Summary

This email is a very long way of saying that in 2009, Kookoolan Farms will not be raising meat chickens for fresh weekly sale to New Seasons Markets, farmer's market, and restaurant customers.  We have 1500 birds already started which we will butcher between March 10 and April 7, and which we will sell directly from our farm, and at the March 22 and April 5 and 19 Hillsdale Farmer's Markets.  This is roughly 10% the number of meat chickens that we produced in 2008, so they'll go fast, and we recommend stocking up for your freezer. 

During 2009, we will sell everything we produce almost exclusively from our farm store at our farm in Yamhill, focusing our efforts on chicken eggs, cheesemaking classes, a five-family CSA vegetable garden (two shares are still available for at-our-farm pickup), establishing our young mixed fruit orchard, and development of a more natural, comprehensive system for raising poultry meats. We will offer 125 Red Bourbon heritage breed turkeys at Thanksgiving which will be sold directly through our farmstore or the Hillsdale Farmer's Market and must be reserved in advance. We will also offer beef, pork, and lamb shares in the summer from custom-processed animals which must be reserved in advance.

Check our website for details (www.kookoolanfarms.com).  Watch for the reincarnation of Kookoolan Farms chickens and poultry meats in the not-so-distant future.

Reinventing Ourselves

2009 is our fourth year of farming.  We are still farming novices, but since buying our little farm in October 2005, we have accomplished much:  building half a mile of fences, three barns, two greenhouses, and a poultry processing plant, almost all with our own hands and little hired labor; we have learned to milk cows and to raise and butcher chickens; we have obtained all the necessary licenses; we have established a brand-name presence for our premium poultry and raw dairy and eggs.  We believe that we have done an excellent job of bringing a specialty niche poultry to Portland, and we appreciate very much that so many of you think so too.

Another aspect of what we've accomplished is a large amount of research on the status and history of American poultry production over the last hundred years.  We have learned that "ethical and sustainable" farming, especially as applied to livestock farming, is not "black or white," but rather a continuum.  And not just one continuum, but several:  housing, genetics, chick procurement, feeding, handling, slaughtering, and processing, are each a continuum.  In January 2009 we began to receive our weekly shipments of day-old meatbird chicks again, and this quieter time on the farm allowed us more time for reflection and discussion; more time to analyze what went well in 2008 and to dream and aspire to what we'd like to do better in 2009. 

Our introspection and analysis led us to the realization that there are many aspects of this "ethical farming continuum" for Kookoolan Farms that we'd like to change.  After five weeks of receiving 300 chicks a week, we decided to stop with the 1,500 chicks we already have, and to use 2009 to completely reinvent our poultry offerings.

Free-Range Poultry Housing

Nearly all poultry in the U.S. is raised indoors in confinement, in completely artificial, crowded, man-made environments.  For about six months out of the year, our meat chickens were raised outdoors on grass pasture, better in every way that the industry standard practices, and raised to 9 weeks of age rather than industry standard age of 5 weeks; for the other six months of the year, our meat chickens spend their lives indoors in our large, bright, and airy barn.  

For fully 12 months of the year, our egg-laying chickens are raised outdoors.  In a joint venture with Baird Family Orchards, we raised one batch of heirloom breed "Buckeye" broiler chickens outdoors under their peach orchards for 16 weeks.  In 2007 in a joint venture with Barbara Thomas Wines, we raised one batch of heirloom and Livestock Conservancy/Slow Foods Ark of Taste "Delaware" breed chickens outdoors in their vineyard for 18 weeks. 

The outdoors birds are a joy to watch, and they largely take care of themselves.  The indoor birds are a lot of work:  people must bring them their food and water and clean bedding, and must remove all their wastes.  

All three families were far happier with the health and quality of life both for our chickens and for ourselves, when the chickens are raised exclusively outdoors from as young as three weeks old, in a completely natural environment, and when we keep them with very low stocking densities.  In our climate, it is only possible to keep young birds  outdoors from May 15 until about the end of October.  Further, on hot sunny days, chickens need shade.  This summer we used portable tarps, but we were far happier, and so were they, with the natural shade provided in a fruit orchard.  Our open grass and clover pasture currently has no shade, but this month we planted a young orchard for the integrated purpose of chickens providing pest control for the fruit trees, and fruit trees providing shade and windfall fruit for the chickens.  Unfortunately these young trees will offer little shade in 2009.

