We Pay Tuition

In the school of farming, we've been paying tuition for several years now, and today another bill came due.

Although the temperature was only 92, the sun beat down strongly. After my friend came down in the morning and we removed the tree protectors in the stone fruit orchard, I stayed inside or in the shade.

At about 3pm, Phil went to clear a new path for the cows' electric line, and noticed that the broilers were not doing well.

Last Thursday night, he had closed their pen, and made sure all the large birds, ready for processing, were inside. That made it MUCH easier to catch them the next morning: they were contained! But, without thinking much about it, he hadn't raised the pen back up.

And as the heat index hit 107 or more, the birds sought shelter wherever they could find it: under tall grasses, behind the feed barrel, next to a stump. And then more birds came for shelter.

The birds on the outside died of heat stroke. Not enough shade, no breeze. And for us in the shade, we simply had no idea.

The young broilers in the cattle trailer fared a bit better. Rather than almost 30 dead, we lost only three this afternoon. When I went back this evening, though, having dosed the group with Belladonna and done my best to cool them and relieve them this afternoon, we had lost another twelve! Argh!

Phil was much more upset than I was. Thirty dead broilers, only a week or two from processing? I've been there, done that. The first time I wept: it was my fault, because I had left the electric fence off. This time, again, we simply didn't have the common sense or the experience to know how to properly care for the animals under our care.

In some ways, it was a good confirmation for me that yes, we really had no business trying to get even a small commercial farm open this year. We would have just lost, through our ignorance, a half a year's supply of chicken for one family.

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In other news, Phil and I are having good discussions about where we see the farm going, how we plan to pay for it (without customers), if or when we should try to build a dwelling. I feel like we're really tracking together for the first time in a long time, and I like that very much.