But what these models did allow for was more eggs with fewer laborers, a siren song to industrialists everywhere. While most businesses had long succumbed to reductionist systems of greater mechanization (think Henry Ford’s assembly line), agriculture had been the square peg. The devil wasn’t so much in the details as in the variables. But now that a building could control for weather and predators, and even regulate how much feed each bird could access, it was ripe for expansion.
Battery cage systems caught on nationally in the 1950s, and consolidation in the industry began. If we scroll ahead to 2015, the American Egg Board lists a mere 268 companies accounting for 95 percent of the nation’s 305 million laying birds. Seventeen of these companies have flocks of 5 million chickens, though flock doesn’t seem to be the right word for numbers that large. The number of egg producers has been reduced a stunning 99.99 percent in 110 years.
Heck, it’s an 89 percent decrease from the 2,500 egg producers around in 1987.
That cold day in the barn, I remember being grateful as lunchtime neared and I could stop fretting about frigid hens and step into my true role at these coop-raising events: feeding people. It’s a task I gratefully shared with Mimi, as Jason’s mother is the better cook between us.
I readied the makeshift barn buffet, a plank supported by two cinder blocks, for our slow cookers filled with pulled pork for sandwiches and baked beans. We weren’t big meat eaters ourselves, maybe serving it once or twice a week. This stems from me, the primary cook, having read the famed Diet for a Small Planet back in the 1980s. This small missive laid out the resource intensity of meat production with its high water and grain needs. So while I found meat tasty and, honestly, more socially acceptable to eat at other people’s homes, I generally served a simpler, more plant-based diet than the typical American household.
But today, our wet, tired friends deserved the hot, rich pork. I was glad for Mimi’s help. She carried in a plate of her homemade chocolate walnut bars as Abbie and Milo shadowed her. Not just for her treats, though that helped, but because she provided them the kind of full-eye-contact attention that was a rarity in our busy farm-building household those days.
I was also glad she’d driven the two-plus hours up from her Twin Cities suburb because I knew she’d make sure this meal wasn’t just hearty and good, but also lovely. She’d found pretty paper plates with matching napkins, remembering little details like dessert forks and cream for the coffee. Despite being served over a dirt floor, this farm-elegant meal conveyed our sincere gratitude to these cold volunteers literally building this dream. It was difficult to accept all this freely given generosity.
Putting out the last of the rusty folding chairs that propagated in barn corners, I couldn’t help but think the luncheon had the air of a shower, an event commemorating a big life change. Sitting down, we formed a loose circle, plates on our laps, while our supportive friends, many of them business owners themselves, murmured encouraging words to us.
To be truthful, I’ve grown suspicious of life events that trigger showers. It feels like the calm before the storm, the harbinger of things to suck. Historically, these were occasions for women to share their collective marriage or child-rearing wisdom gathered along their own journeys. But that’s not what happens today. We’ve become too politically correct to issue opinions based on our experience, thus leaving attendees of such fetes to fall flat of the original intent. I know; I’ve participated in such group failings myself.
But unable to bring ourselves to lay out reality for the honoree, we adopt an “ignorance is bliss” attitude and distract the guest of honor with a Cuisinart, a Diaper Genie, and assorted petit fours—and, like those gathered around the barn, just smile, hoping for the best for this new endeavor.
Chapter 5
2012
It was summer in the Midwest, which is to say it was idyllic.
Long days rolled out like the land before us, expansive and dotted with wildflowers and fireflies. It’s a potent season that can enchant away all thoughts of our protracted northern winters, which seem not only far off but altogether improbable. I blamed it on the heady billow of chlorophyll and vitamin D. In this unfiltered sunshine even a non-agrarian like me could see that this swelling farmland was beautiful and precious, a ripe expanse of great potential.
I just wasn’t convinced it was our potential.
But we were about to find out. With a transition as subtle as an ax, today would come to have a story, a moniker, and forever more be The Day the Chickens Came.
