A while ago, Staples had a promotion that entitled me to a box of fifty ball-point pens. So I took them up on it and soon I had these pens all over my house. The only problem is, they don't write. Okay, sometimes they write, but not often, and not for long. They don't like some kinds of paper and they tend to just balk for no reason.

Now, I'm not stupid, and that means that I'm going to avoid Staples store brands for the rest of my life. From now on, every time I try to use a pen that doesn't work, I will think of Staples. Even if the pen is someone else's! In spite of many positive experiences over the years, they've convinced me that their company is run by the kind of morons who are happy to put their name on junk.

So I ordered a box of Bic Round Stic pens from Amazon.com, which is where I'm doing all my shopping these days because of Amazon Prime, which give me "free" second-day shipping if I pay $79 a year. I already bought enough stuff on Amazon that I'd save money on the deal, but it's pretty wild that now I can buy a lens cap of a box of pens and have free shipping. I live in the country, and a trip into town is time-consuming. Hooray for mail-order!

But back to my story. So my Bic pens came in, and on the side of the box was the following statement: "Quality Promise: Bic Does Not Make Store Brands."

What does this mean? I think it means that Staples is not the only group of idiots in charge of advertising and promotion, and that many, many companies are dissipating their customers' goodwill by handing out inferior pens with their name on it. Why not put your competitor's names on crummy pens, you dimwits! Or maybe pay the extra two cents and get a pen that writes.

Bic, on the other hand, makes a good-though-unpretentious pen that lives up to its motto of, "Writes first time, every time." If I pick up a Bic pen that's been lying around with its cap off for a few years, it usually writes perfectly. And on their boxes, they go to the trouble of distancing themselves from their so-called competition. If you buy a pen that doesn't say "Bic" on it, they imply, you're asking for trouble. Fair enough.

Sometimes people ask me about competition, and my answer is always, "What competition?" I think you can see why. Hardly anyone has Bic's good sense. They're mostly like Staples.

My livestock water is pumped out of a brook that have the usual kinds of crud in it -- bits of plant matter, bugs, silt, etc. These tend to clog livestock waterers and also the foot valve at the bottom of the inlet pipe. Sure, the foot valve is screened, sort of, but the screen is too coarse, and sometimes I have to pull the twigs and crud out of it.

So I got tired of this and looked for a finer screen. My eyes fell on an old orange string glove. Bingo! I pulled it over the foot valve and held it on with a zip tie. The water is running cleaner and the foot valve probably won't clog for a year.

This is probably the weirdest improvised repair I'll do all year.

Update, August 15, 2009: The glove clogged with silt and I removed it. It didn't look a lot different when clogged, so I'm going to replace it with something that looks a lot different when clogged -- window screening, perhaps. It sure worked while it lasted, though!

Our six pastured pigs are getting awfully big, and they have minds of their own. Every few days, Karen has to move their electric fence to give them access to a new swath of pasture, since grass-fed pork is the name of the game here. Once the fence is off, they can escape if they want to. They've done it before. How can you deal with this problem?

I was out mowing and I watched Karen work her magic. She had a trick all worked out: the pigs were hungry. They look to her for food. So their first impulse is to follow her around, not to leave and go foraging on their own. As she worked, she'd pause once in a while to fetch a few hard-boiled eggs from the pickup, and give these to the pigs. This kept them close at hand and totally under her control until she was done. Then she gave them the last of the eggs, stepped over the fence, turned on the juice, and was gone. A job well done!

A feed bucket can do more than any amount of yelling or pleading.

By the way, we take all our cracked or otherwise unsalable eggs and hard-boil them for the pigs. During the off-season, when we have no pigs, we fill up a chest freezer with hard-boiled eggs. Pigs will gladly eat frozen eggs, shell and all. If the eggs are stuck to the carton, which they usually are after having been frozen, we feed them carton and all. The pigs have nothing but time, and will happily separate the eggs from the carton on their own.

Grass-fed, egg-fed, pastured pork is like nothing you can find in the store. Feel free to envy us.

A long time ago, someone, probably my dad, told me that "80% of all carburetion problem are really electrical." In other words, your engine doesn't run, and you suspect a fuel or carburetor problem, when all the time it was an ignition problem.

This happened to me over the last week, when my tractor (a Ford 640) would not start. I wasn't the one operating it, and the issue became confused because he didn't use the fuel shut-off, so we really did have a carburetion problem -- the carburetor was flooded.

