Locally Laid

by Lucie B. Amundsen

“What, then? You want to quit?” Jason now looked at me, square on.

  And there it was.

  I then understood that Jason could not pull the plug on this without me explicitly telling him to do it. He’d dragged me into this, and without my express permission or perhaps even a direct order, he couldn’t stop trying.

  “I don’t know,” I said quietly, looking down at the dirty egg in my gloved hand and back to the man barely standing beside me.

  For sure, a part of me wanted to end this nightmare and put us back into the comfort of office working. A big part. But there was a surprising something else going on in my head and chest. What if we were, as they say, three feet from gold? I thought of all the hurdles we had overcome. What if we just had a few more to go until we’d figured it out?

  I opened my mouth, not entirely sure what I was going to say.

  That was when our friend Lee Ann walked in. The food buyer for a Duluth hospital, she gave Locally Laid its first official institutional order. Now we’d hired her son to help wash eggs a few hours a week. She’d popped in to say hello before driving him home.

  “Hey, how’s it going?”

  She was bright, happy, clean—states I was certain I’d never be again.

  Our faces said it all. Lee Ann, with her easy smile and affirming presence, managed to cajole us out of our funk. I don’t recall what she said exactly, but I know that by the time we’d sprayed out the machine, mopped the floor, and bleached the last surface, we were feeling better. At least good enough for us not to finish that earlier conversation.

  It could be that Lee Ann inadvertently saved Locally Laid.

  Because shortly after that, right when I was sure Jason could not go on another day, something happened.

  If this were a movie, the camera would pan across the bleak prairie to Jason, dirty and broken-spirited, struggling to heft buckets over the electric fence. He might have just slipped on the ice, spilling that hard-won water as he dropped the full container on the snow. But something would catch his attention. He’d be looking squinty-eyed at something in the distance. Something … puzzling. It would be hard to make out against the dazzling backlight of the winter’s low sun, reflected off the snow. But a figure would step nearer and nearer until Jason would hear an iconic greeting he’d recognize anywhere.

  “Dude … what’s up?”

  Brian had arrived to work the farm.

  Chapter 15

  While we’d been busy starting Locally Laid, life had had twists and turns for Brian, too. Mimi and Jason finally got all the paperwork straight for Brian’s longtime girlfriend, Soon, to come to the United States. Within weeks, they were married in a charming ceremony in a Minneapolis park. She wore an intricate beaded gown, a dress she saw in a wedding magazine and sewed herself—in a weekend.

  The couple was living at Mimi’s townhouse as Soon started the hard work of acquiring a third language and Brian endured seasonal jobs. He hadn’t landed a full-time position since returning home from Asia a year and a half ago.

  Just as Jason’s job loss had once freed him up to attend to Brian in Cambodia, Brian was similarly available to help his brother through his winter terror. He started coming up to Duluth a couple of days at a time, sleeping downstairs in our trundle bed. Then two days morphed to four, and, not long after, he was spending the workweek with us, while Soon and their young baby, Mya, were south in Minneapolis.

  The brothers working together to water the birds transformed the task, while still hellish, into a doable misery, something they could limp through together. Jason had no doubt that if Brian hadn’t come along, neither his back nor wherewithal would have made it through the winter.

  Walking into the house one evening, I ran into Brian, looking dirty and tired in his muddy winter gear. I immediately felt guilty that while I’d spent my day as a teaching assistant in a climate-controlled room, he’d been out doing physical labor in the cold.

  “Oh, Brian,” I said. “I’m sorry, it’s so damn hard out there.”

  “Aw, you know, we’re all learnin’,” he replied in his laid-back-dude tone. “Experience. You just can’t Google that.”

  It was a pearl of prairie wisdom. I stared, lost in this wise observation about life and process, turning this modern-day adage around in my head. Then, just to prove he was still Brian, he quickly followed it up with a joke involving Willie Nelson and oral sex (which is something you actually can Google).

