Karen sold so many turkeys this year that she left the van behind because only the pickup was big enough to take all those coolers full of fresh turkey to the farmer's market! This has never happened before. Everyone who had pre-ordered a turkey showed up, and that took care of every single turkey, so that went off splendidly.

We (and when I say "we," I mean Karen) raise old-fashioned Bourbon Red turkeys on pasture. The turkeys are in floorless pens that get moved to a fresh patch of grass twice a day. This gives the effect of free range without having the turkeys fly away into the woods, where they provide an early Thanksgiving for coyotes. I'm all for wildlife, but I think they should pay $6.00 a pound like everyone else.

A few potential problems loomed like storm clouds on the horizon, but then blew away. Our ice machine gave Karen some trouble a couple of times but not enough to interfere with production. A few turkeys got out of their pasture pens (yipe!) and needed to be herded back. Our water tank from our very slow wells got low as turkey butchering proceeded but we ended with a couple of hundred gallons to spare.

Customers were enthusiastic, and rightly so -- Karen's turkeys are the best! Because we sold every turkey we butchered, Karen found a 2009-vintage turkey at the bottom of the freezer and that's what we had. Delicious!

The end of the school year is upon us, the weather is nice and we're seeing more people at the two Corvallis Farmers' Markets, (Wed. and Sat., 9-11). Get your grass-fed chicken and eggs there, along with all the other fine produce of our local area!

For more information see the Markets' Web page at LocallyGrown.org

My employer, Citrix Systems, sent me the plaques for the patents that I helped develop for them. Woo-hoo! Ten patents about different kinds of network acceleration, which is what my day job is about.

The Corvallis Indoor Winter Market started a new season yesterday, with plenty of happy customers and vendors. We were there with grass-fed chicken and eggs, and a lot of other local farms were there, too, selling meat, cool-season vegetables, nuts, honey, baked goods, craft items — you name it. This is good stuff: you should see how much stuff the vendors buy from each other, and we're in the know!

If you're in the Corvallis area, why not treat yourself to a Saturday breakfast or lunch out and combine it with a trip to the Indoor Market? Come on — you deserve it!

The Indoor Market runs from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM at Guerber Hall at the Benton County Fairgrounds. See you there!

The weather is turning colder but we're having an unusual string of sunny days. This is good! The cool temperatures are a clear warning about winter coming, overcoming my procrastination, and the sunshine makes it easy to prepare. My wardrobe has already changed -- I'm in flannel-shirt mode, and will be until April.

Because of the work we had done on our water wells, we have exposed piping that has to be winterized, and it's time to mow the pasture one last time before winter sets in. It won't do to have tall grass up against the sides of the house in the winter -- it leads to rot.

We've got about two years' worth of wood in the shed, so that's no problem.

While our hens are out on pasture all winter, in small draggable houses, little needs to be done for them. The last step after all the mowing is to string several hundred feet of extension cord so we can put birdbath heaters in all the waterers. The garden hose will freeze on cold nights, but the daytime highs are almost always above freezing in this climate, so keeping the waterers from freezing solid is adequate.

We got 200 day-old pullet chicks today. Fall's a good time to brood chicks if you're not in a particularly hard climate. The weather gets cooler as the chicks get bigger and more cold-tolerant, which works really well. These chicks will start laying before Easter.

Lots of people have had great experiences with fall brooding after reading my book, Success With Baby Chicks, which goes into year-round brooding in great detail.

When we were getting started on the farm, we got a great deal on used incubators -- we paid something like ten cents on the dollar. How did we get such a great deal? Because the Emu bubble had just burst.

You see, for a couple of years, there was this huge emu fad. The idea was that emu feathers, eggs, meat, and oil were all in tremendous demand, that any emu with a pulse was valuable breeding stock, and that any idiot could become a millionaire by getting in on the ground floor. Stories of fabulous prices paid for emu eggs in unnamed New York restaurants were used as proof of the huge demand.

So there was a tremendous rush into the emu-raising business. A five-acre ranch could make you rich, working only part-time. Wow!