Turning my head, I picked out a cow in the adjacent field making direct eye contact with me, chewing cud and staring through my sunny-day facade. Perhaps she caught the acidic smell of fear wafting over the fence. Or maybe I was just such a spectacle of floppy arms and loose ends that even a bovine couldn’t help but stare.
In spite of our many weeks of preparation and today’s clear skies, I felt like a pratfall in the making. My head spun with thoughts like, maybe there’s a reason why we’re the FIRST commercial-scale pasture-raised egg farm in the ENTIRE upper Midwest.
I was a farm fraud, a prairie train wreck.
Pocketing a box of industrial staples, I scrambled over the second of two cattle gates rather than fool with their rusty locking mechanism. Though it was early, the metal was already hot, but on the other side of the fence, the pasture smelled like happy childhood, a fragrant mix of sweet grass, warm earth, and clover stirred up under a kid’s sneaker. I breathed deeply, trying to steady my nerves.
I looked toward the hoop coops, just under two football fields away, set on the pasture’s highest spot. Seeing the six oblong structures, white-tarped and complete with roosts and nesting boxes, even I had to admit they looked beautiful, even chicken-ready. Around each one was unspoiled prairie, cordoned off with portable, solar-electric fences necessary to rotate the birds onto fresh grass.
The best way to understand the revolving pasture process is to mentally draw a circle representing a couple of hoop coops, housing some six hundred chickens, and imagine it as the center of a flower—like a daisy a child might sketch in crayon. Then draw a simple U-shaped petal off the coops. This would be the first pasture run for the birds, also called a paddock, created with the flexible fencing. After a couple or three days, as the hens roamed within this area freely, picking down the grasses, thinning the herds of insects and foraging every single seed, it would be time to erase the first petal and draw another adjacent to it. This would be the fence line for the next fresh space for the chickens to roam. And so it goes, until the birds have migrated all the way around the coop. Some two weeks or so later, they return to that very first field, which would then be verdant and ready again for their fervent poultry assault.
That is, when the birds arrive.
“Lucie!”
Jason was waving me over to the first chicken house. There were well over a dozen people on the field now. Some were folks Jason had met in his agriculture class; others were friends whose children went to school with ours. While they didn’t all know each other, they shared a common excitement to be part of this big, idealistic thing from which they could walk away freely. I don’t mean that to sound ungrateful; it was actually envy talking. Part of me longed to sneak into their tidy cars and fold myself into their sensible lives.
Jason introduced me around, and while I smiled and shook hands, I wasn’t registering names.
We did little tasks as the hours passed in the hot sun. Answering question after question regarding our farm plans made my happy mask of “Isn’t this great?!” pinch my face. I needed a minute alone. The opportunity arrived while bending wire back around a door frame. I’d taken off my leather gloves for a better grip on the stubborn material when a sharp end found a tender spot under my fingernail. The quick jab bled persistently, requiring a Band-Aid.
I pawed through the first-aid kit in the back of the Kubota, a glorified ATV built for farm use. It was the first of many purchases not originally built into our business
plan. These included several generations of waterers and feeders and, oh yes, a several-thousand-dollar well, but that would come later. The ATV’s four-wheel drive and hefty suspension became necessary as spring transformed the field into a sucking clay trap that made transporting lumber needed for the floor frames of the coops with the minivan (our most rugged farm vehicle) impossible.
The gift of good credit allowed Jason to walk into a dealership and, after penning his illegible signature on a $10,000 note, walk out with next-day delivery. The four-wheeler was happy orange and easy enough for our children to drive with supervision. They called it BoBo. In my head, I referred to it as the “summer tour of Europe I will never have,” but I tried not to dwell on it.
