I wasn’t trying to criticize, nor look down my nose at you. (It does go both ways… I see more than a few “organic food fights” on various blogs). In fact I started out offering suggestions on how you could operate more efficiently. While I understand your reasoning in your management choices, at the same time I often find myself thinking that there is something wrong with the inherent inefficiencies in your choices. I cannot seem to reconcile the fact that you accept those inefficiencies to be what they are and pass whatever the cost may be onto your customers. There is nary a business in the U.S. that can operate that way for long, as competition soon drives prices lower and force a certain amount of efficiency. I can’t decide whether you are truly selling a unique, value-added product outside of any competitive market forces, or whether you are just convincing your customers to monetarily support you and your ideals. (Not necessarily criticisms, just my thoughts and observations).

There is a sliding scale of perceptions involved. A typical, family owned organic dairy farm here would be milking 40-100 cows on a few hundred of land. In California, a family owned organic dairy would easily be five to ten times that size, yet would also be providing for numerous families of employees. What we do here I consider to be traditional farming. This area was settled by farming families 150-170 years ago. They were not necessarily “poor farmers” just getting by scratching in the dirt, but true agriculturists who built very successful agriculture based businesses in this area. One of my g-g grandfathers came to Wisconsin from Germany in 1845. He was 18 years old and was a shepherd in the old country. He worked on a farm in the Milwaukee area for ten years to save up money to buy his own land. He eventually bought land on the western side of the state where he built a small log cabin. Over the next 35 years he built a farm of 600+ acres, replacing his log cabin with a modern brick home. He started from nothing and grew it into a business that supported him and his family and a number of farm employees by providing food to a region. Such is the story of agriculture on our area. Small family farms, that weren’t just subsistence farms, but farms that were actually feeding a region and making a living doing it. These farms have struggled and almost disappeared from the landscape, many now being used as country estates and recreational-use lands. The organic industry has saved many of these farms that were hanging on by a thread and prayer, as well as opened up opportunities for aspiring farmers to put good, productive land back to use.

I feel that we are making something of a living wage for our family using traditional agriculture methods that suit our climate. Does it involve a few hundred birds rummaging around the backyard in the most idyllic setting that a person can imagine? No, but it does involve an operation of a certain scale. My gg grandfather did not make a living pasturing less than one cow (which would be the bovine equivalent of a several hundred chickens). Does that scale mean that we compromise our standards? No. These birds have a henhouse with feeders, waterers, perches and nestboxes; the typical equipment that you’d find in any chicken coop of any scale. They are allowed free roam of the barn, and the outdoors as weather permits, just as most backyard flocks do (we raised small backyard flocks for a number of years before we started this venture). They are fed organic feed that is raised on nearby fields that is fertilized by their own manure. It is not any less organic or any less humane because of its scale.

To address you concerns of “confinement” pullet raising, you have to realize that that photo shows birds of an age that are ready to be moved out to a hen house. They are raised to about 16-18 weeks old before they are moved. Obviously, they weren’t that crowded as day-old chicks, nor were they that crowded as 10 week old chicks. They start to reach that point of looking crowded as they are ready to be moved to different housing. Even the smallest of operations use some sort of brooder to raise chicks chicks to some given age before they are allowed outside. Is raising chicks in a brooder a “confinement” operation, or is it providing necessary shelter, heat, food, and water until the birds are of a certain to age to go outside? What is the appropriate age? Is it two weeks, ten weeks, or sixteen weeks? In this case it is 16-18 weeks to ensure the integrity of vaccinations that protect the flock from disease. Of course, the folks at CI don’t tell you the whole story. They do do their best to portray a stark comparison; the highlights of one operation versus the “worst” of another.

I’m still not following your argument of competing against cheap, government subsidized grain. The organic grain system in the U.S. operates outside of the federal crop subsidy program. Even in conventional production, subsidies are only a few dimes on the bushel, it is the sheer scale of U.S. production that makes these subsidies add up to billions of dollars on trillions and trillions of bushels. While I continually hear arguments from folks about how “heavily” our food is subsidized, in reality there is probably less than one cent of subsidies involved in the production of a dozen conventional eggs (6 billion dozen eggs per year). How much can they subsidize the four pounds of feed it takes to make a dozen eggs? Anyhow, given that you are probably paying $30 a bag for your trucked-in layer rations, the economy of growing your own (and thus doing it more sustainably) makes it look more attractive. Any corn that you grow at less than $30 per bushel (or possibly purchase in your region) increases your profit. There are protein/mineral premixes available from the mills that you can add to any locally sourced organic corn to mix your own ration.

