KOOKOOLAN FARMS - 15713 HWY 47 - YAMHILL, OR  97148 - (503)730.7535 - kookoolan@gmail.com

We are a small, diversified family farm located in the Carlton-Yamhill American Winegrowing Region in the foothills of the Oregon Coast Range, established October 17, 2005 and now entering our seventh year of farming!  Our maritime climate provides mild temperatures summer and winter, and plentiful rainfall for our mixed-grass pastures.  We maintain an integrated diversity of livestock:  Jersey cows, chickens for both meat and eggs, and occasional batches of more exotic birds such as geese, Bourbon Red heritage turkeys, and pheasants.  We also raise vegetables and tree fruits.



Kookoolan Farms is the biggest small chicken producer in Oregon.  We are one of only four farms in Oregon to have licensed, inspected poultry processing right on our farm.  That means your farmers, Chrissie and Koorosh, have the young chicks under our control from day-old hatchlings to ready-to-cook.  Chickens are raised indoors under heat lights for the first three to four weeks year-round; in summer they are finished on grass pasture.  We don't truck our chickens to slaughter.  We hand-process and hand-pack our birds using the most gentle, most humane practices we can find, leaning heavily on Temple Grandin's work.



Cows, goats, pigs, and sheep are raised with 100% full-time access to grass pastures, and although the doors are always open, we don't force the animals out of the barn in inclement weather.  Our dairy animals receive free-choice grass pasture, alfalfa hay, clover hay, and grass hay, plus a small amount of mixed grains as a treat during milking, plus a seaweed-based trace mineral supplement.

We always have too many projects going at once:  barns and fences being built, farmhouse remodelling in progress indefinitely; chemistry/fermentation experiments bubbling away in every corner of every room; and so on.



We bought this farm in October 2005; we have built two greenhouses, almost a mile of permanent fencing, a permanent concrete-floored 30x115-foot barn, a bridge, and a milking parlor; produced more than 40 tons of compost, built a mile of four-foot-wide raised vegetable beds; owned cows and goats and sheep for the first time in our lives; learned to raise and butcher chickens; built and licensed a poultry processing facility and a winery and tasting room; bought and installed poultry processing equipment and a delivery truck with a lift elevator for driving to market; learned to drive a tractor; bought a second tractor, learned where to buy feed, alfalfa, straw, baby cows, baby chicks, the plastic bags we package our poultry in; midwifed goats and cows; learned to milk goats and cows; and have learned a lot about starting, managing and marketing a business - and about living together.

Our main motivation is passion to produce the best food we can, passion to steward our land sustainably and responsibly, passion to provide a high quality of life and health for our animals.  Our financial goal for this farm is for it to provide sufficient income to sustain our family and household expenses, so we can quit our day jobs and spend all our time in each other's company!  We take pride in our hand-crafted boutique foods, and pleasure in sharing our little farm with each other - and with you.  We welcome your visits, please call first.

We are located on Highway 47 between Yamhill and Carlton.
15713 Highway 47
Yamhill, OR  97148

Phone (503) 730-7535
Chrissie and Koorosh Zaerpoor
email kookoolan@gmail.com

 

ABOUT CHRISSIE AND KOOROSH
Koorosh grew up in Shiraz, Iran.  During Koorosh’s childhood, his mother and grandmother kept small flocks of chickens and ducks at their home.  Although Koorosh scored in the top 1% on university placement exams, his original aspiration was to become a farmer, and during all the subsequent decades, it remained a dream to be a farmer. 

 

 

Koorosh attended one year of university right after high school, but because their family was of the Baha’i faith, during the Islamic revolution of 1979, his parents lost their pension and both Koorosh and his brother were both expelled from university.  (Only Muslims were allowed to have the very limited number of university spots.)  In the aftermath, Koorosh worked a variety of laboring jobs, including beekeeping, tending a vineyard, caring for sheep, general construction, lens grinding, and cabinet making.  At age 28, married and with an infant, he illegally escaped Iran at a cost of eight years’ salary.  He and his wife and child were granted asylum protection through the United Nations, and finally immigrated to the United States.  He had been working as a cabinet maker for some years, and desired to make a life in the U.S. as a cabinet maker, but his elder sister convinced him to attend university and earn a graduate degree.

 

He worked his way through university at Berea College in Kentucky, mostly in construction and cabinet making positions.  While attending graduate school at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon, he worked as a general contractor doing general construction work.  Also in Corvallis, he bought and renovated his first home.  Later, while he was working on his doctoral thesis, he had his own landscaping business.  For the last six years at Intel, he has been an equipment and process development engineer, most recently in the Pathfinding group which develops equipment specifications for equipment that may be needed in the next five years or so, and negotiating with suppliers in equipment selection and development.  He is a talented equipment mechanic, and a talented and innovative engineer for designing, building, and developing equipment and developing and characterizing manufacturing processes and manufacturing assembly lines.  He is a capable project and program manager, and has excellent people management skills.

 

Through these jobs, Koorosh acquired solid skills in every aspect of building, remodeling, and woodworking.  He has all the tools and all the skills and experience for a variety of farm construction projects such as barns, greenhouses, fences, watering and feeding systems, and so on.  He has a lot of experience working with and supervising blue-collar workers.  He has excellent negotiation skills.  He is a genius at improving and implementing automated systems, for example, to deliver food and water for animals.  He has basic experience and confidence in handling a variety of domestic animals.