There was little aid to be had within the filthy Red Cross kit I found in the back of the little vehicle. More Band-Aids were in the minivan, I remembered, allowing me to depart the chatty group busy filling the last of the pristine waterers, a sort of inverted plastic jug that drip-flowed into a red lid for easy hen access. Holding pressure on my cut finger, I headed for the big field gate and awkwardly waved at our children, Milo and Abbie, then nine and eleven, who were looking for bugs in the grass to give the chickens when they arrived, something they’ve done dozens of times with our backyard birds.
Just before the fence line, I veered the few steps over to the frog pond. The heat, now bordering on overwhelming, made even the sight of this stagnant water inviting. Reflexively, I checked in on the tadpoles, a daily highlight during these past few weeks of construction. I looked to see if any had started to sprout legs or dropped a tail, but I was careless with my shadow, giving myself away. They flitted to their hidey-holes under the marsh grasses.
I want a hidey-hole, I thought, just as Jason loudly snapped his cell phone shut. “They’re almost here,” he shouted, announcement style, and a murmur of excitement passed over the farm. I hustled to tend to my cut and repositioned myself in the field before the big arrival.
We’d decided that our chicken supplier, Myron, was nearly there. That morning he’d spent hours crating up the birds for travel and was on the road before checking to be sure that today would indeed be a good day for us to take on a trailer’s worth of wriggling, pecking, scratching, clucking life. Had he phoned, even we nascent chicken farmers would have told him not to transport birds today.
It was the weekend of Grandma’s Marathon, an event that annually draws some ten thousand athletes and twice that many spectators to Duluth. The commotion clots up the region’s highways and side roads. Add to that the fact that we were experiencing a rare heat wave, and that meant a truck full of hens, our hens, would be sweltering in stop-and-go traffic up the normally free-flowing Interstate 35.
I heard it before I could see it. A truck approached the farm at high speed, kicking up dirt on the gravel road. It was the king-cab type, the kind that carried two extra wheels under full-fender hips. And I was surprised to see it hauling a flat, open trailer with scores of red and yellow crates fastened to it with industrial strapping and bungee cords. It was completely exposed. This was not the ventilated semi we were expecting, but rather a two-bit operation held together with spittle and bailing wire.
“Oh,” I whispered, my hands pushing my hair on top of my head. “He’s a bigger yahoo than we are.”
In my chest, an icy spot called all the blood in from my extremities. I was lightheaded. I was mouth breathing. I’d read this is the body’s response to stress, readying the large muscle groups to fight or flee. But my sympathetic nervous system was actively engaged in the least glamorous third option—freeze. I was a dull human paperweight on the prairie.
As everyone sensed that something was amiss, the energy chatter drained away from the field. We were all staring. When the rig stopped, Myron—a large, sturdy man—leapt out, yelling and waving his hands. Because I was a good five hundred feet away, I couldn’t make out the words, but his tone and big gestures require no translation.
It was panic.
He gestured wildly toward the metal gates that led onto the field. We stood, stunned and unblinking.
Clearly, there was trouble. Myron shouted through the repressive heat, yelling over the noise of his truck towing the open trailer hauling our nine hundred chickens. It set Jason into an open sprint from the farmhouse driveway. The words echoed through the stifling air. From where I stood in the field, I couldn’t tell if they were yelling to or at each other, but either way Jason made quick time through the heat to the first set of big swing gates.
After months of working here, he was practiced at lifting the off-kilter metal fence with his foot to ease the rusty chain from its locking mechanism. And before Jason had run just over two hundred feet to the next one, Myron had gunned his big rig with its long, open trailer through the rutted and marred path between the barriers.
I held my breath and felt a small trickle of sweat down my neck. My fists opened and closed in a seemingly involuntary manner.
Jason made it to the second gate for his next foot-balancing, wiggle-chain dance and pushed it open just as the truck sped through. It appeared that Myron did not slow down at all. I swore under my breath and was surprised as Milo’s hand stealthily slipped into mine.
I gave my son a little squeeze, looked down, and smiled. “Wow, it’s an exciting day, isn’t it?” His blank nine-year-old face told me he wasn’t buying it, either.
