- Janet Pelz
I catch up with Jennifer Argraves of Crown-S Ranch at the midpoint of one of the many cycles that makes up her life. Through our conversation, there are references to the cycles of the land, of the animals she raises, of the business she runs that supports her family, even of the materials she and her husband use to build their feed sheds and solar-powered chicken trains. And each of these cycles is guided by their motto, “Better for the animals, better for the environment, better for you.”
(some of the grass fed cattle at Crown-S-Ranch in Twisp, Washington)
This weekend cycle started at 5 a.m. on her eastern Washington sustainable farm, loading freezers with beef, pork, chickens and lamb before adding 100 dozen eggs in the trailer for the monthly trip across the mountains. She’s headed for a series of drop-off locations around Seattle, where a community of consumers, careful about the food they eat and the imprint they leave on the environment, pick up their monthly deliveries. When she steps through my front door it’s as if a fresh breeze blew in, on a smile that seems to have forgotten its end point.
Over my dining room table this urban woman tries intellectually to understand the mechanics of Jennifer’s farm, which for her is as natural as that smile. I know this conversation would be far more meaningful if I were actually watching her cattle graze or smelling her one-of-a-kind composter in action. But until I can fit in a 10 hour outing to see it all myself – which I hope to do -- I’ll have to write from my imagination, shaped by Jennifer’s words, the photos from her website (you can take a virtual tour here ), and from my taste buds when I experience the farm fresh eggs she has brought as a hostess gift.
The eggs, she tells me, are among their farm’s most popular products. “They are collected literally in the days before we come. A supermarket egg can claim to be fresh when it is 10 weeks old – our eggs are never that old. We collect the eggs and they just fly out.” Because their chickens graze, “it’s a real seasonal egg, so you’ll see as the flora and fauna change on the farm, the egg yolk changes. We’ll get really orange yolks when the grass is really green.”
Jennifer and her husband Louis Sukovaty are engineers by training. After graduating from the University of Idaho they moved to the big city of Seattle to gain experience and hone their engineering skills. (It was in Seattle that they met their neighbor, Joanie Warner, who recommended that I write about Jennifer). This was part of Jennifer and Louis’s 10-year plan that would culminate with a move back to the land, where they would continue in their respective engineering fields while dabbling in farming.
But as with many life plans, life has a way of complicating them. For them if was literally a life -- a new life, their son Geza. His birth set Jennifer to thinking about the food she would be feeding him, and the more she learned, the more concerned she became.
“He was a year and a half old and that’s really where the whole story of the farm starts. All my life I’ve been a professional, I’ve done my own thing, my honey has done his own thing Then we have this baby and the baby starts to eat. I had all this time with him and I started to do all this research about food, and it’s, oh my gosh, all these things I didn’t know -- I used to go to McDonald’s! I researched about cattle being fed grain instead of eating grass. Cows are perfectly set up to eat grass, and they’re paired with us. So for hundreds of years we’ve been eating grass fed beef. The coli that’s in their gut goes into your gut all the time. But you’re paired with it and your stomach acid gets rid of it. But a grain fed animal actually gets sick. It has different stomach acid. And that’s why we get sick from it. So I’m like, there’s no way I’m going to feed this to my child! I just became obsessed about food.”
This obsession coincided with the announcement from Louis’ parents that they were ready to sell their 50-acre farm in eastern Washington where Louis grew up. Jennifer and Louis bought the property.
Their expectation? “We were just going to be engineers. We wanted to raise our kids ourselves, so the idea was we’d have one full-time working unit between the two of us. We’d continue being engineers -- we started North Cascades Engineering -- and have a little toy farm with a garden like we each had growing up.
“So while I started to learn about food Louis was starting to learn about systems. And it just got to a point where I wouldn’t eat chicken unless we raised the chicken and I wouldn’t eat pork unless we raised the pig. And pretty soon we’re going to raise all these things, and we have friends who want good food for their kids too, and I can’t find anyone out there who’s doing this. And Louis is loving it and every mom should know where her family’s food comes from.”
From there, Jennifer describes the process that incrementally transformed this ‘toy farm’ into a professional business and lifestyle shift, growing in inverse proportion to their engineering business until they finally closed North Cascades Engineering.
