He’d exude the happy confidence of a man who’d built a better mousetrap and deliver a pitch of how our eggs differed from the ninety-nine-cent ones. It ran the gamut from flavorful yolks and attractive packaging to our environmental work and memorable name. Jason also touted LoLa’s “Eat Local” ethos. That local in the Locally Laid name was no accident (nor was the sassy double entendre).
No doubt, we’d greatly benefited by the hard work of food activists who’d come before us, adding terms like locavore to our common speech. Their efforts were paying off, with retail outlets now seeking out regionally produced food as their customers demanded the freshness, the feel-good, and more variety than commodity producers provide. And all this added up to steady orders for our product.
Certainly our right-name, right-time circumstances might have opened the door for our pasture-raised eggs, but what kept us in restaurants were the cooks. Tom from the Grill later told us that our eggs initially caused a little tension in the kitchen. Line cooks were getting to the egg boxes first and labeling them “FOR LINE ONLY” because our outdoor birds were producing—and I love this phrase—yolks with superior integrity.
Cooks weren’t tossing out eggs that come out of the shell a bleary mess, ruining their sunny-side-up orders. We’d also heard that bakers liked them for the tall meringue that didn’t require cream of tartar, a perking agent for flaccid egg whites. (We giggled around the farm, saying, “LoLa don’t need no fluff’ah!”—forgive us, we were tired and punchy.) But most impressive, Tom said that because egg waste was virtually eliminated, our higher price wasn’t cutting into the bottom line.
As we started appearing in a few retail stores, I started working the media by sending out press releases and inviting them out to the farm. Getting column inches and TV time was relatively easy given our visual promise of over a thousand chickens in a bucolic backdrop. Add in that all the birds are named LoLa and we’ve got ourselves a story.
When a news crew was scheduled to come, I prepared Jason with a bunch of talking points—about food miles, our use of non-GMO corn, and that we pledged to plant a tree with every delivery to offset our carbon footprint. And though Jason was a great spokesperson (despite still wearing that grubby ball cap against my wishes), regardless of how hard he steered an interview toward America’s broken food system, the story was always pretty much the same.
I can sum it up in four words: OH MY GOD … CHICKENS!
I’ve decided Americans are vulnerable adults when it comes to the hilarity of poultry. Apparently, chicken is one of the most inherently funny words in the English language. And it must be true; the venerable tastemaker the New Yorker said so in a 1948 article. In the piece, haughty H. L. Mencken chastises our “plain people” affection for the humor-inducing K sound, making jokes of fine places like Kalamazoo and Hoboken. Ostensibly, this jocularity also mocked the honorable chicken as well.
But for whatever reason, eggs were selling briskly.
In September, we tabled at the Chester Bowl Fall Fest. It’s an event that attracts thousands on behalf of the ski program that puts hundreds of children on the slopes every winter.
It takes a special energy to “give good booth,” but I was becoming better at public speaking given that I’d begun wading into teaching as part of my degree program.
While we were selling cartoned eggs from our refrigerated minivan and a few of our sassy Local Chicks Are Better tees, we mostly were there to educate the public on the term pasture-raised and get a little brand awareness. There were some unexpected benefits, too.
For one, repeating your story all dang day makes you good at it. Damn good at it. Shivering in the shade and showing the umpteenth person pictures of our chickens eating clover and alfalfa, I was punch-drunk tired and referred to the chickens as “salad-eating poultry athletes,” and really, that said it all. It made sense given that when we eat right and exercise, we’re healthier. It’s the same for a chicken. And a healthier bird would lay a better egg. Universities and USDA-funded studies found that eggs from birds raised this way had less fat (one study found less cholesterol, too) and more of the hard-to-get good stuff like omega-3s and beta carotenes.
This was when I first realized we had learned a lot, like a crazy lot, in a short period of time. People had many questions about chickens and, for the most part, we could answer them. Our painful education on the pasture was starting to take, despite our remedial starting point.
But the best reward for putting oneself out in the big world is the unexpected connections you’ll make. Cara, a petite blond woman in her early thirties, came bounding over to us and I immediately saw in her the same exuberant energy Jason possesses. There was a crescendo of animated conversation involving quick talking and sweeping hand gestures. Cara worked for a good-sized, local distribution company, Upper Lakes Foods, and was hell-bent on growing their line of sustainable offerings. She and Jason set up a time to talk over the winter.
As she and her happy dog jaunted off, I turned to Jason and said, “What the hell are you doing? We don’t have the capacity for something like that.”
Jason smiled and shrugged. “Not yet.”
Chapter 12
It was early December, nearly six months since The Day the Chickens Came, and winter was settling over the Northland. You could feel the change of season in the light; it’s thinner with less sustenance. It cast no shadows. And for the first time since I could remember, this magical and exciting pre-Christmas season had felt neither. It was like the sharp intake of fearful breath as the season of death descended.
Ever since we’d talked about starting the egg company, people had asked us how the birds would overwinter. And Jason had confidently and consistently answered that, given a higher-calorie, fatty food called scratch, the girls would be just fine. These were, after all, hardy northern breeds. And when they roosted together, wing to wing, they’d create significant heat, which we’d make the most of with straw bales stacked against their coops. I hoped he was right.
