The Milk Barn Farm

We’re thrilled to announce our second product: CBD Rollers! 

Since we launched our CBD Tincture, we've been surprised to learn that many of our customers were using CBD oil topically. And a dropper bottle isn’t the most convenient way to do that, so, roller bottles!

These are the same amber glass as our tincture bottles, but topped with a stainless steel roller ball. They’re smaller - holding just 10 ml - but that makes them easy to pocket. And we’re using a higher potency CBD, made from plants we grew as usual, so that a little goes a long way.

Topical CBD works wonders as a pain killer. I use it on my back. Others have told me it helps with headaches when applied to the temples. 

We’re very excited to announce our first official farm product: Milk Barn Farm CBD Tincture. 

This coconut oil-based tincture has been made from Cannabis we grew last summer. It’s a strain with naturally low THC and high CBD, so it’s technically hemp. Whatever THC there is gets cooked out in the process, so it’s just a CBD tincture (confirmed with lab testing). It’s full spectrum, so it has all the associated other cannabinoids that work in concert.

And since I grew the plants myself, I can confirm that they were raised ridiculously organically and never saw a chemical pesticide or fertilizer. They were raised with love, Oregon sun, and goat poop.

I personally use it orally for anxiety and insomnia and topically for back and muscle pain. Others use it to help older pets with aches and pains. 

UPDATE May 2019: You can now buy online from our new web store.

Midsummer Petunia

Egg 2.0

Dorothy was our first layer last year, surprising us with an egg in the goat shed at about six months. The other chickens began to lay over the following weeks and every tiny first egg was a joy to behold.

One our Cuckoo Marans from this year's flock laid her first egg yesterday. At four months! I found it sitting in the grass when I went to open the coop this morning. There are four Cuckoo Marans and I'm ashamed to say that they're so similar looking we're calling them "The Marys". I'm hoping that their adult comb shape will lend itself to unique identification.

Farming, if you can call what we do here on our humble two acres “farming,” is a constant process of learning. And learning is just fucking up with note-taking.

Today we fucked up.

(I’m just going to warn you now, this is not a story with a happy ending, and there’s a sad photo below.)

If you followed the story of Cordelia’s Brood, you know that our Speckled Sussex hen, Cordy, went broody. To bring her out of it, we got her four adorable Sussex chicks, which she adopted quickly. 

It’s been three weeks. The chicks were getting their wings and Cordelia was losing her mind. We’d locked them up together in the henhouse – not a bad situation by any means, complete with food, water, pine chips, and plenty of room to move around – but Cordy was used to the great outdoors, and she wanted out.

So last week we started kicking all the other chickens out of the coop (the coop is approximately 7x20 feet and entirely fenced in), closing the outer doors, and letting Cordelia and her chicks have the run of the place for a few hours each day. When we opened the henhouse door and they all came waddling down the ramp, we called it “the parade” and it always made us beam with joy.

A video posted by heather champ (@haitchchamp) on May 26, 2016 at 4:03pm PDT

Today we decided to leave the outer doors open and let Cordy and her chicks interact with the rest of the flock to see how it would go. We’d been worried about this, but it went great! Most of the hens had no interest in the chicks. So when Cordy led them out of the coop and into the fenced pen, we decided to let her do it.

Abby, the dominant Rhode Island Red, immediately came over to give the chicks a peck, but Cordy swept in and chased her off. We were so proud. We felt confident letting everyone mingle for a while.

I had to spend some time in the house and Heather had an errand to run, so we left them unattended for an hour or so. It was a beautiful day and everyone was getting along just fine. It seemed okay.

We’d been so concerned about the rest of the flock, we forgot about all the other dangers.

Cordelia was among the first chickens we got last year. She’s a Speckled Sussex, a heritage breed from England that was once threatened but is now in recovery. They’re “dual-purpose” birds, which means they’re bred for eggs and meat, so she’s one of our bigger birds. She grew into a beautiful, sweet hen. 

And then she got broody.

