Next Level Nerds with Redmond Hills Farm
We’re back with another Next Level Nerds episode, and this one’s packed with real-world farming grit and laughs. 🐓🌱
Meet Bernadine & Ray from Redmond Hills Farm in Oregon. They’ve turned retirement into full-time farming—raising pasture-raised Cornish chickens, quail for eggs & meat, and even working with Longhorn cattle. But their journey is far from simple…
🔥 In this episode:
✔️ Navigating farm-use tax laws & building permits in Oregon
✔️ Expanding from chickens to quail (and now selling chicks to farm stores)
✔️ Dealing with cougars, bears & owls raiding the flock 🦉🐾
✔️ How HOAs tried to ban their “live eggs” 🤯
✔️ The struggle (and fun) of turning a hobby into a profitable farm business
If you’ve ever thought about taking your backyard flock to the next level, or just want to hear some wild farm stories, this episode is for you!
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Jennifer: 0:23
Welcome back poultry nerd. So we've been sitting here chatting with our guests today already, and it's going to be a doozy I think. So this is the second episode in our next. Level nerds for whatever reason that tongue ties me. And so today we have Bernadine and Ray from Redmond Hills Farm in Oregon. Welcome guys.
Redmond Hills Farm: 0:50
Hey there. Thanks for having us.
Jennifer: 0:51
Yeah. Hello there. Hey and Carey's here today. He's being
Carey: 0:55
Yep. I'm here today. I was not able to attend a previous recording session.
Jennifer: 1:03
Yep. You, we told him you were busy when we recorded yesterday on delivering feed and stuff. So sometimes business happens, it
Carey: 1:11
does.
Jennifer: 1:13
And that's what kind of what the purpose of our series is taking these hobbies that we started with to the next level and turning it into kind of a business. So you guys have done that now, you've, you retired recently, right?
Redmond Hills Farm: 1:31
We
Jennifer: 1:31
did retire from outside of the house, working outside of the home. Now we're
Redmond Hills Farm: 1:36
busy with our farm.
Jennifer: 1:38
Which, which took it more time? The other job? Or this job?
Redmond Hills Farm: 1:42
Oh, physically this job, by far. Yeah, there was a time where I was doing both. I didn't have much of a life then, so I was back and forth to the farm and to work. But so now, yeah, we're physically busier than ever which is, I guess could be good. But we're supposed to be retired but we're still working.
Jennifer: 2:02
So tell us what, tell us about your farm, where you are, all that good stuff that we need to know.
Redmond Hills Farm: 2:08
It starts with my husband Ray's family, so I'll let him kinda explain that part, honey. Go ahead. So we're in McMinville, Oregon. And that's about an hour or so south of Portland. Salem is the capital here. So we're between Portland and Salem on the west side of the state. We're about a 40 minute drive to the coast. The farm is originally it was purchased by my grandparents, 1957. It's right outside of town here, and it was about 600 acres at the time. It's been divided up over the years. It stayed in the family for the most part. But we. Got 85 acres of the property, what, two years ago now or so? Terrific. Two and a half years ago, something like that. So it's been in the family for a long time. My grandfather, when he was alive, raised cattle and sheep. After he died in the eighties, my grandmother stayed on the farm as long as she could, but the property was leased out for sheep and and hay and that sort of thing. So once we got R 85 acres, we. Have to keep this property in farm deferral as far as taxes go. Which means we have to farm it and we have to do a farming practice that the intent is to make a profit is basically how it's worded. So we dec we looked at a bunch of different things. My parents live up on the farm still. They raise goats, they have Nubians and they raised Spanish goats for years and years. We looked at doing that. We looked at all kinds of different things. We looked at cattle and so we just decided that we would go with. Pasture raised non GMO, no soy chicken. And I can't remember now at what point we decided to go with quail to go with that, but that's how we got started with the property. We, we. We are both now retired, Bernadine retired last year from the county and so we're both retired from, outside farm work. We never really planned on being farmers, honestly. Here we're, even though he was in the family for a long time and it has been in the family for a long time. It's all good though, and that's what we're doing currently. I just started reading, I started reading Facebook and looking at I've always, I've had chickens in the past. And I had all kinds of chickens. We used to live at another five acres away from town a few years ago. And at that point I had chickens. So I liked poultry and I was familiar with poultry night, but then I started reading about quail and I'm like, huh, what's quail? And so at the time we're trying to farm our land, then that's. When I started really digging into what quail was. Told Ray, I'm like, Hey maybe we could do quail along with the chicken. And people seemed, and I explained to'em what it was, and, for we can grow for meat, we can grow for eggs. And so that's how that started. Just an idea popped in my head like, so here we are.
Jennifer: 4:53
So chicken's like the gateway drug right to farming. And now you've added quail. And then I see you added yet another item, what, two weeks ago?
