Some Thoughts on Lowering the Cost of our Chickens 

When we set out as new farmers to raise our own meats, from the beginning our goal was to produce the best food available anywhere, period. We had splurged on wild Copper River salmon a few times and tasted the tremendous difference in flavor, texture and color compared to farm-raised salmon. We had read about the difference in flavor and nutrition possible with pasture-raised meats and poultry in some of the books by Dr. Andrew Weill, but although he strongly recommended and endorsed the nutritional and health benefits of eating pasture-raised meats, at the time he advocated a mostly vegetarian diet as an alternative for most people, because pasture-raised meats were nearly impossible to find. We couldn’t find pasture-raised meats at the time either, so we decided to do it ourselves. That was six years ago. We’ve developed a loyal following for our specialty poultry which is available directly from us and available at the meat counter at all New Seasons Markets, but we frequently have people ask why our chickens are so expensive. In the meantime we’ve continued to learn a lot more about mainstream industrial farming and processing methods, and there are a lot of things that we could do differently here at Kookoolan Farms to lower the cost of our chickens.

The costs of raising chickens are pretty much the same for all poultry raisers, whether large or small scale: there’s the cost of the baby chick itself; the energy cost for keeping the baby chicks warm; housing facilities for the babies and later for the growing birds (the two different ages/sizes have different housing requirements); bedding materials such as sawdust or wood shavings; the cost of feed and water; labor; licensing; waste disposal; processing; packaging; and the costs of marketing, sales and distribution. Each of these line items offers an opportunity for cost savings, and each in turn is discussed below in its own paragraph. Let us know which ones you’d like us to implement!

1.  Chicks

The healthiest finished birds start with the healthiest chicks. As soon as possible after hatching, the chicks should get established in their warm brooders and start eating and drinking. Delays cause weakened chicks that become more susceptible to illness and disease. We want all of our animals to have only one bad day in their entire lives, not to struggle with illness in infancy due to human errors in shipping time. So over the years we’ve tried several different hatcheries, including the closest one to us, in Hubbard, Oregon. Unfortunately, it would frequently happen that we’d drive an hour to pick up our chicks but they wouldn’t be ready yet, and we’d have to wait. We were shocked to learn that the chicks we were buying there sometimes were hatched in Hubbard, but sometimes were flown in from Washington, New Mexico, or Texas. The place in Hubbard was so small that they were unreliable, and their varying sources for chicks resulted in lots of inconvenience and wasted time for us (sometime half a day to pick up our weekly order of chicks!), as well as widely varying quality of chicks and condition on arrival. From this we experience we learned that getting the best possible chicks always resulted in the best quality harvest-age chickens. Our experience has been that “bargain” chicks have been weak and more likely to arrive in poor condition, but we certainly could save a few cents on the purchase of each chick.

Caring for baby chicks. Newborn chicks can’t control their body temperatures, just as human babies can’t. Day-old chicks need a brooding environment of about 95 degrees Farenheit, with the temperature lowering about five degrees per week until the young chickens grow in their feathers (full feathering doesn’t happen until about 5 to 6 weeks; before that they’re mostly covered in yellow downy fuzz). To keep our chicks warm, dry, and healthy, we hand-care for them twice daily, making sure their food, water, and bedding are clean, and their brooders are at the right temperature. Mr Lemus tenderly makes the rounds morning and afternoon, and he has become very skilled in watching the chicks’ behavior for the slightest signs of distress. This high standard of hygiene keeps the chicks healthy so they don’t require medications. But with a small daily dose of antibiotics, we could make many shortcuts possible that would lower our costs and yours. (Incidentally, the daily use of antibiotics also causes all animals to retain water, resulting in a higher weight than non-medicated animals – great for increasing profitability and lowering producer costs. This is the source of the water that is released when you cook industrially-raised boneless skinless breasts and hamburgers, for example.) We could check on the chicks only once a day, or even less. We could change the sawdust bedding less frequently because the antibiotics would prevent fecal-born diseases from spreading in the food and water. With automated feeding and water, we could check on them even less frequently; maybe only a few times a week, significantly lowering our labor costs as well, although a higher percentage of the chickens would die.