Despite my many hours each week in the egg-washing facility, I still felt like a poser at Locally Laid. Jason, who all but lived at the farm, walked around like he owned the place because, well, he does. And though I technically do, too, it was like the city cousin coming to play in the country. I knew the only way to overcome that feeling was to work through it, literally.
Getting started, I headed off to the shed, our former egg-washing building that was now storage and Jason’s nap station.
Jason had asked me to collect eggs while he did some winterizing chores and finished the shelter for an additional eight hundred hens from a farmer who’d sought us out to buy his birds. He was looking to get out of chickens.
At Jason’s behest, I donned the too-big kneepads, the kind my father used for laying floors in his home construction business. I tried to exude confidence in them, if only for the audience of me. I was grateful that Jason had already handled the day’s more muscle-intensive work of trekking the buckets of feed and the barrels of water. And like many things at the farm, it worked so much better on paper than it was proving to be in real life.
Just as before, watering the hens started with filling the large plastic casks on the back of the four-wheeler from our landlord’s hose, then driving them out to the individual waterers and filling them, one by one, from a gravity-fed tube. It was time intensive. And then it hardly worked at all. Despite fiddling with the barrel, the tubing, and the spigot and locating it on the highest possible ground, the water had been barely trickling. Like we couldn’t even count on gravity. This added up to hours squandered on this one chore. Jason had been talking about putting in a well at the farm, which is sensible and all—except, you’ll remember, we didn’t own this land. We were welcome to improve the property as much as we wanted, but we also knew our landlady would never sell.
Poking around the shed for some eye protection, I saw the Game of Thrones book cast atop an overturned bucket, its cover filthy, pages bent. It was clearly a loved v
olume and I smiled. I’d bought it for Jason despite it not being his typical genre. It was a prescription. The idea was to get him as far away from the prairie as possible.
He’d been jumpy and perhaps more worried about the changing season than he let on. However, I had another theory. It went like this: take a gregarious guy and stick him all alone out on a pasture for fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, with a thousand-plus birds providing a slightly hysteric din, throw in the fear that he’ll fail them along with his entire family, and that man will back right up against the edge of reason.
In our prefarm life, Jason read a lot, mostly nonfiction, and I know he would ruminate about these subjects at length. Now he came home too tired and sleep deprived to pick up thinky books, and I was concerned that his excess mental energy was churning up worries where there were none at all. Like that fall, when Jason walked in the door and beelined to me saying, “How’s our marriage?”
It was a statement delivered with incredible earnestness. “What?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”
“Like, are we okay?” His eyes wide as he emphasized the word okay. “Are you going to leave me, because if I were you, I’d leave me.”
His unnerve was contagious. This is the man who loves to shake things up, and now he sought solace from me, someone who views adventure through splayed fingers.
“Why would you say something like that?” I stepped closer, into the aromatic zone of his work clothing.
“I don’t know, I’ve been out on the pasture, just thinking …” He trailed off. His eyes were rimmed red; fatigue and concern hung on him like a horse collar.
Admittedly, I yearned for an existence that made intrinsic sense, at least more sense than this one, but the thought of taking the children away from their father made none at all. And, of course, there was Jason himself. I mean, after all, I am his Bird.
Despite his farm filth, I reached in and folded him down in my arms, pulling his foul-smelling self against my body and rocking him gently. “Jason, I love you … and I couldn’t leave you even if I wanted to. There’s too much debt.”
He made a snerty noise and I felt him smile into my shoulder.
“Well, at this rate you’ll never be able to leave me,” he said, leaning more of his weight into me while I ran my fingers through his wavy hair.
I gave him the book and the edict to read a chapter every day between chores.
“Read aloud to the chickens if you have to, but get totally lost in this world. Stop thinking so much.”
And he did.
Having found a pair of oversized gloves, I shuffled outside into the diffuse light. The bulk of the collection baskets were neatly stacked near the farm’s feed bin. Despite the cold, this area had the homey smell of grains. I worked apart a pair of baskets and held one up in front of my face. I couldn’t help but be drawn to it in the way most people are drawn to simple objects of the past. Perhaps we associate them with a less complicated time with its straightforwardness of task.
These are particularly irresistible when filled with eggs, and LoLa’s are various shades of taupe and brown and speckles; the whole montage pulls at something deep inside you. Nostalgia? Romance? I’m not sure, but there’s something about the entirely nonhomogenized nature of it that just feels satisfying.
I headed for the first coop, puffing white clouds of breath as I clumped along in my rubber boots. Looking up, I took in our ten acres, framed by the distant barn and abandoned silo. They were dusted with early-winter snow and under the white skies it felt bleak, but oddly beautiful, too.
At the paddock, I made big, exaggerated footfalls, pushing over the bendable fence. I was surprised that my stomach still squeezed as I entered the chicken’s enclosure. Despite seeing these birds for months, it happened every time, a fear they would rush me, as they sometimes did when I carried buckets of feed—chickens running atop of chickens in a loud, flustery poultry tsunami.