Redmond Hills Farm: 5:03
We've got the Longhorn cattle up there now. Yeah. Those actually, those belong to a friend of ours. They're we had'em bring them up there because we needed cattle on the property to help. With the regenerative farming part piece of it, but also, to help keep the grass down and stuff up there. Our property is pretty much all a hillside and it's a lot of rock and it's perfect for grazing animals. And so we needed some help with that. And he's got a bunch of longhorns and brought'em up there. So a win-win that way.
Carey: 5:33
That. That to, I like the way those look.
Redmond Hills Farm: 5:37
Like
Carey: 5:37
to me, I just like the look that they have. Yeah I don't know if they have any other practical use. I just like the way they look. Yeah,
Redmond Hills Farm: 5:46
They keep the grass down. They keep the grass down, but their meat is leaner than regular beef or told, we haven't tried it yet, but they tell us that it's leaner and it's a better meat, healthier. But they're definitely pretty they're really. Beautiful animals, I think.
Jennifer: 6:03
So you, so based on what I just heard, you decided just to move into the business aspect for the farming credit, for the land.
Redmond Hills Farm: 6:13
So in order to keep. The land in what's called farm deferral here for tax purposes. You have to be, you have to farm it, so it's in what's called an exclusive farm use zone. There's different zones. There's forestry zones and there's, other zones in the state. But exclusive farm use zones, you have to farm it. You have to do something basically to make money, to make a profit in order it's a farming practice in order to keep your taxes much lower than what they would be otherwise, property type. The second reason why is because. There's no dwelling. There's no house on this 85 acres, and in order for us to qualify to get a building permit from the county, we have to have a farming operation that produces a certain dollar amount gross dollar. For at least two years in a row or three out of five years in order to get the county to approve a building permit for us to build a house on our own property. Yep. It's, there's a lot of. There's several different avenues, if you will, for someone that has exclusive farm use land to get a building permit for a dwelling. But our property, because the way it's been divided up over the years and there's houses on other, parcels that used to be part of the big parcel. The only option we have is this option. And so that was our, really our main goal and our main reason for getting started with farming the land.
Jennifer: 7:54
So once you have the house built, do you have to continue farming?
Redmond Hills Farm: 8:00
It's, yeah. It's still an exclusive farm use we have to, yeah, we have to con continue some kind of farming operation there, whatever it is gonna be in order to keep the tax deferral status. Yeah. And Quail's kind of perfect for that.
Jennifer: 8:14
Yeah, it's just interesting that there's, you would think that people would start their businesses, oh, I'm just gonna sell some eggs, and then it just morphed from there. But in a lot of cases, there's other reasons.
Redmond Hills Farm: 8:29
It's a need. Yeah. There's a need there to do that.
Jennifer: 8:33
Yep. Yep. Okay. So now you've got, you're doing Cornish out on pasture, right? And you're doing the quail in the barn. So tell us the business side of it. How did you decide to take the birds to the business level?
Redmond Hills Farm: 8:50
As we read more and more about quail, they're excellent egg producers. You get one egg from a hand each day. We thought let's introduce eggs to the, our community. Tell'em, try to get the word out that there's quail eggs. A lot of people on our end over here don't know what quail. Or how we can use, you know what? That we can even eat quail eggs. They think quail are the first thing they say when we tell them that we're raising quail. They think it's a mountain quail that you see outside. Oh, they're so cute. They run around our backyard with a little, tough in the, on the head. And I'm like, no, those are mountain quail. That's not the same, but it's same family, but just not, not the same bird. So we explained to them, what that is. And but the more we talk to people, the more we realize that there, there is some interest out there for eggs. So that's how we started getting birds first for eggs. So we bought a few hatching eggs. We decided to hatch our own. I started really small at home. The NR 60 or what was that? NR. I forget what that is. That little in the round one. The nature, right? Yeah. Nature. There you go. And so I started with that and. Ven, not ven pop, vanilla pop and pops or something. Those little round, small incubators that aren't really, I didn't get the Maddie Coops from that'cause I heard that one's pretty good. But I started small and I did pretty good actually for the first few times I go, this, I can do this.'cause I had chicken eggs before, so I'm like, this is okay. I did pretty good. I was getting good hatch rates. So that's how we started our first. Little batch of birds. And then I start reading looking up some videos on how to build cages. Of course a little bit before I started hatching eggs, I saw Terry's videos on YouTube that gave me great ideas how to build your own cages. We ordered some fence, some hard hardware or hard wear cloth and everything that we need. Yeah, there you go. From fence wire.com or Amazon. And I built my own cages just by watching videos. And so I. I bought the shelves, the wire metal shelves that you can get for usually people use for pantries. And then I built my cages and I attached shelves, and then Ray and I built some wooden ones together and then put cages on those. And so that's how we built our little. Collection of cages and birds and it went from there. And pretty soon we started thinking, wow, we have too many roosters. We gotta do something with roosters. And we start calling around and see how we can get'em. There's different rules for that here in Oregon too. We can't just process'em out of our house and sell'em. It's gotta go through a licensed facility. There's all kinds of rules and regulations with that. So that's how that started with that. And we pretty soon were processing roosters. And selling them at, we started going to the farmer's market. With our pasture raised chicken. So we introduced quail and now we take, quail to the farmer's market. And it grew from there just from extra boosters. And so that's how that started from a business perspective, we have, so we have a second, we have another business too, that we've had for 12 years. And so we have an idea about, what it takes to get a business started and get your. Get your name in out there and all the licensing that's involved and insurance and everything else. We just knew that in order to get to the goal that we need to get to, to meet the gross income requirements in order to get a building permit for our house that we needed to get to build this business and really put it out there, that's what that's has been our driver from day one is to get to that point where we can report to the county that we've earned what we need to so that we can get a building permit to build a dwelling up on our farm.
