On to the farm!

Food ethics aside, I’m excited for the change of pace farm life presents. My life in San Francisco consisted of lazy mornings, regular and lengthy hours of computer use, and frequent travel. I ate in restaurants several times per week and spent the majority of my social time in urban parks and bars.

Since arriving on the farm in early September, I’ve become an early riser, a regular coffee drinker, and haven’t once left the property to do anything that wasn’t farm-related. I wake to roosters crowing (some of the chickens roost in the front yard, right outside my window) and hear them practice their calls throughout the day. (Fact: it actually takes a young rooster quite some time to perfect his crow). I spend the early morning hours trudging around with buckets of grain, feeding the sheep, goats, donkeys, and chickens who all come running at the sound of their gates opening. My days are filled with endless hours of berry picking and/or vegetable garden weeding, and the evenings – or what’s left of them once the day’s work is finally over – are spent around a communal dinner table over food that has mostly been grown or raised on the property. Definitely a change of pace!

Morning feeding in the goat pasture

The information I’m learning here doesn’t appear in neat, organized notes or primers. Instead, it accumulates over days of repeated activity, through my own observations and experience, and from the barrage of questions I ask my farm family each night. For instance, I have learned quite a bit about chickens by collecting and washing eggs each evening. Though the Brightwood chickens range freely through huge pastures, they still have a hen house to rest and lay eggs within. Each evening I detach one of the walls of the house to expose the back side of the laying nests. The hens tend to lay eggs in certain nests on certain days, and on some days there are more eggs than others. Though I haven’t figured out why they prefer certain spots, I have learned that a healthy and happy hen can lay an egg each day at the peak of summer. Chickens are greatly affected by daylight hours, so now that autumn has set in, the best hens probably lay an egg every day and a half or so. Others might lay one every other day. These natural rhythms cause variation in egg production each day. The various breeds of hens lay different colored eggs, so it would be possible to track which are the most productive.

The removable hen house walls make for easy egg collection

One day when I was collecting eggs, I noticed a chicken lying in the hen house. Usually the chickens are scampering around the pasture or perched on one of the crossbeams in the house. This hen was laying on her side and every minute or so another curious hen would peck at her. She didn’t move. So, I had my first dead chicken to deal with, which involved gathering it up in a garbage bag and making sure the bag ended up in the “to the dump ASAP” garbage bag. But this was last week and no one has made a trip to the dump and I’m now breathing through my mouth whenever I’m in the garage (which thankfully is not attached to the house).

The dead chicken

Apparently the hens occasionally die of natural causes. Because this hen had keeled over in the house without any visible injury, it’s safe to assume she was one of the oldest chickens (three years old) and died of natural causes, though free ranging chickens can live at least ten years. If the hen had died out in the pasture, or appeared mangled in anyway, it’d be more likely that was killed by another animal, like a fox. At night, the chickens are guarded by Ben, a Maremma sheepdog that is traditionally used to guard livestock in Italy. There are four of these dogs on the farm. Ben’s brother Charlie watches over the three sheep at night. The other dogs, Hermes and Athena, are Maremma-Great Pyrennes mixes and weigh nearly as much as I do. Hermes spends all of his time with the main goat herd while Athena acts as an oversized house dog because of an injured leg.

Ben & Charlie

Hermes with the goats

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