Mission Village Voice, a publication based in San Juan Bautista, gave special permission to BenitoLink to run a Q-and-A style interview between Anne Caetano (AC), owner of Mission Village Voice, and local organic food producer Lisa Knutson (LK).
Due to the length of the interview, the article is being run in two segments. This is Part 2:
Lisa Knutson, owner of Pasture Chick Ranch, grew up in San Juan Bautista, and considers it her hometown. The life she led in San Juan Canyon with her family is the backbone of who she is and what she does today. Knutson runs a successful organic food business and in this interview, shares the trials and tribulations of taking part in local agriculture. In the second part of her interview, Knutson explains how innovative local growers and producers in the county have helped her get a start. Becky Herbert owns the new Farmhouse Cafe in Hollister and Sallie Calhoun owns Paicines Ranch in Paicines.
LK: Fast forward to today. I had heard about Becky Herbert and really wanted to meet her. One day, Sallie Calhoun sends out an email: “Hi, girls. I just want to introduce you two. Becky, this is Lisa. Lisa, this is Becky. You two need to know each other!” One day we got together for coffee, and we’ve been glued. We brainstorm any big decisions. She started carrying our chicken and our eggs.
AC: What is the name of Becky’s business?
LK: It is Eating with the Seasons here in Hollister. It is a CSA.
AC: What is a CSA?
LK: Community Supported Ag Program. Becky is now opening Farm House Café here in Hollister. Her dad started the first CSA in San Benito County. They are basically a distributor for small farms; she’s like a hub. She’s united all of us small farms.
AC: That’s wonderful.
LK: It’s completely wonderful. It was such a great blessing that I have the privilege to work with her. So anyway, Farm House Café (opened) in September and that will be my first local outlet for our product. It (is) a restaurant and store.
AC: Oh, I can’t wait!
LK: It’s adorable. Susie Crump did the interior. Becky is featuring our chicken; our eggs are going to be in her frittata or sold boiled for “grab-and-go” protein. She will be using our organic pasture hens for a bone broth available by the quart jar.
AC: Exciting. Are things leveled out now?
LK: Oh yeah, It’s been a journey to get this thing leveled out. We have a really good source for our meat chicks, and our laying hens chicks are coming from Missouri. It’s a three-generation hatchery. They arrive in the mail.
AC: Mail? They mail them?
LK: Yes.
AC: How do they mail them?
LK: They arrive in a box with clusters, and there are so many birds in each one so they keep warm.
AC: Overnight?
LK: Yes, they get here in about a day and a half from Missouri.
AC: You’re mailing chickies.
LK: Now we’ve got a really good team in place. We are going to do a boutique goat dairy here too.
AC: Will you have an outlet here in town?
LK: To start it will be Becky Herbert’s Farm House Café. There is a small family-owned grocery store chain in the Bay Area that has said they would like to have an exclusive. Our other restaurants want to use it, and the Farmers Market has told me they want it ASAP! They have all tasted it.
AC: It’s amazing how one thing leads to another.
LK: I’m having coffee at Vertigo. We took our big leap the same year Kitty and Dmitri opened Vertigo, so we kind of have this “What the hell have we done?” relationship. Kitty is visiting with Courtney and me and said, “You’ve got to meet Jarad.” And I am thinking, “I wonder if..” There was a man that I had sold eggs to at a farmer’s market. He was like a broker to high-end chefs, and he was selling my eggs to a guy named Jarad, but he would never tell me who he was because I don’t think he wanted Jarad and me to ever meet. He ended up doing other things, and Jarad didn’t get eggs anymore, and I didn’t know how to contact him.
So Kitty introduces us, and I asked him, “Did you buy eggs from a little farm in Hollister about a year ago?” And he goes, “Yes, and they cut me off.” I said, “Well, that would have been me,” so we sat and visited for about an hour and a half. He came out for a tour.
AC: Does he live in San Juan?
LK? He now lives in our area and loves it. He’s a Michelin-starred chef. One just never knows what treasures are just around the corner.
AC: He’s another Q-and-A!
LN: He is such a Q-and-A! We are so becoming what Sallie and I call the Lunatic Fringe, where we believe San Benito County is known for food like Napa is known for wine.
AC: Where is he a chef?
LK: Chez PJ’s in Mountain View. Now when he needs product, he calls ahead, comes out, picks it up and leaves the money in the freezer.
AC: Do you work with any other chefs?
LK: Yes, Joel Gullion. He is an award-winning French cuisine chef and part of Vine Dining Enterprises.
Joel came out with his executive chef Brenda Mora and Mario, the president of LB Steak Santana Row. They started serving chickens two weeks ago, and they called last Friday saying they need more, and their customers love it, and they would like to add the eggs to their menu.