Jennifer: 13:08
Wow. I'm in Tennessee and we just, we can just process the quail and sell'em out the back door, essentially, like endless supplies of them because they're in,
Carey: 13:19
I was gonna say, yeah, they have the USDA has exemptions for people under X number amount that you don't have to go through. It is crazy to me. Yeah. That some states require more than what the feds do.
Redmond Hills Farm: 13:35
Yeah. So I should have said, yeah here in Oregon, you, we could, there's a limit. We could process ourselves and sell up to 1000 birds from directly from the farm. Yeah, that means folks would have to come to the farm and buy those, directly from us. If you wanna sell to a restaurant, if you wanna sell to a catering company, if you wanna sell to the public at a farmer's market. The birds have to be processed by a licensed processing facility. State licensed processing facility, which is the place we use is also USDA inspected. So that's the deal there. We can sell up to a thousand birds directly from our property. Okay. If people come up there and get'em. Yeah. See
Carey: 14:17
In Alabama since COVID, they made this ex exception where you could actually make deliveries. So it didn't have to be from they didn't have to come to your farm. That'd be great. During that time, they allowed for deliveries. And I think that was USDA, so maybe Oregon. Might allow for deliveries.
Redmond Hills Farm: 14:41
Yeah. We didn't get, I haven't found that at all. We've talked to the state and to the processors and to the the state agricultural folks here, and that's never been even mentioned,
Jennifer: 14:51
yeah. Yeah. And a thousand quail goes really quick too.
Redmond Hills Farm: 14:56
It does. And plus, go ahead.
Carey: 14:58
I found the best luck reading those rules and stuff on the website. Because you would be surprised at the amount of rules and exemptions that those charged with enforcing have no clue they exist.
Redmond Hills Farm: 15:17
Yeah. I can see that happening. Yeah.
Carey: 15:19
So
Redmond Hills Farm: 15:19
yeah, it's delivery would be a great option actually, because, you we're NPIP certified. We don't, I don't want a lot of people coming up to the farm. Not a lot of traffic. That's a risk. Property too, is we don't have an address for our farm property. So in order to get people up there, yeah, they have to go across another part of the property. There's three other houses up there with three different addresses, but our property doesn't have an address. So trying to get people up there Yeah. Would be a major, paint a wrong direction if they follow GPS. Yeah. Oh my. It gets'em lot end up at my sister's house end. That's a different story.
Jennifer: 16:03
Okay, so you guys are selling the pasture chicken. Are you using Cornish for that?
Redmond Hills Farm: 16:10
Yeah.
Jennifer: 16:10
Okay. And then you're selling the quail meat and the eggs and all of that's at the farmer's market?
Redmond Hills Farm: 16:17
Yep. Yes. Yes. And we offer delivery.
Jennifer: 16:21
Are you still doing chicks too?
Redmond Hills Farm: 16:23
I
Jennifer: 16:23
know
Redmond Hills Farm: 16:23
at one point you were doing chicks. We are doing chicks. We recently, within what? The last first of the year? Last year, actually last year. Last year, we started delivering to our local farm stores chicks. We have three different they're called Wilco here in Oregon. There's three different ones that have called us from different cities that want chicks. So we've been hatching, maybe we make deliveries every two weeks of about 150 chicks. 50 chicks to each. Wilco. So that's been kinda a neat little, yeah, it's kinda exciting because it's, we're got some business going there.
Jennifer: 17:00
Is it hard to get your foot in the door to do that?
