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.

While this story about eggs and weight loss isn't new, it was news to me! Basically, one group of overweight people were given egg breakfasts and another bagel and cream cheese breakfasts with equal numbers of calories, and the egg-eaters ate less during the rest of the day, felt less hungry, lost more weight, and had more energy!

"Where can I sign up?" you ask. Well, you could do a lot worse than to throw out your cereal and bagels and eat a more traditional breakfast. Grass-fed eggs, for preference. The concept seems to be that protein satisfies your hunger longer, while carbohydrates set you up for renewed cravings a short time after eating.

The Atkins Diet, Grass-Fed Goodness, and Me

High-protein breakfasts (and lunches and dinners) have worked for me, too. I've lost 45 pounds [Update, March 5 -- Make that fifty pounds!] on the Atkins Diet, which I started a couple of years ago, and it certainly reduced my appetite. I enjoyed food as much as ever, but I ate less of it. Grass-fed eggs, pastured pork, and grass-fed chicken that we raise right here on the farm have been a big factor in my success. My only regret is that no one has bred a pig 50 feet long so it has enough bacon! We always run out of bacon first, and you just can't buy bacon like we get from our own pigs.

Another thing that helps me is to weigh myself every day and put a dot on a weight-loss chart. This give me daily feedback about my progress. If I start backsliding, I see it and start managing my eating more strictly.

I recommend a digital scale for this — they're very affordable these days, and they're a lot more accurate than the old spring-type models. It's best to buy tools you can trust!

The Most Important Thing is Not to Quit

Probably the most important thing is to make a firm decision that you're never, ever going to give up. You're going to keep working on weight loss, one way or another. Your tactics may change, but the goal will remain constant. If you fall off your diet, that's okay — it doesn't mean a thing. We all mess up sometimes, and that means that the occasional failure is normal, expected, meaningless. But you're going to get right back on the diet again.

You can switch diets, too, if you get stuck or get tired of the current one. You can do anything you want, except giving up!

How I Used Self-Hypnosis to Get Unstuck

I'm still not at my goal, and I've stalled a couple of times. I got stuck after losing 20 pounds, but used a self-hypnosis recording to get me unstuck and lose another 25 pounds. I was impressed!

I don't know what you think about hypnosis, but you can't argue with success, can you? Oh, wait, of course you can -- but you won't, because you're too considerate. Science has caught up with hypnosis over the past couple of decades, and it's lot less mysterious than it used to be. This is reflected in the format of self-hypnosis programs that you can buy on the Web. They tend to start with a calm discussion of the problem and its solution (say, weight loss), then walk you through some progressive relaxation to hopefully get you in a receptive state of mind, then they restate the solution again in a somewhat different way, often using anecdotes or metaphors in addition to making obvious suggestions like, "You're going to get slimmer because that's how you want to be."

I'm fond of the products from Hypnosis Downloads.com, which has a huge selection of downloads. Also, they're use less gimmickry than anybody. No echo chambers, no new-age music -- they're more straightforward and workmanlike than anybody else I've run into. Not to mention that their prices are reasonable and they have steep volume discounts if you buy more than one program.

I'm also talking a long walk every day and doing my farm chores, but I've done all those things for ages and they've never caused me to lose weight. The Atkins Diet and the self-hypnosis are what have worked for me. Two years so far, and no backsliding, though I'm still not where I want to be.

But eating eggs for breakfast is a good start!

These two videos document the "Chicken of the Future" contest from 1948, showing what, for the time, were the best chickens and the best practices for raising them (some of which most of us would envy, even today!)

They're worth watching just for the glimpses they give of good chicken-raising technique, but be careful to take a good hard look at the butchered carcasses! They look just like rubber chickens. And the chickens of 60 years ago grew more slowly, had higher mortality, and were less productive than modern hybrids.

This contest was very well run. Earlier egg-laying contests were easy to game, and the results of the contests had nothing in common with what you'd get if you bought baby chicks from the contestants. They were basically an accidental scam.

For the Chicken of the Future test, they started with a large number of hatching eggs -- too many to cherry-pick the ones from the best hens -- which were all incubated together. The day-old chicks were brooded in identical pens, then moved into different identical pens after the brooding period. When the cockerels were 12 weeks old, they were all butchered at the same time (with winning pens giving a dressed carcass weighing probably a little more than two pounds!) subjected to USDA inspection and grading, and generally compared with one another.

Feed consumption and overall profitability were kept track of. Profitability was affected by chick mortality, carcass value of the cockerels, rate of lay and size of eggs of the pullets, mortality among the pullets, and feed consumption. Careful records were kept. In the Forties, dual-purpose breeds like New Hampshire Reds usually won in total profitability -- so much so that no one seems to have bothered entering any White Leghorns!