I’ll leave it at that. As I said, I wasn’t necessarily criticizing you as much as I was trying to understand your thinking. I wish you both good luck…

-Mac

As worthwhile as this discussion has been, we’re going to have to wrap it up as we can’t afford to spend more time on something that, after all, is only a small part of our diversified farm business. We’re rapidly getting busier; first spring plantings are only a few weeks away, and we have transplants growing right now. Below I’ll address a few of your last comments/questions and wrap up our thoughts, though I certainly have not addressed everything you raised. We are working on a discussion of our thoughts and experiences on the whole on-farm breeding issue, and related disease issues, which may come out within a couple weeks.

“I charge a fair, from the farm price that takes into account what I have into the product. For those that buy at retail, the extra $2 that they pay pays for bulk processing, top-notch marketing, and retail distribution.”

I don’t think you quite got my point here, so let me try again. I agree that your on-farm price accurately reflects the cost of production of any given dozen eggs in your system, since you sell them for about the same to local customers or the co-op. My argument is, the only reason that works for you overall is because the vast majority of your production isn’t sold on farm, but relies on the wider food network. In other words, your farming model would not make you meaningful money if you had to sell all the eggs your 2,500 birds produce in your local area at that price. You would either have to do a ton more marketing and transportation yourself, thus increasing your costs, or cut your price significantly, thus killing your profits. You can sell 2,000 dozen eggs locally at $2-3/dozen, but not 50,000 dozen (my rough estimate of what your flock might produce based on your numbers; please correct me if needed). Thus, in my view, your lower local price is in fact subsidized by the urban co-op consumers because they’re the only reason you stay in business at the scale you do. Even if it feels good to sell to your neighbors, you’re largely in the business of selling high-priced ethics, not feeding people cheaply, and do not have standing to criticize us for doing the same thing.

“I’m not sure what conventional crop subsidies have to do with the cost of producing your own. If you were in a position to grow your own you would just do it.”

We are primarily a vegetable & pasture farm, not a grain farm. We earn a far higher return per unit space on produce than on bulk grains, and it would be economically insane to take some of our vegetable areas out of production to raise small grains in competition with the large-scale grain farms that produce cheap, government-subsidized feed. I’ve sold fresh-ground cornmeal at our farmers market for up to $6/lb; “generic” organic cornmeal goes for around $2-$3/lb online; a bag of organic feed corn costs me about $0.20/lb. However, the high cornmeal price still doesn’t earn the same return per unit space as vegetables because corn is so much less economically productive per area than vegetables. (We’ve run the numbers; here’s a talk we’ve given with some data on sweet corn vs. other veggies. When we can grow vegetables & sell them at a much higher price than the feed corn we could raise on the same plot of land, it doesn’t make sense for us to grow our own feed corn (or other feed components). There is no economically sane way to grow, harvest, & store grain for our flock in the current system.

Feed corn is so cheap because of the economies of scale of large-scale agriculture, the significant price supports of government subsidy programs, and the artificially low cost of oil; two of these three factors, and arguably all three, are the direct result of government interactions with the marketplace. You agree that growing small-scale grains is labor-intensive; given that that’s your criticism of our model overall, it certainly isn’t a viable option for trying to make a profit on pastured poultry when I can buy the bulk stuff so absurdly cheap. In addition, growing and handling grains requires specialized equipment, which you noted that even you don’t want to invest in even though you certainly could. To put it another way, why spend labor growing small grains to feed to chickens to turn into eggs to sell at a barely profitable price when I can grow vegetables on the same land for a far more direct return? That’s a direct result of government intervention in the marketplace, turning on-farm self-reliance into a handicap rather than good management in the name of cheap food for consumers who don’t need it.

