So, I went to a retreat for a class at church (the introductory class that I hadn’t taken for the 2 years I’ve been going). We sang and prayed together and read from God’s own Word. It was a beautiful location down near Oklahoma, by the Ar-Kansas River. I didn’t come away with some huge breakthrough, or maybe I did. It’s the Self thing—everything is about me, and that attitude makes me compare mySelf to others. There is a nearly constant dialog in my head, comparing my actions to those of others, usually slanted so I’m the better one. This is unhelpful, and kinda shoots down the whole thing of being justified by Jesus’s righteousness. And it all stems from my Self being alive and well. Die, die, die!!! Can I let it die, so it’s not about “what’s in it for me”? Am I even a Christian if my core loyalty is to my Self?
Well, while my self is off dying, I went sledding this evening, With some friends. On the highway embankment. It was fun. The snow came this afternoon, and since it’s just about freezing, it won’t stay long. On the way home, I was reflecting on my future, and I had this crazy idea. Hanging out with a couple guys who run an ebay business can give you this sort of inspiration. We were together most of the retreat, and the trip there and back. Anyway. So, I could go back to raising chickens on pasture like we did back when. But from talking to one guy who is into natural food, it sounds like the market is kinda saturated. At the health food stores you can buy “free-range” chicken, and at Walmart you can get “No Antibiotics, No Hormones* Chicken” (*actually, as they note on the package, it’s against FDA regs to give chickens hormones anyway—but the No Antibiotics thing is real.) So. if people want meat with a healthy label, they don’t need me. Of course my chicken would taste better, and be “Fresh Range(tm)”–a phrase my dad coined. Sure the health-food-store-chicken is “free range” but that is accomplished much different from how my chickens would be raised. My chickens would be moved to new grass everyday—-they would have to stand in the grass, with the bugs. The “free-range” that I have seen raised commercially, while a step in the right direction, left something to be desired. They had a chicken house with LOTS of chickens in it (in the thousands) and then little doors in the sides where the chickens could come out and walk around in the sun—sometimes they had little fences up to keep the chickens in, sometimes they just let them wander. But, that’s kinda different from my chicken—but how would you tell from the package?
But some people would make the distinction. Those people might not be in my 1 hour radius. Which is where the crazyness comes in: I sell these chickens on ebay, pack them up and ship them to wherever people are who want chicken that “tastes like chicken.” To help show people how great these chickens are, I could video parts of their lives and put it on the internet. People could come watch “helmet cam” footage from my daily care of these chickens. I could even put the butchering process up–with a “graphic content” warning. Then people could feel like they know what these chickens are, and why they should get them shipped a thousand miles to their door. “Chickens raised in the Big Blue Room”. But, they would almost be raised on the internet. So, I’m not really shipping un-inspected meat across state lines! These chickens were raised in the youtube-o-sphere as much as anywhere else!
Yup, so that’s it! My niche is selling chickens to people like you, whether you live between here and the nearest Starbucks, or you live in Maine, you can login, order some chickens, and the UPS guy will bring them to you a couple days later.
