timer told me that the bounty and the price of pelts paid for his pack of coon hounds. One result was that chicken and sheep farmers had little to fear from predators.

When the bounty dried up in the Seventies, so did the hunting and trapping, and the raccoons, bobcats, and coyotes became an ever-increasing threat. Even since I started raising chickens in 1996, things have gotten much worse. Benton County keeps cutting the amount they’re willing to chip in as matching funds for the Federal predator control program — which only targets animals that are actively killing livestock — with predictable results: If you don’t learn all about electric fences and snares,  your chickens are goners. It’s almost as bad in town as it is in the country!