The beetles in that section got cleaned up.
The chickens also scratched through the straw mulch, pecked at several young plant stems, and uprooted a handful of shallow seedlings whose root systems hadn't yet anchored firmly enough to survive the birds' enthusiasm.
She assessed the damage without letting it become more than it was.
Roughly a dozen plants lost to the chickens.
The beetle pressure in that section genuinely reduced.
The method had worked on the insects.
The calibration had been wrong.
She rebuilt the enclosure smaller, reduced the number of birds per rotation, and tightened the schedule.
She ran three birds through each section on a cycle of no more than four hours before moving them.
She supplemented the chicken rotation with hand-picking, walking the rows with a bucket of soapy water, knocking beetles and larvae from the undersides of leaves by hand.
A task that cost nothing but time, unglamorous in the specific way effective but invisible work is always unglamorous.
By late June, the beetle pressure was manageable.
The rows kept growing.
The information about Miller Creek reached Ren in pieces, the way information travels in a county where people don't organize their news.
They just share it when it's relevant.
She heard the first piece at the co-op in early June.
A man she knew slightly, a row-crop farmer from the creek bottom, said the standing water from April's sustained rain had taken longer to drain from the bottomland fields than anyone had planned for.
Planting windows had closed before the ground was fit to work.
He'd lost 40% of his intended potato acreage to the delay.
She heard the second piece at the farm stand in late June.
A woman who supplied the elementary school's kitchen program said her usual potato supplier had cut his estimated fall delivery in half.
She was looking for alternatives.
She said it casually, the way people say things at a farm stand that are actually questions dressed as statements.
Ren took her name.
She wrote it in the notebook under the date.
The summer turned dry in July.
Not the catastrophic, cracked-earth dry of a genuine drought, but the persistent, unrelenting dry of a season that had used up its moisture in April and had nothing left to give.
The bottomland fields that had survived the spring flooding found their already stressed plants pushed further by the heat.
Farmers who'd lost spring planting to standing water now watched their remaining acreage fight through the dry stretch without the root depth needed to pull from lower soil moisture.
Ren's raised ridges, mulched with straw that had been holding soil moisture since May, responded to the dry stretch differently than bare clay would have.
The straw regulated the surface temperature.
The organic matter she'd concentrated at the root zone held moisture the surrounding soil couldn't.
The plants on Ridgeback grew through July at a pace that surprised her.
Not lush. Not extravagant.
Steady.
The kind of growth that doesn't call attention to itself but shows up in the measurement every week.
She documented it.
She wrote the measurements down.