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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