How a Midwestern family with no agriculture experience went from a few backyard chickens to a full-fledged farm—and discovered why local chicks are better.
When Lucie Amundsen had a rare night out with her husband, she never imagined what he’d tell her over dinner—that his dream was to quit his office job (with benefits!) and start a commercial-scale pasture-raised egg farm. His entire agricultural experience consisted of raising five backyard hens, none of whom had yet laid a single egg.
To create this pastured poultry ranch, the couple scrambles to acquire nearly two thousand chickens—all named Lola. These hens, purchased commercially, arrive bereft of basic chicken-y instincts, such as the evening urge to roost. The newbie farmers also deal with their own shortcomings, making for a failed inspection and intense struggles to keep livestock alive (much less laying) during a brutal winter. But with a heavy dose of humor, they learn to negotiate the highly stressed no-man’s-land known as Middle Agriculture. Amundsen sees firsthand how these midsized farms, situated between small-scale operations and mammoth factory farms, are vital to rebuilding America’s local food system.
With an unexpected passion for this dubious enterprise, Amundsen shares a messy, wry, and entirely educational story of the unforeseen payoffs (and frequent pitfalls) of one couple’s ag adventure—and many, many hours spent wrangling chickens.
Over the last several years, the local food movement has become, well...a thing. People are becoming more aware of just how many resources their Big Ag food requires, and that it will not be - CANNOT be - sustainable over the long term. In response to that knowledge, there are more "backyard" farms popping up, and more businesses designed to be part of the local food in their area. Locally Laid is one such business. In the book, Lucie Amundsen describes just how their family ended up as one of those businesses - and she bares the good and bad of it all.
This book was actually an unexpectedly enjoyable read. Some books on this sort of topic are all about "WE ARE DOOMED", and while I appreciate that those are important as well, it's a pleasant change of pace to read something that is knowledgeable and informative without feeling exhausted when it is finished. Amundsen has a plucky (HA! See what I did there?) sense of humor, and she isn't shy about using it in the book. It was entertaining and refreshing all at once. She also isn't shy about elucidating the difficulties that she and her family went through in order to try and make this enterprise work. She writes well about the all-encompassing fear that the farm would fail and they would have lost everything. While I think some people might not like such a close look, the realities are there for all to see - smaller farms have been going out of business at soul-crushing rates for the last several years, and the debt-load to make a go of it can often be unsustainable, even for those who work for Big Ag. I'd much rather an honest look than a sugar-coated one.
As someone who grew up on a farm (one that may not last much longer for many of the reasons outlined in the book), I feel that Amundsen did a good job of exploring the challenges and highlights of trying to make one work, particularly knowing that this was never her choice. This was her husband's idea, and she ended up along for the ride. I don't blame her for not feeling a soul-enhancing passion, because she is very honest that she would never have chosen this to be their life's work. And she very clearly says that, if they had to go back and make the choice all over again, she really doesn't know that she would say yes. But it's there now, and they are doing their best to be proper stewards of the land and of the local food movement.