 

Chrissie grew up in Hoopeston, Illinois, in the heart of corn and soybean country in the American Midwest.  Her parents co-own commodity farms, and she had frequent contact with family friends who were full-time commodity farmers.  She married young and also worked her way through university, first as a secretary and later as a technical writer.  She worked full-time and took two courses per semester, finally finishing a BS in physics ten years after graduating from high school.  She became a serious gardener and chef, with deep interests and skills in cooking, ethnic foods, wild foods, foraging during hiking trips in the forest, edible flowers, meats with high omega-3 content and human nutrition as it is influenced by the diets of the meat animals consumed.  She also spent several years shopping at the elite high-end groceries, taking wine appreciation classes from the local community college, and eating many meals out in restaurants.  All of this experience turns out to apply directly in terms of speaking with chefs at their level, suggesting recipes to consumers and chefs, speaking knowledgably and confidently in describing and comparing the characteristics of our farm products to serious foodies.  And her knowledge of herbs and wild plants has direct application in recognizing weeds in the pasture, and selecting additional plantings for the pasture.  She has also been making wine and mead since 1996.  She took a weekend seminar in composting several years ago.  She had long wanted to have a larger acreage and become an herb or tree farmer, or to start making mead commercially.

 

Following the birth of her third son, she had difficulties breast feeding and turned to a lactation consultant and many alternative/herbal supplements to increase milk production.  It turns out that all of these tips and tricks for human lactation apply directly to goat and cow lactation as well.

 

She began university studies as an architecture major, and has always had a passion for restoration of period houses, and for designing and building a house from scratch.   She designed the high-end kitchen for her 110-year-old home in Hillsboro, Oregon, and kept a serious herb and vegetable garden. 

 

After completing her bachelor’s degree, Chrissie has worked the past 12 years at Intel Corporation in a variety of equipment and process engineering roles, and people and program management roles.  She also completed six graduate courses in solid state physics, electrical engineering, and materials science while pursuing a MSEE from Columbia University in New York while working full-time at Intel.  She has had key roles in the design and startup of five Intel factories and has a strong knowledge of issues of factory layout, facilities, and workflow planning.  She has very strong written and verbal communication skills, good artistic skills, good public speaking and persuasion skills, and excellent organizational and planning skills.  She is a very strong people and program manager.  During her most recent previous role at Intel, she directly managed a staff of 15, and directed the activities of some 30 or 40 people at one technology development center plus three factories.  She is currently a quality and reliability engineer.  She has strong interest and good instincts in marketing and sales, but not much experience. 

During the last few years of managing at Intel, she had developed aspirations to start her own business such as necklace making or mead making or renovating small homes in the neighborhood for resale, and with that view had taken an entrepreneurial course through Portland Community College.  She was also president of the Board of Directors for People’s Food Co-operative in Portland, Oregon ( www.peoples.coop), which gives her contacts and learning opportunities in the food distribution and chef/grocer community. 

Both Chrissie and Koorosh are highly motivated, self-starters.  Both are ambitious and have “strong stomachs” for risk taking.  Since purchasing the property in October 2005, they have already successfully raised and slaughtered several thousand meat chickens over six licensed seasons, and kept a herd of three Jersey cows for raw milk. 

Our approach for learning fast is to just jump in and do it, and to force ourselves to do it quickly and do it well by setting aggressive goals and constraints so that we simply cannot allow ourselves to fail.  Ridiculous as each may sound, here are some early examples, and all were successful:

•  During June 2005, before buying a farm, we decided to try growing edamame.  In a period of less than ten days, Chrissie obtained seeds for ten different varieties of edamame beans, secured 200 square feet of community gardening space in Beaverton, and had the land tilled for planting.  We had the soybeans in the ground on July 1, and successfully raised all ten varieties to maturity.

• Even before closing on our property on October 17, we had already ordered 625 day-old chicks for delivery on November 2.  This forced us to build a 16x32 foot greenhouse quickly so that we would be ready for their arrival.  We were.  
• In what we recognize now to have been a serious error in judgment, we also bought a pregnant Angus cow on October 16, and drove her 60 miles from Canby to Yamhill in this homemade trailer on the back of a half-ton, low-rider pickup truck.  Both the truck and the trailer have proven useful in hauling cows, chickens, lumber, rented equipment, rocks, sawdust, and chicken food.  

• We received an additional 400 chicks for an egg-laying flock on November 21.  For the next six weeks, we cared for a total of 1,000 chickens in the worst possible conditions of weather and manual feeding and watering.  But we did it.  
• We slaughtered 500 9-week-old chickens on the weekend of January 7-8, 2006.  This enabled us to see the entire process and experience it at some significant volume of birds.  We understand first-hand what needs to be in place to perform our own slaughtering on our farm.
• We sold, or thought we had sold, all 500 chickens to a small ethnic market in Beaverton.  When he pulled back at the last minute, allegedly due to his available freezer space, and we were left with over 200 slaughtered, processed, bagged chickens, we needed to buy sufficient freezer space to store these items with less than 24 hours notice.  Through Chrissie’s connections at People’s Food Co-op, we bought two large commercial freezers for $1000, and had one of them turned on and cold in our garage in less than a day.
• In December, 2005, Chrissie was web browsing for general sustainable agriculture information, and found a call for research grant proposals from the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education foundation – with proposals due only five days later.  We decided to go for it, and along with a university professor as technical consultant and with a veterinarian, we submitted the grant proposal on time.
• We took a three-day trip to Arizona in December 2005, which forced us to improve the automation of our food and water delivery systems.  The three-day trip was an experiment to see how well it worked.  It did.  No chickens died while we were gone.
• We took a one-week trip to Japan in March 2006.  This forced us to complete our 30x150 foot greenhouse ready for our large laying flock, to trench and lay 750 feet of ¾-inch irrigation pipe for watering the animals, to improve fence strength, and to find a farm sitter.  We trenched one day, laid all the pipe the next day, and only two chickens died while we were gone.

• This is starting to sound like the evidence in an involuntary commitment hearing, so we'd better stop here.