Redmond Hills Farm: 17:05
Not too hard, not really. We just made, I made some phone calls out to the farm stores. We have, there's Wilco stores, there's Coastal, there's tractor supply, so there's several. And so I just started calling. And, we go into this Wilco here in McMinnville all the time. And so we talk, we talked to them when we went in there and yeah, it wasn't too hard. Actually they do require that you're NPIP certified, so that helped. Yeah. In that aspect. Yeah. So that's why we keep our certification so we can do that. And that's all they wanted of us. And they asked if we were certified and they didn't even come to our farm or anything. They just, he came to the house? To the house. He came to the house, but not the farm. Yeah. We spoke to'em in person. And that's all it took. And pretty soon and word got out to the other Wilcos in different cities we drive, what is it? Vancouver, and an hour and a half, about an hour and a half to, to deliver chicks on every other Sun Saturday. But they word of mouth is what really got us a business. They just sent an email to all Wilco saying that we had chicks and they sell. The next day, they sell over, like we've gone there the following day and they're all gone and they've told us that they sell in one day. 50 chicks will just go like that. They're gone. So far it's doing really well.
Jennifer: 18:16
Then you say, next time order 75.
Redmond Hills Farm: 18:20
I just need more birds. I didn't wanna go over my head because there's only two of us and it is a lot of work. You know those poop trays, you know how that goes. So we're constantly cleaning poop trays and wa and waterers and so it would be nice, but at the same time, I don't know if I want that much more. But yeah, we can do more. We've talked about it before. If we really wanted to ramp it up, I think we really could. We had one of the stores actually call us recently, and they wanted to up their order to a hundred chicks. It's from 50, and so we started doing that. But if. My preference would be, I think our preference would be at some point to hatch chicks and sell chicks and not necessarily continue with raising Cornish, especially non GMO. No soy. It's expensive. It's really expensive and it's heck of a lot of work, as you guys know. So well, I would really like, and we're supposed to be retired. So at some point, I think it would be good if we could just hatch chicks and sell chicks. I would love that. We've got everything to do it.
Jennifer: 19:21
Oh yeah. You get, but you're not processing, right? You're taking them to a processor,
Redmond Hills Farm: 19:26
right? That's correct.
Jennifer: 19:27
Yeah. But you have, obviously predator issues probably right. Because I see you post about bears and stuff.
Redmond Hills Farm: 19:34
Oh, cougars and bears. We have it all. Coyotes. Owls, we had a rescue owl that got tangled up in one of our nets, our Cornish nets.'cause we have to have the netting. We have a mountain pasture on the, surrounded with electrical fence. But we have to have them in smaller areas where we can put a large netting over it because when we didn't do that, we lost every night we were losing a bird to an owl. Or more than one L. So yeah, we have cougar, we have bear, we have everything. Our quail are inside a barn that's made for, we made it for that purpose. It's got the the vents or the fans. It, we've got the LED lighting, 16 hours a day. We on program programmed lighting, so they get 14 hours of light every day. They've got the, big man doors where they can get air and once in a while we'll go there and open the man doors so they get the fresh air. So that works out good for the quail and they're protected that way'cause they're not outside. But our Cornish, we really had to do the extra work with the netting and the electrical wiring, all that to make sure they're protected. And Ray usually takes, he takes care of the Cornish and I take care of the quail. That's how we divvy up. We help each other, but that's our focus.
Jennifer: 20:49
Yeah. I'd rather do the quail over the Cornish too.
Redmond Hills Farm: 20:53
Yeah. They're messy. They're nasty. They're nasty.
Jennifer: 20:55
They are are you doing anything with all of that manure to be profitable? Or No? No, that's a
Redmond Hills Farm: 21:05
that, no, not right now. But that is, that's something you definitely can get into if we wanted to, yep.
Jennifer: 21:10
We have a whole style. You can have your own mount poop more. That's what we call ours is Mount poop more. We have ours.
Carey: 21:17
Yeah. People actually get that to use for their flower beds, raised gardens, that kind of stuff. That's a good thing that you can use for your old feed sacks.
Redmond Hills Farm: 21:28
And it's pretty hot. So how long does it, is it like chicken manure or how long do you, does it need to cool off?
Jennifer: 21:34
So we we put ours out and then I get the free tree trimmings from the tree cutters and they dump in a pile off to the side and our field. And then every time we put scoops of. The quail poop out, we just add a scoop of the tree, trimmings the brown, and that makes the browns right. And then anything else, from the brooders or whatnot goes in that pile too. And then we just turn it over. But we, we generate a lot here. We have a literal mountain of it and it sit for about 10 months and then I'll run out of last, the last cycle. From the garden and then I'll start using this one and we'll, so we always have two going, one we're using in the garden and one that's more fresh, if that makes sense.