That being said, keep in mind that we do make significant efforts to cut our off-farm feed purchases by feeding out produce scraps, whey from our goats, cooked meat/fat scraps from on-farm processing (non-poultry), and so on. We also have plans to grow some minimum effort food plots that the birds can be rotated onto for self harvest. In the original post, I noted that I was cutting my feed cost estimate by 1/3 to account for this, but replacing the remainder of feed with on-farm grain just doesn’t make sense even by our ethics. If the subsidy system was reformed to bring the price of commodities closer to their actual economic cost, and/or fuel prices rose from their also too-low current values, doing it ourselves would make more sense. But in the cheap fuel and cheap corn world we have right now, we have little choice.

I think the basic issue we’re disagreeing over here is scale. You see scale as an economic efficiency and necessity; I see it as creating as many problems as it solves. You see it as bringing affordable food to the masses; I see it as degrading agriculture while subsidizing consumers who don’t need it given what they spend on other goods. You’ve already admitted that you source your “organic” pullets from a confinement barn like this one, hardly what organic consumers think of when they envision, or even visit, your own farm. You claim that it’s difficult to raise large numbers of chicks in a less-confined setting, but that’s exactly my point: your scale precludes many of the more sustainable animal managements methods that are both proven over time and assumed by customers when they buy organic. You certainly could breed your own, but it would raise yours costs enough that your model wouldn’t work; thus you take the shortcut and use confinement-sourced birds in violation of organic principle, if not rule. Your model takes shortcuts to achieve “affordable” organic for consumers who think they’re paying for something better.

Looking back at how this discussion began, your opening argument was that we were quaint, inefficient, and overpriced. The conventional ag world could easily say the same thing about you, so we’re all operating on a sliding scale of economics and ethics that has no absolute baseline. Once that’s established, we’re also all operating in a reasonably free market in which consumers are free to choose what farm management methods they want to support with their discretionary income, just as they support sports teams, fashion designers, soda companies, and so on. My core complaint with your system is not its management choices, though I don’t think they’re ideal. It’s that you (and/or your co-op) are marketing your eggs with an ethic that’s a lot closer to our model; in effect it’s the greenwashing that I object to. You’re selling yourself to urban consumers as us, while looking down your nose at us, and I have a problem with that.

The other main place we disagree is on the relationship between consumer and farmer. Consider your quote that “I’m sure I could come up with a specialty egg that I could convince some folks to buy for $10 per dozen, but I am trying to make a living feeding people, not just collecting money from a fortunate few.” We too, are trying to make a living feeding people. But we don’t feel a moral need to keep food cheap at all costs in the richest country in the world. The vast majority of Americans have enough discretionary income to afford $6/dozen eggs; look at the concession prices at any sporting event or fair, or the sales receipts at any convenience store, for proof of that. And heartless as it seems, the bottom 10% can’t be our personal concern; that’s what we have government safety nets for, which again are funded by the taxes our businesses generate. So I have no regrets about charging a fair price for a high quality product to consumers that are willing to pay it; our farm isn’t here to fix the world’s social problems, it’s here to earn a living for us from consumers who want us to exist.

It’s worth noting that though our CSA is the highest-priced in the area, I don’t think most of our members would consider themselves the “fortunate few”. Though I’m certainly not privy to the details, we seem to have folks from a wide variety of backgrounds, jobs, and economic situations; few if any would be considered “rich”, and who cares if they are? It’s not inherently shameful to be rich or fortunate, or to sell products to those who are. Our CSA members have simply chosen to adjust their budgets for something that’s important to them, just as those who buy our eggs do. Regional considerations also matter; we had a CSA member on-farm a few days ago buying eggs, who recently moved here from the Northeast. He was already used to paying $6/dozen for market eggs there, so didn’t bat an eye at our prices: it was normal to him in his personal budget.

