Let me ask a simple question: Why don’t rare chickens have a registered pedigree? Breed registries are a critical tool in promoting and preserving any type of rare or valuable animal.  If you want to buy a purebred puppy for a common breed you’re likely to end up with a dog registered by the American [...]

It will soon be Valentine’s Day at Greenfire Farms, and with the lengthening days our thoughts turn to the cyclical explosion of new life all around us.  Curiously, this brings to mind a place not too far from our farm in the sketchy section of the nearby town where police cars outnumber SUVs by a [...]

Early one morning a few days ago I was gassing up the pickup truck at a local convenience store, and I saw a sleek black pitbull mix skirting the edge of the parking lot.  Behind him only dark woods, ahead the bright lights and sharp corners of the fuel island, he seemed content to live [...]

Okay, so what’s up with calling a snowman ‘Parson Brown’? It’s that lull between Christmas and New Year’s when the vital signs of corporate America drop to an anemic, thready pulse.  But, chickens don’t read calendars and cows never go on vacation so farm life rolls on.  It’s been an unusually mild winter in North [...]

It’s always exciting to import a new chicken breed into America, but if we’re serious about saving breeds from extinction we need to think about how the breed will survive a decade…or centuries…in the future.  If a breeding population is too small and isolated then inbreeding begins to exert its corrosive effects and the breed [...]

People frequently ask about the size of the these birds. Here’s a picture of an adult hen next to a normal-size apple.      

As consumers, it’s easy to lose sight of the process.  When I pick up eggs at the farmers’ market (which I do since Greenfire can’t support a weekly $600 omelet), I often catch myself forgetting about the birds the eggs came from.  And I’m a chicken farmer!  Sure, I’ve made a connection with ‘my farmer,’ [...]

This week we picked through the orts and leavings of the grand military feast and scored a good deal:  A slightly used 12,000 BTU air conditioning unit painted in the classic Army olive drab and stored in a super-slick Hardigg plastic case.  If it worked in Iraq, it should work in Florida, too.  So, Greenfire [...]

So, you ask, is our current Greenfire office really so small that we’re willing to live in a shipping container and view it as a major upgrade?  A picture is worth a thousand words.   The container has now been accepted into the pineywoods cattle herd.