When I was first researching chickens, there was a lot of talk about broodiness. It’s when a switch flips in the hen’s tiny brain and she thinks she’s sitting on fertile eggs that are about to hatch. She goes from a happy chicken laying every day, to a grumpy girl guarding her babies. Broodiness is bad in an egg-laying flock, not only because it stops egg production, but because the brooding urge takes over. Hens can forget to eat and drink. The rest of the flock may pick on her. If the broodiness lasts too long, she can die.

I worried that one of our hens would go broody and I wouldn’t notice. I shouldn’t have. There’s no mistaking a broody hen. For the last two months, every time I checked the boxes, there was Cordelia. The moment she saw me, she’d puff up to be turkey-sized and make a sound like a Velociraptor on a motorcycle doing doughnuts. If your hen ever goes broody, trust me, you’ll know.

Farm communities are full of folklore about how to break a brood. (Grandma Powazek would have called it bubbe meise.) Take away the eggs. Kick them out of the box. Give them a cold water bath. Put ice cubes under them. Cage them separately. We didn’t try them all, but the ones we did try only seemed to make Cordy more grumpy. At some point, it felt like we were just torturing her. So we decided to try something else: give her what she wanted.

A video posted by Derek from Milk Barn Farm (@powazek) on May 11, 2016 at 5:14pm PDT

We purchased four Speckled Sussex chicks from Burns Feed. We got them as soon as they came in, so they were about a day old. I read that, when introducing chicks to a broody hen, it helps if they’re the same breed and as young as possible. I don’t know if it’s true, since I only have our experience to go on, but I figured why not start there. Some of those bubbes know their shit.

First we did it the wrong way. Excited to get started, we just plopped the chicks in the nesting box with Cordelia. She did not react well. She puffed up and started making an even worse sound. Now the motorcycling Velociraptor was also the lead singer of a death metal band. She started to aggressively peck the chicks, so we took them out and put them in the chick brooder in the garage.

Then we did it the right way. We took some of the nesting box material (hay and wood shavings) out from under Cordy, and put a couple eggs back under her. Then, in the garage brooder, we put the chicks under a heat lamp, on top of the nesting material. The idea here is for the chicks to smell like Cordy when we bring them back. 

Then we waited for night. Chickens are drowsy at night, so Cordelia was less likely to freak out when we put the brought the chicks back. I even got a red light to work by (since I’ve read that chickens don’t see red light). 

While Cordelia was asleep, I gently lifted her up, took away the eggs, and placed the four sleeping chicks under her. She didn’t react. I also put a feeder full of chick feed and a waterer in the henhouse and closed the henhouse door so the other chickens wouldn’t interrupt. 

As anyone who’s raised chicks knows, heat is the critical thing in the beginning. Chicks need to stay at about 95º F for the first week. But they’ll instinctively move toward a heat source, which, in this case, was Cordelia. So long as she accepted this, they’d be okay.

The idea is, the broody chicken wakes up and thinks, “Hey! They hatched!” And that switch in her brain flips from brooding to mothering. We just had to wait and see.

The next morning, the chicks were all still alive. Some had wandered away from Cordy, but it was a warm day (and even warmer in the henhouse) so that was okay. We just kept visiting them and putting the chicks back under her. Cordy still puffed up when she saw us, but the Velociraptor was merely idling. 

That night, we put the chicks back under her one more time, and went to bed.

By the next day, we found the chicks and Cordelia all huddled together. The Velociraptor was gone. In its place, a momma hen, showing her chicks around the henhouse. Directing them to the feeder. Lifting herself up and scooting the chicks under her on her own. One big happy family. 

A video posted by Derek from Milk Barn Farm (@powazek) on May 14, 2016 at 11:43am PDT

If all goes well, we’ll be able to let them all out of the henhouse in a few weeks and watch as Cordelia shows her babies the world. It’s strange to call something that happens in nature every day a miracle, but it sure feels like one.

