KOOKOOLAN FARMS
A small, diversified family farm in Yamhill, Oregon, committed to organic farming practices, rotational grazing, grass-based animal husbandry, humane animal handling practices, and producing the healthiest, best-tasting, premium poultry in Oregon.
Blog with photos
June 2, 2009
Has it really been so long since I've posted? It's been a busy spring: we remodelled our little poultry processing facility with stainless steel walls and poured-concrete baseboards. We removed our wrecked greenhouse (crushed, like so many in this area, under the weight of the December 2008 snowfalls) and replaced it with a 100-tree mixed-fruit orchard irrigated by a gray-water irrigation system that re-uses water from our milking parlor and poultry processing facility (yes, we have a DEQ permit for this). We wrapped the porch of our 1905 farmhouse in a reclaimed piece of plastic from the wrecked greenhouse, and used the humble little space to start seeds for our garden. We sold our dairy goats last winter, a necessary prerequisite both for the orchard and for the market garden that we've started. We've midwifed the birth of a Jersey calf. We're already harvesting an abundance of salad and braising greens, some radishes, and within a week snow peas and snap peas. We accepted only four CSA subscriptions this year while we work out the systems for this program, but we have more vegetables than those four families and our own can eat, and this surplus is available every day on a walk-in basis in our farmstore. We've started a couple hundred more laying hen pullets all of Livestock Conservancy heritage breeds: buff rocks, buff orpingtons, buff chanteclers, marans (dark chocolate brown eggshells!), and more Auracaunas that lay the blue- and green-shelled eggs. We're excited that in just another week or so we start receiving our heritage breed meat chickens. This summer we're planning a giant screening experiment of 380 individual chickens of 15 different breeds from five different hatcheries, raised to 12 and 16 weeks of age, following the "Label Rouge" protocols from France, and culminating in a planned October 2009 cook-off hosted by Vitaley Paley! Our cheesemaking classes have been featured on several blogs and on page 14 of this month's "Culture" magazine -- the only national magazine devoted to American artisinal cheeses. We've been interviewed and photographed by NPR independent reporter Sadie Babits and photographer Jan Sonnenmair, and filmed by Derrick Pereira and Nora Gedgaudas (author of "Primal Body-Primal Mind"). We've spoken about our farm at a Friends of Family Farmers event in downtown Portland and hosted groups of students from Portland State University and from a homeschooling high school veterinary program. And we even managed to tile our front entryway and a bathroom upstairs: long-languishing personal projects that never seem to make it to the top of a busy day's to-do list. Best of all, for dinner last night we had "Champ," a traditional Irish peasant dish of mashed potatoes, green onions, and butter. With all three ingredients fresh from our own farm, it was comfort food both simply made, and simply luxurious.
Kookoolan Farms salad greens, 2009
December 3, 2008
As best as I can tell, these show actual photos and footage of animals in horrendous conditions both before and after they are dead, and the news stories tell of abominable practices related to incubation, handling, hygiene, and trucking -- except the one about China seems to be a hoax. But no wonder people don't trust their food sources, and no wonder more people are becoming vegetarians.
Not in the news is one of my current "hot buttons," which is the sale of processed chicken rather than whole broiler/fryers. Although boneless skinless breasts, and thighs, and ground chicken, and chicken nuggets all seem like harmless convenience foods, they hide the story of why they exist. If you have the stomach to watch the chicken-harvesting scene in the video "Eating Mercifully," you will see that the chickens are battered appallingly as they are "harvested." Obviously most of these chickens suffer bruising, dislocations, and broken bones. This is the reason that most poultry in the U.S. is sold as parts rather than whole birds. The damaged limbs are cut away from the carcass and "processed" into ground chicken and chicken nuggets. Broken bones are removed for "value added" convenience products such as boneless skinless breasts. Unfortuantely, buying processed parts buys into this kind of treatment for poultry.
