before the storm

My latest flurry of work has been about finishing my second eggmobile so I could get my flock two out into their new home. It seems only a couple per day escape the netting/hardware cloth and have to be caught when the door gets closed.



The picture below is flock one. These birds are laying well and seem happy and healthy despite the wet conditions.



I also moved the pigs before the big storm. They had pretty much finished off the first area I had them in, and the areas I added to that area, and it was time to move them before the storm pinned us down. I put them in a prior year's garden to let them tear it up and stop the weed cycle.





The sheep are now opposite the pig's new area...

2010 customer email

I sent out my first email to customers and friends today. Sums up what we have available in terms of product, so I figured I'd paste it in here also...

Happy 2010 to everyone. Now is the perfect time to let you know that we've planned a ramped up season this year, as last year was a sell-out every single harvest.

This year, the first 2 Sunday/Monday afternoons most months will be chicken pickup days excluding September and October due to the dry grass season. The 2010 price for our chicken is $5.00/lb.

We will be harvesting the Saturday before pick-up this year so that the meat will have been "rested" (for tenderness) for 24-48 hours by the time you get it. The pick up times will be Sunday afternoon from 3-5 and Monday afternoon 4-6 (you don't have to tell us which window you'll come in--just place your order for that harvest). You'll get a reminder email the Friday before the harvest.

Here's the list of chicken pick-up days: March 7/8, March 14/15, April 4/5, April 11/12, May 2/3, May 9/10, June 6/7, June 13/14, July 4/5, July 11/12, Aug 8/9, Aug 15/16, Nov 7/8, Nov 14/15

In other good news, since we like variety and dislike inhumane, environmentally unsustainable, confined animal operations, we've expanded our efforts to include lamb and pork. Sure, almost all lamb is grass fed, but they are excellent mowers and fertility builders, and a very welcome addition around here. Pork rips and roots up pasture like crazy, but now we can retire our diesel powered roto-tiller, and there is no better example of inhumane animal production than intelligent hogs raised in concrete boxes. They say a pig's happiness is measured by how far up their face the mud stain goes. Ours have mud up to their ears! Fill your freezer with meat that you and mother nature can both feel good about! If you find someone to split a half hog or lamb with, you don't even need a big freezer (you just have to get rid of a few of the mystery items back in there, like the 2 year old tater tots, which is a good thing!)

The hogs and the lambs will be ready around April/May, and I am taking orders now. Lamb is priced at $3/lb and we will only sell them whole (about 70 lbs.), and pork will be $4/lb for a half hog and $3.75/lb for a whole hog (about 220 lbs.) The animals will be humanely harvested by the butcher (Willowside Meats) and then prepared according to your taste (you will call them to specify how thick you like your pork chops, how much you want made into sausage and so forth). You will be buying the live animal from us, but don't worry, you won't get it until it is packaged up and frozen, and you'll pick it up at Willowside. In addition to paying Felton Acres the price of the meat, the butcher (Willowside) charges a harvest fee (around $50/animal) as well as a "cut and wrap" fee (around $0.70/lb) which you pay directly to them. Get your orders in soon to ensure your share!

Once again, it was a pleasure farming for you in 2009 and we look forward to seeing you all when you come pick up your chickens. Thanks for being such mindful eaters!

-Mary and Marc
http://www.feltonacres.com

environment and livestock

came across a good explanation of why livestock done wrong is a big part of the problem and done right it can be a big part of the solution to our little greenhouse gas problem:
"Beware of Bad Science"

A couple of days ago I realized what change I want to make over the coming year in my own life: no more CAFO meat. I will give up meat that I did not produce in a humane and environmentally sustainable manner, or source locally from a farmer I can insure did the same. There are going to be a few exceptions to this rule of course:

-I will eat what I am served as a guest in another person's home. I don't want my choices to make me a pain in someone else's a$$.

-I will eat sushi from my favorite restaurant: Hana Restaurant in Rohnert Park.

-I will eat wild caught seafood (except Chilean Seabass, Southern Bluefin Tuna, endangered species type stuff). I believe hook and line fishing has proven sustainable over 1000s of years, appropriate regulation and enforcement is the answer to overfishing, not boycotting paying fishermen for their labor. High prices for the product actually reduces "effort"/resource extraction.

Basically since I've filled the fridge with grass-fed chicken we've been pretty close to that at home, excepting for the occasional package of chicken-apple sausage from Whole Foods. Luckily for me, Mary, who was really close to this eating style already, has also signed on to this change for herself, which will make it easier. So bye-bye whole foods CAFO sausage.

