Bring On The Chickens

We had this great story of how I put a post on craigslist and an amazing farmer up in the Apple Hill area responded, telling me he would switch all of his layer and his meat chickens over to soy and corn free feed. We chatted chicken and eggs and Weston A Price Foundation, and about the industrial push for feeding animals corn. He was super kind and gave us a great deal on 6 dozen eggs that I picked up from him each week. In fact his wife was a charter school teacher, like me.

And last week he disappeared. Sounds a bit dramatic? Well,.....he did. He was a no-show for our usual pick-up appointment, and he returned none of my emails, texts, or phone calls. I emailed his business email, checked his website for catastrophic events, prayed nothing bad had befallen him or his family, and then his cell phone was disconnected.

I can not even begin to say how BIZARRE this has been. I have contemplated driving to his house, but have felt that may not be the best choice. And the saddest of all was being forced to remove his farm from our list of corn and soy free resources. I looked forward to highlighting his farm and his kindness on my just-getting-started website, but now I have to remove his contact information entirely. That to me is truly sad.

We are rationing out the eggs we still have in the fridge while we search for a new source, but so far we have found nothing. I have even sought to have some shipped from out of state. As a result we are being pushed towards owning our own chickens much faster than we had anticipated. Ellie needs the egg yolk to help with her healing and complete her nutritional needs. We can not continue to rely on someone else.

We checked country regulations and we meet the lot size requirements by exactly 135 square feet, so we have begun our planning, and hopefully within the next week we will be moving forward. But not quickly enough to have eggs for our Ellie, I am afraid. What a sad world we live in. What a frightening place when even the farms do not know of an alternative for corn. This does not comfort me when I think of Ellie's future. It pushes me back towards the continued internal debate: pray and know God will provide, or get moving on providing what we know we need. This time the answer was given to us - so bring on the chickens.