We raise our baby chicks in small groups of only 50 per brooder. This way they have more room and are less likely to stand on each other and suffocate each other. We like to give our birds as much space as we can, but we could lower our costs significantly by crowding more babies into each brooder. This would reduce the energy cost per chick, as well as the labor required to maintain each brooder. We could crowd the older growing chickens in their housing as well, further lowering our costs.

2.  Labor

Let’s talk some more about labor. For the best quality product, we believe it’s imperative to have our food handled by workers who know that they are treated with respect, trust and appreciation by employers who demand perfect quality and hygiene, perfect gentle handling of all animals, and who do not allow or encourage employees to take shortcuts to get a job done more quickly, and we also think it helps that our customers are on our farm every day seeing our animals and workers, and often taking time to express gratitude for our employees’ efforts, and letting them know how much our products are appreciated. As it happens, we pay each of our workers significantly better than minimum wage. I personally don’t want my food to be handled or prepared by a worker who is resentful of unfair employment practices. Unemployment is high in Oregon, and higher in Yamhill County. At least once a week, more often in summer, we have someone stop by the farm or phone us and offer to work for less than minimum wage. By hiring illegal immigrants, we could lower our labor costs, and as a bonus we’d also be able to bypass mandatory state and federal employment taxes, unemployment taxes, and worker’s compensation insurance.

3.  Raising Birds Outdoors

It’s actually more difficult to raise poultry outdoors on grass than indoors in a barn. For pasture-raised poultry, the chickens must be able to eat clean grass every day. This means we can’t just add fresh sawdust to manured areas to keep the chickens clean. Rather, the housing unit must be pulled onto fresh grass daily, or at most every two days. We’ve tried many different styles of housing over the years, from variations on the “chicken tractor” to semi-permanent “day ranging.” We’ve settled on hand-built portable housing with only 30 birds per house. Building these houses provided winter employment for our staff so that we had no winter layoffs or even slowdown of work hours. Moving the houses is hard physical work, and it requires great care to ensure no chicken is crushed during the move. But by introducing daily antibiotics, we could leave the chickens on their own manure and move the housing less frequently, if at all, paying mere lip service to the term “pasture raised.” This strategy would lower the chickens’ consumption of grass and therefore lower the nutritional value of the meat. It would also be likely to build up diseases on our pastures, which of course we could cheaply control by means of various antibiotics, pesticides, and other chemicals. It would greatly lower our costs compared to all the labor of moving the coops daily. And who would know, right?

We take great care to handle our chickens gently, and to ensure that in their entire nine-week-long lives they have only one bad day. We take many extra steps to minimize their stress and discomfort on that last day. The transportation coops that we use to catch and hold the chickens until slaughtering are designed and sold as “16 bird capacity” crates. With shipping direct from the manufacturer, these crates cost $90 each. We own about 50 of these crates, so that’s about $4500 in crates. We only put eight birds in each coop, giving the birds a little personal space and enabling us to handle the birds more gently without having to shove and push and jam to pack the 16^th chicken into the crate. We are very strict with our workers that the birds must be caught gently around the body with two hands, that we must move slowly and quietly so as not to panic the birds, and never grab a bird roughly by one wing or one leg (which generally bruises, dislocates, or breaks the bone – giving us a damaged carcass which can be cut up into separate pieces such as breasts and thighs). We catch the birds at dusk, often working late into the evening because that time of day is less stressful for the chickens than in broad daylight or afternoon summer heat. This would cost less in labor, and would be more convenient for the humans, although it would result in increased stress, hunger, thirst, and wait time for the chickens. Once caught and crated, we drive the tractor very slowly to minimize the bumps for the chickens on the short trip across the farm to the slaughterhouse on our property. We probably just wasted the $4,000 on extra crates. We certainly could save hundreds of dollars in labor every year by doing a faster, rougher “harvest”. We could drive faster.