  Brian started streamlining the operation, finding ways to make the chores more efficient, getting the farm on a tighter schedule for everything from pasture rotations to feeding to coop cleanings.

  “He’s just a better farmer than I am,” Jason would say about Brian. “He has more field sense than I do and, more importantly, he freed me up to work on the business.”

  When Jason says “on the business,” it’s a distinction from working “at the farm,” just spinning the daily plates of necessary labor some fourteen hours a day. With Brian there, Jason had more hours and more energy to course-correct the venture as a whole and look at creative ways to make enough money to survive that first year.

  Certainly, without Brian, we couldn’t have looked at Locally Laid beyond the day-to-day struggle.

  It was that January when Jason tossed a brochure on the dining room table.

  “I think I should go to this,” Jason said.

  “The International Poultry Conference,” I read aloud with some skepticism, saving my most mocking tone for the tagline, “Meat Me in Atlanta.”

  I pushed up my glasses and brought the document closer to read the fine print.

  “Honey, everything about this sounds like Big Ag to me.”

  The folks who attend this event count their birds by the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

  “Good,” Jason replied, “then they must know something about chickens.”

  Setting the flyer back down, the date caught my eye: late January—in Georgia.

  “Hey,” I said, “I think I should go, too.” It had, after all, been a long winter.

  A few weeks, one plane, a train, and two buses later, we were the non-business-attired minority in Atlanta. With my red canvas Dickies jacket and matching Doc Martens knockoffs (shoes Abbie had lent me), we were a colorful standout in a dark sea of twenty-five thousand blue and black suits—and a few dozen Amish.

  We strung lanyards over our necks and hit the exhibition floor, where I felt like a gaping rube at the 1829 World’s Fair. The booths were massive, with machinery, movie screens, and large, rotating overhead signs. Some exhibitors even trolled for conventioneers with women in tight skirts who’d gladly bend over to polish your shoes … with their hands. Some things you can’t make up.

  “I should go talk to those exploited young women about union organizing,” Jason said with a wry smile.

  My look said, “Yeah, keep walking, farmer.”

  There was plenty to see. Colossal, hissing machines the size of our living room rolled trays of eggs to big metal arms injecting them with who knows what at the rate of thirty shells a second—then conveyed them away. This was robotic technology right out of the Terminator movies.

  Compared to our hands-on operation, where the biggest piece of farm equipment was a Toyota Sienna, it was like we’d landed on some technically advanced planet. One getting bigger every day. Even so, Jason remained convinced that the big business of chickens had things to teach us about automating some of our systems, while we kept birds on pasture.

  He went from booth to booth explaining our business model, and while the salespeople were polite, they didn’t have much to offer the outliers from northern Minnesota. I could see them struggle with what to say to Jason as I liberally ate the candy off their tables.

  It was evident we were in the small-farm minority in Atlanta, but I knew there were a few others—namely, the Amish crowd. They were the only group that stood out more than we did, and I was dying to talk to them. Despite the women’s bonnets and simple prairie-style dres
ses and the men’s robust beards, we probably had more common ground than not. I sidled up to a group, but when I opened up my mouth I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound like, “Hey, that little hat of yours tells me we’d have a great conversation about natural methods of poultry production.”

  There were an awkward few seconds. I sputtered a false start, smiled, and then let them go. I’d wager they were relieved. I know I was.

  Feeling pretty done, I was trying to persuade Jason to bail with me into the Georgia sunshine. Then we turned a corner in the enormous convention center and came upon the European companies. They weren’t attending the conference to sell their pasture farm products, but they eagerly dug out their iPhones to show us movies of grass-based operations in Germany.

  Jason’s face became animated watching the small screen. It was birds, outside, yes, but also with feed running on a conveyor belt, giving each hen a fair shot at dinner; integrated nipple watering systems, which would eliminate dirty and frozen waterers; and nesting boxes that gravity-fed eggs onto a covered conveyor directly to a packing facility. This made for a much cleaner product. And as most EU countries do not allow egg washing, there’s a big incentive to farmers to keep shells unsoiled.

