Alchemists of Change
Franchesca Duval of Alchemist Farm: A Candle profile
“The church has been called from the beginning to be the small, working model of the New Creation.”
— N. T. Wright in conversation with Justin Brierley and Belle Tindall on the Seen & Unseen podcast.
You can’t tell the story of Alchemist Farm without the story of Nilus. In a way, I suspect Nilus to be one of the original alchemists behind the farm. Or, rather, he is perhaps a stand-in for the True Alchemist.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Franchesca Duval hesitates at the till, having just closed the drawer on her last customer’s transaction. It’s about time for her break, but she can see an older man starting towards the bank doors from the parking lot. As she waits for this next customer to walk through the door, her eyes go out of focus for a moment.
Like a wave, the melancholy washes over her again. “God, please help me find a good church,” she whispers.
It’s a prayer she’s prayed hundreds of times over the last months. Raised Greek Orthodox, Francesca has been looking for a new church since moving to attend college. It’s not as easy as you might think—in these, the early days of the Internet—to find a good Orthodox church in the U.S. when you’re in a new town.
She looks up as the man finally walks through the automatic door. He’s an older gentleman, a bit of an unusual sight, dressed in farming clothes with his thick glasses, long grey hair and perpetual smirk. He walks straight up to her wicket.
“You look like you’re Orthodox.” It’s his opening line.
“I am,” Francesca responds, stunned. How does he know? She’s not even wearing a cross.
“You need to come to my church.”
“Yes, I do!” she replies. Relief floods her as she laughs. It’s a direct answer to prayer.
It turns out her bank customer’s name was Nilus, and yes, Franchesca did begin attending his Russian Orthodox church. She still goes there today, in fact, along with her husband and two children. Because of him, it’s where her husband became Orthodox.
Nilus is also the person who inspired Franchesca to pioneer the first humane hatchery and poultry farm in California’s Sonoma Valley.
“These really pivotal, changing moments in my life were spoken through Nilus,” Franchesca says when I speak to her via Zoom this summer. That’s why he’s a stand-in for the True Alchemist, I think, imagining him as a Gandalf-like character.
“We all have that option and ability to listen to that nudge from God, like Nilus did by asking if I was Orthodox. To get out of our own ego’s way. If we can cleanse our vessels and just be the words, we can be that mouthpiece that God wants us to be. Nilus brought me to that church that I was hoping for, and he also told me about the male chicks.”
The chicken-whisperer
Seeking a new way of life for their growing family, Francesca and her family had purchased a farm in Sonoma County back in 2013. The three-and-a-half-acre farm hadn’t been cared for in years, so they spent the first year rehabilitating the overgrazed pastures that were overtaken by weeds.
In her community, Nilus was known as a kind of chicken-whisperer. He would even lie down near his brooder in the barn at night, sleeping beside with the baby chicks because he loved listening to the little sounds they made.
Wanting to fulfil her lifelong dream of having her own backyard flock, Franchesca approached Nilus at church. How should she begin, she wondered?
“Well, you know what happens,” Nilus told her when she spoke of ordering live chicks. “The male chicks are all killed upon hatch.”
They’re not just killed. In fact, at larger scale hatcheries, male chicks are either incinerated or ground alive.
“What?” Franchesca stared at Nilus, open-mouthed. They kill the male chicks, just because most people want hens that lay eggs? “No!”
Sure, she understood that roosters are noisy, making them challenging to keep in backyard settings. However, to let them hatch in the commercial hatcheries and then just kill them? The cruel revelation was devastating.
“My heart was touched when I found out what happened to male chicks upon hatch,” she relates. She decided right then and there that her farm wasn’t going to do that.
“There’s this whole side to agriculture that’s pretty intense. I don’t know why the wider industry doesn’t share these things…. They probably think they’re doing a service. Who wants extra roosters? They’d probably say. We’ll just kill them. But that’s from a hardened heart, I think. Anyone who sits down and really thinks about it would feel that we need to do better.”