When chickens are held without food or water, the first six to eight hours is not too hard on them, just as it wouldn’t be for a human. But longer than that becomes increasingly uncomfortable for the chicken. After six to eight hours, meat quality begins to deteriorate due to dehydration, stress hormones, and hunger. Our slaughtering crew starts at 2:00A.M. every single week. This means that one night a week, Koorosh and Chrissie are up very late ensuring that all equipment, tools, and coffee are ready to go for a crew who starts at 2:00A.M. Starting the work at that hour means that the chickens are asleep in their crates until the moment of slaughter, and means that the chickens have been without food or water only 6 to 8 hours. The short wait time results in better flavor and quality for the meat, as well as much more humane conditions for the chickens. Chickens naturally awaken at the first graying of dawn, a good hour before sunrise. Our crew is done and cleaned up before 7AM. We could save a little money and have our crew start at 8:00A.M., and finish by 1:00P.M. The chickens would be hot, thirsty, hungry, and stressed. Their still-under-24-hour wait time would still be legal, and the meat quality would be somewhat less, but maybe not enough that people would notice. And they’d be a little bit less expensive.

4.  Slaughter Age

Kookoolan Farms chickens are slaughtered at nine weeks of age. Birds can be raised to the same weight in only six weeks in a barn, and are more profitable: because barn-raised birds get less exercise and burn less calories, they more efficiently convert their food energy to muscle and stored fat, resulting in faster weight gain. We think the birds have a better quality of life outdoors and that at some level they must appreciate having lives 50% longer than they would if we kept them indoors. More mature birds, finished at a larger size, who get more exercise, not surprisingly have better muscle development, better flavor, and better texture, resulting in better tasting poultry than we’ve ever had anywhere (in the interests of product benchmarking and via the wonder of the internet, we have imported and paid for some pretty danged expensive poultry!). Although it’s the largest birds that have the best flavor and texture, paradoxically the larger size makes them a little harder to sell, meaning we have to work a little harder to tell the story again and again of what that larger size means in terms of both meat quality and quality of life for the chicken. Having pasture grass as a portion of their diet enables the birds to build up omega-3 fatty acids to the benefit of both their health and yours, and making these omega 3 fatty acids available to human consumers at a fraction of the cost of wild seafood. But it would be cheaper to raise the birds inside, and less effort to sell them.

5.  Waste Disposal

Developing a licensed poultry processing plant on our own farm required us to submit a written proposal for waste disposal. We have never shipped a single gram of processing waste off our farm, nor have we ever allowed a single drop of wastewater to go directly into our creek. We spent several thousand dollars developing a wastewater catch system, licensed through Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality. With very tedious manual methods in easily the worst job of the week on the farm, we hand-bury the offals and feathers in our compost pile, providing important fertilizer for our vegetable fields, pastures, and orchard, and responsibly disposing of our own waste. But nobody actually checks on our systems. We could just dump the wastewater into the Yamhill River watershed. No one would notice. We could just put the offals out at the curb for garbage pickup. It would (believe it or not!) be legal. It would certainly be cheaper and easier.

We chose hand-processing for our chickens because the artisanal nature of one-by-one slaughtering and evisceration gives the most control over the bird’s comfort and stress in his last moments, over the cleanliness and hygiene of the meat, and over the quality of appearance of the carcass. Our crew takes pride in their hand-processed product. Automatic evisceration lines built overseas would result in lower overall cost, lower hygiene standards, and fewer jobs. The high-speed automatic equipment sort of tears the intestines out of the abdominal cavity, and can spill the contents of the intestines onto the meat. This contaminates not only that carcass, but the equipment and the next carcasses to touch the equipment. In large plants they just accept that “it happens,” and they compensate for the inevitable by a dip in a chemical disinfectant bath for all carcasses.

6.  Economies of Scale

By being small scale and only processing chickens one day a week, our same crew care for the live chickens, handles the chickens and cattle, milk our dairy cows, tend and harvest vegetables, operate tractors, build and maintain irrigation systems, and perform various carpentry tasks. They are a skilled workforce commanding a higher wage and being treated with respect and appreciation. Our workers see each week how the careful husbandry of the live chickens results in the fine quality product we work together to produce. They daily experience how all the parts of our farm work together as an integrated whole. Your patronage of our farm and its products have created four full-time, year-round, skilled farm jobs during a down economy. We have foregone many economies of scale to accomplish this: our licensing, which would be the same for any size slaughterhouse, shares its cost over only 9,000 birds a year, not 250,000 carcasses a day like “the big guys”. We operate our poultry processing plant only one day a week, six mponths a year, and we drive our delivery truck only one or two days a week, giving us much lower capital utilization than any single-commodity large corporation would consider. We have chosen to structure our costs around adding jobs, not on purchasing automated equipment built in overseas factories, shipped to us with loads of petroleum, and sold to us by national or multi-national corporations who would just remove our money spent on that purchase from Oregon’s economy. When you buy a Kookoolan Farms chicken, all your money gets re-spent by us and then by our workers on very local purchases from your businesses and your employers, right here in Oregon.

