“It’s probably time. It was time a while ago,” I said.
Eggs are a young bird’s game. Some of our chickens, the elder statesgals of the flock, were now twenty-eight months old, and their advanced age showed with less production. And what was left in the nesting boxes was of poorer quality. We’d kept them nearly a year and half beyond industry standard. The chickens were now geriatric layers.
He nodded.
We revisited all our options for culling the flock and reminded ourselves that there were several reasons to do this. Beyond the obvious egg problems of an aged flock, it was also time to thoroughly clean our barn and let it sit vacant for a bit. This is the best way to eliminate parasites and tamp down disease.
While the barn had been a huge improvement over wintering in the field, it hadn’t been built to house hens and thus wasn’t properly insulated. We hadn’t finished paying the last winter’s propane bill until August. With a vacant barn, we could reevaluate our options.
But first, we had to empty that barn.
While we liked the idea of bringing our chickens to the USDA-certified facility to be processed into stew hens, that would mean renting a truck and bird crates and driving them at night (for the least amount of poultry stress) a few hours west. Then spend a night in a hotel and bring them back in a series of coolers—which we’d have to buy. Or renting a second truck, this one refrigerated. Suddenly, we were looking at expenses in the thousands for a product we weren’t sure we could even give away.
We reached out to our contacts in the Asian community. Although it took us a while to find the right person, he agreed to come take our hens live off the farm and pay us a modest buck a bird. They would use these pasture-raised chickens (tough as they were) to feed themselves, and this felt, if not exactly good, then fitting.
I liked the idea of providing high-quality, low-cost protein to a community willing to do the work of processing it. We fed the chickens another two weeks as we attempted to confirm a date. When the set day finally arrived, he didn’t show.
“Brian talked to the dog guy,” Jason said. I looked away. Giving our girls over to be dog food for a musher wasn’t my first choice. It didn’t even make my top five. But it felt better than the advice we’d gotten from other farmers: kill them and lay them on your fields as fertilizer. There was some sense in this, as we were looking to diversify and start the process of adding berry plants to our farm. But it seemed wrong to halt a good bird’s “circle of life” train short and with it the opportunity to pass on her superior nutrition before going back to dust.
The next day, the dog man came and Jason returned home quiet. We both were, but we also understood this was farming.
It was a desolate period being chickenless chicken farmers (as our partner farmers filled the gap while we were out of lay), and that was when I received the envelope. It came to our Wrenshall post office box addressed to “Management,” a demarcation that made me smile. There’s considerable overlap between labor and administration at Locally Laid Egg Company.
I opened up the envelope and found a handwritten letter.
Dear Locally Laid,
I find your name on your egg carton extremely offensive and your sexual innuendo in advertising them vulgar. Not only were they the highest price in the store but also the worst in advertising. I will share this message with the owners of the grocery store and friends. We have enough crudeness in the world without egg advertising adding to it. I bought them in a hurry and will not again.
Most people really liked our Locally Laid name and it’s fair to say we received several hundred compliments and energetic thumbs up, easily balancing out the three complaints we’d gotten over a couple of years. But this one felt different. Maybe it was the steaming vitriol behind the angry penmanship that made this gentleman feel more real to me. Like he was an actual person: one I’d hurt.
Having lived in the Midwest nearly twenty years, I’d finally picked up the complicated steps to its social dance, though not without a few stumbles along the way. Initially, the blunt New Englander in me was completely tone deaf to the subtle dodging of conflict, always skirting what one really means and never stepping on anyone’s toes. Ever.
I knew the contrite response I was supposed to write.
Even so, I’d come to think of Locally Laid as “dirty optional.” I mean, you can go there if you want, but there’s also a perfectly family-friendly primary meaning that thoroughly describes our venture. But while I’d meant to push the limits of social acceptability, I hadn’t intended to brutishly burst through them, either.
I decided to sit on it. In fact, it was a full month until the guilt over a timely reply got to me. I’d set up the kids with beanbag chairs and popcorn for the president’s State of the Union address and then dug out the letter.
As the official procession fanfare started in the chamber of the House of Representatives, I reread the rant and found myself having an entirely different set of reactions. While I still didn’t like the idea of vexing people, even prudish ones, I was stuck on one phrase, “the highest price in the store.”
You know, I’ll take my lumps on the double entendre, justified or not, but when it comes to the cost there are many good and real factors that go into that number. Yet our eggs still come in pricewise well below many other cartons on the dairy shelf. After I’d crafted a sincere acknowledgment that my letter writer had every right to stand up for his opinions and indeed more of us should, the televised speech got more rousing. And that was when I started typing faster.
Milo turned to shush me, so I moved into the dining room, where I could still hear the inspirational cheers from our nation’s capital. Fueled by the rousing applause, I deconstructed our moniker starting with “local” and explained all I’d learned about food miles. I also informed him of our planting of what was then some three thousand trees to offset our minimal carbon footprint—before ever taking a paycheck.
