Back when I had 400
laying hens, 15 milk goats, broiler chickens in the summer, and pigs
growing out back in what I liked to call the outdoor freezer
department, people would look around the farm and say something that
always made me smile.
“You’re so lucky to have all that free food.”
“Free food.” Whenever someone says that, I know immediately
they’ve never set foot inside a feed store. Because if they had,
they’d understand that nothing on a farm eats for free except maybe
the barn cats—and they expect benefits, a retirement plan, and
canned tuna on holidays.
People picture a hen strolling peacefully around the yard, pecking
at a few bugs, laying an egg, and calling it a day. Crack that egg
into the frying pan and voilà—free breakfast. But that “free
egg” actually started life as a day-old chick costing somewhere
around $7.
And that chick then spent about 5 months eating like a teenage boy
who just discovered the refrigerator before she ever laid her first
egg. For those 5 months she consumed a steady stream of chick
starter, grower feed, and eventually layer ration. Feed that came in
bags. Bags that came from the feed store. Bags that I paid for. Many
bags. Enough bags that the feed store owner greeted me by name and
probably sent his kids to college on my account.
By the time that hen finally laid her first egg, she had already
eaten enough grain to qualify as a small agricultural subsidy. And
that’s just the feed. There was also the brooder with heat lamps,
the electricity to run it, the pine shavings for bedding, feeders,
waterers, nest boxes, fencing, and a coop sturdy enough to discourage
every raccoon, fox, mink, and weasel within three counties.
But sure. Free egg.
The goats were no different. People would see the milk and say how
wonderful it must be to have free dairy products. Well yes… if you
ignore the hay bill, the grain bill, the mineral supplements, the
fence repairs, and the fact that goats consider fences to be more of
a philosophical concept than an actual boundary. And we won't even
begin to add up the vet bills.
Then there were the pigs. Pigs that politely converted large
quantities of expensive grain into bacon. Very tasty bacon, I might
add, but bacon that had been preceded by a feed bill that could make
a grown farmer sit down and
question his sanity.
And all of that is just
the cost of the animals themselves. That’s before we even talk
about the labor. Hauling
water. Stacking hay bales. Carrying fifty-pound bags of grain like
they were sacks of concrete. Then there’s trimming goat hooves,
which involves bending over long enough to wonder if your spine is
still under warranty.
Sheep add their own special contribution to the process. Trimming
their feet involves wrestling a two-hundred-pound animal onto its
butt while it loudly protests the entire procedure and questions your
parentage. Once you finally get the job done, the sheep will often
just sit there for a minute looking puzzled, as if it’s trying to
figure out how the world suddenly ended up sideways.
And of course there’s vaccinating the sheep, the goats, and all
of their offspring, as well as disbudding the goat kids, which means
chasing animals around the pen while they demonstrate that they are
far more agile than the human supposedly in charge of them.
And then, of course, there are the guardian dogs. Three of them.
Because if you don’t have guardian dogs, all you’ve really done
is set up an all-you-can-eat buffet for every coyote and wandering
neighborhood dog within a five-mile radius. Those guardian dogs don’t
work for free either. They eat. A lot. Apparently protecting
livestock builds up quite an appetite.
After a while your back begins to make noises that sound like
someone stepping on a bag of potato chips. That’s usually the point
where you realize the chiropractor is now part of the farm budget,
which is why we should probably add another expense to that “free
food”—the chiropractor who kindly put my spine back where the
Good Lord originally installed it.
Now don’t get me wrong. Raising your own food is worth every bit
of it. You know where it came from. You know how the animals were
raised. You know exactly what went into that egg, that milk, that
pork chop or leg of lamb. That kind of knowledge has real value in a
world where many people think food begins its life under fluorescent
lighting at the grocery store.
But free? Not exactly.
That egg in the frying pan cost about seven dollars, a pile of
feed, a chiropractor visit, and a walk to the barn in January when
the wind is trying to blow you clear into Canada.
Still, when I crack that egg into the skillet, I know one thing
for certain. It may not be free. But it’s honest food. And besides,
after paying all those feed and other bills, the least that chicken
could do was contribute to breakfast.
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