Another interesting point was that the contest flocks had outbreaks of disease, which was considered routine at the time. Up until the Twenties, when small farm flocks were the rule, sickness in poultry flocks was uncommon, but it got worse and worse as flock sizes increased, reaching its peak in the Forties and Fifties, in spite of the introduction of antibiotics. Gradually, better biosecurity methods were introduces and the amount of disease plummeted. An outbreak of disease in a contest flock would not be considered routine today.

We're dropping our prices this week. There's no more room in the refrigerator, so we need to drum up some extra sales. Since there are other egg vendors at the Saturday Farmer's Market, undercutting their cheapest eggs with our cheapest eggs ought to draw in some bargain-conscious customers.

Setting prices is a screwy business. Most farmers are too insecure to do it well, and end up setting their prices too low, increasing the odds that they will fail. Just the concept of, "What's the right price?" is pretty much an imponderable: a question with so many ramifications that your mind can spin around in tight little circles forever.

So we let our refrigerator set our prices for us. The process is almost entirely brainless. It works like this: If our refrigerator is full of unsold eggs, it's time to lower prices. If there are tumbleweeds blowing through an empty refrigerator, it's time to raise prices. That's all there is to it.

Once you let the prices float, your attention shifts to more important things, namely: "What can I do so customers enthusiastically help to empty my refrigerator in spite of high prices?"

Step One is to have the best eggs ever. Life is way easier if your customers stick to you like glue and spread the news by word-of-mouth because your product is so good.

Step Two is to get people to notice. Let's face it, eggs have zero mindshare with most people. If your refrigerator is bulging with eggs, one effect of lowering your prices is to draw in some skeptics who wouldn't try your product at the old price. If your stuff is the best, some of the skeptics will become converts. Sales are the simplest way to move this process along.

Step Three is to scatter instantly grasped indicators of what you are, so people get it. Wearing overalls and a straw hat at the farmers' market, having pictures of happy hens on green grass, smiling, and not being a jerk to your customers are all good. (Don't wear clothes that feel too much like a costume, though, unless you like that sort of thing. If you go all stiff and unnatural, it doesn't help.) People have this range of mental images of what a farmer ought to be. If you happen to fit one of them, flaunt it.

But avoid slickness. If you live on a real farm, slickness tends to be outside your grasp anyway, because everything you own gets muddied, faded, and battered. Customers are aware of this on some level.

Okay, so someone has given you some exotic ingredient you've never heard of, like okra tofu, or banana seeds, or worm legs. Should you feed it to the chickens, and, if so, how?

The general rule for feeding miscellaneous stuff to chickens is to feed it in a separate feeder, while continuing to give them all the ordinary chicken feed they want. The chickens are pretty bored with the same old chicken feed and are sure to take an interest in anything new. They'll eat as much as they want.

The trick is to avoid trying to make them eat more. Chickens are quite good at figuring out whether feed is good or bad, and how much is good for them. In fact, they're better than you. So never starve them in order to make them finish off their yummy dish of politician's hearts. Just take away what they don't eat.

Try to feed them only what they'll clean up in a short time -- 20 minutes is traditional. In particular, don't let things that are capable of spoiling sit out to grow bacteria and mold, or attract flies and rats. The refrigerator is your friend. Use it to store the excess, rather than setting out too much.

You can also do it the hard way by looking up the foodstuff in question in a poultry nutrition reference. My favorite is Feeding Poultry by F. G. Heuser, which is one of the old poultry books that I brought back into print. It doesn't have an entry for politician's hearts, but it does list some pretty bizarre stuff, like whale meal (page 170) or silkworm chrysalis flour (page 173). The mind boggles. But you'll still want to use the "try it and see" technique with a new ingredient.

I can never find a hammer. Or a shovel, for that matter. I've got one around here someplace, but that doesn't get the ditch nailed.

One day I couldn't stand it anymore -- I was spending way more time looking for hammers than I was using them. So I went down to the hardware store and bought five hammers: four unpretentious Chinese hammers that they were practically giving away, and one nice American one. (This was in the days when the Chinese could build hammers but not crescent wrenches. Things are a lot better now.)

This plan worked great. It's hard to lose five hammers. It took years!

The same is true for shovels. Actually, it's worse with shovels. Hammers last forever: you just can't find them. Shovels break eventually, especially if you run them over with the tractor. "Oh, there it is!"

So is it moral, frugal, or prudent to buy many more tools than you really need? Define "really need," bucko. Before I bought the five hammers, it wasn't working. Afterwards, it was. I rest my case.