Our chickens are always gently hand-caught and gently hand-loaded into coops. The coops are designed and sold with a 15-bird capacity; we never put more than eight in a coop. These coops are $40 each and we own 40 of them. It's a significant investment in capital equipment to have twice the "recommended" number of coops, but it's gentler and safer for the birds. We slowly catch our birds one at a time, and place them one by one into the coops. Judging by the video, our labor cost for catching birds is about 15 times that of "industry standard." We typically have less than 5 percent of our birds with bruises or other injuries -- some 95% of our poultry is fancy-quality, undamaged, undiseased, uninjured, perfect broiler/fryer carcasses. Right there in the unblemished bird is direct evidence of our gentler handling procedures.
Commercial poultry is so over-medicated and so diseased at the time of "harvest", and typically trucked very long distances to slaughter, that this has now become a ventor for animal and human health issues. Studies have shown that when these trucks drive past, they leave a comet-trail of antibiotic-resistant disease germs in their wake. When you follow such a truck on the highway for a few miles, these germs enter your car. When the truck drives past a farm, it deposits these unwelcome visitors on the farm property. Antibiotic-resistant disease germs are spread among wild birds nesting or resting on the side of the highway. Birds are often trucked hundreds of miles, in the coldest and hottest weather, with no food or water for up to 36 hours prior to slaughter.
We've all read that the USDA's standards for "free range" are ridiculously permissive, allowing a single door or a few minutes of access to the outdoors to qualify. Apparently now the "raised without antibiotics" tag is also misleading. The hatching eggs of meat chickens are routinely injected with long-acting antibiotics that stay in the chicken's system right up until the slaughter date. When Tyson was caught doing this, they objected to removing the labelling because "it's the industry standard" and "everybody does it." Kudos to the USDA who for once seems to be pressing the point that such chickens are NOT antibiotic-free.
Yikes.
We have confirmed that our hatchery does not inject anything into the eggs, ever.
We have never given antibiotics to any chicken, at any stage of its incubation or growth, ever.
We have never deliberately mistreated or roughly handled any chicken, ever.
Koorosh and I participate in the catching/harvesting of our chickens, always.
Our chickens are raised and killed on the same farm. When we "truck" our chickens to slaughter, we're talking about a 3-minute tractor ride, 64 chickens at a time (eight coops of eight birds each is all our little Kubota tractor can move in one trip). Our chickens are caught at sunset and killed before dawn the next morning, minimizing their discomfort.
Our licensed and inspected poultry processing facility is clean and exceeds the standards of both the Oregon Department of Agriculture Food Safety Division inspector, and the standards of the meat director at New Seasons Markets, both of whom have observed our slaughtering and packing operations.
And every week you get to vote YES for this better kind of farming by buying our chickens at New Seasons Markets or directly from us at the Hillsdale Farmer's Market. The question is not really why are our chickens so expensive. We believe we raise chickens the way they used to be raised, and the way they should be raised. The real question is, what corners are the big guys cutting to make commodity chickens so cheap?
I'm not done yet, but I'll stop here and call this Part One. I still have a lot to say about environmental practices, the cost and quality of animal feeds, diversified farms vs monoculture farms, grass-based farming and omega-3 fatty acids and CLAs .... but for now it's a sunny afternoon with an hour and 45 minutes of daylight left, and I need to go collect eggs and feed the cows.
At your service,
Farmer Chrissie
Yamhill, Oregon
May 24, 2008
We're too lazy to mow the lawn, so we exclusively use organic, self-fueling, not-made-in-China lawnmowers, AKA our dairy cows!
May 10, 2008:
Hurray! One of our favorite annual milestones: getting the meat chickens out of the barn and onto the pasture! Look at all that lush green grass for them to eat!
April 15 2008:
Beautiful sunset, laying hens outside in the late afternoon light.
View west to the coast range.... View north/east to the town of Yamhill.
Hens think about whether to lay eggs in the straw ... late afternoon in the Coast Range.
April 2008:
My favorite flowers are daffodils because the cows and goats don't eat them!