We use the best quality feed we can find, milled in Oregon. Did you know that your tax dollars provide “farm subsidies” for “grain farmers”? More and more, those so-called grain “farmers” are actually vertically-integrated multinational meat companies who grow and mill their own feed. Your tax dollars as corn, wheat and soy subsidies enable the largest producers to feed their animals at lower than commodity prices, and enables the largest producers to make it appear that their meats cost less than they really do, because Americans only pay part of their commodity meat costs at the cash register, and the rest of it in their tax bills. (The photo shows a 20-acre field of "Yamhill" heirloom-variety wheat, custom grown for us by our next door neighbor, and hauled less than a quarter of a mile from his field to our barn.)  But Kookoolan Farms is too small to change our practices in this regard (we can’t grow and mill and store our own grains for months or years at a time), so this is actually not a cost savings opportunity for such a small player as Kookoolan Farms; rather, it’s simply an area in which our costs will always be higher. And I’ll just skip the larger issue of taxpayer-funded cleanups of environmental problems associated with large producers, but I highly recommend the book “Righteous Porkchop” by Nicolette Hahn Niman, among others.

The mainstream industrialized food system here in the U.S. got the way it is over a long series of small cost savings, small quality tradeoffs, gradual consolidation of small producers into larger ones, over a 50- to 100-year period. Yes, all those same cost savings choices are available to us too, and available to you three times a day or every time you choose what to eat next. Instead, we have made choices that we are proud to offer you as being the best for the animals, the best for food taste, quality, and safety, best for the environment, best for our local economy, and best for our employees. We feel privileged to be living in Oregon where such passionate eaters allow us to produce the best food available without yet having to make unsavory compromises. But let us know where you’d like us to trim our costs!

In the meantime, you can buy our chickens directly from us one Sunday a month at the Hillsdale Farmer’s Market (next on Sunday, May 22), direct at our farmstore in Yamhill every day, at Gaston Market, and every day at the meat counter at all New Seasons Markets (delivered fresh to every New Seasons Market store, every Friday).

You can seek out our premium poultry currently on the menus at Bijou Café, Dundee Bistro, Beast, Biwa, Bar Avignon, Cana’s Feast Winery in Carlton, various Soter Vineyards events, and the Adidas Headquarters employee cafeteria. At Beast this week, our chickens are prepared as follows: wing wrapped in cherry wood bacon, breast with sautéed easter egg radishes in brown sugar, goat cheese, and fava beans. Legs are confitted separately and served with the same plating of radishes and favas. At Dundee Bistro last week, the breasts were stuffed with goat cheese, pickled peppers and spinach, and served on polenta. Tonight the breasts are grilled and served with snap pea risotto, but next week will be something different. Bar Avignon offers Kookoolan Farms chicken liver pate almost every night. Bijou Café, one of our very first poultry customers and now using Kookoolan Farms chickens for the fifth year in a row, features our pulled chicken meat in enchiladas, quesadillas, and on salads. Be sure to ask for them too at Meriwether’s Restaurant, Grand Central Baking, HOTLIPS Pizza, and Sassafras Catering.

Happy eating,

Koorosh and Chrissie Zaerpoor
Kookoolan Farms
15713 Highway 47
Yamhill, Oregon 97148
email kookoolan@gmail.com
phone (503) 730-7535

May 2011

Happy Spring from Kookoolan Farms! 

Finally, we’re seeing sun breaks.  The sun is brighter and hotter than last month, and overwintered vegetables are starting to grow again.  During the couple of dry days over April 10-12, we got our small upland vegetable field planted.  This will provide us with early-season vegetables in late May and June.  We expect to finally get into our 3.5-acre main vegetable field in our floodplain next week:  forecast calls for 5 or 6 sunny dry days starting April 17.  The first pastured chickens of the year are available now at all New Seasons Markets throughout the Portland area.  And Farmer Koorosh addresses your concerns about radiation in the food from local small farms.
 

