Loya Update

First of all - happy Thanksgiving.  Please forgive us for neglecting the blog.  We got caught up in suburban life.  Chris and I are living in my parent's house on a cul-de-sac in Edmond, Oklahoma - just north of Oklahoma City.  We joined a food co-op, located the farmer's market and found a place to get bubble tea.  So, the critical things have been accomplished.  Now, I can concentrate on more writing.  

For those of you eagerly awaiting an update on Loya - here it is.

But first, for those of you who do not know who Loya is, I'll fill you in:  she is our 2nd adopted kitty.  We were walking along a creek, down the road from the Farm (it sounds nice and peaceful, but we were actually arguing about something that I can't remember anymore...), when I heard a tiny meow coming from some bushes nearby.  I bent over and saw a tiny, black kitty head looking back at me.  Next thing we know, this jet black, six-toed fuzzy creature is glued to our side, rubbing against our legs and purring.  She had a zip-tie cord around her neck and was thirsty and starving.  We gave her some water from our car, and some other people threw her some chicken-mc-nuggets from Mcdonalds (she threw up later that night).  As we were talking to some other people about where the local animal shelter was located, she decided to jump into our car and settle in on my lap.  And that was that.  She decided we belonged to her ever since.

We were concerned that Loya would not adjust well to life in suburbia.  She loved living on the farm - chasing mice, romping through the garden and pestering Eddie, an orange, male tomcat 3 times her size.  When we packed up the car and put her in the back for the 4 hour drive to Oklahoma, she cried for half of the trip.  Maybe she got it out of her system because after only a few days of being at the house, she became BFF with our other cat Bella.  Bella tolerates her with minimal hostility, although I think she wishes she was once again the only cat back in her cozy apartment in NYC.  Bella and Loya live with us upstairs and my parent's 2 cats live downstairs with them.  Almost daily there are some pretty intense kitty fights.  It's kinda like 2 kitty gangs - or kitty West Side Story.

Besides the kitty gang wars, Loya is doing great.  She is experiencing all sorts of new and exciting things like drinking out of the toilet.  She enjoys snuggling, eating and running up and down the stairs.  

Scenes from the Farm

It's been a few weeks since we bid the Farm farewell.  We officially survived living in Waco and picked up some valuable skills.  We learned some great songs and made some great friends. We literally had dirt behind our ears and ants in our pants.  It was a great experience and I would recommend it to anyone.  But before we left, Chris had one final goal he wanted to accomplish.

The Farm manages a 50 acre organic pecan orchard and harvest was to begin shortly before we left.  But to our dismay, it was discovered that crows were invading the trees and eating our pecans.  Chris was assigned the task of going to the orchard every morning and evening to try to shoot the pesky birds with a shotgun.  Chris embraced this chore whole heartedly and in his enthusiasm he was compared to local Waco celebrity Ted Nugent.  For those of you not familiar with Ted Nugent, apparently he is a musician who had some hits in the 80's and now has a hunting how-to show.

While Chris was patrolling the orchard, he noticed some craters in the dirt that appeared to be a tell tale sign of - get ready - wild pigs.  Chris now knew what he wanted to cook at his birthday BBQ/going away party.  

The first idea was to put a bunch of rotten pears into a box shaped trap to see if he could fool the pigs into the trap.  That didn't work, so Chris decided to recruit some help.  He managed to wrangle Matt and Nick into his pig catching plan and they decided since the pigs root around in the middle of the night, they would have to plan an all night hunt.  Chris requested snacks, so Molly and I went to the grocery store and we packed up the guys with plenty of food and homemade chocolate chip cookies.  

I think the hunt ended up being more like a guy slumber party with guns.  Apparently the guys never saw even one pig the entire night, but that may be because they were all bundled up in their sleeping bags dozing all night.  So, you may be surprised to hear that we didn't end up roasting a pig, but I think Chris enjoyed trying anyway.

We Love Canadians

We have been enjoying apartment living on our own since our Canadian house mates, Peter and Kristine, left for Canada for a month. For those of you who don't know, we didn't end up roughing it in the Nicaragua house for our entire stay. We lasted about a month. When Matt invited us to come volunteer at the farm, he said the only housing available was the Nic house. When Chris told me that we would be living in a place without electricity, running water or toilet - I started crying. My goal was for my life to be LESS crazy. After the initial shock, I made a deal with Chris: I would move to the farm with him if he agreed to come with me to the composting toilet in the middle of the night - whenever I needed to go. (This tends to be a nightly occurrence, unfortunately....and sometimes I have to go twice in one night.) Chris has kept his end of the deal and he even chases away the cockroaches before I go into the toilet. I am very thankful for that.