March 31, 2008:
Chrissie fainted this morning, landed on her chin, and broke her jaw. It took us almost two weeks to figure out that it was broken and not just bruised or dislocated, after which her jaw was wired shut for five weeks.
March 30, 2008:
At today's Hillsdale Farmer's Market (www.hillsdalefarmersmarket.com) we will have fresh whole chickens, frozen whole rabbits, chicken stock kits, and chicken organs. We will also have chicken eggs and duck eggs. We do not have any cut-up chicken parts this week. We are already taking orders for Bourbon Red heritage breed turkeys for Thanksgiving 2008 - the baby chicks will be on the ground within a couple of weeks. (Babies for broad-breasted turkeys go on the ground in July.) Upcoming poultry specials: We expect to have squabs (young pigeons) for the April 13 market, and chukhar partirdges for the April 27 market. Quails are coming in late April or early May, and we'll have one small batch of guinea hens at the beginning of July. Lambs will be available by the half starting in May. We are presently sold out of our lovely natural grass-fed beef but should have another animal available by mid- to late-April which can be bought in 1/8th shares. Interested in some other poultry? We welcome your inquiries.
March 25, 2008:
Our Jersey cows have been moved onto rapidly-growing lush pasture, and we are all tasting the difference in the milk. Unfortunately, it doesn't start as a good difference! Cows which just eat lush-growing grass pasture actually produce milk with an off-flavor. An annual phenomenon is that when the cows' diet changes from dry hays in winter to lush grass pasture in spring, (and again in the fall when the diet changes back from lush grass to dry hay), the enzymes and other flora and fauna in the cow's rumen have to adjust to the change in diet. During the one-to-two-week adjustment, milk is famous for having off flavors which can vary significantly day-to-day. This is a normal part of the annual milk cycle. We anticipate that within two weeks at most, the cows' digestion will settle down and the milk will once again be sweet and mild. We apologize for any inconvenience, but this is real nature at work here. You can read about this on Claravale Dairy's website as well: http://claravaledairy.com/faq.html
March 1, 2008: Subsidized farming is not what you think. Read this op-ed piece by Jack Hedin, an organic vegetable farmer from Minnesota, and be amazed by our ridiculous laws... (by the way, Kookoolan Farms receives no government subsidies and we do not politically agree with subsidized agriculture). http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/opinion/01hedin.html?_r=1&ex=1205298000&en=3e157aac557a11db&ei=5070&emc=eta1&oref=slogin
Feb 12, 2008: Green chicken is safe to eat!
A customer emailed us today that her roasting chicken had an area in the breast meat that was "leaf green, but otherwise normal in texture, odor, and appearance." This is a phenomenon known as "green muscle disease." You can easily search on Google for " "green muscle disease" + poultry " to find out more about it, but basically it's a lack of oxygen to the pectoral muscle, always occuring in the deep layer of breast meat near the breast bone, caused by the combination of large size and the chicken getting lots of exercise. It rarely occurs in commodity chickens because they are typically grown to smaller sizes and are raised in comfinement. It also only occurs in large-breasted hybrid varieties of chicken and turkeys - never in slower-growing, single-breasted, heirloom poultry varieties. Kookoolan Farms will always replace your chicken at no charge if this occurs in your bird, but please be assured that such meat is perfectly safe to eat - both the "normal" parts and even the green part. To date we have brought to market a lifetime total of about 5,000 birds, and this problem has been reported to us exactly four times. Here is a picture of green muscle disease that another customer emailed to us in 2007.
February 11, 2008: Our first goat kid was born Saturday evening, February 9th, while we were packaging chickens for market the next day. (This was also the first evening this spring for hearing frog songs from the creek.) She's a lovely little doeling with a white start on her forehead (like her mother) and a brown coat (like her father). Unfortunately for her, her young mother rejected her, and so "Starla" has moved into our 7-year-old's bedroom. Liam says "This is the best thing that has ever happened to me," and "thank you for letting me sleep with the little goat, Mommy." He wakes up twice during the night to give her a bottle, and still goes to first grade in the morning.