Hopefully, in a couple months, we’ll have four happy Sussex pullets we didn’t have to brood ourselves, and one less broody hen.

Back when I was gardening in San Francisco, I learned the only way to grow strawberries that I actually got to eat was to plant them in a hanging basket by the house. The squirrels were brave, but generally still too timid to come right to the house and try to get into a hanging basket.

So I did the same at our new place here in Oregon. And I found out a couple weeks ago that a bird had the same idea. Because as I was watering the strawberries, I discovered a tiny nest.

The eggs were tiny, dime-sized. The mother bird flew away before I could photograph her, but from the look of her and her eggs, I identified her as a House Finch. She’d made a nest from straw and goat hair, collected from our farm. 

A few days later, I found one of the eggs pushed out of the nest. When I attempted to move it back in, I noticed it was cracked. Nature is beautiful, but cruel. I took it out of the planter and disposed of it.

A few days later, the three remaining eggs had all hatched.

A video posted by Derek from Milk Barn Farm (@powazek) on Apr 28, 2016 at 11:37am PDT

As I stood over the nest gawking, the momma bird sat in the Witchhazel tree behind me, squawking angrily.

The chicks were impossibly tiny, eyes closed, mouths open.

I checked on them every day to make sure there were still three, doing okay. They grew like weeds.

Soon they had wings.

And open eyes.

And feathers.

And then they were gone. I’d come out to check on them and they took one look at me and flew away.

The whole process only took about two weeks. So short from my vantage, but an eternity for them and their mom, I’m sure.

One Less Lawn

The Downside of an Affectionate Goat

Our unofficial farm motto is “boys are terrible.” A male chicken is a rooster and all they do is make noise, beat things up, and refuse to lay eggs. A male goat is a billy and all they do is stink, pee on stuff, and refuse to make milk. So, no boys allowed here. Fortunately Jax and I (Derek) got special dispensation.

(Seriously, boy goats smell awful. And they can pee sideways. Sideways! That’s just not right.)

Last year we got eight baby chicks that developed into lovely hens. But chick sexing is more art than science, and even the hatcheries and stores only claim a 90% accuracy rate.

This year we got 16 chicks. They’re just over two months old now. A couple days ago, when Heather was doing the morning chores, she heard something very rooster-ey coming from the coop.

A video posted by heather champ (@haitchchamp) on Apr 14, 2016 at 1:59pm PDT

Yup, that’s a rooster in training right there. One of the white Americuanas. Bummer.

After this discovery, we decided to check out the rest of the chicks and discovered that one looked a little different.

Those are our two Welsummers there. See the comb and wattles on the one on the right? The hens get those eventually, but if they develop this young, well, it’s probably a boy.

So I think we’ve got two young roosters in the flock. Two out of 16 is 14.4%, so I guess the sexing is only 85.6% accurate this year. It happens.

Which leaves us with a decision to make. We could:

A. Keep them. It’s a common misconception that you need a rooster for the hens to lay eggs. (You don’t.) But there are a few good reasons to keep a rooster around. They protect the flock, but our goats do a good job of that, and the hens don’t need much protection anyway. We could keep them around to fertilize eggs so we could incubate them and increase the size of the flock. This appeals to me, but it would also mean hatching more boys, and having to deal with this even more. And roosters are gorgeous, which is nice. 

But the downside is the noise (and we already have rooster neighbors, so it’s not like we’re wanting for rustic sounds). Plus, they’re aggressive and dangerous. Imagine an angry toddler wearing razor-sharp ice skates and you get the idea.

B. Give them away. Fran at Burns Feed (where we bought the chicks) will rehome roosters once they hit three months, and she’ll only give them to people who swear on a stack of bibles that they won’t be used for cockfighting or dinner. If you’d met Fran, you’d know she’s not someone you want to lie to.

C. Eat ’em. Okay, so, this isn’t for the squeamish, but it’s the truth. Small scale farms traditionally have one main job for unwanted roosters, and it usually starts with a knife and ends in a pot. 