It was an interesting experience living in the Nic house, but around mid-July we noticed an extra room in Peter and Kristine's apartment and we brazenly asked them if we could move in. That was a moment that I appreciated Chris' lack of subtlety:

"We noticed an empty room in your apartment. Can we move in?"

They said yes and since then we have been living in relative climate-controlled luxury. Although it was fun waking up in the middle of the night to stumble along outside in a sleep-induced haze from the Nic house to the composting toilet, those days are past.

Speaking of the composting toilet, since Peter from Canada is the designated "peak knocker" in this building, and he's been gone for a month, the peak is starting to get a little too close for comfort. For those of you not familiar with composting toilet lingo, I'll explain. When people defecate into the composting toilet, the waste goes into a chamber directly below. As more and more waste piles up, the mound starts to form a peak, like a pyramid shape. When the peak of poop starts to get too high someone has to take a stick and knock it down so that the waste forms a more even surface at the bottom, so that there is room for more crap. Once the peak has been knocked quite a few times and the chamber is completely full, someone has to open up the pit and remove all the feces. Fortunately, this is only done a few times a year - and it hasn't been done while we've been here (although it would have made for some humorous blog material). I think the Farm waits to assign that task to some unsuspecting, enthusiastic group of spring-break college volunteers looking to change the world.

So other than the growing peak, things have been quiet around here without the Canadians. We have redecorated (i.e. swept the floor) and enjoyed having a little more space to ourselves. But we do miss them and our quality time together: long discussions about God, judgement, hell, cats, scripture, politics, bear attacks and taking shots of Chris' homemade kombucha. In Peter's absence, we keep all of his phrases alive. These are expressions of excitement said in a sort of monotone manner, kind of like the teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off:

1. This is pretty much the best ever.

2. This is for real.

3. You talked me into it.

4. This is really happening.

5. This is unbelievable.

Before leaving, Peter's big project was selling frozen, chocolate-covered bananas at a movie night in downtown Waco. The bananas were fair-trade bananas, and selling them was a way of trying to educate people about fair-trade and the abuse going on in this industry. If you are interested in learning more about this topic, check the farm website or I can send you one of Peter's pamphlets.

The Turkeys are Here!

This is day 5 and the turkeys are still officially cute. People here on the farm were saying that the turkeys would turn ugly after the third day, but I have been checking daily, and they are still not ugly.

About 100 tiny turkey poults were donated to the Farm by a large turkey factory. They arrived when they were one day old - cute, fuzzy little peepers. They are kept in a special coop with temperature controlled lighting to keep them warm as they are extremely fragile. These turkeys have been commercially bred to be exactly the same, and as a result they are so genetically similar that they are very susceptible to all kinds of illnesses. I am also told that they are unbelievably dumb - bred not even to be able to reproduce on their own! So, although they are not a heritage heirloom variety of naturally bred turkey, they will be raised humanely: without antibiotics or hormones and allowed to roam freely.

Back when I was a single gal living in the city, one of my roommates came home with another bizarre tale of daily life in New York City. She had seen a group of people protesting inhumane treatment of poultry outside of a KFC in Greenwich Village. She was baffled at the sight and wondered how people could have such misplaced passion. Who cares about chickens when there is terrible suffering of human beings all over the world!

Recently during our morning devotional time we were asked to step outside and find something to look at and practice some meditation. I had arrived to the devotion time late and was more focused on eating toast than I was at trying to meditate. Thankfully, Samson from Ghana was in a contemplative frame of mind and said something that really resonated with me. He was looking out over the farm and the creation story from the Bible came to his mind. He noted that the Earth and all of creation was made before man and that nature had an established working order to it apart from man. In the end, man was created to fit into that natural order. He went on to observe that because of the corrupt human heart, man has tried to make creation work according to his own order.

So, maybe cruelty towards poultry is not that big of a deal compared to all the insanity that is going on in the world, but at the heart of the industrial food model is the abuse of the natural order for profit. Birds are living creatures and were never meant to be pumped full of hormones and drugs, bred to have unnaturally gargantuan breasts, and left packed in cages, unable to walk around. As man continues to use nature for the accumulation of wealth instead of respecting the limitations of the natural order, we, and future generations reap the effects of the depletion of our natural resources, global warming, disease and destruction. I'm reminded of the scene in "An Inconvenient Truth" where Al Gore shows a picture of a scale with the Earth on one side and bars of gold on the other.... Hmm.... Which one should we choose?

Here is a Wendell Berry quote from a book I am reading:

"I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating. The food he grows will be fresher, more nutritious, less contaminated by poisons and preservatives and dyes than what he can buy at the store. He is reducing the trash problem; a garden is not a disposable container, and it will digest and reuse its own wastes. If he enjoys working in his garden, then he is less dependent on an automobile or a merchant for his pleasure. He is involving himself directly in the work of feeding people."

