Online and Offline Predators

I logged into the blog the other day and was informed by the blog software that I had a quarter of a million comments awaiting moderation!

Of course, none of these comments seemed to have anything to do with my blog. I was just being victimized by one of the botnets, whose zombie army of infected PC’s was endlessly uploading exhortations to buy various kinds of junk.

I disabled comments altogether to keep it down to a dull roar. Since spammers are the worst programmers ever, the botnet hasn’t really noticed, anymore than they noticed that not one of their last quarter-million comments has been posted. You can see why these guys aren’t holding down a real job.

But never mind that. It’s just a nuisance.

In the real world, our egg production has fallen precipitously, down to about 20 eggs per 100 hens per day, which is really dreadful. We got twice as many last year.

We’re not sure what happened. Yes, it’s the natural molting season, but usually the hens drift into molt at different times, with no sudden cratering of production. A huge drop like this is triggered by extraordinary stress, not the ordinary changing of the seasons.

I think a busy predator, perhaps a dog, possibly a coyote, maybe a child, chased the flock around for some time and scared them half to death. This really distresses the chickens, far more than when a predator such as a bobcat nabs a single chicken and leaps the fence with it.

So we’re keeping our eyes open in case it wasn’t a one-time event.

I expect the rate of lay will start picking up any day now. Karen’s talking about using lights again this winter, to encourage the hens to start laying again, and maybe we will.

Lousy intruders.

More Farmer’s Market Tech

We’ve played with a lot of different technologies at the farmer’s market. Electronics used outdoors need to be rugged, easy to protect from rain, and usable in bright sunshine.

Back when we made people order fryers in advance, we brought a Panasonic ToughBook so we could take the deposits and enter the orders on QuickBooks. We stopped doing this when we started bringing chickens on spec, rather than just to fill orders. Because every cop car in the country seems to be equipped with one of these, used ToughBooks are plentiful and affordable on eBay and other places.

An iPad is also good, and has enough battery life to last all day, which the ToughBook never had. I haven’t used my iPad for serious work at the market yet, just to goof off during slow periods.

This is about to change! I’ve been playing around with the Square Register, a dinky little credit card reader for smartphones and tablets, and it’s pretty cool. You can take credit card and debit card payments from anyone, and the money ends up in your bank account after about two days, with a flat 2.75% fee. It works really well.

The farmer’s market is one of the last bastions of, “Whoops, I ran out of cash, so I can’t buy your stuff,” and as a vendor, this is a problem I want to solve!

I’ve also used Wells Fargo’s smartphone app to electronically deposit checks, which involves taking a picture of the front and the back. This is a great idea, but it’s too time-consuming when you get a lot of checks for small amounts, especially when the checks insist on fluttering in the breeze as you try to get a clear picture. For big checks, yes, absolutely. For smaller ones, it’s easier to go to the bank and deposit them the old-fashioned way.

I’m an audiobook addict, and over the years I went from listening to books on cassette to listening to them on an MP3 player — first a Rio 500, then an iPod Nano, then an iPod Touch, and now an iPhone. The farmer’s market is too busy for this, but it’s nice when doing farm chores and during the half-hour drive each way.

I’m always amused at how products that are initially marketed to urban hipsters seem to be useful down on the farm.

Pre-Season Work

We’re gearing up for a busy year in 2013 and are catching up with repairs and upgrades before the busy season starts, with contractors doing the difficult parts.

The upper part of the barn roof has been redone. In the Seventies, corrugated roofing had been nailed over the original cedar shakes, which didn’t hold the roofing panels securely enough, and they were starting to blow off. So we had that all taken off and re-roofed with new steel roofing that Karen had acquired at bargain prices.

This was not a beginner’s project! We stayed on the ground and let the experts do the work, which they did safely, well, and faster than I expected, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the barn roof remained leak-free for another thirty or forty years.

Inside the barn, we started to suspect that the wiring might need to be upgraded when we went to turn on the lights and showers of sparks rained down from the fixtures! I like a little excitement, but not that much, so all the old wiring is gone. No more metal conduit, no more fuse boxes. Modern wiring and a circuit breaker panel, plus better placement of the lights and outlets than before, mean that we can flip a switch without flinching.

If you do your own wiring, which I do sometimes (but not this time), you’ll want a copy of Wiring Simplified, especially for farm wiring, which is a whole different world from the residential wiring you may be more familiar with.

I’m a little afraid to add up what all this costs, but we’ve built to last, so I don’t expect to do any of it again anytime soon.

How do you find good people for this kind of work? Asking around helps a lot, especially when you ask people who’ve had the same sort of work done. The secret is to ask, “Who’s the best?” rather than “Who do you use?” because when you ask about the best, the same names come up over and over, and the best hardly cost any more than the worst in a down economy, and they do much better work. If you’re going to cut corners, cut ’em on something that wasn’t going to last anyway. If you try a cheap brand of kitty litter and don’t like it, the experience runs its course and is soon over, no harm done, but it’s different with major repairs.

Come to the Indoor Farmer’s Market!

The Corvallis area is lucky to have an Indoor Winter’s Market, where year-round produce such as greens and eggs are available every Saturday, plus items that store well, like roots and bulbs and frozen meat and canned goods and honey, and also baked goods and other yummy stuff. Not for us is the notion that farmers’ markets are a summertime thing!

I’m surprised this hasn’t caught on more. Oregon has mild winters, but so do a lot of places. And it’s nice to have the market in a large, heated building when the weather is nasty out.

Karen and Karl hold down the indoor market, selling fresh eggs, fresh stewing hens, and frozen broilers. If you’re in the area, drop by Guerber Hall at the Benton County Fairgrounds from 9 AM to 1 PM on Saturdays, mid-January through mid-April.