So that’s what Franchesca decided to do.
Farming with a soft heart
Starting in 2015, Franchesca was given a small batch of fertile eggs as a Christmas present by her family. She hatched them with an incubator on her bathroom counter. Now, nearly ten years later, she has a flock of 200—hens and roosters—of heritage and rare breeds.
The zero-waste, regenerative farm sells its heritage breed chicks online, and is known as a pioneer of humane breeding and hatching. Chickens are kept on rotating pastures, free from breeding cages.
Most importantly, they are a no-kill farm for the male chicks. “I wanted to offer an alternative for folks who felt the same way I did about that practice of killing male chicks. I set up a system where we donated all of our male chicks that hatched to local impoverished families who raised them for food,” Franchesca told the Urban Exodus Podcast in January 2020.
In fact, in the wine country surrounding the Duval’s farm, many immigrant farm workers are from Guatemala or Mexico: cultures that have a thorough knowledge of how to work with rooster meat, Franchesca says.
“Each week we have different families lined up to take home a box of baby chicks. They feed them their food scraps until the chickens are grown and processed. They’re able to get some protein for their families that they might not otherwise be able to afford,” Franchesca told Eco Farming Daily. “It’s tackling a lot of issues at once.”
The farm also runs solely on clean, renewable energy (solar). Chick shipments, which are sent across the U.S., are one hundred percent plastic-free. Shipping boxes come with instructions for composting them and instructions to reduce household waste going into landfills.
Step by step
However, it wasn’t like this at the beginning. Franchesca freely admits that the farm has provided a big learning curve. Being led from the heart—as she was through Nilus’ comment—is a recurring theme.
“Every change was revealed to me, one step at a time,” she says. “‘Here’s another way to do better, and here’s another way to do better.’ And I would just say ‘yes’ to it.”
This one-step-at-a-time process has helped her to not feel overwhelmed by the ecological state of the world.
“There was a time I had that paralysis,” she says. “For me, the cure for that is heart-based action. Don’t sit and be frightened. Do something. That’s how I’ve used the farm as an agent for change and to inspire other people as well. Everyone can be an alchemist of change.”
Alchemists of change
Alchemist Farm originally took its name from the fact that her husband, Ryan, used to call himself an “alchemist.” He is the farm’s tinkerer, taking something unused on their homestead and turning it into something useful that the farm needs.
Franchesca’s greatest motivation for the farm has always been to model a better way forward. So she latched onto the word, wanting to demonstrate to others that they too can be “alchemists of change.”
“My greatest calling is the hope that more people will be inspired—in whatever sector they are in, whatever type of business—to make the changes they see God revealing to them.”
In doing so, Franchesca admits there’s a potential danger of being perceived as “greener than thou.” She’s thought about that carefully, because she’s had friends say they felt they couldn’t even use a paper coffee cup around her—not because of anything she’d said, but because that’s how she lives.
“That’s why I’m honest about my journey. We didn’t start out this way. At the beginning, I had no idea!” she says. “I try to give people the courage to know that they don’t have to be perfect out of the gate.”
Inspiring and inviting
Both in everyday interactions and on social media, she tries to speak in a nonjudgmental and invitational way.
“There’s such militant intensity from people who are trying to make positive change that it becomes too much. It closes ears; it’s not an invitation; it’s a judgment. I’m not here to judge; I’m here to inspire, if it’s God’s will. I pray for the words to say. If there’s anything worth saying, I ask for the words to be put in my mouth.”
She admits this means that some days, “I’m real silent. I do my best to not speak unnecessarily, because there’s a lot of that.”
What is possible?
She’s a firm believer in focusing on what is possible—not on the world’s overwhelming problems.
“A lot of people have dealt with a whole lot of trauma and don’t feel like they can be in their hearts. I try to have a safe-feeling space on social media. I’ll talk about larger ecological issues or things that are dark or scary about the industry, but I always offer a solution if I’m going to talk about it. I never leave anyone with an emotional trauma dump of what I’m working on, because that’s not fair.”
