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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Pig Wranglin' - How Pigs Were Herded West

Scanned from Outdoor Pig Production by Keith Thornton
From the start of our whole farming adventure I’ve been keen on pigs. Pigs are the unsung hero of the farm. They eat the scraps, they eat the whey, they till the land (i.e. cause a huge mess and dig mud wallows), they have impressive intelligence, and, most importantly, they make bacon! For whatever reason, when we visit farms I always love the pigs and I’m really looking forward to having a herd.
 
So, I’ve been reading a lot about outdoor pig production. I guess I should say “a lot of what I can find”, which isn’t a whole lot to begin with. One of the most promising books I’ve found is called Outdoor Pig Production, by Keith Thornton and it just came in the mail this week. I found a copy from someone in the UK and it even has an old note and a newspaper clipping taped to the inside with a picture of a Duroc and the breed’s benefits:
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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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