The photo shows a thousand or so chickens under tarps in summer 2008.  Not bad, but we think we can do better.

Organic vs Biodynamic

All of our housing and raising practices qualify as certified organic; all of our slaughtering and packing plant practices could be certified organic.  Here the term "organic" really just refers to the absence of chemicals.

We have begun working in the realm of biodynamics as well, incorporating vermiculture (worms) and investigating pond-raised tilapia (fish).  We believe adding these enterprises to our farm goes a long way in continuing to compost all poultry wastes and to continue our 100% natural prevention and control of diseases. 

So far our poultry feed has not been certified organic -- more on feed sources a few paragraphs later.

Poultry Genetics

There has been substantial media focus on the rapidly-reducing number of species and varieties of foods available to humans.  A huge amount of our own species' calories comes from just corn, soy, wheat and rice.  Within these plant species, genetically modified varieties exist for all four, and a number of natural and heirloom varieties suited to particular climates, resistant to particular diseases, and possessing certain characteristics that were valued by the people who selected them (such as flavor, color, and nutrition) are either lost or threatened. 

It is the same for livestock breeds.  Modern domestic breeds of cows, pigs, chickens and turkeys are bred for rapid growth and docile temperament.  Older breeds that had been selected for high butterfat, good mothering skills, excellent taste, hardiness in certain climates, and strong immune systems are rapidly going extinct.  

Nearly all of the chickens that we raised in 2008 were Cornish Cross chickens.  These are the same broad-breasted chickens that are raised by virtually everyone in America; exact statistics are hard to come by, but well over 90% of all American chickens are Cornish Cross.  By the early 1950s, more than two-thirds of all commercial chickens in the United States carried the bloodlines of the winners of the "Chicken of Tomorrow" breeding contests of 1948 and 1951.  The poultry breeder who placed second in the contest developed the hybrid chicken:  female and male breeders are bred separately for different characteristics, and then bred together for egg and chick production in confinement factories.  The hybridization ensures that second-generation chicks will not produce good meat chickens, guaranteeing buyers for the hybrid chicks just as sterile seeds from Monsanto guarantees seed buyers.  

Commercial broiler chickens today grow to twice the finished weight in less than half the time and on less than half the feed, compared to chickens available in 1935, as shown in Table 1.  Summarized another way:  prior to the hybridization and industrialization of the poultry industry that began around 1935, the natural growth pattern of a meat chicken was a 16-week growth period to a finished carcass weight of less than three pounds.  Rapid growth in modern chickens has come at the expense of the birds' immune systems, resulting in weaker legs, more heart attacks, green muscle disease, and the need for antibiotics and medications to prevent large-scale outbreaks.  

Table 1, Broiler Productivity, 1935-95

Reproduced from Boyd, "Making Meat:  Science, Technology and American Poultry Production," published in the journal Technology and Culture, Volume 42, Number 4, October 2001, pp. 631-664.

Koorosh and I are having ethical struggles with nearly every aspect of what we've outlined here.  The delicious irony is that preserving these heirloom animal breeds requires both raising them and creating a market that demands these meats.  Older breeds of chickens have far better immune systems, and they are physically able to reproduce naturally.  Is it possible to grow an older breed of chicken, have our own flock reproduce naturally, raise the birds to the natural mature age of 16 weeks, and market a 3-pound bird profitably?  This is an experiment best done on a small scale, and not with the volume of birds we raised in 2008.

