You Want to be an Agrotourist

Here is the ad I expect to put up on Craig's List, as soon as I can scrape some of the caked-on crap off the horizontal surfaces of the chicken house, get in
fresh wood shavings, and ready a new space for myself under the main house. I figure it's going to put a lot of quarters in my sock, which will all go toward my journey to Great Bear Lake .... if I can get Davey to cooperate. So check it out:

Bernie Made Off with your investment money, your house lost half its market value, and your credit cards were canceled, so now you can't even pay summer hotel prices in Paris, Texas ..... and anyway, you want to reduce your foot print and your waist line, while contributing to a sustainable enterprise by eating local foods, and living on the land's natural bounty. Yachtless in the Finger Lakes, you want to ride the bow wave of the latest popular movement: You want to be an Agrotourist.

Here is your chance to experience, not simply life on the farm, but the full, free-range life - life as the farm animals themselves experience it, embedded with the flock, keeping their hours, sharing their quarters and their rations, totally home on the range.

As a guest at Dog's Plot, you will rise at dawn, if not before, and thrill to the fierce mock battles of our colorful, designer roosters, who (because they are not hardened and provoked by professional football players or small time gamblers) will seldom hurt one another while providing your entertainment and working out a social order with their incessant sparring.
You will luxuriate in the affectionate burbling of the hens as you forage with them for seeds, nuts, and small game, then roll and bathe with them in the mulch under the pear trees. You will have an opportunity to join in the usual activities of a small working farm, such as helping the chickens to rid the garden plots of noxious weeds and insects, and occasionally intervening when hens who are overly concerned with their relative status, start to peck and pull out each other's feathers.

After a full day in the sun, you will crawl into the fresh wood shavings of the nest area bedding, and marvel at the sweet smell of the chicken house interior and of the assembled birds themselves - a smell which results from the grains, greens, insects, and occasional frogs, shrews, or voles in the diet which you will share with them.
Of course you will not be required to eat bugs, or mice, or anything you don't want, and of course we will provide you and your family, (who after all have no beaks to crack or crops to grind grain) with the means to prepare your food. Naturally, you will also be free to dust yourself off patronize one of our local restaurants.

But we guarantee that by the end of your stay, living for a week or more entirely on this cleansing diet, you yourself will be as sweet smelling as a bird of paradise or an Irish Spring, and that your personal droppings will be delicate brown curls around a light center, as dry and odorless as cake decorations..... or else the first day of your next stay of a week or more, will be free of charge.
2009 season starts July 1.