A Celebration of Growth

Last Saturday the Farm hosted "A Celebration of Growth", a fundraiser dinner cooked by the one and only Chris Becker. The fundraiser drew many new supporters to the farm and the proceeds benefited the urban gardening programs that the farm is spearheading in Waco.

It was a four course dinner and the menu included:

Local tomato, cucumber and basil salad
with Moroccan extra virgin olive oil, '07 vintage

Handmade zucchini panzotti
with golden butter, meyer lemon preserve and pecorino secco

Grass-finished World Hunger Relief beef
with red potatoes and liana beans

Spiced poached pear
with homemade vanilla ice cream

Chris was in his element and we watched in amazement as he cooked every dish and timed every course to perfection. We now know why he spent all those weeks toiling in the barn to refurbish the commercial stove known as "Lazarus". Rusty, gross and non-functional, Lazarus was saved from the scrap heap by the Farm and sat in the barn until Chris arrived as a new volunteer. Given up on by so many others, only Chris was able to restore the stove to working order and wield it to create an unbelievable evening of food.

And with the interns and volunteers receiving 20 minutes of waiter training, we had some pretty decent service to go along with the food. Only one steak was dropped. And luckily it was dropped on the floor and not on a donor. The only other crisis was that the ice was melting too quickly in the iced tea. So all in all - a very successful night.

The best part about it was the leftovers. Yes, we enjoy the all vegetarian meals that are served on the farm, but I think we all savored the luxury of the steak and sparkling water at the after-party meal...and the after-after-party meal.

There was a lot of care, skill and love that went into the meal. Chris' cooking ability and organization is obvious, but probably most of the people eating the meal did not know the persistence and patience it took to clean and repair Lazarus. Not to mention the labor and sweat poured into growing the produce in the garden or raising a grass-finished cow. The next time you scoff at the price of a piece of local, organic food, take my advice to get to know an organic farmer and experience what they do. I guarantee, you'll never scoff again and you'll gladly plunk down the money for something you KNOW is good.

Fried Chicken

Yesterday we had a huge farm fried chicken lunch made by Chris.

You can probably figure out what that means...

I cut the throat of a rooster. It was a fairly disturbing experience. As you might have imagined, I have never cut the throat of any living (or dead) thing before. I reacted badly, to be honest.

The process went like this: we wrangled a bunch of brown hens that we suspected were old and not laying anymore. We put them all in a pen and each had a turn to spend three days in an isolated cage to lay an egg. If no egg was found in three days, the hens were transfered to a different pen: chicken death row. After we had collected about 20 hens in death row, we scheduled a day for the culling.

Part of me cringed at this process. It was not so much the fact that we were butchering the chickens for food, but the fact that we were trying to single out the females that didn't "produce" anymore. It reminded me of Josephine Bonaparte or miscellaneous wives of Henry VIII being done away with for being too old, lack of fertility or other ways in which they were deemed to be useless. We want you, but only for utilitarian purposes.

The morning of the culling had arrived (culling is a nice word for killing) and we were all set for the chickens we had brought down to the processing house. We were also ordered to butcher 2 roosters - they had attacked Matt's little daughter. If you are a rooster, it's not a good idea to attack a farm staff member's child, just for the record. We had a sawhorse set up with two attached buckets with holes in them big enough for the chickens to be put in upside-down so that their neck and head stuck out of the bottom. Once the throat was slit, someone had to stand there and hold the chicken as the body convulsed and the blood drained out. After a couple minutes the head was cut off and the body was submerged into hot water to loosen the feathers. Then, the body was put onto a fancy chicken plucker (we don't have many fancy, mechanical contraptions at the farm - this thing was donated). A wheel with rubber nipple-like things spun around and seemingly magically defeathered the chicken body. Next, the chicken feet were removed and the body was cut open at the bottom so all the guts could be pulled out. Lastly, you pop the chicken into a baggy and put it in the freezer.

We kicked off the culling with Matt's fancy rooster pictured in my previous post. The throat slitting and body convulsing part was fairly unpleasant to watch, so I happily volunteered for gut pulling. Once the chicken is dead and defeathered, it looks similar to what you might find in a grocery store, and that was more comforting than the feathers flying and blood flowing portion of the process. Gutting a chicken is not rocket science, but it did have its challenges. Once the bottom of the chicken was cut into, you had to carefully insert your hand into the body cavity as far back as it would go. You then had to begin pulling a mass of organs gently out of the body - careful not to puncture the intestines or gall bladder. A couple people squished the gall bladder too hard and fluorescent green goo went everywhere. Then the organs had to be sorted out - intestines and gall bladder in the trash, someone wanted the livers and gizzards to cook that night, and Chris wanted just about everything else to put into an esoteric Italian dish. And just so everyone is clear, the gizzard is the chicken stomach. The stomach has to be sliced, kind of like you are slicing a bagel, and turned inside-out. The contents of the stomach have to be emptied into the trash and the lining has to be peeled off. This is how it's done. It is for real.