Feeding -- part one, the natural, whole-food diet

We've all watched wild birds:  they forage for wild bugs, worms, fruits, berries, seeds and grains.  This, or some subset of it for the more specialized species, is the natural diet of most birds.  Chickens are naturally omnivores; they are the descendants of dinosaurs.  They will eagerly eat any kind of meat or fish, and are even natural cannibals.  They are natural foragers, and our laying hens forage widely across our pastures.  This activity is good for them:  for exercise, for diversity of diet, for fresh air and sunshine (needed to obtain vitamin D, just as in humans), and to ward off boredom.  Cornish Cross broilers have been bred for rapid growth, part of which includes a reluctance to expend any calories.  They will choose to be hungry or thirsty rather than walk several feet to a waterer or feeder.  They need the food to be brought to them.  All commercial poultry food is processed (cooked) into a mash or a pellet, obscuring the quality of the input ingredients.  Nearly all chickens eat a diet that is mostly corn and soy, despite the fact that these foods were virtually not present at all in chickens' diets prior to 1900.  Processed food is sterile and is the equivalent of humans existing only on a soft-food diet.  It's not natural for the chicken.

Feeding -- part two.  Organic vs. conventional

Most commercial chicken feed is conventionally raised corn and soy, which means most of it comes from monoculture corporate-owned factory farms in the Midwest, using chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides.  At best these are high-producing hybrids which require large amount of fertilizers for their high yields; at worst they include GMO varieties.  The Mississippi, Ohio, and Missouri Rivers drain the bulk of America's bread basket, pouring millions of pounds of chemicals into the Gulf of Mexico.  The unnaturally high levels of phosphorus cause algae to flourish, sucking oxygen away from native plants and animals and causing "hypoxia".  

 These grains come to Oregon through the commodity market, using large amounts of fossil fuels for shipment by barge, train, or truck.  "Organic" grains are mostly imported into the U.S. rather than grown domestically; most come from China, Brazil, or Canada.  Chinese organic grains are of questionable certification and prone to containing unauthorized ingredients such as melamine and other chemicals; Brazilian grains may be grown without chemicals, but the soil fertility comes from unsustainable slash-and-burn agriculture of the Amazon basin.  Also, "certified organic" just means the absence of chemicals; lower-quality by-products rather than higher-quality whole grains are generally used in certified organic animal feeds.  Organic feeds can be as much as twice as expensive as conventional feeds, and when we raised small batches on organic feed we found that there did not exist a large enough consumer market to pay the premium required to support 100% certified organic feed.  Again, we're talking about a continuum, but the bottom line is that we have at least some kind of issue with every single feed source we've been able to locate.

The photo shows our 17 acres of custom-farmed, heirloom-variety "Yamhill" wheat, raised with no chemical inputs, less than 1/4^th mile from our own farm.

Feeding -- part three.  Local vs. distant

Whether conventionally or organically grown, most mills are buying their grains on the open commodities market, and the big producers don't want you to know from how far away the grains are coming.  We want to buy local and sell local, and a good source of locally-produced poultry feed simply isn't currently available.  

We and a few other farms are in the tentative stages of forming a farmer-owned grain co-op for the purpose of growing, milling, and selling our own local, organic, sustainable animal feeds.  This too cannot come to fruition in time for the summer 2009 season.

Handling, Slaughtering, and Processing

This part we feel that we do very well.  At Kookoolan Farms, "trucking to slaughter" involves a 200-yard-long, two-minute tractor ride.  Our birds undergo minimal handling stress, are killed humanely and with respect, and are processed cleanly, chilled rapidly, and delivered within 24 hours fresh to our customers.  We handle our birds so gently that more than 95% of the chickens we processed in 2008 were sold as fancy-quality (absolutely blemish-free with no bruises, dislocations, or broken bones) whole broiler/fryers.  However, and this probably is not a surprise to any of you, killing chickens, burying their offals for compost, and cleaning the slaughterhouse are not our favorite farm chores.

Summary

Thanks for your attention to this rather-too-long email.  We hope to see you at the March 22 Hillsdale Farmer's Market (www.hillsdalefarmersmarket.com) and at our farm (please call ahead for an appointment, 503-730-7535).  We remain committed to using the best, most natural farming practices and raising the best-quality foods for our family and for yours.

In good health,
Chrissie and Koorosh Zaerpoor
and Kookoolan Farms