The price of organic

In doing my research of all things organic for our farm, I have come to realize that there are some things that the everyday person or "non-greene" person probably does not think about much.

The biggest complaint heard about organic food is how expensive it is. And if it doesn’t have all those bad chemicals then why does it cost so much more? Producing anything organic is more labor intensive, involves morality testing, is time consuming, very expensive and it is a very risky business venture as well.

On our hobby farm we have the luxury of not having to make a profit. I looked into the process involved to become a certified organic farm and quickly realized we were not there yet and may not ever be. There are a lot of certification fees (which are very expensive) and application fees and record keeping going back 3 years and just when you think you are done you still have to pay fees to stay organic. So I decided that my customers who buy from me, whatever product they choose, whether it is eggs, garden produce or cut flowers, will know me on a personal level and know the great lengths we have gone to "be organic".

So I’m not really in need of the official U.S.D.A Organic seal. There is risk involved in growing organic because if my crops are infested with some bug or mold I must find natural ways to deal with the problem.

I have recently been reading about viticulture (grape growing) in France. Some vineyards are attempting to go organic and that is really changing the way it has been done for hundreds of years. But the change away from synthetic pesticides and fertilizer has lead to a loss of millions of dollars in grapes. Even so many are committed to the new way of growing knowing there is a learning curve. Many simply cannot become “certified” because they want to use synthetic help to save as much of their crop as possible when conditions are bad and using any synthetic treatments means you can’t be “certified organic”.

Here on my farm I have not had many difficulties this year with pests but have found problems in another area that I didn’t at first think would be so hard to over come.

The thing I have found to be the most difficult is finding & buying organic chicken feed.
Depending on where you live in the U.S.A. the availability of feed varies greatly.
Here in rural Wisconsin, it’s kind of like trying to find a four leaf clover. I have searched and looked at several options and sources. Then I had found a great place that had just the right product I wanted and at a reasonable price, only problem… it's in Fishersville, Virginia. That’s 904.10 miles away! No problem they ship it right to you.

Let’s do some math shall we? I need 200lbs of chicken feed that should last me approximately 6 weeks. I have to feed 37 chickens everyday. At $25 per 50lb bag X 4 bags = $100. Ok, that isn’t too bad, but the shipping cost of a 200lb load is $76 ouch. $176 every 6 weeks!!! (Now consider that non-organic feed would cost me $48 for 4 bags and it is just down the road a bit.)

There has got to be some place local to get organic chicken feed right? NOPE!
So back online I go in my quest for the perfect chicken feed. After many hours of searching I finally have some success and I’ve gained knowledge on how the supply chain works in my state.
I found 5 places to buy organic chicken feed from here in WI. 1 only sells by the ton so they were out. I just can’t buy a ton of feed for my 12 birds. 3 of them are on the other side of the state about 6 hrs drive time. Not exactly a trip I want to make very often, but maybe on my way home from a trip to Minnesota (which I make a couple times a year).

That leaves one supplier left. After studying the ingredients of said supplier I find that a lot of the protein in there feed comes from soybeans. And I’ve notice that the case for all organic chicken feed in the state of Wisconsin. So what is wrong with soybeans? Well I called my source in Fishersville, VA (remember the one I liked but didn’t want to pay the shipping). They are promoting “soy-free” feed and I wanted to know why? Turns out soy is no longer cool, here is why http://www.westonaprice.org/soy/index.html
(In case you don’t want to look up the link… soybeans have a form of estrogen that has been linked to early onset of puberty in teen girls, retardation of sexual organs and maturity in boys, cancer in women and other problems…). Ok, some bad stuff in there, but it does seem to be accumulative and in the mean time I’m just happy to find organic feed, even if it does have soybeans, at least they are organic.

Today I drove to 2 hrs to Frank Organic Feed & Supply in Jefferson, WI. I had placed my order by phone and made arrangements to meet the owner, Joe Carens. When I arrived Joe was there with my order and we had conversation about chickens, gardening and the organic business. Joe was nice enough to let me take a couple of photos before I left, and then me and my chicken feed went home.

Joe also has a soy-free alternative for chicken feed, only problem… again it is by the tonnage. So, either I need more chickens to feed, cough up the money for shipping or Joe has offered to call us the next time someone orders soy-free feed, and if we are in the market, he will order an extra 200lbs of feed for us. Now thats service.
Heck maybe we can even find a few other farms around here willing to go in together and buy a large quantity of soy-free feed. You never know, maybe in 3 years we will be the supplier of organic grains to make feed for this neck of the woods.



Frank Organic Feed and Supply
121 W. Candise St.
Jefferson, WI 53549

Contact: Joe Carnes
FAX: 920-674-5729
Office: 920-674-5730

Why?