The truck roared to where the chicken coops sat on the pasture, and Myron was out of the vehicle so quickly he left the driver’s door open. Insistent beeps emitted from the cab. Yanking tow straps, he shouted orders to grab poultry crates. As I approached, the urgency became clear. These birds appeared limp in their travel containers, which looked like narrow and rectangular four-sided versions of milk crates with a latch.
Our assembled friends emerged from their stunned states and were now passing chicken containers fireman’s-brigade style. Myron moved to the front of the line at the doors of the hoop coops and cut open the crates’ zip ties. He reached in with his huge workman’s hand, grabbed hens from any place he could get a grip, and flung them into the coops.
I was stupefied.
Our experience handling chickens involved the utmost respect: a gentle grasp around their body to avoid an upsetting frenzy of wings, and then a quick tuck under an arm where perhaps they could hear our hearts. We had always cooed and spoken softly to our birds, looked gently into their faces in search of an interspecies connection, and whether real or imagined, we’d always found one there.
In contrast, Myron hurled birds, making a pile of broken ones to kill later.
I willed my body to move to start de-crating hens, because every bird I handled was one less that Myron would touch. I didn’t want him touching any of our chickens. Just as I leaned forward, I heard a terrible cry and turned. It was my Abbie, her skinny-kid, preteen body dominated by her open mouth, contorted with shock and anger as she took in Myron’s tyrannical acts. Tears leaked down her face, red from anger and the extreme heat. She was too upset to form words, but nonetheless she was pleading with me. Everything about her screamed, Make it stop.
I embraced her to my chest, then pushed her out just far enough so she could see me when I spoke.
“The chickens are so hot that we must move very quickly to get them into their coops, where it is cooler and there is water,” I said. “They will be better once they’re inside.”
Still, her eyes weren’t on me; they were looking over my right shoulder to Myron, who was moving like a bulldozer through the crates.
I gave her shoulders a gentle shake. “Look, this will be okay.” She surrendered her attention to me, but her expression said she would never again believe me.
I sent her to find her grandmother and picked up the next crate, circling as close as I could to Jason. We shared a look, a kind of a head tilt with raised eyebrows toward our daughter.
He gave me a curt, understanding nod. After two children, four moves, a military deployment, and a decade toget
her, we’ve earned this form of nonverbal conveyance.
I watched as he walked up to Myron. Jason had been losing weight during the couple of months of construction, and Myron appeared bigger in height, heft, and persona. At that moment, I thought Jason brave, doing something I’m not sure I could—approach this rough and seasoned farmer with our bleeding-heart, newbie ideals of how to handle livestock.
Though I couldn’t hear the conversation as I made my way to the trailer to grab the next crate, I could read the body language. Myron, though offended, stepped back—and acquiesced to Jason as the check-writing customer, not peer. The next chicken he picked up, he did not pitch.
Snapping open a borrowed pocketknife, I cut the plastic ties on the next crate. The birds inside had contorted to fit the shape of their low box, and I couldn’t imagine what this long journey, exposed at highway speeds in the heat, had done to them. But rather than rejoicing at their freedom, the birds cowered in the corner and made me reach in past my elbow to grab them. Wrangling a gentle grasp on a chicken, I was alarmed by her size. She was supposed to be a sixteen-week-old hen, robust and nearly at peak maturity. Rather, I felt bones protruding under wispy feathering.
As I scooped her out, I saw that in addition to being stressed and skinny, she was wounded. These chickens did not have trimmed beaks, a common practice in large-scale poultry production. These nervous birds had been using their sharp beaks on each other.
Honestly, when we’d finally found someone willing to take our bird order, we didn’t know about trimming, and if we had, I’m sure we wouldn’t have requested it. There are varying accounts, depending on your source of information, about whether squaring off the beak-tip cartilage with a laser is painful. The only thing I can say with absolute certainty is it’s controversial.
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