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.

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]

We decided last fall that 2005 would be our last year of chickens and eggs. The reasons are many and varied. The primary reason is that the cost of organic feed increased by about 25-30% over the last year making chicken production unsustainable for us economically. Rising gasoline prices have also made weekly trips to Portland and to the feed store unfeasible.

When we started selling eggs several years back, we were one of the only local, organic and pastured egg producers. Now many other farmers raise eggs – some on the same scale as us, and some just as a backyard flock to add to their vegetable table at the farmers markets – and rather than compete with those vendors, we’ve decided to focus our efforts elsewhere. Namely, in production of high quality lamb, beef and pork, and also on conservation projects on our farm (such as planting over 3000 trees in riparian areas over the couple of years!)

This also means that we won’t be raising our fabulous broiler chickens this year. We may raise more again at some point in the future, but we definitely will not be raising any this year.

We appreciate the wonderful support from our loyal egg CSA and broiler customers over the last several years and we look forward to continuing to provide families with high quality, eco-logical and humanely-raised meats.

We plan to have our spring newsletter and ordering info for beef, lamb and pork available by late March/early April. Check back here as we’ll post it online, or email us and we’ll send you a copy by email or snail mail.

Cheers!

If you are looking for eggs from hens raised the same way as ours, I’d suggest seeking out Cherry Blossom Farm at the Portland or McMinnville farmers markets… our friend Chenin does a good job raising her chickens!

So, last weekend Rich walked by one of the apple trees in the field where the hens are, and he noticed this curious site… an Araucana hen’s head sticking out of a hole in the tree!

There was a hole in the trunk where some of the hens had laid a few eggs when the tree was within the fenced area. But this hen managed to somehow crawl up through the trunk and get wedged in this spot.

After a lot of racking of our brains, we finally decided to cut off the branch above where she was (hence the red line to show where we cut).

We managed to extricate the hen successfully, and the tree (hopefully) had minimal damage since the part we cut was mostly dead already.

Only an araucana chicken would get into a predicament like that. I’ll bet it’s the same hen who crossed the swale for 30+ days to lay eggs in our feed shed!

If you are interested in getting on our waiting list, please drop us an email. We may add a few new subscribers in coming weeks, particularly at our NE and Forest Grove sites which currently have the fewest subscribers. We also may add some subscribers for our summer season which begins June 16 and goes through September 15th, so if you are interested, make sure to get on our waiting list ASAP!

Thanks!

We will be back at the market on March 13. And our eggs will be available at our Terwilleger, Garden Home and SE Portland sites this Thursday, so contact us if you want to sign up!