It was painful to watch the bubble burst. The bubble burst the instant the demand of eager new farmers wasn't enough to soak up all the emu eggs and spare emus, meaning that, for the first time, you had to try to sell to consumers. And it turned out that consumers had never wanted emu products in the first place. Demand for emu products had always been very limited, and the focus of the industry had been to find more farmers to sucker, rather than to build a genuine demand for the product.

And that's how we came to buy several GQF Sportsman incubators for ten cents on the dollar. The country was awash in emus and emu equipment that nobody wanted, sold at desperation prices by people who were quitting the business and perhaps losing their farms.

This sort of thing plays out every day, usually on a much smaller scale. The alternative farming business is plagued with fads. At any given moment, there are half a dozen widely publicized fads that are every bit as idiotic as the emu bubble. Want to keep your farm? Don't go there.

The key think to keep in mind is how much your actual customers are willing to pay. I don't have any mythical New York restaurant customers, so I have no outlet for insanely overpriced emu eggs. If I were to try to sell fresh, grass-raised emu eggs at the farmer's market, I'd be lucky to sell one a week! They'd be more in demand as blown eggs for craft projects than for eating. This is not a base on which I could build financial security!

You have to sell to the market you have actual access to. Sure, you can bet the farm that you'll gain access to a new market with a new product, but the first rule of gambling is, "When you run out of money, you can't play anymore." Betting the farm and losing the farm go together. I never bet the farm.

But I've gone through this experience on a small scale several times. There was the time when we got 100 Americauna pullets to satisfy our customers' oft-repeated desire for green eggs. It turned out that what our customers wanted was not "green eggs" so much as "green eggs at the same price as other eggs." The problem is that the green-egg hens only lay half as many eggs. Not a single customer was willing to pay a price that made green eggs worth our time.

Most fads are like that: lots of talk, but the customer won't put his money where his mouth is. That's why there's so much fraud in the alternative food biz: many customers are too cheap to buy what they claim they want, but misleadingly labeled products are often within their price range.

Right now, with chicken feed at record high prices, the fad is for people to badmouth the most affordable ingredients like corn and soy, and ask for eggs from chickens fed hideously expensive or totally unobtainable substitutes. But they won't pay the $10 per dozen that it would cost to satisfy their desire. It's almost all talk. We don't use organic feed, and our eggs are the most expensive in our area (because they're the best). Anyone using more expensive feed than ours is likely to give up the business, because their costs are higher but they're not getting as much for their eggs. Even at the best of times, the profitability of the grass-fed egg business is nothing to write home about, and taking on burdensome extra costs just makes things worse.

You have to be extra-careful in situations where the customer's fervor exceeds your own. You need to do things that you believe in, not what other people believe in. Sure, your customer has to believe in your products, too, but you'll never get anywhere trying to satisfy beliefs you don't share.

When I got started in farming, I was very skeptical of the alternative-food dogma, and rightly so. Back then it was all, "Soy is our god, bow down the magic bean." Vegetarianism was big, and soy worship was the cornerstone of vegetarianism. But I like meat and dislike tofu, and, besides, the food faddists get on my nerves, so I ended up in the meat and egg biz. When the tide turned and the mantra became, "Soy is the devil, we must exorcise the demon bean!" I wasn't too surprised. Irritated, yes. Surprised, no.

So my advice is to be careful with, "The customer is always right." They don't have skin in the game and can pick up or drop a fad in an instant. Talking the talk costs them nothing. It's different when you're trying to produce something they'll like. Production is expensive and time-consuming. Let's all be careful out there.

You know how it goes: you move into a four-bedroom farmhouse with an immense barn and a seven-bay vehicle shed, and after a few years, all of it is bulging with stuff. Where did it all come from? What's it doing here? And why can't I find anything anymore?

So for the first time ever, I've rented a huge commercial dumpster (30 cubic yards). It showed up in late afternoon, so I didn't put much into it today -- a couple of broken-down wheelbarrows, the kids' childhood little red wagon, sadly and irreparably rusted, a tractor gas tank with a hole in it, several decrepit office chairs and other defunct furniture. Soon the balance will shift as more farm stuff gets put in -- rusted-out feeders and the like.

