Working with Nature

This morning is clear and it looks to be a good day here in northern Ohio, but it's been raining off and on for about the last six or seven days.  On Monday my dad needed some extra help at his shop so I did my chores in the morning here and left for Birmingham.  As I was finishing up my chores it was beginning to rain very lightly, and I gave my still young broilers that are out in the field pen a pep talk warning them to get under the sheltered end of the pen if it started to rain hard.  I don't think they listened.  Later that morning a thunderstorm rolled through, and though I don't think that the winds were excessive or anything the chicks were scared and tried to pile up in the front corner of the pen.  When I got home in the evening and checked on them I found that eight were dead.  It looked as though they had just been smothered and trampled to death by their brothers and sisters during the storm.  I'll assume that's what happened since there were no signs of predators or anything like that.  I was worried about them when I left because it was only the second day that they had been in the field and had not yet experienced rain.  Hopefully we won't lose anymore before it's time to harvest them.  You win some and you lose some.  As Beyond Organic farmers we take on more risk than that of industrial scale conventional farms, but the rewards are infinitely greater.  We could easily raise birds for Tyson or Perdue and they would front most of the expenses ( cost of chicks, feed, and meds), but the birds wouldn't be worth eating when we finished them.  Our model produces food that leaves us with a clean body, clean environment, and clean conscious.  Nature is cruel and when you are working with it sometimes you will get burnt, but ultimately it is much easier to work with Mother Nature than to work against her.