I messed around with various stupid and irrelevant actions until I finally woke up and brought a voltmeter into play. I discovered that the ignition fuse had voltage at both ends, but the fuse HOLDER had no voltage at the far end. It had corroded and wasn't making a good connection. I burnished this up a bit, the voltage magically appeared, and the tractor started right up.

This, by the way, is what you get when you use inferior parts. When I converted the tractor from 6V to 12V operation, I added an el cheapo fuse block. I should have bought a marine-quality one. Never again!

Another take-away is that, if you allow things to go downhill, it's hard to tell what's going on. I was down to one working headlamp, and then zero. With working headlights, I can use the lights as an impromptu voltmeter, because the way things are wired, the ignition is getting voltage if the lights are. But with both of them burned out, I had to go find my multimeter. Life is simpler if only one thing is broken at a time!

Nevertheless, I designed a T-shirt this morning, commemorating old iron, which you can see below. After all, my tractor is older than I am!

When we were starting out, we believed that old-fashioned breeds of chickens would do better on old-fashioned farms. A lot of people believe this. The idea is that heritage breeds are best, while modern commercial breeds are suitable only for factory farming.

Alas, that's not how it works. For starters, there has always been a distinction between show birds (which are supposed to look pretty) and utility birds (which are supposed to turn a profit through their meat or eggs). Never the twain shall meet. Once heritage breeds were supplanted by modern hybrids, that was the end of the heritage utility breeds! You've basically got a bunch of low-producing show birds on the one hand, and high-producing modern hybrids on the other. The middle range, with some exceptions, has gone extinct.

And even utility breeds of yesteryear are nothing to write home about. I did extensive work with California Grays and Rowley New Hampshires, both of which were cutting-edge in the Fifties, but modern hybrids ran rings around them in our hyper-old-fashioned pastured environment. Hmmmm...

In fact, the hybrids are just better, period. They grow fast and have low mortality. The egg-type hens lay huge numbers of high-quality eggs, while the broiler produce enormous amounts of high-quality meat compared to the heritage breeds.

Last time I did the math, I figured that, to sell heritage broilers instead of modern Cornish Cross broilers, I'd have to charge three times as much to make the same money. Not only were there no takers, but I myself was far from convinced that the old-timey birds were worth even the same price per pound.

So my advice is the same as always: test, test, test. We tried everything, and settled on what worked for us. The things you're told and the things that work are never the same things, so you have to test.

My July Newsletter has just been emailed. If you're not a subscriber, you might consider joining (near the top right corner of the page here). Topics include quality in produce and pastured pigs.

It's raining here today -- unusual in an Oregon summer. But the chickens don't mind very much. It'll help keep the grass green, which is good, because the chickens won't eat it once it starts to brown off.

It's tempting to fill your day with farm chores, but the fact is that farming (and rural living in general) is filled with projects that have to get done, projects that happen once in a while but not every day. If you fill up your time with daily chores, you won't be able to get anything done!

This is doubly true if you have a day job, as I do (in the WAN acceleration group at Citrix Systems). There's been a big deadline crunch that's kept me from getting my newsletter out on time or even respond to email properly. But I get my daily chores done because (a) I've purposely kept a lid on how many I accept, and (b) There are limits to how much I'm willing to let things slide in a crisis.

I figure that 2-3 hours of daily chores are about all a full-time farmer can afford. For a part-time farmer, it's much less. Too many things come up that require large blocks of time -- some planned, some not. The chicken houses have to get built, escaped livestock have to be coralled, failed machinery has to be repaired -- it all takes time, and lots of it.

So keep that chore load low!

It's an article of faith these days that selling your farm products directly to the consumer is the only way to go. Ah, if it were only that simple!

The nice thing about selling direct is that face-to-face sales build trust and loyalty, provides direct feedback, and eliminates the middleman, allowing you to keep all the money. All well and good, but it's awfully labor-intensive, especially if you live a long way from your customers. Farms, you have probably noticed, are way out in the country, and you're a long way from your neighbors, let alone your customers.

We started with direct sales of free-range eggs at the farmer's market, then added a couple of local supermarkets. A farmer's market takes about seven hours, including travel time. To deliver to three local stores takes us about two hours. Each channel gets about half our output.

Obviously, it would be a lot easier to add a couple more stores than farmer's markets, and stores are open year-round, while farmer's markets aren't.