I however had a bad tacqueria habit. I even used to have a McDonald's habit, until Omnivore's Dilemma turned me off on that, and now the few times I've wanted comfort food so bad I've tried it I've ended up with a stomach-ache. So that hasn't been around for me that much. But the burrito Thursday is going to be a hit. I've never really preferred falafel to schwerma at middle-eastern places. But now, that's what its going to be. The other day I was out and about at lunchtime though so I had a salad at the bar at Pacific Market. It was great! My bet is in the end I'll be gaining a lot more than I'm giving up by adding this small amount of discipline to my own eating habits.

Prius Sucks!

The Prius is a great example of how consumers have a herd mentality that doesn't necessarily track proportionally with quality, value, or anything that you'd think rational individuals would use as criteria to make their decisions. I'm as guilty as anyone. I own a 2007 Prius.

My mother bought the 1st generation Prius when it first came out, and one test drive and I knew it wasn't for me. Main complaints were that the accelerator drags on you, so unless you ride it with a lead foot all the time, you find you are going too slow on the freeway. Secondly, the brakes, with their charging feature, are so "grabby" that everyone in the car suffers mild whiplash.

But after a few years, wanting to get a car for around town or even day fishing trips with good mileage, I decided to test drive one of the later generation Prius' to see if they had solved those problems. To my delight they had, the car was zippy and responsive, and the brakes felt like any others. I bought it.

Then I found out that it is the worst car I've owned. It has been well below expectations in so many ways that I feel compelled to list them here. I believe that Toyota's design engineers made a long list of bad decisions that leads me to think that they literally despise their own customers, and our satisfaction is not high on their priority list. It is the worst car I have ever owned by FAR, and I'm including my '79 Datsun 510 wagon in that, my first car.

What sucks about the Prius? First and foremost, all this hybrid technology and money and effort has gone into this car, we have to put up with all these idiosyncrasies, for how much mileage? 40ish miles to the gallon? That's pathetic! You can do that with a regular engine and a car that is aerodynamic and light.

Actually, I think a bulleted list might be better:
-poor technology/mileage increase ratio. 45 miles/gallon is ridiculous Toyota!
-the stupid reverse beep is awful
-your passenger cannot use the GPS while the car is moving
-if you have any objects in the passenger seat, the seatbelts beep at you 3x normal duration, followed by a louder even more incessant beep. usually you give up and buckle up your items (but it wont let you operate the GPS w/ a passenger detected, oh no, not Toyota)
-The battery is in the back, but you can't open the back door if its dead.
-There is a relay for the battery up front, but you have to read the manual to know about it, and its under a plastic cover that is impossible to remove with cold fingers alone
-If you need to move your car to jump it, you are out of luck, can't get neutral w/ a dead battery AFAICT
-Toyota's answer to traction control is to separate the accelerator pedal from the engine for 1 second if it detects wheel slippage. So you go to merge into traffic, and you give it gas, but the wheel hits some sand and slips. You are half way into the street have no gas pedal, just a little orange light saying the car slipped. Thanks, idiots!
-the recall where the gas pedal and the mats are incompatible. This one I'd tolerate as just an unforseen design flaw, without all the other stuff.

I know there are more but those are the ones that I can think of for now. What a terrible car, to be so darn popular. I personally can't wait for the Chevy Volt, and I'm going to have to refuse to sell the Prius to family members because I can't let them suffer as I have. I will not buy another Toyota. Be smart; stay AWAY from Prius! These things would be tolerable for 70 or 80 miles to the gallon, but 45? Demand more from the top car company before rewarding them with your hard earned dollars...

new arrivals

some new arrivals. a ram, 2 baby ewes, a baby ram, and another whether. 8 weaner pigs. Yorkshire x Hereford cross.














now I need to go fortify that pig pen...

green meat

Looking back on what I've written so far, I've realized I've touched on some of the darker aspects of my fun and low impact methods of producing meat: castration, predation, slaughter, the fact that given the chance our food will escape or defend themselves with nasty pinches; in other words they are not 100% willing to be eaten at any given moment.

And yet, these are the realities of food production, animals (like us) eat other animals. Death is part of every life. I believe that these animals have some of the best lives animals could ask for. There is a bargain between farmer and crop and land in any kind of production. My feeling is that it is possible to live up to our end of that bargain to the benefit of all. They thrive so they dodge the predator attacks. Their eggs and meat taste fantastic. Personally controlling the final stages of their lives is the least I can do for them, and no "pristine state of nature" insures this type of passing the way I can. The guiding principle is to take processes that occur in nature sustainably and sustainably enhance those processes to produce viable, quality food. It doesn't have to be a zero-sum game of resource extraction and environmental quality depletion.