I’ve killed an animal in order to eat it before, but I’ve never seen a fish take a dust bath. Fishing is one thing, but it’s something else to kill an animal you’ve raised since it was a tiny adorable fluffball. I think I could do it, but I know I wouldn’t like it.

So I think we’re going with option B. That’ll give us a few more weeks to make sure they are indeed roosters, and that we do indeed want to say goodbye to them.

One Year Later

A video posted by Derek from Milk Barn Farm (@powazek) on Jan 13, 2016 at 4:45pm PST

A video posted by Derek from Milk Barn Farm (@powazek) on Mar 24, 2016 at 3:54pm PDT

A video posted by Derek from Milk Barn Farm (@powazek) on Mar 15, 2016 at 4:57pm PDT

With 16 chicks in the brooder, it was time to build an addition to the chicken coop. I decided to basically build the same coop again, right next to the existing one. (Big thanks again to The Garden Coop plan this is based on.) Only this time, it will be sided for shade in the summer and protection from the rain the rest of the year. I also designed a set of eight nesting boxes for the wall on the end.

I started with the nesting boxes. With the constant rain, I wanted a project I could do in the garage where it was dry. I designed them in Sketchup, cut all the wood, and got to the glueing, nailing, and screwing. It came out looking pretty much like the design. Then I built the other two walls and waited for a sunny day.

When the sun came out, I mapped out where everything would go, and sunk the cinderblocks into the ground in approximately the right places. The cinderblocks will keep the whole thing level and up off the ground. The chickens supervised me closely.

Then we got the walls in place and screwed together. 

The chickens got the idea pretty quickly.

The goats also wanted to help.

Then I could really get to work. I installed the rafters, extended the roof across, dug a trench one foot down around the entire perimeter and installed wire mesh around the exterior (this is a barrier against any critters digging their way in), and replaced all the dirt. I also added a new chicken door to the front of the old coop, since the old ones are now inside the addition.

Now I could work on installing the siding. I used cedar fence boards because they’re cheap and I like the way they look. It also matches the goat shed.

The hardest part was getting the outer nesting box doors on and functional. It required a bit of trimming and cussing. I have a new appreciation for cabinet makers.

I also added plexiglass windows in the center of each wall, so the chickens have a nice view and we can glance in to check the nesting boxes.

Finally, I added a couple hanging solar lanterns. Gotta class the joint up just a little.

I’ve left the interior wall up for now, so we can keep the new chicks separate for the first week or two. I’ve heard that’s a good way to introduce them. But when that’s done, I’ll be able to remove the divider and it’ll just be one big coop inside. I’ll also then be able to run roosting bars along the length of the interior.

I’ve read that you need one nesting box and two square feet per chicken. So now, with 10 nesting boxes and 100 square feet, this coop could accommodate 50 chickens. We’re only up to 23 now, so that gives us plenty of room to expand in the future.

The Goats of Milk Barn Farm Say Hello

Last night, when I put the chickens in their coop, all eight went in happily. I said, “good night, ladies,” and closed the door.

This morning, when Heather opened the coop, seven chickens came out. Inside, Francine the Welsummer was flat on the ground, one wing extended. She was cold and stiff. There was no sign of any trauma. She was just dead.

Francine was one of the original eight chicks we got about a year ago. She’s a Welsummer, a breed from Holland known to be docile and good in the cold. She grew into a gorgeous chicken and laid beautiful light brown eggs with dark brown spots. She was one of my favorites.

I have no idea what happened. She hadn’t shown any signs of illness or violence. No predators got into the coop. She was laying just fine – she gave us an egg yesterday.

In chicken keeping circles this is known as “Sudden Death Syndrome” which is a fancy way of saying a chicken died for some unknown reason.

The farmers I’ve gotten to know this past year have a hardness about them. I suppose that’s natural. If you see these creatures as food or food factories, it makes some things easier. 

But I don’t have that thick skin yet. I don’t know if I ever will. Francine was one of us, and we feel her absence like a frigid wind.