Breaking Records, ORVF Chicken Available, A Confession
We turned last week’s cookout space back into a chicken processing area and harvested our first batch of ORVF chickens for the season. We’ve been sold out of all chicken (except bone-broth) for a while, so it’s good to get some ORVF chicken back in freezers. Hopefully it won’t stay in the freezers long. Amy has been taking pre-orders and trying to fill all chicken shares before adding additional inventory to the online farm store. We appreciate your patience. And your appetite for our chicken.
Not only did we harvest our first batch of pastured birds, we did it in record breaking fashion. We put 248 birds on ice in just under 2 hours. We’ve come a long ways. But we haven’t come it alone. To say we’re thankful for the friends and family who come help on processing days is an understatement. With a Campbell family reunion this weekend, we had some extra family help in the valley to speed up the process.
Our processing crew also broke another record Wednesday on the packaging side of the process by cutting up 183 birds for parts. Cutting up chickens for parts takes a lot more time and work than packaging whole birds, but everyone buckled down and got it done. It was a good day. With a welcomed rain shower to cap it off at the day’s end.
Tuesday evening Amy and I caught and crated the chickens for this week’s harvest while the kids were at VBS. We got them all caught but didn’t get the big chicks moved from the brooder out to the shelters before Amy had to pick the kids back up from Bible school. Thinking that Amy and I would’ve already got all the chicken shuffling done, the kids weren’t thrilled about coming home to more chicken work. We thought we’d have it done by then too. Funny how everything takes longer than you think it will. Actually it’s more tiring than funny. But we got it done, keeping the 22 shelters filled and moving to fresh grass everyday.
Our Salatin style shelters are 10 feet wide and 12 feet long. We pull them the 12 foot length of the shelter everyday. 12 feet times 22 shelters is 264 feet, which means pulling shelters 88 yards everyday. Using 5 gallon buckets to fill up the waters after moving them, on Tuesday Hallie and Hasten hustled to fill up the waterers as fast as I could move the shelters.
Thankfully more rain showers throughout the week. In between rain showers on Thursday, Hallie and Hasten went with me to move a group of cows to a new field. I’m not sure if it’s because they like the cows or like riding the 4-wheeler. Maybe both. Instead of moving them in between showers, we ended up getting caught in a shower. Soaked to the bone. The kids thought it was fun though.
On Monday, a couple from Pennsylvania got married in the field by one of our cabins. It was a beautiful day for a wedding. I’m guessing about 50 folks were in attendance for the destination wedding. Offering weddings on the farm has been a reoccurring thought over the years. Still not sure if this is something we want to promote and pursue moving forward, but at least it gives us more data to work with. The family was great to work with, and the weather was perfect. Our hesitation to the wedding thing is when the weather is not perfect and when the families are not great to work with. We’ll see.
This week I’ve been listening to “A Confession” by Leo Tolstoy, as he eloquently takes us down his life’s road to faith and journey with God. Much like Solomon’s writing of Ecclesiastes, Tolstoy’s evaluation on life was that it was meaningless. Although he had a family, success, and good fortune, he became suicidal. Through questioning God and seeking the truth, eventually he not only came back to faith, it was ultimately faith that brought him back to life.
“What will come of what I am doing today or shall do tomorrow? What will come of my whole life? Differently expressed the question is: Why should I live? Why wish for anything or do anything? It can also be expressed thus: Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?”
“I did not believe what had been taught me in childhood, but I believed in something. What it was I believed in, I could not at all have said. I believed in a God, or rather I did not deny God, but I could not have said what sort of God. Neither did I deny Christ and his teaching, but what his teaching consisted in, I again could not have said. Looking back on that time, I now see clearly that my faith, my only real faith, that which apart from my animal instincts gave impulse to my life, was a belief in perfecting myself. But in what this perfecting consisted and what its object was I could not have said… And all this I considered to be the pursuit of perfection. The beginning of it all was of course moral perfection, but that was soon replaced by perfection in general, by the desire to be better not in my own eyes or those of God but in the eyes of other people. And very soon this effort again changed into a desire to be stronger than others, to be more famous, more important and richer than others.”
“Another instance of realization that the superstitious belief in progress is insufficient as a guide to life was my brother’s death. Wise, good, serious, he fell ill while still a young man, suffered for more than a year and died painfully, not understanding why he had lived, and still less why he had to die. No theories could give me or him any reply to these questions during his slow and painful death.”
“Had a fairy come and offered to fulfill my desires, I should not have known what to ask… there was really nothing to wish for. I could not even wish to know the truth, for I guessed of what it consisted. The truth was that life was meaningless. I had, as it were, lived, lived and walked, walked. So I had come to a presuppose and saw clearly that there was nothing ahead of me but destruction. It was impossible to stop, impossible to go back, and impossible to close my eyes or avoid seeing that there was nothing ahead but suffering and real death, complete annihilation. It had come to this, that I, a healthy fortunate man, felt I could no longer live. Some irresistible power impelled me to rid myself one way or other of life. I cannot say is wished to kill myself. The power which drew me away from life was stronger, fuller, and more widespread than any mere wish. It was a force similar to the former striving to live, only in a contrary direction. All my strength drew me away from life.”
“I did not, myself, know what I wanted. I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it. And all this befell me at a time when all around me I had what is considered ‘complete good fortune.’ I was not yet 50. I had a good wife who loved me and whom I loved, good children, and a large estate which without much effort on my part improved and increased… My mental condition presented itself to me in this way: My life is a stupid and spiteful joke someone has played on me. Though I did not acknowledge a ‘someone’ who created me…”
“Family, said I to myself. But my family, wife, and children are also human. They are placed just as I am. They must either live in a lie or see the terrible truth. Why should they live? Why should I love them, guard them, bring them up, or watch them? That they may come to the despair that I feel, or else be stupid? Loving them, I cannot hide the truth from them. Each step in knowledge leads them to the truth, and the truth is death.”
“What meaning has life that death does not destroy? Union with the eternal God, heaven, so that besides rational knowledge, which had seemed to me the only knowledge, I was inevitably brought to acknowledge that all live humanity has another irrational knowledge: faith, which makes it possible to live. Faith still remained to me as irrational as it was before, but I could not but admit that it alone gives mankind a reply to the questions of life and that consequently it makes life possible.”
“Where there is life, there since man began, faith has made life possible for him, and the chief outline of that faith is everywhere and always identical. Whatever the faith may be, and whatever answers it may give, and to whom soever it gives them, every such answer gives to the finite existence of man an infinite meaning, a meaning not destroyed by sufferings, deprivations, or death. This means that only in faith can we find for life a meaning and a possibility. What then is this faith? And I understood that faith is not merely the evidence of things not seen… Faith is the strength of life. If a man lives, he believes in something. If he did not believe that one must live for something, he would not live.”
Have a good week.
Will