FRESH pastured poultry available at New Seasons Markets all season! 

We’ve had our first chicken butchering day of the year this past week.  Our chickens will be available at all New Seasons Markets this year, delivered FRESH every Friday to all stores.  Our season runs now through the end of October.  If you’d like to have our chickens over the winter, you’ll need to have your freezer stocked up before the end of October – the last couple of batches go fast!  This year we’ve had our first price increase since 2008.  Our whole chickens are $4.59 a pound, whether you buy them at New Seasons Markets, direct at our farmstore in Yamhill, or at the Hillsdale Farmer’s Market (we just go once a month). 

So what do you get when you buy our chickens?  

• Pasture-raised.  Our chickens spend their last 1 to 4 weeks (depending on season and weather) outdoors on grass pasture.  This is not only healthier for the birds, but also healthier for you! 
• Our chickens enjoy a longer, richer life.  Our chickens are butchered at nine weeks of age, compared to 45 days for industrially-raised chickens.  They enjoy three times the personal space, and are raised outdoors on sunshine, grass, and bugs as much as Nature allows.  We like to think they appreciate it. 
• Our chickens are humanely handled.  From their first day to their last, our chickens are handled gently and respectfully, using gentle methods from Temple Grandin to minimize their stress and discomfort.  The evidence of their gentle handling is right in front of you on the blemish-free carcass:  no bruises, no broken bones, no torn skin.  In 2010, 94% of our chickens were sold as first-quality whole carcasses. 
• Kookoolan Farms chickens really do taste better!  Our chickens have a better diet, more exercise, and more maturity than other chickens, giving them a richer, “real chicken” flavor, and real texture.  Our chickens stand up to longer cooking and do not become stringy or mushy.  For best results, cook longer at lower temperatures (we recommend roasting at 325 degrees farenheit and using a meat thermometer rather than a timer to determine “done-ness”). 
• Our chickens are completely chemical free.  We have never used any synthetic herbicides, pesticides, or fungicides on our farm.  Our chickens do not receive any antibiotics or medications.  We do not use any chemicals in our poultry processing. 
• Our chickens are not trucked to slaughter.  Kookoolan Farms is one of just a few farms in Oregon with on-farm poultry processing, licensed and inspected by the Oregon Department of Agriculture. 
• Sustainably raised and processed.  We rotate our chickens across our pastures in portable “chicken tractors” similar to the Joel Salatin methods.  We have never shipped even a gram of processing waste off our farm.  The solid wastes are composted and used in our vegetables fields and orchards.  The wastewater is used to irrigate and fertilize our orchard and perimeter trees. 
• Kookoolan farms is committed to social justice.  Our workers are legal, local, and paid $10 to $14 per hour.  We butcher chickens only one day per week.  Other days we are planting, cultivating, and harvesting vegetables; doing carpentry work; milking cows; making mead and kombucha, and hosting cheesemaking classes.  We believe that safe, interesting, chemical-free, and varied work is important to the human sustainability of our farm.

HILLSDALE FARMER'S MARKET
THIS SUNDAY, APRIL 17, 10am to 2pm

Kookoolan Farms just attends one market, and just once a month.  We love the Hillsdale Farmer's Market.  This great market runs all year long:  weekly during the warmest six months, twice a month during the coldest six months.  You can buy all your groceries here:  fruits and vegetables; cheese and dairy; all kinds of meat; seafood, and poultry; breads, pastries, and handmade pasta. 

We'll be there April 17, May 22, June 26, July 31, August 28, September 25, October 30, and November 20 --- mark your calendar now while you're thinking about it!

 Everything we offer except raw dairy, is available from us at the Hillsdale Farmer's Market.  On April 17 we'll have an abundance of fresh eggs from pastured hens -- this is the peak month, time to stock up and freeze eggs for winter.  You'll find the best quality eggs of the year this month.  Later in November and December, you'll want eggs like these for your holiday baking, but you won't be able to find them.  Real eggs from outdoor hens are a seasonal product -- hens lay the most eggs in late spring and early summer, when their chicks would have the best chance of survival.  In late summer and fall, the number of eggs declines, and in winter, real outdoor hens lay almost no eggs at all.  Eggs freeze beautifully and keep well in the freezer for a year!  Stock up this weekend!   