I had a similar experience with cell phones. My son Dan has trouble keeping track of his cell phone, and every few months he runs one through the wash. Lecturing has proven ineffective -- and you couldn't pay me to become his laundry maid and go through his pockets. What to do?

Often the first step is to say, "Suppose the problem never gets better. What's the cost?" It turns out that you can buy used cell phones (just like his old ones) on eBay for almost nothing. I just bought two for a total of $16.00, including shipping. So I gave him one, and he owes me $8. And when he runs it through the wash, I'll give him the spare for another $8. After that, he can buy his own replacements directly.

He can afford this tiny expense, so who cares? Not me. It takes a couple of minutes for me to log onto Verizon Wireless and activate a new phone, but that's it. It's not enough to worry about. We've all got bigger fish to fry.

So my advice is: let's not worship our tools. Sometimes they get lost or broken prematurely, but if this isn't not expensive, forget about it. Manage your time. Stop obsessing about your stuff.

Also, it's worth recognizing that expensive possessions are a burden. You feel compelled to protect and nurture them. There are better places to invest these feelings.

Now, I'm not saying that someone who uses a hammer all day long should use a cheap one. The best hammer you can buy is none too good under these circumstances. But it's still just a hammer -- mass-produced, identical to a zillion others, easily replaceable, and affordable. I'll bet the best hammer you can find is cheaper than taking the family out to the movies. So buy two hammers while you're at it, and don't freak out when someone wants to borrow one.

Sure, some tools are fragile or customized, and we need to keep other people's mitts off them. But this is a bug, not a feature: a burden, not an advantage. We should keep this sort of thing down to a minimum.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go buy some more hammers.

The best thing about farming is that it allows you to become an eccentric -- everybody around you expects this -- which is enough all by itself to gradually make you rich.

Consider:

• Farmers typically stay on the same farm forever, thus relieving themselves of the expense of buying a bigger McMansion every few years. For most people, buying houses they don't need is the stupidest waste of money in their lives.
• Buy a fancy new car? When your gravel road is going to ding it up and it's always going to have half a ton of feed or livestock in the back? Are you crazy? Besides, no one expects you to. Everyone smiles and waves when you drive by in your elderly pickup. That takes care of the second-stupidest waste of money.
• Nor are you tempted to buy a flavor-of-the-month politically-correct car, like a hybrid. Where does the half-ton of feed go? Even the most repellent snob won't begrudge a small farmer his 10-mpg pickup truck. Face it, you're surrounded by a cloud of political correctness (and possibly smoke from your worn rings) wherever you go.
• And the same goes for clothes, too. A farmer doesn't gain any points for wearing the latest fashions.

So even if your part-time farm never makes a dime, it provides you with a tremendous level of social approval for living like a cheapskate. If you take the slightest advantage of this, you're likely to retire rich.

(Assuming that farmers ever retire. I think they live forever.)

Recently, some teenagers in my area were camping out and decided to kill and eat a duck for their supper. Bad idea. They were caught.

Now, in the real world, this would have been treated like the imbecile case of poaching that it is, but Benton County is run by city people, who are crazy. There was a hue and cry for a charge of felony animal abuse. Lots of people were itching to get those kids under psychiatric treatment. What could be a stronger sign of mental illness than hunting out of season?

You can see the article here.

This is not an isolated case. A guy in Albany was cited because he had an old, skinny horse, whose skinniness and age were taken as signs of neglect, even though there was a younger, well-fleshed horse on the same pasture (how can you starve one horse and not the other when they're running around together all the time?). If you're not in a rural county, it's important to slaughter your animals before they become old, skinny, or lame, or you'll be arrested. Even if they can be cured, a convalescence within sight of a cell-phone Samaritan may land you in jail. Don't risk it.

If you're planning to move back to the land, don't make the mistake I did by moving to a county dominated by city people. They'll sic the law on you. Find a rural country, preferably one dominated by farmers. You're trying to get away from urban attitudes as well as urban architecture, and this requires that you have at least a county line between yourself and the nearest urban population.

Farmers on the edge of town have always been slapped with nuisance lawsuits for being farmers (the sound of roosters crowing or tractors running, dust from plowing, flies, etc.). This is one reason why such farmers are eager to sell out to developers: city people won't let them farm. But now we're being threatened with jail or mental institutions.

I grew up in Del Norte County in California, which is an impoverished county in the redwoods. The largest segment of the economy was unemployed loggers, and poaching was universal. The game wardens looked the other way if you weren't selling venison in the street, because it helped people feed their families. But by the standards of law enforcement here in Benton County, everyone I grew up with belonged in the loony bin. Go figure.