Wholesale prices in our neck of the woods run about 2/3 to 3/4 of retail prices, so eggs that retail for $4.00 bring $2.67 - $3.00. Because it takes less time to stock a supermarket than attend a farmer's market, selling to stores often give you a higher hourly return in spite of the lower prices.

I've never sold through distribution, but I knew a guy who did. He had 1,200 free-range hens and sold all his output to high-class restaurants in Portland, 90 minutes away. After a while, he signed up a distributor to handle his eggs, picking them up at the farm and delivering them to his customers. Because the distributor was already headed that way and already handled most of these accounts with their other products, they could do this very cheaply. Time-consuming trips to Portland were thus eliminated, freeing up time for farming and living.

The fact is that high-grade produce grown in small quantities simply doesn't make it into big cities. It's all snapped up by gourmets in the nearest large town. It doesn't start spilling over into big cities until production exceeds what the closer towns can handle.

Of course, big cities are where most of the money is, so overcoming distribution issues is one path to higher profits. Distribution is nothing to sneeze at. Another possibility is direct sales via mail-order. This is a problem with eggs, since they're fragile, but is practical with other products. The main issue is that the product needs to have a high value per pound (so shipping doesn't dominate the costs) and be of extremely high quality, so gourmets will make it worth your while. And the gourmets have to find out that it exists, too, one way or another.

Classics never go out of style. I still use the same type of programmable calculator today that I did thirty years ago.

It seems hard to believe, but thirty years ago I plunked down $299 for an HP-41C calculator, which had just been released by Hewlett-Packard. I was a penniless college student at the time, and for the life of me I can't remember where I got the money.

I was living in Corvallis at the time, attending Oregon State University. The HP-41C had been designed across town at the Hewlett-Packard campus, and many of my classmates were HP employees.

The 41C was seriously programmable, had the then-revolutionary ability to display text, was indestructible, and had a nearly infinite battery life. Friend used its alpha display functions to create cheat sheets, but I never bothered. Setting up handy programs before midterms was a lifesaver, though.

Karen also had a 41C, which died about ten years later when her backpack fell off the luggage rack of her motorcycle and was run over by a motorist. Much later, my original 41C developed a crack in its display and became generally flaky. So we bought several of the slightly newer model, the 41CV. We got them used on eBay. They're still going strong in spite of being around 20 years old. They stopped making the calculators in 1990, sad to say.

I use these calculators at the farmer's markets, and people are constantly noticing. "Hey, I worked on that project!"

To commemorate these durable bits of local history, I've created a T-shirt, available through Zazzle.com below. Keep those 41C's running!

Thirty Years of HP-41: 1979-2009 by artsyandroid

I've been meditating on the ideal roof for a chicken coop. It ought to have the following properties:

• Easy to install.
• Cheap.
• Lasts forever.
• Strong.
• Rainwater doesn't cause mud in front of the house.
• Chickens don't roost on top.

Also, if you live in the suburbs, it should be pretty enough to shut up your pompous neighbors.

Most of my houses have shed roofs made of galvanized steel roofing. The configuration is a "shed roof," which just means that it's higher and the front than at the back, so rainwater pours off at the back of the house where is causes less trouble.

My roofs are just metal, with no plywood decking underneath, and no insulation. This is appropriate for highly ventilated houses with enough airflow that the inside temperature and humidity are about the same as outside. You don't have to worry about condensation in such a house.

In a tightly closed chicken house, you'd want an insulated roof, but you'd have to be nuts to build such a house. Ventilation is the magic bullet for chicken health. (You'll want to read Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, one of the classic poultry books I've reprinted, for complete information.)

My houses have purlins but no rafters. The sheet metal is nailed directly to the purlins with roofing nails, meaning that they are supported only every four feet. This has worked well for me. One thing I've learned, though, is that if the roof sticks out very far in front of or behind the house, you need to nail a 2x4 across the underside of the very front of the roof, and one at the very back, to keep the sheets of metal roofing from flapping in high winds. Otherwise they'll work themselves loose.

One problem I haven't solved is that of keeping chickens from roosting on the roof. Chickens like sleeping as high in the air as they can, and that means the roof. My roofs have a shallow slope and they can sleep anywhere on the roof they want without sliding off. A steeper roof is clearly called for. I haven't done any experiments to discover where the sweet spot is. Maybe I should!