I went on to explain how sustainable agriculture largely misses out on large government subsidies that commodities enjoy. And the difficulty and risk of breaking into this highly consolidated industry, one that by its nature of keeping chickens by the hundreds of thousands can more easily spread a disease like salmonella over millions of eggs, sold under multiple labels, resulting in a large-scale food safety nightmare.
Then I moved to the labor, the fence moving and the feed buckets. Also how our small flock sizes benefit both our poultry athletes and their eggs, but these same practices pit us against factory farms that enjoy massive economy of scale.
By this time, I really had my Middle Ag on—it felt like LoLa, that inspirational logo chicken, lit on my shoulder, bolder than me, drove my typing. From my keyboard, I clacked our information about shuttered midsize producers and the rippling effect on rural communities, from feed stores to schools to corner cafes. Moving on, I hit on the importance of sourcing local inputs and selling locally, business to business, keeping all that money swirling in small communities rather than extracted from them. And the financial risk we took on as we worked to create shelf space for our partner farms—and fetch a fair price for their goods.
Most importantly, I admitted how our farm isn’t perfect. That we wished there were more we could do for our wintering birds than just providing roosts and dust baths and bringing dried prairie grass into the barn. I wistfully yearned to entertain our chickens by teaching them games like Toss Across.
In closing, I wrote:
So, to the point of your letter, I want to say you’re right. Our name, Locally Laid, is totally cheeky and pushes the envelope. And I truly am sorry we offended you. (I’d offer you one of our American-made Local Chicks Are Better Tshirts, but I don’t think you’d wear it.)
But here’s why we risk your umbrage. When our perfect double entendre breaks through the media clutter in which we’re all steeped, we leverage it. With that second look from a consumer, we educate about animal welfare, eating local, real food and the economics of our broken food s
ystem.
We all vote with our food dollars every day and we respect your decision if our playful moniker keeps you from buying our eggs. It was just important to me that you understood everything that was going on behind that name.
Now I gotta ask, would you have learned all this if we were named Amundsen Farms?
Jason read it and said, “Wow, you really went full-frontal farmer on this guy.” He then put a hand on my shoulder. “I know you’re going to make this into a blog, but I don’t want you to be disappointed. It’s unlikely a lot of people will care at this level.”
Yeah, at the heart of it, this was a pretty wonky response and when I threw it online I figured about fifteen folks, mostly other farmers I knew, would read it all the way to the end.
Then we left for the bank. We needed to increase our line of credit, not because we weren’t selling enough eggs to cover expenses, but to bridge the gap until we got paid for those eggs.
To that end, we’d romanticized Locally Laid’s financial system as thoroughly as we had our pasture one. We’d envisioned a graphic-worthy arrangement that shuttled our superior product to retail and wholesale outlets, and payment arriving in a timely manner allowing us to stay square on all our bills. It didn’t work that way. Sometimes stores would wait over forty-five days to pay us, completely ignoring the fourteen-day terms we’d specified. Or they would cut the check on time, but not mail it for weeks so their books looked like they were caught up on bills.
The financial stress was crushing us.
As I sat in that familiar bank chair, my phone started pinging, indicating every Twitter share and Facebook comment. Jason eyed me and I turned my phone off with an apology to our banker.
By the time we were walking out twenty minutes later, the blog had been shared hundreds of times. Just three days later, social media numbers indicated views of over 250,000.
Jason and I giggled like children, even as the response crashed our website.
Soon, the media were calling and I was sitting in the Duluth branch of our public radio station for a statewide interview. I was tired, having been up well past midnight stuffing Tshirts into envelopes, fulfilling orders we were getting from all over the country.
I was looking forward to hanging out in the studio with my friend Dan, the radio reporter, but he’d left to work on a story. There was an unreassuring note on top of the large panel of buttons and levers that read: Don’t touch anything!
As I sat gingerly on the chair in front of the large mic, the producer 150 miles away rang my cell and asked, “So, is it ‘agriculture of the middle’ or ‘middle agriculture’?”
“We’re going to talk about that?” I asked.
“Yeah! We’re really excited about it,” she said from our state’s public radio mother ship in St. Paul. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the segment goes long, so be prepared to talk for up to twenty minutes.”
I gasped a little.
While I was more comfortable with public speaking from the last couple of years, most of these media interactions were two minutes, three tops. Twenty minutes felt like an eternity.
“Okay!” I said, hanging up as my stomach banked a corner without me. I regretted having eaten breakfast.
It clipped along quickly and went just fine, even after that unexpected and frightening sentence: “We’ll open the line to callers.”
After a few media cycles involving TV, podcasts, and blogger interviews, we received incredible feedback. Egg sales spiked and we sold some five hundred tees in thirty-seven states. It meant we didn’t have to dip into that new line of credit. In fact, we even took our first small payday some two years and five months after selling our first egg.
That night, we took the kids out for dinner.
“So what’s our hourly rate work out to be?” I said, indicating the check Jason was showing the children.
He smiled a “don’t you even start” smile and ordered us a pitcher. We were, after all, celebrating.
