gay little farm

🌾 welcome 2 our little farmstead thing, run by gaytrans couple on the olympic peninsula of WA, USA. account is run by ren, he/it

🌾 we raised rabbits, heritage turkeys, geese, and chickens. I am very autistic about turkeys and they are my specialty. especially into conservation breeding and local food security. little garden will occasionally be posted about too

🌾 cw for potential talk about animal death, illness, butchering, etc. I also like to post about current ag news, including meat industry stuff.

🌾 I write about ag & related topics on my substack. 100% human, no ai, researched and cited.

🌾 support the farm on ko-fi

The truth is that we’re just too broke to do it. That’s been true for a while, but I don’t need to tell any of you that cost of living is getting worse every day with no increase in income. Without being able to buy land to have a secure and guaranteed space to be and put in long term infrastructure, it’s just not possible to raise livestock like we’re trying to do. There’s occasionally one in a million land leases out there, and we stuck it out for so long in the hopes that we’d hit the jackpot with some miracle, but torturing yourself waiting for the impossible is a really good way to waste away your life and lose your mind.

I think it’s pretty obvious that these birds and the work I aspire to with them means everything to me. I’m feeling a lot of grief, naturally. Less than 1% of turkeys produced for food in the USA are heritage, and it is deeply important to me to educate about the low welfare of broad breasted and other production breeds, and teach that the alternatives are what will build a stable, local, resilient food system. By stepping away, I’m crossing my fingers we can work towards getting back to it.

Everyone who buys birds from me comments on how they’re the most beautiful, gentle, best tempered poultry they’ve seen. I’m so incredibly proud of the work I’ve done with my lines over the past few years and I’m proud to say I’m a pretty darn good poultry breeder and caretaker, and it’s hard to let that work go. But I’m not hands off - I am involved with my birds, constantly observing and responding to them, which is what’s allowed me to become a good caretaker and breeder, and finding a place where we can live in the same space as we raise our birds has proven to be an impossible task. I’m not doing the work I want to do when there’s so much physical distance.

I’ll be keeping the rabbits cause they’re easier to have at a rental, and we’re gonna try to find somewhere we can keep <10ish birds as a backyard flock because there’s a few that I can’t stand to say goodbye to, but if we can’t, we have an indefinite foster home for them.

I hope to return to this work someday, and I do plan to pursue that possibility in the coming years. I’m obviously very sad. But another contributing factor is that we live in one of the most expensive counties in an already expensive state. The estimated baseline living wage for one person here is 63k/year. the highest paying jobs here pay $23 an hour. I am euphoric about leaving a county dictated by snowbirds and airbnbs.