I have taken a few stabs at the morality of meat eating vs. vegetarianism, but I give up I can't write about stuff like that without ranting. Here's a link to a good article.
what-to-tell-vegetarians-who-say-eating-meat-is-immoral

got sheep?

Crab season opened last Saturday but was accompanied by a 15ft swell from the Gulf of Alaska that kept me off the water until Monday. It was only 10ft by then. So I dropped 6 pots with a variety of baits (first time trying whole chickens that I had chucked in the freezer when they expired) out on my favorite spot north of Bodega Bay that I found several years ago by throwing pots all over the place and counting the crabs. By the time I was back to pull my first pot after a mere half hour soak, it had 4 keeper crabs in it. You gotta love the week-long sport season before commercial starts this Saturday. Once the ocean is blanketed with their pots, overnight soaking becomes a necessity almost. Certainly with rockfish closed there's nothing to do while they soak anyway. So we've been eating dungeness the last few days and once again my children have demonstrated that they are adventurous. One unfortunate thing is that Jeremy got so into helping clean the crabs that the second day I came home with them he wanted to do it all, including bringing them over to the chopping block. I put one upside down on the tailgate for him but he grabbed it with his fingers on the bottom instead of the back, so a pincher reached down and grabbed the tip of his ring finger. When he started screaming I came over and finessed the other claw away and took a terrifying moment to pry it off; they are damn strong little creatures. Subsequently I recited: I am Marc Felton. You pinched my firstborn. Prepare to die. Crabs are by far the easiest psychologically to dispatch of all the food items I have encountered.

Apparently according to someone on the local chicken chat group, it is migration season for hawks. I can testify that suddenly hawks are targeting my day-ranging laying flock. Its basically my worst nightmare, because there's no way to protect free ranging hens from interested hawks. Basically, if one gets determined, I need to find a new location, and I haven't any at the moment. How do I know they're getting attacked? About 4 or 5 days ago I went down to collect eggs and all the chickens were hiding under the coop. Uh oh, somethings attacked them. But no evidence of success like feather piles or carcassas. Then the other day I was shucking some old corncobs I'd grown as a treat before I went off to catch crabs and the orange rooster made this low guttoral moan that I now recognize as the serious alarm sound. Hens scattered running for cover. Instead of a dive bomb from high above, the hawk came sizzling in almost parallel with the ground and very low; bursting from the cover of 4 large apple trees that are clustered together just uphill of the current hang-out area. Due to the rooster warning, the hawk missed getting any bird, but it landed in a tree right above the feeder just as casual as it owned the place. Of course after the initial paralysis wore off I went running at it screaming and yelling, pushing it to another tree and another and another, until finally it was far off my property. When I was setting up for sheep yesterday another attack happened the same way. I heard the alarm, looked through the trees and fences to see the hawk doing some trick flying low to the ground, and had to run down there and chase it off. Again, unsuccessful. It doesn't look like a big hawk. It looks like a cooper's hawk, which I didn't think were large enough to take adult birds. It could be that this is another scary kind of hawk that is migrating through though. Tough to get an ID on an attacking hawk. What this tells me is that my instinct telling me to keep roosters with my flock was dead on. I am now convinced that roosters are necessary for hawk protection, and I will not keep one of my eggmobiles on land that someone has a no-rooster stipulation.

Did I say setting up for sheep? Yes, I couldn't stand watching that dryland pasture mix regrow with all that chicken fertilizer and yet nothing eating it, so I bit the bullet and got some sheep. These are not for wool, but for meat, with 2 for breeding to make more meat. Turns out you can't leave males you intend to eat intact, it gives the meat an off flavor, so I got to watch the process of actually banding one of the whethers. The breed I got is the American Blackbelly sheep and they are sooo cute in a non-white lamb sort of way. The ewe looks about 10 months old, the ram was born in September and the 2 whethers were born Oct1. They seem very happy with the forage; I saw them eat grasses etc, baby apple tree leaves, seed pods of old summer weeds gone to seed, and apples! I didn't think sheep would eat the apples but there they were last night eating apples on one side of the fence with a few turkeys dining on apples on the other side. Very cool. I looked at them at 4 am and they weren't in the shelter I'd built for them out of a raised bed cover I'd built out of PVC + tarp, they were just snuggled around the base of a tree near their water trough. Here's the latest family portrait (minus chickens).