A few times a week, people stop and congratulate us on our “success,” mistaking our poultry fame for big farm profits. We’re still a very new company, after all, with significant debt to service and investments to make. And though I joke with them that we make tens of dollars from Locally Laid (tens!), I know they don’t believe me. They don’t want to. It’s not the ending they want and, frankly, I wouldn’t, either. But surely we’re not yet at the end. Profits will come, just not today. But I don’t push this onto these kind people, legitimately excited for the farm. I let them think what they want—that I’m modestly downplaying our financials.
Occasionally, someone will take it further and tell us how lucky we are to have started the farm at all. I smile and usually say something along the lines of “It’s been a mixed bag,” hinting at its strain. Of course, if I were to rummage through that diverse sack of experiences, I’d fish out good feelings, ones of doing something important, something physical, something bigger than just making a profit, or even having our bit of “poultry celebrity,” which I quantify as being about four clicks below the lowest-rated weatherman on the public access channel.
However, it wouldn’t take long to run into something cutting within that mixed bag representing the physical hardship, as well as the financial and relationship peril. I’m glad we can’t go back in time, because I don’t think we would do it again. When Jason jokes that the farm was his midlife crisis and it was either that or have an affair, I find myself wondering which would have been more difficult on our family.
Because saying, “It’s been hard,” well, it’s not sufficient. The stressors have felt real enough to have their own chair at the dinner table. But mostly, I missed my family during the startup, just wanting us to be physically and emotionally together, like before the farm, with time and money for milestone trips to Yellowstone and Washington, D.C., much less a simply frivolous excursion to the Harry Potter theme park.
Mercifully, though, our day-to-day lives have gotten physically easier in the past year. Abbie will start high school in the fall of 2015 as Milo continues to plug away at his middle school years. Perhaps after spending the summer wrangling new LoLas and learning about crops, they’ll welcome the relative ease of classrooms and book bags. There’s been talk of their setting up a farm stand and even hope that our eldest may apply for a farm work license, allowing her to drive sooner than her peers. Mom says, “We’ll see.”
Locally Laid is even in the process of hiring some full-time positions, adding a couple of living-wage jobs to our growing Northland economy. This should help greatly with the workload, but I suspect we’ll never completely relax, always an ear cocked for the other work boot to drop—an out-of-order AquaMagic, a fouled-up invoice, or problems to work through over a wide cultural divide with our Amish partners.
Thankfully, I’m not alone for any of it.
Jason is with me, still full of wild ideas and farm-enhancing visions—Sustainable berries! Garlic! New chicken feed formulas!—but most importantly to whisper in my ear the encouraging truth: everything’s coming together.
Indeed, it’s right around the corner.
Acknowledgments
Writing a book takes a clown car’s worth of supporters to hurl it forward. I’m grateful to those who crammed in for the ride.
Right out of the gate, I want to thank my parents for my liberal arts education. It made all the difference.
Sincere gratitude is also expressed to:
My editors, Caroline Sutton and Brianna Flaherty, and all the fun folks at Avery/Penguin who guided this project and let me keep Jason’s mugging scene.
My agent, Holly Bemiss, who made me rewrite my proposal more times than either of us care to remember. You were right.
Gail Blum, John Erickson, and Rod Graf, for entangling yourselves in this farm project and our lives. Without you, there would be no Locally Laid.
Also all our volunteers who built our hoop coops for only lunch in a barn and a T-shirt.
Patricia Weaver Francisc
o, my thesis advisor and friend, who greatly influenced this book, along with the entire creative writing program at Hamline University, especially Dean Mary Rockcastle, who awarded me the Richard P. Bailey scholarship the semester I truly needed it.
Dean Bill Payne and the University of Minnesota Duluth for the flexible work schedule to write.
The Glensheen folks, who endured a chronically underslept co-worker and never made me close the mansion alone in deference to my bravery impairment.
Dr. Randy Hanson for beginning my middle-agriculture adventure.
Eric Ringham for encouraging me to tell the big story of farming through my little story of farming, and for putting my essays on Minnesota Public Radio.
My many early readers of messy drafts, but especially the keen-eyed Michael Creger, who wouldn’t let me get away with a dang thing, and Tom Schierholz, who misses nothing. The book is better for it.
The Arrowhead Regional Arts Council for supporting this project with the McKnight Foundation and the Minnesota State Legislature’s general and arts and cultural heritage funds fellowships.
The University of Maine’s Cooperative Extension.
Dr. Stewart Smith and Professor Sarah Redfield of Lakeside Family Farm for graciously talking economic theory during high harvest.
My encouraging Facebook universe: co-workers for those who work alone.
Intuit and their Small Business Big Game competition that afforded us remarkable opportunities, as did the Carlson School of Management’s Minnesota Cup contest.
The beautiful city of Duluth by the Unsalted Sea and every person who rolled down their car window at a red light to tell me they’d voted for us.
Tom Hanson at the Duluth Grill and the fine folks at the Whole Foods Co-op in Duluth for being those crucial early adopters.
Matt Olin for lending his talents to create our LoLa, a chicken who became so much more.
My motherin-law, Jean McCue, for her nonstop encouragement.
Brian for breaking his back caring for LoLa, trusting me with his story, and the Willie Nelson joke.
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