As I was removing the organs of one of the chickens, Will, the chicken master, came over and exclaimed, "Wow! That looks like one healthy liver!" I love strangely placed enthusiasm. I wasn't sure if all the chickens were as equally healthy as that one. As I opened up the body of another I was shocked to find strange, gelatinous orbs floating around the organs. Was it tumors? Everyone rushed over to examine. Turns out, they were under-developed eggs. That chicken was vindicated only in death...

The time came for me to kill my rooster. I thought it would be good for me to experience the entire process, but I was growing more apprehensive. The rooster was put upside-down into the bucket and I took hold of his head. One quick stroke and he would be dead. I gave it a good go, but the knife was too dull and I hadn't cut deep enough. But I had sliced enough for the blood to start flowing and the body to begin writhing. I didn't want to do it again. I looked to Chris for help - he told me to give it another go myself. I pleaded with Samson, the intern from Ghana, to help and he just stood there with a blank look on his face. Apparently, Chris and Samson thought I should do it myself as some sort of organic farm, meat eater rite of passage or something. All I could think about was this was turning into a slow and painful death for this poor bird and no one would help this crazy girl dancing around, whining and crying, with a dull knife in her hand. So, I gave it two more good cuts and it was over.

I am now officially retired from chicken butchering.

Bird Brain Violence

The summer is flying by and many of the live-in volunteers are moving out to go back to school. To celebrate their time on the farm we had a giant farm dinner party and Chris cooked the last frozen turkey raised on the farm last season. The party was a great celebration with an enormous spread of local food. As the party was winding down Darren, one of the live-in volunteers, decided we needed to organize a game for a little after dinner entertainment. He is a very smart guy (taking a year off before moving onto med school to become a brain surgeon) and suggested we play a game of tape ball where all of the participants knock around a roll of duct tape with brooms, sticks and other blunt objects. Unfortunately, we ended up hitting each other more than we did the duct tape. Against my better judgement, I participated in the game and am now nursing some pretty intense cuts and bruises.

In addition to the friendly game of tape ball, there were a couple other violent situations that arose this week involving the roosters. I have grown pretty confident dealing with the chickens over the past few weeks, but earlier in the week I was attacked by a rooster. I was explaining to my friend Luke, who was visiting us on the farm for a couple days, how to wrangle a chicken. As I was standing there holding the chicken, the rooster came in out of no where and started to charge me. If you are not very familiar with roosters, they have a fairly large, menacing spike on the back of their leg and they can draw a fair amount of blood with their beak. I have heard a few stories about people being attacked by the roosters, and here are a few methods to avoid being injured by a rooster starting with non-violent approaches:

Non-violent approaches:

1. Run away

2. Bring an umbrella to open and close to startle the rooster and get it to go away

3. Move your feet around to distract the rooster, then grab it by it's feet and carry it around upside-down for a while to show it who's boss

4. Put one foot up in the air to hypnotize the rooster

Violent approaches:

1. Drop kick the rooster like it's a football

So, as the rooster approached, I put my foot up into the air hoping it would cause the rooster to fall into a non-violent trace-like state. Unfortunately, it did not work and I had to drop kick the thing.

I didn't really notice the roosters very much until this happened. Several people here on the farm just want to go ahead and butcher the roosters because they are violent and they serve no purpose. We don't want to have any fertilized eggs and all they do is attack people - so why not just eat them? I'll grant them - they are very pretty to look at with all their flashy feathers and what would the farm be without the typical cock-a-doodle-do every morning? But...I am beginning to think dispatching them is a good idea because today I was attacked again, and this time I was double teamed.

I made the mistake of opening the chicken coops up before feeding and watering all the chickens. So, all the chickens and roosters were roaming about as I was going about my chicken chores. As I was getting some feed out of the feed bucket a rooster approached me with a wily look in his eye. I was ready for him and was using the lid of the garbage can we use to store the food as a shield as I lifted my leg to kick if necessary. But to my surprise, another rooster was behind me. Before I could do anything, the rooster had flown into me from behind and cut me on the back of my leg. Fleeing was the only option and I made my way safely over to the water hose and used that to fend of the next couple of attacks.

I think it's about time for some chicken noodle soup.