Also on Sunday we'll have kombucha tea, lots of Cheesemaking supplies, beef shares for customers who've reserved them in advance (you know who you are), and a small number of whole chickens (really you're better off this week getting them at any New Seasons Market, and the price is the same), feet and necks for stock, and livers.  We'll also be taking reservations for beef, pork, lamb, venison, and Thanksgiving turkeys; and for Cheesemaking classes held at our farm.

Vegetable Farming for 2011 

This will be our third year raising vegetables for money.  In 2009 it was a small experiment, taking only six CSA subscriptions plus raising our own family’s vegetables.  In 2010 we expanded to take 30 CSA shares, and we gingerly ventured into a few restaurant sales of vegetables.  In 2011 we are tripling our planting compared to 2010, taking more CSA shares, and seeking restaurant partners who will take weekly delivery of fresh vegetables. 

Those of you subscribing to our vegetable CSA program will be relieved to know that we got a lot of seeds planted last weekend during those couple of sunny days on April 10-12.  Our small upland vegetable field dries out a month before our larger main field, located in the flood plain of the Yamhill River.  This small upland field provides our early vegetables in late May and June, and then our floodplain field produces our main crop from about July 1st through the end of October.  Meanwhile, after harvesting the upland field by the end of June, we plant our overwintering vegetables during July and August.  These provide our household with vegetables from November through May!  You can model your home garden on the same principles.  We recommend "Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades" by Steve Solomon for its two-field, three-year-rotation scheme.  

Be sure to patronize Bijou Café for our chickens and vegetables, both Papa Haydn locations this summer for our ducks and vegetables, Biwa for chicken hearts and livers, and Bar Avignon and Cana's Feast (only two miles from our farm) for our chicken liver pate.  If you work at Intel, look in the Jones Farm and Ronler Acres cafeterias for our eggs and vegetables.  These great restaurants not only feature Kookoolan Farms products, but they source their ingredients from many other excellent local small farms as well.

Meadery

Our first product, Spice Road Mead, was bottled in December 2010, is available for sale now!  Mead is a wine- or beer-strength fermented (not distilled) beverage made from honey as the fermentable sugar.  Our Spice Road Mead is an off-dry, wine-strength (11% alcohol) mead, aged six months in a French oak barrel previously used for pinot gris, with added saffron, vanilla, and habanero peppers.  The peppers give a warm finish.  It’s great with lamb, middle eastern and ethnic European food, great with a cheese plate, great with desserts such as cheesecake, flan, rice pudding, or a warming after-dinner drink on its own.  $34 for 750 ml bottle.  We made 22 cases and already there are only 3 cases left. We will have this at Sunday's farmer's market, but you have to ask for it, it won't be out for display.

Danger of Radiation Fallout in the Pacific Northwest? 

We've had a number of customers ask about radiation fallout in the Pacific Northwest following the series of tragedies culminating in the nuclear power plant meltdown in Japan.  Concerns are generally regarding the safety of our CSA vegetables and regarding raw milk.  Here are excerpts from some of the more interesting questions. 

Incidentally, we don't usually flaunt his academic credentials but they are highly relevant here: Farmer Koorosh holds a PhD in nuclear physics from Oregon State University with research at Oak Ridge labs in Tennessee, and he completed a post-doc at Lawrence  Berkeley during which he received extensive radiation worker safety training.  His dissertation was in the nuclear physics of the interior of stars, not in nuclear engineering or human health issues, but he did receive radiation safety training associated with doing his PhD work, and he certainly has the technical background to be able to clearly understand everything being published and to make his own calculations for verification.

The short version is that we see no reason for alarm.  We are working outside every day, working in the soil and rain, eating our vegetables, drinking our milk, and eating our eggs and meats.  But we encourage you to make your own assessment.  Koorosh has written a long article posted on our blog page.

Stock up on beautiful eggs, read about freezing them, and enjoy better access to our pastured chickens all season long by buying at New Seasons Markets! 

Best regards from your farmers,

Chrissie and Koorosh Zaerpoor
Kookoolan Farms
April 2011