  This stirred Jason up and got his mind whirring on a new vision, which he talked me through as he bought a seven-dollar slice of pizza on the convention floor—though, honestly, he was so lost in his monologue, I don’t think my presence was actually required.

  “I’d want a barn with several huge doors on all sides to keep birds rotating on fresh paddocks,” he explained between unattractively huge pizza bites. “And get good regrowth on resting fields. You sure you don’t want some?” He thrust the half-eaten slice in front of my face.

  The irony of Jason talking sustainable production while chewing a meal made of processed commodities was simply too ironic not to tease him about.

  “Hey, I have limited time here,” he said. “I’m not going to drive around town looking for local food.”

  He was right. Big Ag is easy to support without ever meaning to. It’s cheap, convenient, well marketed, and direct-dialed into our brain stem. (I say this as a gal who likes her bag of salt and vinegar potato chips as much as the next person.) And because of cheap diesel, it’s everywhere, too common to even notice, like the air we breathe.

  On the surface, cheaper sounds better. Feed the world, right? And given that populations are only increasing, I used to think that while sustainable agriculture is a nice idea, we probably do need all the sprays and mammoth machines of the industrialized system to really keep people fed.

  Yeah, that’s not true.

  There’s a heartening side-by-side study between conventional and organic crops conducted over thirty years by the Rodale Institute. It found that organic yields not only matched conventional yields, it outperformed them in years of drought—using 45 percent less energy while building healthier, water-holding soil.

  And there’s evidence that the industrial model isn’t even meeting its world-feeding claim. According to the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization, one billion people are currently starving and an estimated additional three billion are classified as “not well fed” in our world right now. Although we’ve long produced enough calories to feed the world, much of it isn’t actually feeding people. Renowned food journalist Mark Bittman writes that a full 5 percent of crops become biofuel, a third goes to feed meat animals, and another third is just plain wasted as it works its way up the rungs of the food chain.

  Every step from source to processing to restaurants and households incurs some loss, but this is especially true in American households, where food is cheap and treated as such. One report cites that we’ve more than doubled our food waste from 10 percent of total garbage in 1980 to now over a fifth of all our refuse.

  That’s something we could change by altering our lifestyles to redirect calories where they need to go. However, there’s another catch with conventional farming that’s not an easy fix. Big Ag takes bigger water. And that’s a resource we finally have to pay attention to.

  While I’d understood that conventional farming relied heavily on nonrenewable oil to make chemical fertilizers, power machines, and transport crops, I didn’t get how their farming practices made for thirsty soil. Loaded with industrial saline from chemical fertilizers, conventionally farmed fields do not absorb and hold water nearly as well as organically farmed land. It takes an estimated four gallons of water to make one gallon of ethanol—until you count all the irrigation that went to the corn crop used to produce it. Then you’re talking a drastic seventeen hundred gallons of water for that one gallon of fuel. It certainly takes the feel-good out of the pump. Of course, livestock takes more than its fair share of water, too. Nor are chickens exempt from this hefty water footprint.

  We’re starting to get it.

  In 2015, California governor Jerry Brown instituted the mandatory order for cities to cut back on water consumption by a hefty 25 percent. While surely this will be helpful, it seems small when one takes into account that most water in the Golden State, a huge 80 percent of it, is used for crops.

  Because fuel is cheap, it’s been a real deal to grow fruits and vegetables in California’s reliably hot climate, rather than risk less advantageous regions, even ones far closer to home. That’s why your broccoli likely travels several states to your grocery’s produce department, rather than from the farmer a few hundred miles away. Likely, he or she could grow it, but not as cheaply or dependably as their Sunshine State counterparts.