Now they apply their engineering skills creating and testing systems for an organic, sustainable farm. And they do all this while challenging the assumptions Americans have had about farming since the arrival of petroleum-based fertilizers and other toxic elements that, while advertising their efficiency, ignore a phalanx of complications they create.
Instead, Jennifer and Louis come up with simple ways to control pests without pesticide by working with natural cycles. “We layer everything. In one pasture, the cattle will go through, the sheep go through, the pigs rotate, the chickens go through. What we’ve found is that most animals are a dead-end host for the animal before them. So any kind of parasite that might come with one animal doesn’t make the next animal sick.”
Chickens help control the pests that on other farms are killed with chemicals. “They are really good at picking horn flies and face flies out of manure.” Chickens come through a pasture recently grazed by cattle in their solar powered chicken tractor (click the link to see it in action).
It’s a Rube Goldberg-like contraption made of salvaged wood powered by a solar panel so it moves by itself, guiding the chickens to new grass and bugs. “The chickens eat the flies in the larva state so they never mature. The chicken also pulls the pat apart, and the rest literally gets absorbed into the soil, providing nutrients, and you never have the smell.”
Perusing farming manuals from before World War II (pre-petrochemicals), Louis read about a passive walk-through flytrap -- a low-tech solution in our hi-tech world -- and set out to build one himself. The cows simply walk through baffles that brush the flies off their bodies. These fly up to a light above – their natural instinct – and they die in the baffles and fall down. (I pointed out this process sounded a bit like my writing – I start with about 15 pages of interview and then run that through baffles until a few ideas fall down and then I put them together like a jigsaw puzzle).
“Then we take the flies and compost them or we feed them to the chickens because they are protein. Industrial farms use two different pesticides to do the same thing. We get the same numbers or better with our chickens and fly traps, and we use no pesticides. The more you work with nature, slow down and look at it, the more these solutions come up.”
As another example, Jennifer points proudly to a photo of their compost facility as another mom might show off her daughter’s chess trophy . “I don’t know of any other compost facility like this, not only in the state, but I’m not sure where.” (photo below of composter)
Everything of a butchered cow that can’t be eaten is sent to the composter. “In six weeks it will completely break down. It’s just a matter of having nitrogen and carbon. Nitrogen is the animal, carbon sources would be from our organic straw or chips from our mill. It’s a balance of that, plus water. We use the water from our poultry processing facility – recycled water. That water goes through a septic system to remove the pathogens and it comes out gray water and we pump it here. When the compost is heated up it gets pushed over the wall to the back. Then we take the compost and put it into a manure spreader, so the nutrients that came off the farm get put back into the farm. We’re actually building top soil – our soil is more fertile now than when we started because of the way that we farm.”
For a long while, “the Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA) wanted us to take all the offal and bag it all up to take somewhere. We had to prove from an engineering standpoint that what we were doing actually worked.” Louis and Jennifer pointed out that industrial farms take animals and feed them to other animals (which Crown-S doesn’t do). So, they argued, if a chicken can be broken down to the point that another animal can eat it, it should be safe to take parts of that same chicken and break it down into compost to put back into the soil.
On the Crown-S Ranch the cycles of the land and the animals weave among those of the entire family. Geza, now 13, “rocks when it comes to systems.” Before the Ranch had its own WSDA certified chicken processing facility, Jennifer and Geza did the chicken circuit together. “At about 10 at night, my son would crawl into the coops and hand the chickens to my husband. They’d do it in the middle of the night so it’s less stress on the animals. I would go to bed and at about 1:00 in the morning my son would be done, so he’d crawl into the truck with me and go to sleep while I’d drive us through the night to Spokane – a four-hour drive to the nearest processor. So at 7 a.m. when the processor starts in the morning, we’d pull in, drop the trailer and go to sleep in a parking lot – I mean, this is where your food is coming from! We’d have breakfast and then we’d bag the birds because we want them to be perfect. We have these shrink wrap bags, we’d put them on ice right away. It’s quality – we’re eating it, you’re eating it!
“My daughter Icel (even the family names are recycled. Icel’s great-grandmother and grandmother both had the same name) knows the sounds of the country. She knows if a chicken is in distress, she baahs for her lambs and they come to her. She has a feeling of the earth. I don’t know how she does it but my daughter actually has chickens in her room. And she has cats in her room and the cats don’t eat the chickens.