“I think that’s why a lot of people are attracted to our social media,” she adds. “They feel, ‘Here’s something that I’m not going to be feeling gross about afterwards.’”
Alchemist Farm’s focus on solutions is a big part of why I started following the farm’s Instagram account. The natural colours in the rainbow displays that Franchesca creates with the farm’s eggs are quite eye-catching as well.
Running a business that goes the extra mile in the ways that Alchemist Farm does is a lot of work. Due to unexpected hassles on the farm, Franchesca and I had to schedule three appointments before we could meet for our video interview.
When we finally do connect later on the day of our second appointment, Franchesca tells me she’d been involved in a large cleaning project before our scheduled interview, and had been completely distracted by the expansion of the task.
“That’s not how I want to treat anyone!” she exclaims, obviously embarrassed by missing the first two appointments.
Naturally, I am understanding. Later, all is forgiven when I see the size of the “cleaning project” she is engaged in.
Franchesca posts a video that same day describing the process of cleaning out their large feed storage silos. The new metal storage silo she bought is (predictably) not as well-made as their much older, seamless metal feed silo that was purchased second-hand. The new silo leaks at each rivet and seam, meaning that when it’s time for cleaning, there will be a build-up of spoiled feed stuck to the sides of the empty container.
Franchesca sticks her head into the echoey, dark cavern of the large metal tube to show her social media followers the caked feed stuck to the inside of the silo. She has to scrape this off the walls, then scrub them clean and leave it to dry again before the silo can be refilled. This task has to be repeated yearly, though Franchesca says that many farmers won’t do this.
Shepherding and stewarding
“I don’t farm that way. I want to make sure none of the spoiled grain goes into my birds’ food,” she says.
It’s this kind of commitment to the farm that almost tanked Franchesca in early 2020.
“When the world shut down, everyone wanted chickens,” she says. “My work did not shut down.”
Business doubled. She was busier than ever filling orders for chicks, packing and taking them to the post office to ship around the nation.
“I could feel everyone’s anxiety—not knowing what their food sources would be, how they could feed their families. People were wanting anything that we had, really looking to us for help. I rose to the occasion and did everything I could to help and give and do it all.”
She was working through the same collective grief that everyone else was feeling, but “I didn’t get the break that everyone else got when they were stir-crazy at home.” While it was a “monetary blessing,” this time period took its toll.
“It landed me in a deep state of burnout. I had to do a lot of work to come out of that, to change the way I eat and take care of my body and to learn to turn off the news.”
It was yet another opportunity to listen to her heart and receive the farm’s gifts.
“I was co-dependent with the farm. The farm felt like ‘me.’ But it’s its own being; I just get to be the shepherd of it. I get to have some boundaries with it, to steward it without being all consumed by it. It’s been a good learning curve to ask for help. Now I have a good team. Now it’s not me doing forty jobs—I’ve got three people who come and help me.”
Again, the lesson has come from deep listening in her heart, sensing what God’s will is versus her own.
“I’ve been trying to listen to ‘Thy will’ vs. ‘my will’ recently,” she says. “I find that ‘Thy will’ happens a lot smoother than ‘my will!’ Franchesca’s laughter is whole-hearted.
“There’s been plenty of times I’ve pushed for my will, and it feels like pushing a boulder up a hill. I can do it, but at great emotional, physical and mental expense. I’m thirty-nine now; as I enter my forties, that’s not how I want to be spending my time anymore. I’m re-plugging back into my family.”
Franchesca is both the heart and soul of Alchemist Farms—one might even say she’s its original alchemist—turning challenges into creative solutions. Though she says she’s an introvert, get her on the subject of caring for the world and creating positive change, and her words are both free-flowing and wise.
Feed your mind well
I turn our conversation to one of my perennial favorite subjects: hope. How do we look realistically at what is really happening in the world without becoming problem-focused?
Her response is characteristically thoughtful. “The problem with pointing to the problem is we know stuff’s messed up. We’re tired of that. Now what?”
