Farm Hopping - Chicken Tractor Comparison at Full of Life Farm


Egg Mobile, Chicken Tractors & Cows on Pasture at Full of Life Farm

Our latest farm hopping adventure took us out to Portland, OR where we were traveling for a friend's wedding. Oregon is a bastion for grass farmers, so we had lots of options to choose from and we were lucky enough to end up at Full of Life Farm with its owner, Bernard Smith.

Although Bernard and his family live in the SF Bay Area, they raise animals in Oregon's fertile Willamette Valley and sell the product in both regions (North CA and OR). The Willamette Valley offers an excellent climate for a grass-based farm and Bernard is lucky enough to have a piece of land that his family has owned/farmed for over a century! The farm produces pastured eggs (egg mobile pictured above), meat chickens and turkeys raised on pasture, grass fed and finished beef, as well as pasture raised pork and goat. A lot going on to say the least! In many ways Full of Life's operations are modeled after Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm, which incorporates multiple grazing species and promotes humane and sustainable livestock production. 

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"You're Not a Farm, Why Call Yourself a Farm?"

Sometimes I think to myself, “What are we doing with a website and a blog and a name for a fictional farming entity that has never produced a single product?” I also frequently wonder, “What they heck do other people think of all this?” Here we are, two city-folk with no background in farming, no real experience on a farm, and we have all this stuff online purporting to be “Little Seed Farm”. Not only that, but we are using pseudonyms! Strange, right? If I were in the reader’s shoes would I be thinking about the absurdity of what we’re doing? Probably. So maybe it would help to explain some of our thinking.

There’s a few reasons why we decided to get going with all this stuff way ahead of time. One reason was completely unplanned, but is definitely a great reason in hindsight, and it’s that now we are completely “pot committed”, as they say in poker. We broadcast our hopes and dreams to the world and now we have a little more pressure to actually make it happen. There’s no doubt in my mind that it would happen anyway, but now there’s more at stake than just a dream between two people.

The original reason that got all this going was that
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The Little Seed Vision

And the Calf says, "So what's this Little Seed business all about anyway?"

What's Little Seed All About?

We’ve received a number of questions recently about our vision for the farm and what we want to produce. It’s a difficult question to answer, but it’s important to share some of our thoughts as we get started.
 
We know that we want to focus on grass-based meat and cheese production, but we don’t have land yet, so we can’t be sure exactly which types of meat and cheese until we settle down. As noted on our Core Values page, a fundamental aspect of our farming endeavor is to work with nature and follow its lead. Location, weather patterns, topography, soil conditions and many other factors will help us determine what to farm. On top of that, we have never farmed before, so we don’t know which aspects we’ll enjoy (or not enjoy) the most. Part of our transition is based on improving our quality of life and pursuing challenges and achieving goals that are rewarding to us and our community. Our own passions will be a driving force in the decision-making process.
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