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.

is about 5′2″…and he’s a retired airline pilot and sits on his porch on a glider reading Gentleman’s Quarterly — he used to read the Wall Street Journal but that got pretty drab — and his wife works as stock broker downtown. And he has 40 acres, and he has a pond and he has an orchard and he grows organic apples. Sometimes there is a little more protein in those apples than people bargain for, and he’s very happy to have that.

This is pulled from Tom Vilsack’s confirmation to be Ag Secretary, during recent hearings in the senate Agriculture committee. If I were a Kansan small farmer, I’d start taking a look at who should be replacing Sen. Roberts.   Definitely underqualified for the job.

Below is a flickr set of real small farmers, created in response to his comments, in all their grubby glory. Hey, I think I know some of those folks!

(via H&H)