TL;DR

We moved coops, harvested, and worked on projects a bit. It was a bit rainy in the morning, but an extra change of clothes did the trick, just like yesterday.

Moving the Coops

Why can’t you call it a chicken coop if it’s got four doors on it? Because then it would be a chicken sedan.

Well we moved the meat bird coops up the field a bit where once watermelon and squash grew just a few months ago. Though this batch of chickens will be gone in about 5 weeks, there’s another one already to take their place, so the coop will still be in operation for a while. However, coops won’t need to be moved around so much in the winter time once they’re put in a place for rest until the spring.

Oh Deer

Today there was a noticeable increase in deer activity. Just about every drive from field to garage, we saw them from the road and hill. They just stood there and stared right back at us, but always in groups of at least three (at one point six). Many of them are not yet adult size and may not have earned a healthy fear of humans. I’m surprised that we haven’t also seen more coyotes recently.

More Chickens

We took some time to construct a temporary enclosure from wood and poly panel scrap to host the new meat bird chicks. Another 150 will take the place of the teen ones currently in the coop once they get sent off to become part of the December meat share distribution.

Being in the nursery greenhouse, it especially reminds me that these chickens are effectively seedlings, however cute they are. We take really good care of all the animals here, but at the end of the day they’re being raised to be high quality food, and in that way similar to the vegetables we carefully cultivate and harvest.

The fact is that if you aren’t okay with that fact then maybe you shouldn’t eat meat. People that talk about getting attached to baby chickens and pigs and cows have that luxury because of the people who know better and still take good care of the animals. I’m working in a space committed to organic and humane farming, not a ‘factory farm’ where living things go in one end and pies come out the other.

No matter where you get it from, before you call it meat, it’s called “livestock” for a reason: it’s alive and its stock. Still, there are big differences between these chickens I know because I take care of and the plastic-wrapped roasted chickens at the supermarket. The latter is betting on you not caring where they came from, what it took to raise them, or how safe it is to eat.

Preparing for the Potluck

We have a CSA member potluck coming up on Sunday and I’m excited to share some of the things we’ve been working on. I’ll be bringing some of the dehydrated produce I’ve been working on for people to try, hopefully provide feedback on later.

Around the farm, we’ve been starting to do small projects to prepare for visitors and for the winter. Cleaning up the nursery greenhouse last week was one of them. The weather looks to be nice on Sunday, but if it changes, another project will be to clean out the upstairs of the barn where the drying onions are stored. This space is large enough to set up the rental tables and chairs for a few dozen people.

Another thing is to set up a way for people to easily send us their recipes and share them with the community. At least at first, I’m thinking of doing this with free and low tech solutions, such as a simple online form that dumps the info into a spreadsheet for later review by Jamie. This can later be used to drive publishing in a somewhat automated fashion, but worst case it’s just copy-and-paste from a central location. This also allows us to track who submitted what and when, which can be useful for attribution and recognition. And of course there are ways to set up notifications so that Jamie knows that there are new submissions waiting for review. This doesn’t have to be done by Sunday, but that’s my stretch goal so that there’s something to share, maybe little printed QR codes for the tables or something easy to capture with a phone for later.

AI Summary from Field Notes

From last weekend’s work to add observability for LLM confusions and over-thinking, today’s summary seems to prove that it’s important to always be thinking of ranges rather that absolute values when it comes to measurement and performance to goal. Case in point, today like many other days, there are natural occurrences of the LLM reasoning properly generating reasoning text that mentions “wait”, such as:

“Wait, the user also asked for questions and future areas of research.”

This is just an artifact of the way the LLM was trained to statistically generate the next set of characters, words, and sentences as internal additional context for generating the final output. This is a common occurrence in language models and is not a sign of confusion or over-thinking.

So when I initially set up the alerting thresholds to only fire after a few occurrences of ‘confusion keywords’, this was a correct hypothesis about margin of error. I’d like this to get more precise, such as smarter pattern matching and keyword permutations, but the baseline code is there for later augmentation. Anyway, here’s what the LLM produced as a summary today:

Summary