In case you're wondering, it's going to cost me roughly $300 to have the dumpster delivered empty and then taken away full, more or less depending on how long I keep it, since there's a $16 daily rental fee on top of everything else. I'm sure I can fill it, so the issue is, "How fast can I fill it?" If I can fill it fast, I save on rent.

The driver who delivered it, interestingly enough, used to live here on Norton Creek Road when he was in high school. I keep running into people like that. Seems a little strange, since there really aren't many houses here, but it seems as if everyone lived here once upon a time!

A lot of our clutter is recyclable. I'm pretty sure that Allied Waste will separate out all the iron and steel with an electromagnet, so I may not go to the trouble of recycling it myself -- not if the price of scrap metal is as low as I think it is. It's a long drive to the scrap metal dealer, and I don't see the point of burning lots of gas to recycle scrap metal unless it's a money-maker! I can recycle cardboard and such locally. Other stuff can go to Goodwill and other local nonprofits.

The dumpster has metal doors at one end, so you can carry stuff inside -- you don't have to heave it over the top the way you do on a smaller dumpster. It's ideal for the kind of large objects that you'd never fit into a regular trash can -- things like mattresses, water heaters, or twisted metal roofing from chicken houses that did a tumbleweed imitation during a storm.

And I've already found some missing treasures!

When picking a date for the first day of the farmer's market season, could you find a better choice than Earth Day?

(Okay, technically Earth Day isn't until Thursday, but the big blow-out was Saturday, and it was great!)

The market opened in beautiful spring weather and attracted swarms of happy customers. It was like being hit by a cheerfulness bomb! You should have been there.

As usual, the other vendors outdid themselves. Imagine the kinds of produce that ought to be ripe by mid-April, and the quality you'd expect for such early produce. Then multiply it by ten. That's the Corvallis farmer's market. All the aging hippies who've been in the organic produce biz since the Seventies have gotten really good at it! Competition for quality, variety, and earliness is intense. There were even some local strawberries -- six weeks before the regular season.

I sold out of chicken in about ten seconds. Customers know we're the best! Once we're in full production, supplies ought to last longer. The eggs held out better, and I sold about 60 dozen, which is excellent for an opening day.

The day was enlivened by the Procession of the Species, a parade that's always held on Earth Day in Corvallis, featuring kids and adults in animal costumers. That was great!

The Corvallis farmers' markets are something special. Wish you were here!

Not so long ago, springtime was a difficult time on the farm. You had spent a lot of your cash during the winter, but harvest time was many months away. Spring faced you with your biggest expenses of the year: getting equipment back into shape, hiring extra labor, plowing, and planting.

On top of that, meat is hard to come by, since you thinned your herds in late fall to match the level of fodder you could store over the winter, and all the animals that you could spare are already gone. And you're even worse off where vegetables are concerned. Anything that doesn't keep for five or six months is gone.

So there you are: strapped for cash and with an inadequate diet. You can't even plant a garden yet, let alone harvest from it. What's a farmer to do?

But do not despair! A miracle is at hand to rescue you from your plight! It's called -- the egg!

Well before planting season, the hens perk up and start laying eggs like crazy. They have to start laying early so that the baby chicks will hatch during a season where the living is easy. And this means that your flock of chickens transforms your farm from an operation where you make money only once a year, at harvest time, to one where you have something to sell every day. And peak production happens right when you need cash the most!

On top of this, eggs are nature's perfect food, and provide your family with nutrition that was sadly lacking once the cow dried up and the last of the greens were gone. Imagine going from the lassitude of empty pockets and borderline malnutrition to the vitality of cash flow and health! Eggs did that.

And, as if that weren't enough, in a typical farm family, eggs provided a degree of social equity. Field crops and large-animal operations were considered to be a manly business, while the chicken flock was usually the wife's domain. She'd tend the flock, market the eggs, and spend the money. Every general store and feed store bought eggs, so eggs were as easy to spend as cash. The humble hen built a lot of equality into a system that didn't have much otherwise.

You've probably guessed already that Easter is associated with eggs because that's what's plentiful during the Easter season. It's impossible to overstate the importance of spring eggs in the old-time farm economy.