Bears, Skunks, Hay Makin'

Another long week. We got a lot done. A lot more we didn’t get done. We’ve been lucky to get through this much of the chicken season with minimal predator attacks. I’m afraid our luck is running out. A bear made a visit to one of our chicken shelters one night this past week, crushing through the two brand new lids I built a couple weeks ago. There were plenty of old 6 - 7 year old lids needing to be replace that the bear could’ve gone through, but no, it tears up the new ones of course. Fortunately, most of the chickens were fine. We only found one dead one. It could’ve been a lot worse. 

The bear hasn’t been the only wild animal drawn to our chickens. My brother John, coming back to the barn to get his truck at 1:00am after an ER visit to get stitches in his hand, happened to see a skunk digging into a chicken shelter. After a 30 minute round trip drive to his house for ammo, he returned and killed 4 skunks that had dug inside 3 different chicken shelters. He’s a good brother. Chicken chores were stinky the next morning. I made a pass around the shelters last night and got another skunk. 

In more chicken news, we broke another speed record for processing chickens. We put 210 chickens on ice in an hour and a half. 140 birds/hour. This time I was the weakest link. I do the killing and scalding. Usually the eviscerating station tells me to slow down so they can get caught back up. Not this time. They were waiting on chickens the whole time. Thankful for a good crew to help harvest and process chickens on the farm. The Davidsons (4D Farms), who have been faithfully helping on processing days, also raise meat chickens. This week we killed and cut up a batch of their chickens along with some of ours. 

Before getting started with chicken killing on Wednesday, ORVF beef and pork were delivered to the farm from our processor. We had lots of help getting it all into the freezers. It was good timing, not just because we had lots of help around to unload, but because we were getting low on our beef and pork inventory. We’ve been out of mild sausage for a month, and Amy sold the last of of ground beef supply at the Abingdon Farmers Market last Saturday. It’s good to get stocked back up even though we haven’t had a chance to sort through the inventory. Lots of freezer work and share filling to do next week. Our inventory on beef, chicken, and pork ebbs and flows throughout the year. It’s hit or miss. But not with the herd shares. Herd shares always get their meat. Every month. If we’re out of something on our online store, it’s not because we don’t have it, it’s because our herd shares are the ones getting it. If you want a steady supply of pasture raised meats from the farm, joining the herd is the most certain way to get it. 

In other farm news, my dad and brother brought their hay equipment up to the farm to make hay for us. Thankful for family. I finally made it into the hay fields to help some yesterday. Hallie might grow to be a hay makin’ girl. She was especially excited to spend all day in the hay field mowing, raking, and baling. It’s been good hay making weather. But we could sure use some rain. 

I made my monthly delivery to Marion on Saturday. Amy made deliveries this week to Knoxville, Bristol, and Kingsport as well as her weekly trips to Abingdon for the market on Saturday. She also kept the on-farm kitchen smelling yummy all week with multiple batches of chicken and beef bone broth simmering. 

The kids helped me move pigs to a fresh paddock in the woods. Half of them got out the next day and had to be rounded back up after repairing the electric fence. 

I started listening to a couple audio books while getting tractor time this week, but I actually ended up re-listening to Leo Tolstoy’s “A Confession.” It doesn’t take long to read it or listen to it, but it’s filled with lots to think about. Sometimes listening while farming prevents me from being solely focused on the book. With Tolstoy’s wrestling with God and searching for meaning still lingering in my mind, I decided to go back through it. Tolstoy’s faith was largely influenced by the common workers, whose faith was real not by the way they rationalized their faith intellectually but by the way they lived it out. Day after day. 

I appreciated his take on the church and importance of sharing a common faith with others. In finding faith, he submitted to the ways of the church whether he understood the rationale behind all the church’s traditions or not. Here’s what Tolstoy had to say about church… 

“I told myself the divine truth cannot be accessible to a separate individual. It is revealed only to the whole assembly of people united by love. To attain truth, one must not separate. And in order not to separate, one must love and must endure things one may not agree with. Truth reveals itself to love. And if you do not submit to the rights of the church, you transgress against love. And by transgressing against love, you deprive yourself of the possibility of recognizing the truth.”

“When fulfilling the rights of the church, I humbled my reason and submitted to the tradition possessed by all humanity. I united myself with my forefathers, the father, mother, and grandparents I loved. They and all my predecessors believed and lived, and they produced me. I united myself also with the missions of the common people whom I respected. Moreover, those actions had nothing bad in themselves; bad, I considered the indulgence of one’s desires. When rising early for church services, I knew I was doing well, if only because I was sacrificing my bodily ease to humble my mental pride for the sake of union with my ancestors and contemporaries and for the sake of finding the meaning of life… However insignificant these sacrifices might be, I made them for the sake of something good. I fasted, prepared for communion and observed the fixed hours of prayer at home and in church.”

“I still saw that in the people’s belief, also falsehood was mingled with the truth. But where did the truth and where did the falsehood come from?… Both the falsehood and the truth had been handed down by what is called the church. And whether I liked or not, I was brought to the study and investigation of these writings and traditions which til now I had been so afraid to investigate.”

“I shall not seek the explanation of everything. I know that the explanation of everything, like the commencement of everything, must be concealed in infinity. But I wish to understand in a way which will bring me to what is inevitably inexplicable. I wish to recognize anything that is inexplicable as being so, not because the demands of my reason are wrong, they are right and apart from them I can understand nothing, but because I recognize the limits of my intellect. I wish to understand in such a way that everything that is inexplicable shall present itself to me as being necessarily inexplicable and not as being something I am under an arbitrary obligation to believe. That there is truth in the teaching is to me indubitable, but it is also certain that there is falsehood in it. And I must find what is true and what is false and must disentangle the one from the other. I am setting to work upon this task.” 

Have a good week.

Will