“I have to be hopeful because the other side of it is not useful. It’s not useful for my mental health, it makes me question the kind of world I’ve brought children into…. It feels like a distraction of darkness to me. When I’m in that space I’m not creating any beauty, I’m not addressing any issues, I’m just stuck. That’s where darkness would love me to be, and I’m not going to accept that. That’s not what God wants for me.”
One of the solutions she’s embraced is not listening to the news. “If something is really important, I will know,” she says.
“I want to be open and hear a lot of perspectives, but I need to narrow it down and really protect the channel God has given me, this mind. What we put in our eyes and ears is equally as important as what we put in our mouths. It’s all feeding us in different ways.”
It’s January 2024, and avian flu is sweeping poultry farms in the US, particularly in Sonoma County near Petaluma, an area known as the “Egg Basket of the World.” Petaluma is only a forty-minute drive away from Alchemist Farm. One poultry farmer in the area has already had to kill more than half a million hens to stop the spread of the disease.
Franchesca stands silent in front of the camera, cradling an icon in her hands. The painting depicts St. Bridget of Kildare, holding a scroll that reads, “Since I first fixed my mind on God, I have never taken it off”—a fitting example of someone who protected the channel of their mind. Chickens scratch the earth near Bridget’s feet in the icon scene.
“Did you know that St. Bridget is the patron Saint of Chicken Keepers?” the text overlaying the reel asks.
“I am an Orthodox Christian,” the text continues as the reel plays. “We keep icons (sacred paintings depicting saints) in our home to remind us to pray and be connected with God through the lives of the Saints who once lived.”
“I pray every day, multiple times a day, for the safety of our flocks and farm from predation, illness and extreme weather.”
“I pray for all of us who work here, every hatch, every chick, every shipment and every person who supports us and raises our chicks in their backyards.”
“May we and all of our flocks be healthy and whole this year and for as many years as we are given on this earth.”
I’m struck, but not surprised. The reel radiates calm and faith, but there has always been something of the transcendent in Alchemist’s posts. Now I know why. I add Alchemist Farms to my list of “businesses that go the extra mile” to profile in the Candle section of this Substack.
“I had a moment at that time, wondering ‘Is the farm going to be okay?’” Franchesca remembers. “The [avian flu] was the closest to us it had been in the last ten years of doing business. So that’s when I asked for St. Bridget’s intercession to protect the farm. I shared that because a lot of people were asking, ‘What do we do?’”
“We pray and we have protocol—we do what we need to, to protect the flocks. We’re not praying, then throwing the rest to the wind.” And the farm has been protected, despite the concentration of cases nearby.
This was her first time sharing related to her faith on social media, Franchesca says. “I’ve been really clear from the beginning: the farm stuff is for sale; I am not. My children and my husband are not. I don’t have my kids’ faces all over everything. So, sharing my faith is a remarkably personal thing.”
The response to the post was positive.
“People can feel when accounts are sharing something real. In a world filled with sales pitches and posturing, just to have something authentic is a balm to the heart. We all need it, and we can all feel it. That was as from the heart as I could ever be.”
“I’m just showing what’s possible,” she says. “I’m just one person, listening to my heart about what feels right. I’m such a strong believer in listening to our hearts and letting our hearts be soft and not so calloused and hardened by the world. If we do that, all of the steps will be revealed.”
Just showing what’s possible. Alchemist Farms embodies a “small, working model of the New Creation,” reflecting the heart of the True Alchemist.
Your voice is needed, and we’d love to hear it in the comments below. However, if you choose to abandon the voice of love in your comments, remember that you are abandoning all of your beneficial power.
Love is the most powerful force in the universe, alone having the ability to create change for the better. Indeed, it is the only force that ever has.
"People can feel when accounts are sharing something real. In a world filled with sales pitches and posturing, just to have something authentic is a balm to the heart. We all need it, and we can all feel it. That was as from the heart as I could ever be.” ❤️
Francesca’s candle is one that will withstand the winds of change 🕯️