Hi, wife of PJ Farmer here. I'll be putting my two-cents in here and there.
So how does a girl who LOVES the city and LOVES the culture of Minneapolis end up raising chickens, growing a garden and living in the boonies...? Well it started about 3 years ago when we found out we were going to have a baby.
Babies make you think, at least I hope so. I knew out life was going to change, but I didn't know it meant leaving the city. In the last 5 years I've had 5 friends how have developed cancer (mostly breast cancer) and of those 5 ladies, 2 are no longer here and of those 5 only one of them was over the age of 35. Heck, I'm 36 now... I don't like those odds.

So I started asking "why?" There has to be a reason so many 30 year olds are developing cancer. Heck they won't even give you a mammogram till you’re in your forties. One friend found a lump in her breast by wiping some food that had fallen on her chest. The lump wasn't in a position that a self breast exam would have found. What is going on? You can’t tell me there is no reason. Now I am about to bring a baby into this world and I want to give my baby the best fighting chance I can. I know I have NO control over most of what is going to happen, but that which I can control… well I want to do right.

One of the biggest things I could (and would) control is the food my daughter eats. 30+ years ago was when foods with hormones really hit the shelves. Pesticides took on a life of there own and we killed EVERY bug that dared to even look crossed eyed at our food. Now here we are 30 years later and cancer is on the rise (as well as other issues), so we decided to go organic.

Now in Minneapolis getting organic isn’t really that hard. Super Target, Uptown Rainbow, and even Cub Foods have organic sections. There are even whole stores for organic food like the Coop on Lyndale, Whole Foods, and one of my favorites Fresh & Natural (they introduced me to grass feed beef and I’ll never go back). But even though it is easy to find the food it is still expensive. When Daryl lost his job after 4 years we felt it was time to move. I said, “Honey, I think God is kicking us out of the cities.” I LOVED my house in Mpls, but wasn’t crazy about the neighborhood. I also dreamed of a yard that my daughter could play in that I wouldn’t be fearful of a drive by or stray bullet. So we packed up and moved to the country.

Now organic food is so easy to find in Minneapolis… not so much here. And the small stuff we do find is very expensive. Grassway Foods in New Holstein is a great place and one of the first to offer organic eggs and raw organic milk, but again, not really in our price range for every day consumption.

Even before leaving the cities Daryl and I had talked about a “hobby farm”, but you k now that sounds good on paper, but who knew if that would really be what we wanted to do. So when we found a hobby farm that we could rent and give it a try I knew God was blessing us.

Trinity thought she was in heaven when she could just pick an apple off the tree anytime she wanted. There was prairie grass and wild flowers, a field for a horse maybe and lots of room for the dog to roam. I imagined Trinity making forts in the woods and being gone for hours playing in the summer time.
Steve is a great landlord for trusting us with his home and I only hope that when the time comes he will sell it to us, knowing that we will love it as much as his parents did.

Back to organic…. When we rented this place we knew immediately that we wanted to go organic. Yes, bugs can be pests, but without bugs our food doesn’t get pollinated, (it isn’t just bees that do that). Yes, I’m a little afraid of spiders or at least creeped out by them, but as long as they stay out of my house (where I use a Kleenex or the bottom of a shoe) I won’t kill them. I don’t want to spray for bugs and then have chickens eat those chemically dead bugs that then I eat… nope not doing that. So no bug chemicals.

Same with the veggies in the garden, whatever I put on those plants I’m then going to ingest and I don’t care what people say, washing isn’t going to get it all. So no garden chemicals. We aren’t trying to tell people that they are wrong or right, this is just the choice we have made. My father-in-law thinks we are crazy, but if I can maybe keep the excess processed food out of Trinity’s system (as well as my own and Daryl’s) and I can do something good for my environment (even if the environment is only our 80 acres) then it is my obligation as a parent and a human to do so. Ok, so I’m done for now. :-)

The Garden

Now that the snow was gone we could start planning on the garden. The main plot was already there, but had not been used in a few years. I also had bigger plans that included a second and third plot. One we call the bird garden which is a bird food plot planted with a heirloom variety corn, Russian mammoth sun flower, pennyroya (a hardy ground cover with a strong menthol-mint aroma with insect repellent properties used since early Greek times), borage (an edible herb that chickens like to eat), and also Amaranth known for high protein seeds.

This required some real planning to accomplish. In the early spring I laid down a thick plastic tarp over the area to discourage grass from growing then a month later remove the tarp and did a controlled burn of area with garden hoses at the ready and my trusty wife by my side with a shovel. I lit the dead grass and started the burn carefully so it would not get out of control. I extinguished it several times and relit. (I once burned several hundred acres when I was 12 and was punished severely for it by my father and "The Belt" so I was really intense about this burn.)