AC: This is amazing!
LK: I know! It’s like a dream.
AC: I’m thrilled for you, but I’m not surprised. You’ve got that incredible work ethic and passion. And now you have a boutique goat dairy in the works.
LK: Yes, we’ve been raising grass-fed organic goat meat for several years, and over the last four, have built a herd of registered French Alpine dairy goats. I have an amazing woman in Canada named Margaret Peters, and she is helping me learn to make cheese. I’ve been testing milk varieties, searching for a sweet mild milk, and the French Alpine Goat has beautiful milk. It’s a very sweet and mild-flavored milk; it’s really good. My recipes are solid, and the yogurt is amazing.
AC: You are going to be making the goat cheese and the yogurt here?
LK: Yes, our plan is that we should start selling it in about a year.
AC: Now let me ask you this – chickens … you sell the meat. Do they have to be a certain age?
LK: 62 days.
AC: You have to manage and figure out all of this out.
LK: It’s like an air traffic controller. Every other week, chickens come in, and chickens go out. Like tomorrow, 360 little birds will arrive. Next Monday, 360 will go to harvest, and next Wednesday the 400 that are in the barn will go out to pasture.
AC: You must have to be prepared for anything with Mother Nature.
LK: Oh yes, we’ve had some disasters. The El Niño last year presented a lot of crazy shifts in weather from extreme heat in the summer months to 2.5 inches of rain in 24 hours — very hard on the birds. But, we have learned, and now our infrastructure is even better, and so I choose to look at what we have learned vs. what we lost.
AC: Lisa, you are the mother of many species.
LK: We do whatever it takes to keep these birds ultra-super happy. We go through straw like crazy because we don’t want them laying on their poo in their shelters. It is like, “Are they happy? Are they comfortable?” If they are happy, there is no stress, which means no adrenaline happening in their body, which makes them taste better. It’s a commitment to keep the birds happy.
AC: This is important information.
LK: We actually just changed what we are using for bedding. We got a cow hay that has a grain in it, so that we are putting seed back into the ground. The goats will come through after we move the meat chicks off, and they will clean up the hay. We want to make it as sustainable as possible.
LK: The ground has to be happy too. If you don’t take care of your ground, you have nothing.
AC: What do you do to take care of the ground?
LK: We have a multi-species rotational program. In a nutshell this means, we move animals in and off of the ground to keep the plants and soil in good condition. Happy ground, happy animals.
AC: Wow. It’s so clean out here, and it smells so fresh! I never thought I would say this about a chicken farm.
AC: Do you have a vet on speed dial?
LK: I don’t. I’ve had to learn to become my own vet. If you called a vet every time somebody needed help, you would be broke. If I get stuck, Charlie Tobias has been awesome as well as Doc White. One day, Dr. Charlie told me, “Look, you know your animals; you just need to listen to them.”
AC: Would you consider your ranch an organic ranch?
LK: We have used the organic guidelines and gone beyond organic practices. All our birds are on organic feed. When the birds get here and they come out of the box, we’ve got their water prepped and give them probiotics designed for poultry and apple cider vinegar to keep their intestinal tract healthy and a little brown sugar to make it palatable. We do an entire respiratory protocol on our young hens to protect them from the diseases wild birds carry. Last week we gave 980 birds a wing web shot; we individually lift their wing and give them the shot as we turned them out to pasture. It is just not safe for them to be put in contact with wild birds with no protection from the hazards the environment can expose them to. All organic protocols allow for such protection for the animals.
AC: I’m speechless! How long does it take to do 980 birds?
LK: Three hours. We make a day of it and made it fun.
AC: Where do you harvest the birds?
LK: We have a family over in Turlock that harvests our birds. They’ve been doing our birds for three years.
AC: How many birds do you take at a time?
LK: 360 birds.
AC: That’s a lot of birds! You are working your tail off! But you love it, I can tell.
LK: This whole thing ties back to the little city of San Juan. There I was in 4-H, with Renee Holthouse, Dorothy Avila, going to catechism at the Mission. I go to the Guadalupe Chapel at the Mission on Thursdays and Mass on Sundays.
LK: We are in such a special area.
AC: I couldn’t agree more! There are so many great people doing so many great things here.
AC: What came first, the chicken or the egg?
LN: The chicken, of course!
AC: Thank you so much, Lisa.
To contact Lisa, email pasturechick@gmail.com. To read Part 1 of the interview, click here.
Special thanks to Mission Village Voice, a human interest publication about San Juan Bautista, Hollister, Aromas and Tres Pinos, published in San Juan Bautista. Sallie Calhoun and Matt Christiano, owners of Paicines Ranch, are major BenitoLink sponsors.
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