Redmond Hills Farm: 22:19
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Yeah, that's a good idea. We definitely could use that. We have a manure too on the other side of our property where my in-laws live.'cause they're right adjacent to ours. So it's, they're like living on the property the way it's divided. They're actually on. Outside on their own area, but she has goats, so we have a lot of compost from. So there's a pile over there, and then there's a pile over here of our quail manure. But we definitely could, we definitely use it that for compost.
Jennifer: 22:48
Yeah. You can sell it hot to somebody who's going to compost it, but yeah, if you just let it sit.'Cause I've been, it's springtime working on my garden and stuff, and we're bringing it over and putting it in my beds and gosh, it's just full of worms and it's just so soft and fluffy. That's good stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And I have people ask me, they're like, do you sell it? And I'm like, oh no, I'm just growing my potatoes right now. Just use it. Yeah.
Redmond Hills Farm: 23:16
We've had one or. Maybe two people ask if we were selling it too. But yeah, now we have, with the cattle up there, we they're stomping it down like they're going through the middle of it. Yeah, we don't just about every day, yeah.
Jennifer: 23:30
Yeah. You might consider piling that up and that would be an easy source of just a money pile right there, that's a good
Redmond Hills Farm: 23:37
idea. Yeah.
Jennifer: 23:38
Definitely
Redmond Hills Farm: 23:39
put in a little like fish worms. Yeah. Good fishing worms. Exactly. Mine, maybe some pellets around or something so the cows don't get to
Jennifer: 23:48
it. And we have black soldierly that come naturally here. So they they work it for us pretty good too. Oh yeah. Do you have those there? I don't
Redmond Hills Farm: 24:00
know. I don't think we do. I haven't seen'em. Oh, okay. No. Oh yeah, those, I'm not
Jennifer: 24:06
you. You're golden Black soldier fry. Yeah.
Redmond Hills Farm: 24:09
I don't think, I'll have to look. I don't think we have. Yeah, just a regular house flies. Yeah,
Carey: 24:15
you can use, you can get some of those off of eBay. And go ahead and start. You amount poop more. Yeah. And then dump'em in it, and they will go through it and do everything you need them to do and they will greatly multiply.
Redmond Hills Farm: 24:33
Wow. And they're good snacks for the birds too, right? The Oh yeah.
Jennifer: 24:38
I, my ducks, my duck's free range, and they're always over there digging through mount poop more looking for stuff, and I know that's what they're finding over there. Yeah.
Redmond Hills Farm: 24:47
That's definitely another money source for sure. If
Jennifer: 24:49
you wanna get into that. And then I hear you got a new contract too, so you're moving into restaurant food too now.
Redmond Hills Farm: 24:58
Oh
Jennifer: 24:58
yeah.
Redmond Hills Farm: 24:59
Ray got that with the catering company. Yeah, we got a catering company. Yeah. So tell him them, Ray, how you he's the one, they reached out to him. You don't have to tell us all your secrets,
Jennifer: 25:09
but we just wanna give people ideas. No secrets.
Redmond Hills Farm: 25:13
They. They reached out to us, actually. Yeah. And so that was, that's part of the whole getting your name out there and doing social media left and right. Word of mouth. Word of mouth. And maybe at the farmer's market, maybe that I, that might have helped. I can't remember. How did they find our name? Do you remember how they said that? Or website. We have a website too, so that's helpful. And I think that's how they found us. But yeah, word of mouth. So he's using our chicken right now. He, at one point he wants some quail, but he said for now he is, he wants some Cornish hens. And so we're gonna try raising some Cornish hens for him to the smaller size. So he can have it in his, he his menu, he has a real large catering. Business that he does for the wineries here. We have a lot of wineries here in our county. And so that's what he does. And so that's kinda exciting. Hopefully it all goes through. Sometimes you know, you don't know, people say they, they want to work with you and then you don't hear from them. But he's been a pretty, he took some of our birds, so hopefully he continues, it's some, it's sometimes you just gotta, like you said, roll with it. It doesn't always work just like you think it's going to, but you, it, you gotta do it or else you gotta try.
Jennifer: 26:23
You gotta try and then you gotta try. Adapt a little bit.
Redmond Hills Farm: 26:27
Yep.
Jennifer: 26:28
Yeah,
Redmond Hills Farm: 26:29
adapt.
Jennifer: 26:30
Adapt. Yeah. That's like the foam for me, or the feed for Carrie. We didn't wake up one day and say, Hey, I think I'm gonna make foam today. It was, I need foam and I can't find it anywhere. So I adapted.
Redmond Hills Farm: 26:44
Yeah. Yep. And that's, you gotta do that's how we, that's how you learn too. You just improvise and you adapt and, and overcome. Okay.
