Road trip! Part 4

So I must confess: none of the pictures were taken by me. I never actually get around to taking pictures. But Aunt Judy does. So all of the pictures on the road trip blogs? They came from her. And on Thursday, I went to visit Chaffin Family Orchards in Oroville, CA, by myself. So there are no original pictures of it. Instead I used some of their pictures from their website. Like this one:

This is Table Mountain, and the orchard is just below it. According to Chris Kerston, the farm manager and my tour guide, California is made up of micro climates. Table Mountain is hugely important to them. Why? The rock face soaks up all the heat of the sun during the day, and then that heat rolls into their orchard, helping their citrus, olives, and stone fruits grow. They don't have any hard frosts because of this. It's so cool! It really does seem to be true that in California, you can grow anything.

And they do grow lots of things! Oranges, grapefruits, peaches, apricots, plums, avocados, mission olives, persimmons, cherries, lemons, figs, mandarins (seedless clementines), nectarines, pomegranates. WOW. And the thing is, there really aren't any bugs in California, at least not when you compare with the southeast. Chris mentioned a few bugs they had to protect the olives from, but I really haven't seen bugs or flies since I've been out here.

So the fun thing about their orchard is that they're super smart. Instead of mowing underneath the trees with machines or using pesticides, they let the animals graze everywhere. I'd much rather listen to a goat nosh on some blackberries than put up with a huge mower struggling through the groves. And it makes so much sense! You feed the animals the stuff you don't want there anyway, and they produce eggs or milk or meat. And then from weeds, you get profit, happy land, and happy animals. Awesome.

Another sweet thing is that there are really awesome dogs with the animals. The Great Pyrenees dogs are trained- not by a farmer, but by an older dog- to bond with and protect the animals. Common predators around Chaffin Family Orchards include hawks, bobcats, mountain lions, and bears. Once the dog is trained, he stays with one kind of animal. So Tyler, in the picture to the left, is a goat dog. There are chicken dogs, cattle dogs, etc. For a girl like me who really doesn't like dogs or pets, they're actually pretty cool. Especially since they don't yap. I don't like yapping.

Until I visited this farm, I never knew there were so many varieties of chicken. Of course, there are Rhode Island Reds and Cornish hens, but there are also Speckled Sussex (absolutely gorgeous, really), Buff Orpington,Transylvanian Naked Neck, Australorp, and more varieties I can't even remember. They even have roosters! I didn't know why you'd have a rooster around laying hens since you don't want those eggs fertilized, but having a rooster around calms the hens down. Apparently all that estrogen can get a little overbearing.

After the tour, I got to help Julie out with her chores. Julie lives in Chico and works as a nurse. She plans to move to Missouri, Tennessee, or somewhere around these parts in early spring to continue learning about farming and then start her own farm. We fed and watered the chickens, including the broilers (Cornish Cross Hens), older laying hens (Rhode Island Reds), and younger layers (mix of breeds). If you've never been around chickens, I must tell you that they will eat anything. ANYTHING. If you stand around too long, they will peck you. If a tree drops a lot of fruit, it will disappear. If they get irritated, they will eat their own eggs and peck at each other. If you work with chickens, keep your cell phones close. Goats are nothing compared to these birds. But really, they're pretty great. And they mutter. You gotta love the early morning mutter.

At the end of the day, I left with a bag of mandarins, persimmons that I had picked- both fuyu and hachiya- and 2 thick, beautiful NY strip steaks. Yup, steak! I haven't eaten a steak in... years. I don't know how many years, but quite a few. It just so happens that Matthew, my cousin I'm visiting, is a trained chef. So I took those babies back to his place, and we had a Saturday morning steak breakfast. It was awesome. The NY strip tasted so good that partway through it, I stopped to fry an egg, sunnyside up, to go along with it. It was amazing. I'm happy to have eaten and be eating beef again.

I'm so thankful and glad that I got to visit Chaffin! I knew I respected their methods beforehand, but to see it all in person and experience it was really swell. And I never expected this, but I think I might actually be able to work with animals in a similar context. If there's any manner of farming that I'm interested in, it's homesteading: raising vegetables, fruits, and animals for you and your family/friends. Small to medium amounts, not hundreds of acres to large scale sales. Homesteading seems very whole and nourishing. Whatever I end up doing, I don't want it to be just another form of rat race, which is what commercial farming of any stripe- organic, biodynamic, or conventional- can turn into. And despite myself... I kinda like goats. They're cute.