“My daughter wanted a dog and I was, like ugh! I just can’t deal with a dog – they’re so much responsibility! I suggest a lamb instead -- they just seem so much easier. I know it doesn’t seem that way to you, but she can bottle feed them all summer when she’s actually home and then they go off with the flock. But a dog? My gosh, you’d have to walk it and train it and what if it ate a chicken? The lamb deal was way better.”
Icel with Betty and Rose
Though the kids live on 50 acres, the community K-12 school campus is right across the street. Yes, they may have a long way to get to a soccer match at another rural school, but Jennifer points out that a 30 mile drive on country roads might be easier than traveling through Seattle at some times of the day. The family doesn’t have a television – they figure there’s always plenty of fun to be had outdoors.
Since starting the farm, Louis and Jennifer have been adding to it incrementally, careful not to grow too quickly, a fault that has put similar operations out of business.
Starting with the 50 acre farm they bought from Louis’s parents, the couple now leases an additional 70 adjacent acres. On 10 of these they grow their own feed – field peas and wheat side by side and without pesticides. “It’s really healthy food we give to the animals that are supplemented with grain (cattle eat no grain). If the animal is healthy then you’re healthy and the environment is healthy.”
Each new addition – a new animal, a new system, a new crop -- is methodically measured and analyzed with an engineer’s precision. The data generated, they hope, can help others replicate their success.
“Once you close all the cycles on 150 acres, you can determine, ‘we can grow this much food to feed this many people.’ And then you ask, how much land do you need if you have this population base? When we first started everyone told us, oh, you’re such a cute little farm, but you can’t feed the world. But what we found is that we can feed the world -- better.”
(most photos on this site credited to Ken Kailing, GoodFood World)
Are you interested in eating healthy and supporting the efforts of Jennifer and Louis?
- Now that the summer market season has started, you can meet Louis and/or Jennifer and their kids every Sunday at the Mercer Island Farmers Market. Pick up some of those farm fresh eggs, a cut of meat, and learn about becoming part of their meat CSA (Community Supported Agriculture).
Jennifer, Louis and Icel at the farmer’s market
- Sign up any time to be part of the meat CSA for beef, pork, chicken, eggs, and lamb. Jennifer will bring your orders of their sustainably-raised meats and eggs to drop off locations in seven different Seattle neighborhoods.
- You can save money by buying in bulk if you have a big freezer. Order half a pig or a quarter of a steer cut to order (about 100 pounds of meat or four shopping bags full).
- Buy individual cuts for a big family celebration or pre-order a turkey for Thanksgiving, or look for their products at local restaurants such as the Herbfarm and Sun Mountain Lodge.
- Come experience the farm at the Haycation house.
A great place for families to help out on the farm and enjoy the freshest eggs and bacon in the process. You can participate as much or as little as you want. Be a farmer for a day, have your kids collect the fresh eggs.
It has two bebedrooms bedrooms and a full kitchen. Check it out here.
Jennifer’s Not-So Secrets for how she does it:
- More than anything it all comes down to priorities. There’s always more to do than there are hours in the day. This is the time of the kids. Really, they’re part of the farm and I’m always thinking about ways to integrate them.
- Time is what you can never get back -- hopefully, we’re all doing what we want to do.
- In small ways, I’m trying to make it more manageable. I really need to figure out where to focus -- we don’t need to do every single farmer’s market. We don’t need everyone to buy our products -- just enough so we can continue doing what we’re doing.
- We’re really low on cash so I think hard about getting a new pair of shoes -- all the money goes to the farm. We’re getting good about trades.
- I don’t know how our society got to the point where it’s all this stuff. What are you going to do with all your stuff? I mean, when you die they just pull up a truck and throw it all in the garbage.
- You look for the balance. You don’t just plow under a field and then think about what you’ll do. You take a step back. Like the soil -- it’s sort of like raising a kid, you’re in it for the long haul. It’s a relationship. In farming -- you take one day at a time and do what you can do.
What books has Jennifer read recently?
The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, by Sandy Tolan
And if you want to learn how modern farming is damaging our health and environment, read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan or watch the documentary Food Inc.
Great article, Janet. I picked up a sample pack (a little of everything, frozen) from their farm at the Twisp farmer's market last summer and we loved it. This is a big reminder to sign up for their CSA, like I meant to! Love the White House article too - what a summer highlight.
Posted by: Beth | 08/01/2011 at 02:53 PM