Jennifer: 26:53
So now I'm gonna let Carrie go, but I, on his rabbit hole stuff, he's, I've been teasing him for 30 minutes now. So tell us about drilling your well and capturing rainwater in Oregon. Because we are just like beside ourselves here about it.
Redmond Hills Farm: 27:11
So is it that where you guys are or you can just, if you need a you can just have a well drilled and yeah, we
Jennifer: 27:17
had a well drilled over at the greenhouse a couple years ago and hooked it up. Nobody cared.
Carey: 27:22
So like where we live and I'm like a mile from the city limits. If you want to capture rainwater or drill a well or anything like that, there's literally nobody that governs that they could care less. Now, if you wanna build a house they're gonna wanna look at your plans and you'll need to pull some permits for that. Unless you are building it yourself, and if you yourself are doing your own construction and have permits or have blueprints, then they'll let you pull your own. But yeah, it's and there's nobody riding around looking to see how many birds you process. Nope. When I asked my USDA person, hey. Alabama, do we go by the federal guidelines for the farm exemption or do y'all have something else? And she was like, no, that's, I mean that we don't have anything specific. I said, okay, so how does that really work? And she looks at me straight in the face and says that really depends on your bookkeeping.
Redmond Hills Farm: 28:39
Wow.
Carey: 28:40
And I said, yes, ma'am. I appreciate your time. You have a wonderful day. Yeah. Thanks for coming. Yep.
Redmond Hills Farm: 28:47
Not Oregon. Oregon's a beautiful green state, but yeah, it's got, they've got some funny rules. Everything here's regulated permits and approvals and inspections, literally everything. So there's actually, they want their money. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. There's actually a database that you can find online. It's open public information about wells, water wells drilled in Oregon. It'll tell you how many gallons per minute they, they pump. So they keep track of all of this information. And to get a well drilled, you have to get a permit first, and then once you get a permit, you get somebody to come out and actually drill the well. The casing, all that stuff has gotta be inspected. Yeah, it's crazy. So everything is and if you're, even if you're building a house yourself out here, especially if it's on farmland, you have to pull all the same permits that a contractor would have to pull and inspections and all that stuff too. So you asked about, yeah, it's expensive too. Oh my gosh. You asked about rainwater, we were talking about this earlier, but essentially the way the state of Oregon looks at rainwater is that when it hits the ground, it belongs to the every person in the state of Oregon, essentially. We have. A large barn we have two now, but they, the large barn has big water tanks on at one end, and so the water, hits the metal roof, comes down to the gutters, and it goes into the water tanks. You can store water that way. Okay. You don't have to have any special permit or anything like that. But. We were looking at digging out a pond up there because we have a, there's a stream that flows on one side of the property, and we could dig out a nice pond over there for, for agricultural use, for the, for livestock whatever. But in order to do that, you're supposed to get ahold of the water master. There's actually a water master. There is a water master for each area. Yep. Yes. It's
Carey: 30:55
So this is my biggest question. So in the state of Oregon, if you capture it before it hits the ground, then it's yours. But once it hits the ground, it belongs to everybody in the state. Yes. Is that right? Okay. That is correct. So every month when they send you a water bill, do they also send you a check? Because you would think if you know the water belongs to each of y'all as well as everyone else in Oregon. They should take how many gallons were used through their system and calculate the math out and send you your residuals, I would think. Yeah, I know. It's crazy. Alaska does that with the oil. Yeah.
Redmond Hills Farm: 31:41
Yeah.
Jennifer: 31:41
Okay. So what does this Water Master do? Yeah,
Redmond Hills Farm: 31:44
so the water masters, there's one for this. I don't know, he's probably, I think he's the only water master for the whole western side of the state. So there's not very many of them. But he actually told me too, one time, you're supposed to submit an application for, if you're gonna dig out a pond, you have to include in that where the pond is gonna be, how the water's gonna get to it, where it's gonna come from. Running down the hill or whatever. And you have to pay like a$700 fee for this application. Just to dig a hole on your property to capture water. And technically if you don't do it and they find out that you've got this pond, they can come out there and, make you fill it in or whatever. But he did tell me himself, he's there's there are people out there that dig their own ponds and I don't have the time or the resources to get to every property. So
Carey: 32:38
that should be, yeah, so do they just have people that ride around and, oh, there's a pond. Let me look and see if their address is in our database. Right? Nope. Nope. We're gonna send them a fine. Lemme keep riding down. They'd never find ours
Redmond Hills Farm: 32:50
if we had one because they, they have to find it by helicopter. That's the only way they'd find it. But,
Carey: 32:54
geez, I'd like to know how you get this job as a water master.
Redmond Hills Farm: 32:59
I don't
Carey: 32:59
even want to know, honestly. That, that seems that has to be a very lucrative position. Yeah.
Redmond Hills Farm: 33:08
Powerful position. I dunno, man.