It did not take long and I watered the area and watched long into the evening to make sure it would not flare up. The next step was some old fashioned sod busting with my new find from the barn my Murray 2hp rotor tiller. The soil was virgin and hard even after I attempted to soften with water. The wild grass and flowers that had owned the ground before were not going to give up their roots easily. It took several days, but once I got about five inches deep, I could start to add my soil amendments like sand and manure.

Nothing fancy, but the manure came from a friend who has a friend that owns a huge diary farm and they have a methane extraction facility there. The fresh manure is heated to 2,000 degrees and turned into energy. (It’s really cool.) This was not part of my research so I’m not that knowledgeable on the subject. I do know I got some of the finest manure I had ever had the pleasure of putting my hands in. I also learned that the farm was organic so the manure is too ~ BONUS!


<--- "Lower Garden"
The soil around the farm and area was brown clay so I needed to add sand and lots of it. I mentioned this to Steve one day. (I had looked into having several yards delivered from a local landscape business. The price was a full 2-week paycheck not an option.) So Steve said "oh you need sand I got sand" and walk up to the barn. I heard an engine start and out he comes with a skid loader/bobcat type machine and drove off into the woods way behind the barn. I just stood there with my tiller in my hand as the sound of the bobcat faded. Then as the engine sound got closer I saw that Steve had come back with a full yard and a half of pure sugar sand. I could not believe it!! "Where did you get that?" I asked. "Just behind the dump in the woods,” he says. And then he produced two more loads in a matter if a few minutes. I was happy as could be mixing my soil and manure and sand, the end result was one large plot 35x45 and two medium plots 25x30 (bird garden & lower garden) and a small herb garden. Total cost of soil prep $0.00.


"Main Garden" or "veggie garden"










"Bird Garden"

The Chicken Coop

During our cold arctic and snowy winter I spent a lot of time studying coop design and upkeep, & raising of organic birds. Lots of work needed to be done to the coop in order for it to house birds. It had not been used in many years. The 16X32 ft. building once held hogs then after a fire and a remodel it held hundreds of chickens back in the day. The windows were boarded up and falling apart, all three doors needed to be replaced. When spring came, the floor was flooded with water due to a negative drainage problem, the roof leaked in 14 different places and the inside was full of junk and extremely old poop from various animals. I talked to Steve about installing windows that came out of the barn. He said he would have his right hand man Kenny do it “‘cuz Kenny can do anything,” (Steve owns his own electric co. and has two employee - Kenny and Steve#2 of which we will see much of later in the story).

As soon as the snow started to melt I got to work on the coop. First thing I did was to remove all the storage junk inside and take down all the boards over the windows. One of the pleasures of living on the farm for me is having your own burning barrel. I pulled one metal barrel that looked to be in good shape out from behind the garage and started chiseling the top off (this took more determination than I expected). Then shoot holes in the bottom half with my trusty 45cal. pistol. Instant burning barrel! (I do recycle and take trash to a proper disposal site, but I also love to burn stuff.)

I had stopped at a few construction sites in my travels on sales route and picked up a good amount of leftover insulation from dumpsters used it to fill cracks and gaps in the windows and walls of the coop. Baby chicks can chill easily and die, so with the added insulation I got for free, I again saved tons of money while insuring my chicks stayed warm. With the spring rains I noticed some leaking in the roof. Once again everything I need was in the barn. I found big cans of black tar stuff and when the weather was right got on the roof and spread 2 galloons of tar over all the nail holes and that seemed to worked great. Cost of roof repair $0.


Next, I borrowed a power water sprayer from a friend and sprayed inside the coop for three hours removing all the old poop, spider webs and dirt from everything! And I mean everything… walls, ceiling and the floor. This was actually fun and will become a annual spring cleaning chore. One gallon of red barn & fence paint at $17 helped to paint the inside after my cleaning. Of course it was barn red. Also a 150Ft. of poultry fence, a box of good wood screws, tubes of window calking and expandable insulation foam for a total cost of $158.

Chickens need bedding on the floor of coop used much like cat litter three or four inches deep and needs to be change on a fairly regular basis, every three months is my personal preference. In my research I read of lots of ways to do this. Buying from the store would be the easy way, but costly because of the large size of my coop estimated cost per year $450. Not really a viable option for this farmer. So it turns out I have a neighbor that operates a old saw mill from the early 1900's powered by a tractor. It's really a site to see because I love all things wood. I needed to make friends with my new-found neighbor as he has something I need SAW DUST and lots of it. I noticed that he seemed to be home on Saturdays working his mill with two other guys. I stopped in one day asking if he would sell me some boards from a old weathered pile in his yard and his price was unbelievable low. I was happy to pay his price plus some extra so my new friend would remember me, when I was done loading all my boards and was about to leave I asked him about the huge pile of saw dust and said I would be interested a few truck loads, He said I could have as much as I needed for free just come and haul it away. On my way home I was pumping my fist and screaming some kind of victory cry. How could I get so excited about some pile of saw dust? What is happening to me?