DING DING DING

In the Ring and on the Ropes With Nature

My day job in sales is very often email heavy, sometimes requiring in-depth responses, sometimes something as easy as a simple sentence affirming the recipient’s assumptions. There are times though that are the crest of the bell curve where one finds themselves in a little bit of a tiff with an uppity lackey making waves in one company or another. If ever in this situation, the most soul cutting and slap to the face response one can give in response to said uppity lackey is the clarinet call of “As per my last email”.

It is the Muhammad Ali right hook of “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” in the business world. When delivered correctly, it has the capacity to knock the recipient out of his or her respective wheeled office chair and onto the thinly carpeted floor.

To date it feels like Nature is delivering her own version of “You’ve got mail”, and it is featuring myself as myself and Mike Tyson as Meg Ryan…Actually that sounds like a better remake than 90% of the stuff that has come out recently.

Dear Andrew: Left, Left, Uppercut, Jab, Jab, Jab and Grapple. Sincerely, Nature.

I ordered over 430 chicks last year in November for delivery starting in the last week of January this year. Not only did I order those chicks, I went to the website of the hatchery and confirmed the date that I could place my order for chicks the following year (this year), jumped online in the morning and put my order in. I was legitimately one of the first to input my order.

The first punch by Nature was to take a swing at my shipping charges. Some vile beast in existence in the dark hole where USPS makes its decision chose to start charging $15 per shipment of live poultry. For one shipment it wouldn’t be that bad, but I had spaced my chicken shipments apart by 3 weeks and in magnitudes of 110 chicks per shipment, thus allotting me an additional $60 over the course of the year. Ugh.

The lady that called me from the hatchery was very apologetic when she relayed the news in December about the additional shipping charges. Like I said above, I work sales and can’t be mad at the bearer of bad news because I have been in that situation and can relate; I can’t be mad at a person for something out of their control. I told her it was no problem and not her fault. As December slowly spilled over into January and the new year was upon us, I received an email that they were not able to fulfill their order to us due to a shortage from their egg suppliers. Double ugh.

The next set of chicks also didn’t ship. At this point it would have been nice for the hatchery to be proactive and reach out to let me know that I should likely start sourcing my chickens somewhere else, but they didn’t. To me this screams of Star Trek levels of red alert as consoles start blowing sparks and poor red shirts start flying across the bridge. They cancelled all of my orders. I was then four months behind everyone else who had ordered chicks and were able to get them, not to mention also in line with likely 100’s of others who were also cancelled and going to start looking around for more chicks.

By now it is round two and Nature has me on the ropes and is delivering sharp punches to my optimism producing organ (the spleen?) as I futilely try to defend my positive outlook; suddenly there is voice to the side of me saying “tag me in bro, I am here to help”. Through emotionally exhausted eyes I see my Poultry Pal Zach standing in my corner of the ring, hand extended.

I need to recreate this image with Zach.

As soon as I tag him in websites start showing up that have chickens; and not only do they have chickens, many of them are able to ship by the beginning of March. The darkness leaves the corner of my vision as I shake the gloom and doom out of my peripheral, enough so to allow me to input credit card information and click confirm.

Ding ding ding, take your corner and receive your first order of 200 chicks!

With only one chick DOA I was pleasantly surprised by the vigor and loudness of the baby birds. I set them up in the same place as I had done every year since we began growing chicks out in large (for us) batches. Alas, when it comes to animals and Nature there is never just one round, but rather one round after the next, after the next, after the next…

Ding Ding Ding, off the stool and back into the ring! We started losing chicks in quantities that belie normalicy. I would wake up in the morning and retrieve five or six dead chicks, only to come out throughout the day and into the evening to find several more. In all honesty I quit keeping count. There is something heart wrenching and profoundly sad about finding life taken before it can be experienced, even when the purpose of that life is to later die in order to provide.

All in all, I expect we have lost about a third to half of our total order.

It isn’t just about the money, which I am blessed to be in a position to say, but rather the feeling of personal ineptitude and loss of life that I feel the most. Nature put me up against the ropes and kept me there, day in and day out, as I watched chicks succumb to something that I still can’t explain. Heat lamps and ample room to move around did nothing to assuage Death’s clicker from sounding off throughout the last couple of weeks.

Let us not forget the wise words of my favorite starship captain:

Phew, okay. That felt pretty good to get off the ol’ chest. I have written often about the struggles of those who farm, both in the modern farming world and the past, but to be living out the struggles that people have felt for eons is both humbling and eye-opening. Dab those eyes dry and let’s round this post out with some other news that shows alongside pain and loss there is also growth and gain.

We got our sea containers in! It wasn’t as easy as jumping onto the WWW and looking at options because apparently the business of buying sea containers is strife with scams and liars. I ended up choosing a company called Quality Containers and talking to my main man Todd. I shared my email with Todd and he ended up subscribing and when we next spoke he had read a number of my posts and was so very supportive about what I write that it sealed the deal for me that this was the company to go with. The man that dropped off the sea containers was game to try and drop the containers down where I needed them despite it being a muddy mess around the concrete pad that was poured, and after a single hairy point where his wheels were spinning in some soft mud, he made the 46 point turn to position those sea containers look like a day in the park. I gave that man a tip he more than earned in his willingness to help me out.

After he dropped them off we spent the rest of the day utilizing 10ft sections of pipe I had bought for fence posts to move them around and situate them on the concrete pad where we wanted them. It was probably similar to the feeling that the people who built the pyramids of Egypt felt when a stone fell right into place…just with less whipping.

After the sea containers were placed where we needed them, my father in law and I started work on the wooden fence line to keep the cows in more or less a 28ft wide lane where they can travel between the pasture and the current milking location at the top of the hill. It took one weekend of setting old oil field pipe into concrete, and another weekend of measuring, cutting, and laying even the boards on the fence. I do want to notate that both my daughters, six and nine, were heavily involved in placing the piping and welding on the plates to attach the boards to. I know I am raising some farm girls when the youngest one feels the kiss of an errant weld spit and says “ow”, then keeps welding. Tough as nails and the carriers of my heart.

Weld Dab.

Side note: I will never not be guilty of under estimating how much time something will take when it comes to manual labor.

This past weekend I had a pair of my besties visiting to help me out; one driving up from LA area to visit “their vacation farm” and one flying up from AZ. Both of whom are showing up for about 40 hours to help me cut into the above mentioned sea containers and to convert one into a milking parlor for a very deserving woman, and the other one will be a processing station for our poultry sales.

Turns out 40hrs is just long enough to act like 20yr old man-children again before the back pain and heartburn starts rear its ugly head.

That’s all folks! I will be doing a write up soon-ish on the progress being made with the sea containers. Thank you for reading!