Carey: 33:10
Both direct deposit and. In envelopes.
Jennifer: 33:15
So once you have the can you use it for whatever you want? Or are there restrictions on that too?
Redmond Hills Farm: 33:21
There are wells for agriculture and there are wells for personal use, like your home, your home, your barns or whatever. So the well that we had drilled, we're planning on building a house right there, and plus we just put up a new barn and we needed water to the barn. Once you've drilled the if we wanted to tap off of that well and run irrigation we could. But it's not something that we're gonna be doing up there. You can't really grow anything on our property except oak trees, fir trees, and poison oak everywhere. You need goats. Yeah. That's blackberry bushes. Yeah. Yeah. We used to have about 400, 500 goats roaming the property, but not so much anymore. And the, we lost a lot too with the cougars out there. Okay. Yeah, that's another story, but,
Jennifer: 34:09
You guys are navigating a lot of issues. I think that majority of us just don't even comprehend because we had the well dug a couple years ago and we have a pond that was dug when we built the house and. It just ne never occurred to anybody here that anybody would care what we were doing.
Redmond Hills Farm: 34:31
Yeah. It's actually called water rights out here. So you'll sometimes you'll see a property for sale out here and the listing will say that it has water rights included. So those water rights come from that application to the water master. Once you're in, once you're approved and you've got a pond or what have you, then you get water rights. To the right to capture that water from a stream or or down the hill into a pond. And at any rate, yeah. Yeah. They, oh, wow. Gotta, there's, yeah. It's not as simple as, oh, you have property, go build a house. And some people still don't realize, they think that we, all they gotta do is go buy a piece of property and. Homesteaded and away they go and it doesn't, it's not that easy. They see how come you guys don't live on your farm? Yeah, we get that ass spot. We want to, but, okay.
Jennifer: 35:21
We have a few minutes, so tell us you told us already, but tell the listeners your hoa slash incubator story.
Redmond Hills Farm: 35:29
Okay. We are having our barn built, so in the meantime, we. Put our hatchers, our cabinet hatchers in the garage and our brooder in the garage. We have a three stacked GFQ Brooders, just three of'em stacked up. And the two hatching time cabinet ha incubators and hatchers. So we put those in the garage so we can hatch our birds. And then when they're at three, three weeks or so, two and a half, three weeks, we were moving them over to the garage. Garage or to the. To the farm, once they hatched and they were able to go out, we put'em out there, out into Aviaries at the time where we had a few aviaries at the farm. And so that's how we're moving the birds out there. While we had our farm built. When, I don't know how maybe our garage or door was open when a day or some, I don't know how this happened, but somebody got wind in the neighborhood that we were hatching birds. That we are breeding birds in our garage. And they, I don't know if the bird flew. They got scared. They called the county. We heard from the county, we received a letter stating that there's been a complaint. There were breeding birds in our garage. No one ever talked to us. We would've, we would've, had they come up to us and asked us, we would've told'em, our birds are probably safer. Because they're NPIP certified, we have'em tested every six months. They're probably safer than the birds out in your backyard. So if you're that scared or that afraid you shouldn't go outside, you know those birdies are gonna hurt you out there. But had they talked to us and they didn't, so we, we had a, take all our birds, our incubators up to the farm. What happened though? It was timing. Good timing, because at that point our barn was already getting finished, so we're able to stall it like a month and then move them out there. They also told us, and then they changed their rules on their. HOA, what do you call it again? The rules and regulations. Rules and regulations. Where specifically now, they updated it and sent everybody an updated copy. Now it says, no quail or live birds allowed live eggs. Live eggs. No quail or live eggs of any kind. So I'm thinking no live eggs. Does that mean we can't eat eggs? We can't have eggs in our refrigerator? Because I know there are groups out there that hatch'em.
Carey: 37:45
I wouldn't buy any free range ones. They might get you for that. Yeah. It's
Redmond Hills Farm: 37:49
A, it's a joke with us now. We'll come home from the farm with a basket of eggs in the truck. And we're walking across our front yard. We live in a neighborhood and there's nosy neighbors over here. Started this. So we're like, oh, here we are. We're back at it with our live eggs going in the house. We came back from processing one time with our basket, with the what do you call'em again, honey? The, where we carry our the birds up to processing the cages. Oh, the,
Carey: 38:14
The transport cages.
Redmond Hills Farm: 38:16
The transport cages we had on the back of our trailer and we parked, we stopped at the house first before we headed. To the farm and the birds had already been processed. They were just empty cages, empty crates, crates. So we got a call from the city saying that someone's complaining that we're back at it again. We raising live birds. And that's what she said. We're back at it again. Back at it. And so now that's a joke between us. We're back at it. We're just outta curiosity
Jennifer: 38:41
or like you in a condo or a house. We're a house.