We’re quite grateful to you for the time, information, and honesty you’ve brought to this discussion. It’s been very worthwhile and educational to us, as it has to many readers who have mentioned this to us. It’s nice to set an example for reasonable discourse on the internet. I hope we’re both able to stay in business and continue to develop support for the overall shift to sustainable agriculture.

http://s57.photobucket.com/albums/g215/mgmccarty/Barn%20Photos/?action=view&current=DSC00270.jpg

http://s57.photobucket.com/albums/g215/mgmccarty/Hens%20On%20Pasture/?action=view&current=Hens018.jpg

Our birds have access to pasture like any other. Perhaps they don’t utilize the forage to the extent that some flocks would and have a heavier reliance on their poultry ration, but judging flock management/humane practices by how much grass a flock eats is along the lines of judging how humane slaughter is by noting the animal’s age. They are not ruminants. Besides, for 4-5 months out of the year our pasture is under several feet of snow. Are your “pasture based” eggs a seasonal product?

“We’ll admit that our model isn’t 100% ideal either; we’d rather not ship in feed from long distances, but economics of growing our own are truly prohibitive given the government crop subsidy system..”

I’m not sure what conventional crop subsidies have to do with the cost of producing your own. If you were in a position to grow your own you would just do it. Heck if you can grow corn, wheat, barley, triticale, field peas, etc., there is no reason you can’t grow, harvest, and grind your own feed, by hand, for 30 birds. It’s a bit labor intensive, but not beyond the bounds of reason. The grains for 30 hens for a year could be stored in less than a dozen drums and mixed and ground as you see fit.

“Cornucopia Institute photo gallery has some excellent examples from the various scales. I suspect you fall in the mid-range, and I suspect your farm looks pretty good. However, the disturbing photos of confinement pullet production for Organic Valley, an otherwise highly-regarded organic co-op, makes me wonder where yours are from, and whether they grow up in such a crowded indoor environment, especially given the price you quoted which seems quite inexpensive.”

Advocacy groups such as CI can paint any portrait that they wish, propaganda is an easy game. I feel our farm is a step above many, yet it isn’t hard for somebody to paint a less than rosy picture. Mr Kastel has shown up out here to take pictures, and although we have nothing to hide, my wife told him that he could take photos, but individual photos wouldn’t be published without our consent. It’s not too hard to take a photo of the most crowded part of the barn and tell people that this how the birds are kept 24/7, to take a photo of the area of the pasture where the birds have dug down to dust bathe and talk of barren, overstocked pastures, to take a picture of the side of the barn that doesn’t have windows and tell folks that the birds are kept in the dark. We compost mortalities and spread the compost on our garden, so there are areas littered with chicken bones, photos of which can support stories of the horrors of nothing more than… farming.

We do buy our pullets from local pullet barns like depicted in that photo. Some are aviary systems like depicted, some are floor raised. For us to raise our own chicks to laying age would take infrastructure on the scale of our existing hen house, and then it would only be utilized for four months out of the year. There is a reason that others make a living doing it, they can utilize the same resources to grow pullets for multiple barns year round.

It is not possible to raise thousands of chicks outside. They do need some sort of shelter. That shelter keeps them warm and out of the elements, and away from predators. It also provides a certain amount of bio-security. Our pullets receive a round of vaccinations that protects them from common avian diseases. Those vaccinations are not complete and can be broken before 16 weeks of age. To let them outside before this age can be a concerning proposition. Disease running through a flock can have severe economic impacts. We have a very small operation but to lose a $17k investment in pullets, plus the resulting loss of family income for at least 6 months while new pullets are sourced would be devastating. I have seen it happen twice on neighboring farms. Poor vaccinations procedures at the hatchery resulted in flocks susceptible to Marek’s disease which is fairly common in the environment. Both flocks had losses of close to 50% and depressed production in the birds that survived.

What are your plans for vaccinating your flock? I hate to say it, but unvaccinated backyard flocks in contact with wild birds are common carriers of avian diseases.

“We’re discussing two very different models of poultry/egg production, and I’m not sure they’re directly comparable in economic terms.”

I don’t believe we are all that different in terms of production (save for scale), but yes, there are major differences in marketing. I always have a market for my eggs. I am never in danger of producing too many, or too few. I never have to dump unsold eggs and take a hit on the cost of production.

