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.