Anna Erickson is raising a 5-year-old child and 1,000 chickens. The name of her business is apt: Hands Full Farm.
Anna, the chickens and her son, Frank, live on a 350-acre cattle ranch between Tomales and Valley Ford that’s been in the family since 1897. She intends to run the entire operation when her 70-year-old dad retires, but she’s hoping he doesn’t stop working anytime soon. For now, her hands are indeed full.
The hens lay about 400 eggs a day—white and brown ones, blue and green ones. They need to be washed, packed, labeled and delivered to the Temescal Farmer’s Market in Oakland, where Anna sells them every Sunday.
“Most people would agree that running a farm and a single-parent household are both very daunting tasks,” she said. “But I try not to think of it as challenging. I consider myself very lucky that our ranch is a family ranch. Frank’s grandparents are in the next house over, and my sister is still here and interested in participating in ranch work.”
Anna is the C.E.O., the bookkeeper, the janitor, the builder, the contractor, the H.R. director and the marketing director. Her sister, Laura, is responsible for hands-on chicken chores, loading five-gallon buckets with Hunt & Behrens feed and gathering eggs by hand each day.
Anna started farming in 2009. At first, she grew vegetables and made jams in addition to raising a few chickens. In 2012, after realizing that eggs were more profitable, they became her sole product. She started with 75 hens. Over time, those became 300, and 300 became 500 and 500 became 1,000. Still, it’s a tiny operation compared to the corporate farms that cram 20,000 chickens into one coop.
Anna would like to expand her business someday, but for now, 1,000 hens seems like the right size. “I want my business to be big enough to be comfortably paid for, and to be sustainable,” she said. “I don’t think capitalism is a good model, and getting bigger and bigger doesn’t motivate me.”
Before Laura came aboard, Anna did all the work herself, even after Frank was born. “When he was an infant, I was coming out to do chicken chores with a baby on my back. I never dropped an egg,” she said.
The work is unpredictable, and the schedule is demanding. If a fence breaks at 9 at night, it needs to be fixed right away. If a water line goes, the repair can’t wait, even if it’s pouring rain and the farm is knee-deep in mud. Some nights, she wakes up worried that she has forgotten an important chore or that some disaster has struck. But usually, her work conjures positive associations. “I dream about eggs more in terms of all the colors they can be, and how pretty they are,” she said.
On a recent day, the farm thick with mud after yet another atmospheric river, Anna headed over to the henhouse wearing a homemade woolen skirt, a hoodie and rubber boots, unperturbed by the barnyard aromas and cacophony of clucking. A few stray roosters that slipped through a recent order of chicks added their crowing to the chorus. “They make noise, they look pretty. Other than that, they have no point, much like human males,” Anna said, smiling. “Usually, I butcher them.”
She came upon a cluster of white feathers protruding from the mud, left behind by a thrashing bird. “This was someone eating a chicken,” she said. “I think it was a morning fox.”
Chickens are at the bottom of the food chain, and a vast array of predators stalk them: raccoons, skunks, foxes, hawks, eagles, wildcats, coyotes. “If a chicken doesn’t get back in the chicken house, they don’t last a night,” she said.
Bird flu is also an ever-present danger, but so far, Anna’s chickens have been spared. “My chicken flock is relatively isolated from other chicken flocks, and we don’t have visitors, for biosecurity,” Anna said. “But there is always a risk.”
The birds produce pricey eggs. Customers at the Temescal market fork over $11 for a dozen Grade A eggs, and $12 for a dozen jumbos. The eggs bring in enough money to cover all operating expenses and pay Anna, who is 40, and Laura, who is 42, full-time salaries. “I’m not getting rich, I’m not buying new cars, I’m not going on vacation to Hawaii, but I’m covering all my expenses and living comfortably,” Anna said. “If I needed to replace my roof, I could.”
In addition to salaries, her expenses include the chicks and materials for the chicken houses, which she builds herself. The biggest expense is feed, the price of which has nearly doubled since the start of the war in Ukraine, which supplies 10 percent of the world’s wheat.
But Anna’s customers are happy to pay a premium for a quality egg. “They’re the most beautiful eggs you’ll ever see,” said Margaret Nettles, a customer who has become a friend. “They are qualitatively different from what you get at the store. Eggs from a warehouse might be cheaper, but they’re not nearly as good. I’m no scientist, but I would guess there’s a nutritional difference, too.”
Ms. Nettles and her wife, Pamela Braswell, split their time between the East Bay and Tomales. They’ve bought Ms. Erickson’s eggs straight from the farm and from the Temescal market. “She has groupies,” Ms. Braswell explained. “Her customers come to the stand and just chat and chat and chat. She just brings people in.”
Chicks arrive at Hands Full Farm—400 at a time—through the postal service. They are shipped in cardboard boxes when they are one day old and begin laying eggs about two months later. They can produce an egg a day in laying season.
Ms. Nettles has accompanied Anna to pick up the chicks at the post office. “They come in flats with four compartments, and you scoop them out with your hands. They are so precious,” she said.
Anna’s pasture-raised birds get plenty of exercise wandering around the farm, but they are not certified organic. Raising organic eggs, she said, requires some environmental trade-offs. “Organic grain comes from China, it’s milled in Canada, and then it gets to America,” Anna said. “By the time it gets to me here in Valley Ford, it’s gone 10,000 miles. How much diesel fuel is that?”
Sometimes customers walk away when she tells them her eggs are not organic, but most are willing to give them a try. “They ask, ‘Are these pasture-raised and organic?’” she said. “And I say, ‘Well, they’re raised out on a pasture, but they’re not organic.’ And then they go, ‘Um, well, okay, I’ll try a dozen.’ They come back the next week and say, ‘Those eggs were really good.”
Sometimes, people assume the business isn’t hers. “I’ve had everything mansplained to me a thousand times, even though I’ve been doing this all my life. People assume that I’m not the farmer. They assume I’m married to it.”
Anna sold eggs at a variety of farmers markets before settling on Temescal. “The customers in the East Bay have been the most receptive and respectful,” Anna explained. “They enthusiastically support small farms, they don’t begrudge our prices or grill us on the why or what of our farming practices.”
Twenty years ago, when she headed off to Montana State University, Anna had no intention of becoming a farmer. She was going to study acting, but the school shut down the program the same year she arrived on campus. Instead, she studied fine arts, which came in handy when it was time to design the Hands Full Farm label, which recently underwent an update. Both versions look like they came from the pages of an 1880s magazine ad.
That’s roughly the era in which Anna’s great-great-great grandfather purchased the ranch, where her father, Lee, tends 100 head of Angus cattle and leases space to a tenant with a herd of sheep. Anna’s chicken operation is a separate business entity, but one day, it will all be hers.
“I’m happy to see the ranch stay in the family,” Mr. Erickson said. “She’s hard-working and learns as she goes. She’s bootstrapped her way up.”
Between parenting and farming, Anna said, there’s a lot of stuff she doesn’t get to each day. “But I have figured out in life, just don’t worry about it, or you’ll go insane. Just do what you can,” she said.