The critical shortage that I see in a western OR-produced chicken feed is the availability of a few critical proteins that our climate doesn’t produce very well, at least vegetatively. Rebecca goes into this in good detail.

There’s a pretty big movement to get people and their animals off of soy products for both health and environmental reasons. Not to mention the Soylandia effect with it’s habitat, energy, and national security implications. Soy is quite a crutch, and a hard habit to break, since it’s a very nutrient-dense food that fills a lot of nutritional holes with it’s near complete protein complement. The downside for us is that feed-grade soy doesn’t do very well in our cooler summer climate. Assuming that animal products aren’t going to be used to fill out the ration, I’ll be interested to see what folks come up with.

Your Turkey Is On The Chopping Block

June 2008

Last Thursday was meat cutting day at the farm. Usually, processing days are pleasurable. Cutting and wrapping requires that we have extra hands on duty, and the long hours spent breaking down a couple beef carcasses inevitably results in a steady flow of bawdy humor and happy camaraderie. But on this particular morning, as I pull into the farmyard, the mood is black. Clint, who runs the saw in the cutting room, hurries by. “Look out”, he mutters, as I shuttle my daughters toward the house to see Grammie, “It’s bad in there.”

I find Grammie (a.k.a. my mom) in her office, staring at the farm spreadsheets, one hand on her forehead as she clicks through the numbers.

“What’s wrong?”

“The price of broiler mash went up $20″

“What else is new?” My tone was sarcastic.

“In one week.”; It went up $20 per ton in just one week. The feed mill says there’s no end in sight.

Price hikes are a grim reality for everyone. The cost of transporting our meats to farmers markets has doubled since 2005. So have the costs for heating the brooders and hauling the livestock. The week prior, the price of casings for our handmade sausages tripled. And in only one year’s time, the price of grain has doubled.

We’ve grown used to it. We are a diversified, pasture-based livestock farm, which means we are in a far better position than most folks when it comes to surviving rising fuel costs and a global food crisis. Grazing ruminants — cows, sheep and goats, can convert forage into good food. And they can make use of our hilly, rocky, frost-prone hillsides that simply can’t grow crops. Poultry and pigs are not ruminants. They are omnivores, and require grain to supplement their diet if we are to produce enough to sell. Because we keep them out on pasture, our grain requirements are minimal compared to producers managing concentrated feeding operations. Still, feed costs make up a good portion of the farm budget. The survival of our family business is like plate spinning, where we focus simultaneously on several elements of the family farm equation: greater diversification, stepped-up marketing, cost cutting, and increased self-reliance.

In truth, we find plate spinning rather enjoyable. Today’s small farmer must be into such a game, willing to assume some risks and to be creative with business management. Generally, we are stimulated by the challenges, forever ready to sit down with calculators, pens and pads to hash out whatever confronts us. If this didn’t hold appeal, we’d all have 9-5 jobs. So I am surprised at the gravity in my mother’s voice.

“Mom, Stop seeing the glass half-empty. We’ll figure out something.”

“Damn it, the glass is half-empty, Shannon!” And her eyes fill with tears. “It’s the turkeys. I can’t control the costs on the turkeys! What are people going to do for Thanksgiving?”

But, I think to myself, the glass is still half-full. The hard times we all face are marked by a generosity of spirit within our community. Daily, I am inspired by the little things folks are willing to do with the understanding that we all need to pull together: The feed mill faces fuel surcharges on all its products. It passes none of them along to the farmers, figuring the increased grain prices are too great a burden already. Many of our expenses have doubled, yet our grassfed meat prices remain steady. Our poultry and pork prices have only gone up 11% in two year’s time. Neighbors call before driving to town to see if anyone on the road needs something. Interns offer to take reductions in pay.

My mother, however, isn’t wrong. The glass is half empty, because the generosity stops with the common man. Like the big oil companies, agribusiness is getting fatter and fatter while the common folks’ bank accounts grow lean.

Last year, neglecting to mandate conservation measures, Congress mandated a five-fold increase in the use of biofuels. According to a story in The New York Times, one fifth of our national corn crop is now used for ethanol production. Increasingly, farmers are planting more and more corn, which cuts the acreage available for other crops, like soybeans, thus driving up those prices as well (1). Next, take a disaster, like the flooding in Iowa, and add it to the mix. I called our local feed mill to find out why our broiler mash prices went up $20 a ton.

“It

Chris and Katie chimed in on the Grains post of last week, talking about the challenges of small scale grain growing, which are significant to say the least.

Chris also linked to a great article by Anthony Boutard on the new blog Grains and Pulses, listing their trials and tribulations over the years of growing grains for the small market.

And finally, Throwback has some interesting posts about how grain prices have and are affecting their operation. Here she discusses their phaseout of laying hens for the same reasons as ours, and here discusses the feed price increases since last fall for their broilers.

OK, this is a little disturbing. I find chicks without the Manic Panic look just fine. If you want a little color, get an Araucana

But maybe I’m just old-fashioned.

[via Karbon County Moos, including directions for how to manic-panic-ify your chicks]

As of today we are sold out for the first August chicken weekend (Aug. 6-7) but still have some chickens left for the second weekend (August 12-13). If you haven’t already placed an order, contact us via email ASAP to order chickens.

We hope the cancellation of the October chickens doesn’t inconvenience anyone. We plan to put out a fall newsletter with updates about the exciting projects that we are starting this fall and what products we’ll have available for 2006.

We have a lot of chickens still available for August – the pick-up weekends are August 6th and August 13th. You can get an order form from this site at www.mossbackfarm.com/archive/000123.html. Or email us your order!

We got our August chicks in the mail last Thursday morning via Phinney’s hatchery in Walla Walla. So far, we are very much impressed with these chicks and this hatchery… all 300+ chicks survived their travels via USPS, and only a handful have decided to head up to the lush fields of chickie heaven. And the whole batch is very lively and seems to be doing great.

This time, we won’t be letting them out to forage unprotected while they are still tasty morsel size… once we let them start to wander out of the brooder, they’ll be protected overhead by cattle panels. Hopefully this will solve our ravenous raven problems.

If you are interested in broilers, contact us ASAP to get your order in. These are chicken raised on organic chicken feed and housed outside on fresh green pastures. The meat will be lean and tasty, so don’t miss out!

If you have already placed an order, you’ll be receiving an email confirmation with the pick-up time and location within a few days.

Let the countdown begin!

As promised, here’s a photo from our batch of young broilers. This photo was taken about a week ago inside the brooder. They are now foraging about in the grass outside the brooder, and trying to evade the ravens!

We are still taking orders for all of our broilers this year, including the first batch which will be ready starting June 4th. If you don’t already have an order form, go to the “broiler” archives on the right side of this page to find the order form (it’s a downloadable PDF). Or contact us and we can mail you an order form.