Comparing my direct sales to yours, my local customers who buy eggs for $2.50 a dozen do get the benefits of our efficiency of scale, plus I do not charge them for marketing or transportation costs. I do little to market eggs for direct sales. When we started I put a cardboard sign out front for a few months. Eventually the sign went away, but everybody now knows we have eggs. They drive down to the barn, get their own eggs out of the cooler, and leave the money in a coffee can, to the tune of around $5000 a year. The only extra cost cost to me over the wholesale production is the cost of the carton and 2-3 minutes labor per dozen. If I do happen to deliver eggs, I charge $3.00 per dozen and record the mileage expense. On other blogs I’ve heard very small producers claim that such practices undercut the market (their market anyways…), but I don’t necessarily see it that way. I charge a fair, from the farm price that takes into account what I have into the product. For those that buy at retail, the extra $2 that they pay pays for bulk processing, top-notch marketing, and retail distribution.

“You criticized this model for trading on the willingness of a “fortunate few” who would pay for overpriced eggs. However, it seems to me that your model is equally reliant on this consumer dynamic, as by your own admission your eggs at $4/dozen are still too expensive for most of your rural neighbors (who, as you noted, don’t care about organic).”

True, it’s a matter of perspective though. I am surrounded by many folks who believe that this is a true “food revolution” that can change systematic problems with U.S. agriculture. Many times the conversation comes around to bringing organic food to the masses. They feel bringing prices for high quality, organic foods closer to conventional prices without sacrificing standards puts more land under organic management, and slowly changes the status quo.

My neighbors who are willing to pay more than the $1 / dozen price at the gas station do so for a higher quality product, characteristics inherent in the product itself, rather than the less tangible ethics and ideals that are the basis of agriculture. Yet those are still dollars that support the expansion of organic agriculture whether the individual consumers realize it or not. You say there is lack of support for organic agriculture in your region, but only larger market shares and exposure will build that infrastructure in your region.

“However, your methods as you described them still fall in the middle of the potential range of flock management ethics, though I’m open to more details.”

I don’t believe so. We aren’t so different from your average backyard flock. We have a backyard chicken coop that has nest boxes, roosts, perches, feeders, and waters. There is plenty of floor space for the birds to scratch around in the litter. There are large doors that enable them to go outside on lush pasture. It is not just some backyard grass, but a forage mix of timothy, alfalfa, canary grass, and shorter grasses. It is just shy of an acre, but the birds do not eat it to a nub. High traffic areas around the doors and nearest the coop become bare, but 90% of this area remains covered in forage. The quality of forage is such that this area probably produces 5-7 tons of forage per growing season, which could equal more than 10% of their rations. I have more land available to expand the pasture or even separate larger areas for rotational grazing , but really haven’t found the need to expand beyond the area that it encompasses now. (It was quite smaller at one point, but they did eat it down to a nub, so I expanded it to the current size that seems to support them rather well.)

“However, you’re still basically using the “factory” model in which all the inputs are purchased off-farm (birds, feed) and mixed together in a production facility before selling the finished product, with little to no reliance on or integration with the overall farm landscape and environment. Your model may have pasture, but it’s not based on pasture.”

Our farm is not an island unto itself, neither is yours. I could grow my own grains for feed, I could raise my birds (more on birds later). Growing my own feed would require that I purchase or rent more land. That wold require that I purchase equipment to work the land or I could hire somebody with the equipment to do all or portions of the machine work. Such an enterprise may also require additional labor that I could hire. The amount of money invested and the amount of time put into it varies. Yes, I buy all of my feed, but those inputs mainly come from my neighbors or regional farms. The neighbor has organic cropland directly adjacent to our chicken pasture. Last year I purchased 1000 bushels of corn from him to be used in our poultry rations, I also sold him 40 tons of poultry manure to fertilize that land. I could purchase or rent the exact same land myself and work the land to the varying degrees that I described, or I can just buy the feed from him. The end result is the same. I have purchased grains from the neighbors, I have purchased feed from the organic feed mill 20 miles from here which purchases grains from organic farms all over the region. I have sold manure to the neighbors for their grain crops. I have also sold manure to a local organic CSA. Our integration into the farm landscape and environment is directly intertwined with a larger organic economy that benefits the environment throughout our region. The same could probably be said of your farm, since in the absence of a local feed source you have chosen to purchase feed from our region.