Sneaking Into Spring

Recent conversations with friends and geese

At the end of last year I mentioned we were exploring a way to slaughter geese on the farm. It was a long shot, but we received a grant that will pay for equipment to process our birds here at the Hedge.

Managed to get off the farm and visit The National Gallery, a favorite place, and home to a few geese.

The grant is for building a mobile poultry processing unit (MPU). A bunch of machines, tables, and other equipment bolted to a trailer. It's a big development for our farm. The equipment will allow us to process and sell our own birds. We will also rent the unit to farmers in our area

A couple weeks ago we drove to Pittsburgh to visit friends and family. We arrived at the Google headquarters where my friend works. Their office environment is not too different from the offices I worked in only a few years ago.

The work I did in those offices, writing software, is still very much a part of my life even if the office isn't. Now, my workspace sits over a garage where I hatch and brood geese. Outside, I pass birds almost every time I walk between the office and house. While I was at Google, I used one of their machines to print on cappuccino foam a picture of myself holding a goose.

Watching the image of me and the bird disappear while talking with my friend about software, felt as if I found the opposite of working on software on the farm while talking to birds. I scream “HELLO GEESE” and the geese shout back

We see you, bird. You can’t fly.

But you come and come again.

We can touch the sky, but we might never try.

Bird, come again.

Here’s what that sounds like:

And while the MPU pushes us further down the path toward “real” farming, I still can't ignore the pull software has on my imagination. Maren uses software I wrote to manage the Willow harvest, I use it to keep track of the goose eggs. Harvesting and sorting willow alongside stealing eggs from geese remain our primary activity until we sneak into Spring.