Here's a photo of Aimee's egg operation, the cleaning and sorting stage. Like most Womerlippi farm business it is carried on at the butcher block table in the kitchen.
Up until recently we have given more eggs away than we sold. We have co-workers who like the eggs, many of whom are willing to pay for them, but for some perverse reason we decided the best procedure was just to take them in a couple boxes at a time and give them away. We really don't need the money, which would only be a few dollars a week, and it's nice to see the looks on people's faces when they get a box of a dozen farm fresh eggs they were not expecting. Easily worth the money, in fact.
When people ask why we give our eggs away, we usually respond that we are trying to subvert the capitalist system.
Which is a slightly offbeat, very gentle Zen koan, if you like that kind of thing.
The chickens don't seem to see very much wrong with the scheme either. At least, they seem perfectly willing to do their bit for a re-conceptualized economy.
We do sell a few, in summer on the farm stand. $1.50/dozen, for farm fresh free range eggs. We file taxes as a farm, and carry farm insurance, and comply with whatever regulations there seem to be.
But we don't seem to work very hard to turn a profit. I guess there must be something wrong with us. But I don't really have the time to worry about it. The sun is shining outside.
No doubt some raving idealogue will now write to me some angry email, to try to put me right on my failed political and economic conceptions of how to run a farm and just be in the world.
That might even be amusing.
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Welcome to our Farm Blog.
The purpose of this blog is for Aimee and I to communicate with friends and family, with those of our students, and other folks in general who are interested in homesteading and farming activities.
The earliest posts, at the very end of the blog, tell the story of the Great Farm, our purchase of a fragment of that farm, the renovation of the homestead and its populating with people and animals. Go all the way to the last post in the archive and read backwards from there to get it in chronological order.
After getting tired of spam comments (up to a dozen or more per day), I required commentators to be Google "registered users". You can write me at mwomersley@unity.edu if you have a serious comment or question and are not a registered user.
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