Bob's Note: This week we feature another BFM vendor, Indian Creek Farms, in their own words on Let's Get Fresh. Jeff and Nadia Myers of Indian Creek are new to the Market for this season. Those of you following along at home will recall that this is the promised follow-up blog to last week's Price Survey. Specifically, Jeff and Nadia address the uphill battles faced by small chicken farmers. We at Indian Creek Farms LLC are a veteran-owned small business farm operating out of Harrisville, WV, in Ritchie County. After serving our great nation both in the US Armed forces active duty for 20 years and then going back to Afghanistan and Iraq for another 10 years we had the opportunity to get a taste of both global travel and cultural diversity. Although this experience cannot be fully expressed in words alone we have come to realize that our second career needs to be back to "ground zero" meaning where our heritage started; beautiful country living and raising clean, wholesome food products which are free from all those synthetic additives that I cannot even begin to pronounce.

It was during the summer of 2006 that we watched the brilliant documentary, Food, Inc., which not only changed our mindset on how we wanted to live but moreover motivated us to become producers of "Beyond Organic" chicken and eggs.

 

Moving forward, we were fortunate to find a small farm plot here in West Virginia and immediately started farming. With little background experience in farming I like to call it "Feeding from the Fire hose on-the-job training". Literally, we just jumped feet first into it. We quickly realized that the consumer market was screaming for good wholesome farm-raised food and we decided that "Chicken, Brown Eggs, Lamb, Rabbits, and seasonal Turkeys" would be our primary focus.

 

After doing a little research we found Non-GMO feed for our birds and already had good well water as well as green and clean pasture in which to raise our livestock. At present we are into our second year and the lessons learned are quite immense. Between figuring out rotational grazing, putting up hay, preventing predator issues, and keeping our livestock healthy through the winter we definitely had our hands full.

 

Thank goodness we didn't have to invent all the rules by ourselves. By continually reaching out to both our extension office and our local friendly farmers as well as doing some late night reading we have done quite well. However, there are always the unexpected bolts of lightning that occur when we least expected it; such as the 9 inches of rain within 2 hours one early morning at 3 am that washed away 60 of our fully grown broilers and their 8x8 chicken tractors or the sly red foxes that always come unannounced for free chicken dinners, etc!