I hated that I wasn’t as comfortable with the working girls as with our home flock. Those backyard birds slid closer to pets than livestock on the critter continuum. And while we were, no doubt, kind to these farm hens, they’d never be as domesticated as the ones in the little coop behind our garage. It was just a numbers game. One can’t pick up and coo to some sixteen hundred chickens in the same manner.
At home, the little flock functioned as a classic hen hierarchy with a top-bird-enforcing order. They’re all girls, but the female in charge had grown a bigger comb, a testament to her elevated testosterone, bringing to mind a number of “size matters” jokes. I’ll leave you to supply your own. But her coop justice was meted out under some human supervision. If a home hen was getting overpecked (in poultry argot that’s called picking and where the term picked on comes from), she’d be pulled out into a separate, back pen of the coop until things settled down. This kind of harassment seemed to be simply part of animal makeup. But on the farm, the only rule of governance was an unmitigated pecking order.
This instinctual code takes the sweetest bird, a chicken who’d seek you out to purr in your lap (yes, hens purr) or snuggle in close to her roost mate, her head slung across her sister’s neck, until she noticed some sign of weakness in the chicken next to her. Perhaps a spot of exposed blood or some flag of feebleness that only another bird can perceive. As we learned back when our chickens first arrived, a docile hen can switch up as though receiving a signal from the mother ship and the signal says kill, kill, kill. She will obey.
On our website, I’d bragged up the fact that our farm hens function as a real flock, unlike those raised in cages—and they do, maybe more than people realize. Months ago when I wrote that, I was thinking of our home hens gathering up to groom together, giving their feathers a bath, much like cats. In some ways our home hens were properly closer in temperament to house cats than poultry.
At the farm, well, those girls were organized around a set of feral rules, ones that set off terrible clashes. Horrifying sights that made you want to whistle for blue-helmeted peacekeepers as skirmishes turn cannibalistic.
That’s why I can be wary upon first entering a coop.
Inside the hoop coops, swinging my baskets, I was relieved at the calm. While there were chickens around, it wasn’t quite wall-to-wall birds, given the mild weather. Many had opted to go outside, where the feed and waterers are. Putting these main attractions outside motivates the chickens to get up and move about outside—even if there is no prairie grass to peck at. Exercise is good for a bird, making her less inclined to start a row with her neighbor.
The farther I walked inside the coop, the more aware I was of the farm smell. It wasn’t as intense as one might think, considering the sharp ammonia-tinged stink of chicken droppings. It can jump right up your nostrils and bore into your sinus cavity, but because our hens are in these airy coops and go outside all the time, the odor is manageable. The straw helps. So does the breeze. But I’m not going to pretend it smells good, either.
Twenty or so hens were standing on the rounded two-by-four roosts that sat chest high and made up the right-hand side of the building. (Later, we’d convert to sticks, which are more friendly to a hen’s feet.) Probably another twenty birds were milling around underneath, kicking in the straw. A dozen plus—more than I’d have liked—were in the thirty nesting boxes, two rows of fifteen on top of each other, drilled into the frame of the coop’s left wall. Certainly, enough birds to see the barnyard archetypes at play.
And just as I bent into my egg-gathering crouch at the row of nesting boxes, the Suck-Up arrived. This bird lit on my back, singing her little coke-coke-coke song in my ear. I petted her as best I could, given the awkward angle and oversized gloves. She was telling me all the business, while perkily moving her head and shoulders. There’s one in every flock, office, and schoolyard.
As I inched my way down the line, mostly on my knees, the tattletale chicken rearranged herself on my shoulder. I was grateful for the ill-fitting kneepads. Despite the strap biting into th
e back of my knees, it was better than completely sacrificing my canvas pants to the chicken droppings, smearing as I moved from box to box, putting eggs into my basket. Many of them were soiled with fecal matter, despite the straw.
Just to clarify, the notion that eggs are dirty because a chicken defecates as she lays an egg is a falsehood. It’s physically impossible, given that the necessary squeezing action of her vagina physically closes off the path from her large intestine. What soils an egg is when chickens lounge in their nesting boxes, treating it like a combination beanbag chair and Depends undergarment.
We overcome this by gathering and changing bedding often and by keeping the girls moving. Modern operations have a clever device that will sweep a bird right out the nesting box in the evening and close the door behind her. This keeps her from messing up where she’ll lay her egg the next morning and encourages her instead to sleep on her roost. I see the wisdom in it.
Moving down the coop, I felt crowded. There was probably only two feet of clear walking space between the row of roosts and the row of nesting boxes. If only we could go back to the past and tell our naive, prefarm selves to plan a different poultry shelter. Despite all the thought that went into these picturesque little hoop coops on the prairie, they were difficult to maneuver in and tougher to clean. We really needed a coop interior we could completely dismantle and run a Bobcat-type machine through, rather than the pitchfork and shovel we currently wielded. But how could I complain? If it was hard for me at five feet, four inches, I could only imagine the contortion that six-foot Jason underwent to gather eggs.
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