Redmond Hills Farm: 38:45
A house. Yeah. They, we this whole neighborhood was built about a couple years ago, two or three years ago. So there's people out there watching every little thing we do. So now when we get home, we're like, oh, we're back out there together.
Jennifer: 38:58
I think I'd bring all those transport cages out to the front yard and pressure wash'em out there if it was me.
Carey: 39:04
Yeah, I think I would do something like that and next time I got a call, I would say, will you please come to my house? I would like for you to come to my house so you can see what's going on and let them see the empty transport baskets. Then I would say, okay, now this person over here, I would like to file harassing communication charges against them because they are harassing me by doing this. Bra
Redmond Hills Farm: 39:36
we walked over, we actually, I got complaints that they made. And along with that was this picture that this neighbor took of our truck and trailer in the driveway with the empty crates on the trailer. So after I got that, we went down to her house and confronted her outside and she said that friendly, not in a bad way, she was friendlier than I was. But I walked over and I said, she was outside. I said, I heard that you were. Con you had some concerns. I said, I wish you would've come talk to us.'cause we would've explained to you that there's no fear. You're safe. There's no breeding. There's no breeding, there's no bad birds. Here. You are not gonna get anything, blowing your way. I said, I wish you would've talked to us first, and then we could've, settled your concerns and she's oh, okay. I said, next time I would've gave you a dozen
Carey: 40:23
eggs. Eggs that weren't live.
Redmond Hills Farm: 40:26
Free. Free unlive eggs.
Jennifer: 40:28
Yeah. Maybe they want you to eat those. What is it? Just egg out of the vegan section in the dairy. Is it a carton of the powder?
Redmond Hills Farm: 40:36
The, oh, The milk. The liquid form? Yeah. Yeah. Maybe that's what they wanted to eat. We can have powdered eggs, I dunno.
Carey: 40:45
But that was freeze dried from what could have been a free range egg at some point in time and. There's a whole group, there's a whole, you never know Facebook group about hatching free range eggs that you get from the store. Yeah,
Redmond Hills Farm: 41:00
I
Carey: 41:00
see. I would wanna know what kind of eggs she has in her refrigerator. They may be live too.
Redmond Hills Farm: 41:05
And how can she prove that they're not? That's
Carey: 41:07
right. That's a HOA sign waiting to happen.
Redmond Hills Farm: 41:12
The thing is too, it's, there's a lot of kids in this neighborhood. Young kids. And when I was in school, which was a long time ago, but I know kids still do this, they incubate and hatch eggs at school or at home as a school project.
Carey: 41:26
We did it in my classroom this year and last year.
Redmond Hills Farm: 41:30
And kids do it at home all the time. So one of my arguments to them was, so are you saying the kids at school can't hatch an egg, a little chick at their house? They'll take it on a case by case basis. Okay, so we gotta watch those. All of you out there, watch those HOAs.
Carey: 41:45
I'd be like, I'm just hatching some out for everybody in the neighborhood.
Redmond Hills Farm: 41:50
Yeah, there you go. I should just go on and hang hand out. Free eggs to everybody. There you
Jennifer: 41:55
go. So well, back to the business thing. I told one of my kids just yesterday, it's if being self-employed and running your own business was easy, everybody would be doing it.
Redmond Hills Farm: 42:06
That's right. Yeah, it's a lot of hard work, a lot of work, a lot of challenges sometimes with people, sometimes just in business general. Yeah.
Jennifer: 42:14
And add adaptations. I think that was a good word for the day. I appreciate you guys joining us and explaining your journey. Making
Redmond Hills Farm: 42:24
a well. Thanks for having us. Yeah, it's been fun though. It's not all bad. It's a lot of fun and I'm glad we're doing it. It's good work. We're retired, but it's also good physical work. It feels good. We're happy at the end of the day. We're tired, but it's a good work. So it's not a, it's not all bad. No. Rabbit hole thing.
Carey: 42:44
If you enjoy what you do, it makes a thing. It's, it's a thing. Yeah.
Jennifer: 42:49
Yeah. What'd you say, Ray?
Carey: 42:51
Carrie didn't get to his rabbit hole.
Jennifer: 42:53
Oh did with the,
Carey: 42:54
I just. Y I, if it's everybody's water, then why are they charging me for it? I, I would, if I had a water God in my state like that, I, that would come and look in my pond. I don't know. I would have a field day with it.
Jennifer: 43:12
It's water master, not water. God.
Carey: 43:15
They act like they're, they act like the other though. Hope I didn't offend anybody with that. If so, carry@poultrynerds.com.
Jennifer: 43:24
All right. All right. We'll talk to you guys later.
Carey: 43:26
Alright, thanks.