  It’s called production concentration, and it happens all over the United States. Take Iowa and Minnesota. These two states produce some 38 percent of all the pork in this country as tiny Delaware strains under a two-hundred-million-plus broiler bird industry. That works out to more than eight hundred chickens per square mile. This massing of production not only strains water supplies but also creates a feedlot waste problem, which falls to government to figure out. And, of course, it makes it difficult for local producers all over the country to compete with mass production’s vertical integration and huge economies of scale.

  I finally dragged Jason onto an outdoor patio near the convention center where we enjoyed a beer in the seventy-degree weather—a hundred degrees away from frozen water and stuck trailers. It was a much-needed respite from being, as Jason said, “Mother Nature’s bitch.”

  “Now that my brother’s at the farm, we can really move forward,” Jason said, palming the beer glass. “When we get back, we’ll start trademarking everything so we can go license this brand.”

  Jason’s always about a dozen steps ahead of me, and of himself too.

  “Yeah, people are just clamoring to start their own LoLa farms and break frozen chicken shit off waterers, too, Jason,” I said between sips. “In fact, they’ll PAY us to do it.”

  “No, I don’t mean like how we do it now, I mean like at our new farm.”

  “New farm?”

  Jason explained that now that he’d seen the semiautomated way the German and Dutch keep hens, he could clearly envision a better farm. Not just better, but entirely different.

  Having based Locally Laid off idealistic pasture-method books and videos, Jason felt duped. From his sore-back perspective, sustainable agriculture’s nostalgic celebration of hard labor wasn’t just regressive, it was literally hurting those doing it. To do just the bare minimum of farm chores—lifting buckets of water and feed—at our small operation requires twenty-six hundred pounds of lifting. That’s a ton and then some. Every day.

  “I want to take the best of the commercial chicken industry—like the barns and watering systems that won’t freeze—and marry that with the most important part of what we do—getting birds foraging and exercising on pasture,” Jason said while ticking off these items with his fingers. “It wouldn’t just be better for me; frankly, Lu, it’d be better for the chickens.”

  Jason was talking fast, clearly forming b
ig ideas about a cutting-edge retro operation. Now that Brian was sharing the workload, Jason had regained the energy to pick up nonfiction again. His bookstand held volumes about radical economics, historic shifts in markets, and green industry. That was how he decided that Locally Laid, an operation not exactly on the edge of ruin but one with a hell of a good view of it, was going to be a “market disruptor.”

  This kind of change is defined as so radical that it helps create an entirely new market, like one for eggs laid by pasture-raised birds. The new method can then displace the dominant methods of producing eggs from caged or barn-bound hens who eat nothing but grains.

  The car industry provides a good example of this. In the 1970s, during the gas crisis, American auto manufacturers were still churning out huge, fuel-guzzling vehicles. That was when the Japanese swooped in with their high-mileage cars. It’s fair to say, we’ve been playing catch-up ever since.

  Jason wanted to be the Japan of this scenario. He had a vision of our small, substandard, clay-splattered farm in northern Minnesota rocking the entire overconsolidated and calcified egg industry in America.

  “LuBird,” he said, “this is going to be good; I can feel it.”

  As he enthused over changing agriculture in our country, I was still stuck at “new farm.”

  On the bus rides back to our far-off hotel, I got to thinking that with no immediate business or kid worries, we were kind of on vacation, although a poultry-themed one.

  When we got back to our room, I entertained flirty thoughts, and while Jason prattled on about German-automated pasture systems, I dug in my suitcase and disappeared into the bathroom. I emerged wearing boy short underwear and a newish push-up bra––a miraculous garment with integral hoists and pulleys that cheated gravity while making the most of my minimally stretch-marked, middle-aged stomach. Months on the all-stress diet plan did have some advantages.

  Jason scribbled in the notebook while I tried to get his attention, my hands on his waist.

  “Put that down,” I whispered. “Pay attention to this Bird.”