Urban Farmer

This week has marked the dawn of a new era in my professional life. Quite literally, I have been up at dawn this week and headed off to my new job as a farmer. I am working at a local organic urban farm, a 7-acre oasis of green and bird songs and crowing roosters in the midst of the vast and dusty urban jungle. This is the part of my story where I go back to the roots (again literally!) of where our food comes from.

The highlight of my first week was getting rained on while I changed the chickens' water dishes. Part of my farm duties include checking for eggs (got six!) and keeping the chickens in fresh water. These ladies are quite entertaining, and tough too. They are
the sole survivors of a brutal coyote attack on the flock and have since been moved to a more secure pen (i.e. one with a roof on it). They are gracious enough to accept my trespassing with only a minor ruffling of feathers and seem grateful for fresh water.

As I learned today, chickens are homicidal cannibals when the opportunity arises. I found a dead chicken in the coop, being casually pecked at and devoured by passing hens. The Farmer diagnosed the cause of death as group homicide following oviduct prolapse. I won't go into too much detail, but the dead chicken was essentially skin and bones  and feathers with pretty much nothing left inside. We had a moment of silence for the hen, and the corpse was taken out to the compost pile for burial. (Feathers and bones are both excellent as soil amendments when composted.) And then life went on. These things happen on the farm. 

Another exciting moment occurred when I was stacking crates of butternut squash in the walk-in cooler .... and a mouse jumped out! A little gray one, very fast and very intent on hiding in another crate of squash. Between four of us we managed to haul all of the squash back out again, find the mouse, and unceremoniously remove it from the premises.   

Among all of this excitement I also hauled crates of melons, loaded up the refrigerator truck, washed arugula, gently packaged squash blossoms, raked wood chips, got rained on several times, sampled some very spicy chilies, and learned that okra is very itchy to handle if you don't wear gloves. A pretty good start to my career as an urban farmer.