7125 Old Stage Road Raleigh NC 919-322-0197
Just a quick update. Turkey preorders have closed. As usual there is more demand than available supply. Thank you all for your support!
Also we will be closed for Thanksgiving November 23-25th. We will be open Wednesday November 22nd for turkey pickup and all your last minute purchases.
As we did last year, (and I’m just copying and reusing the same post again) we are taking deposits on turkeys for Thanksgiving. These turkeys will be coming from Dawn Breaker Farms, the same farm we’ve been getting our limited chicken supply from these past few months.
For all the years we’ve been selling turkeys at Thanksgiving, we’ve sold unfrozen turkeys. The good news, obviously, is they are fresh, never frozen. The down side is the logistics of handling 30 unfrozen turkeys, in a store where we have limited space to keep things cool but not frozen. That means our window for receiving, handling, storing, and delivering to you is super short causing stress to you and to us as we try to rush turkeys in, and you guys back out the door.
With that said, Dawn Breaker freezes their turkeys. That is just the way they handle their processing. They are beyond organic, very high quality, and easier to handle. And they will be $8.75 per pound like last year.
The turkeys this time will target 15-20 pounds but as always the actual will be what it is. Usually people request small, medium, or large birds and we try to sort it out as best we can with what we get.
I don’t know how many birds we will have available this year. It’ll be first come, first serve. Deposits are $40 payable in the store. The price per pound will be $8.75 per pound.
We’ve been waiting anxiously since last year for our new chicken farmer to start providing us birds for the freezer. We were fortunate that Dawnbreaker farms has been willing to supply us with chicken in the interim but we needed our new farmer to grow his operation from a small starter flock to something that could supply us (and you) with the kind of stead supply it takes to keep us going.
In anticipation of our new farmer coming online, we sold down what we had of chicken, and have basically worked with an empty freezer for over a month hoping this week was the week. Ok, THIS week will be the week. Maybe THIS week will be the week? Ugh.
At well past the last minute, we found out that our new farmer was NOT going to provide us chicken. At all. I managed to talk him into one delivery just to help us till we can find someone else but we are basically starting from scratch on a process we started last year. Its very frustrating. With that said, we are in need of a new chicken farmer. If anyone can recommend a farmer we should reach out to, I’d be most appreciative. Please email me at dan@ninjacowfarm.com and I’ll forward the info to Jeanette so she can reach out.
I’m reposting this original post because of course the website is broken and now I’m spending my time trying to fix it instead of doing actual work. Sigh.
I received a call from WRAL last week asking if they could come out and interview me about the heat and how our animals were doing. While I was willing to be on TV (I don’t like it, but Jeanette yells at me I don’t blog anymore so maybe being interviewed would be easier? Nah, never mind. TV people take forever to do anything.)
So decision made, I was able to pawn the opportunity off on another farmer friend who did an excellent job in her interview. But rats, now I have to blog about it or Jeanette will get me….
Despite my avoiding the limelight again, we actually were doing something about the heat for our cows. We have a small pasture at the back corner of our farm. It has a small barn. A small pond. A bit of grass. And a lot of woods. Back in the day (when I was a kid), it was connected to the main pasture through a narrow fenced section and was part of our grazing rotation. But now with our huge chip pile, downed fences, trees in the way, etc it is isolated from the rest of the grazing areas. We use it as a storage area, a shooting range, and various other small things.
I knew when we had such a cool spring that when summer arrived, it would come with a vengeance so I had Vicente start fixing the back pasture fencing so we could rotate the cows through there for a week or so. Our main pastures have the wooded areas fenced out whereas the back pasture is old school, it still has the woods as part of the pasture. Plus these woods had grown a lot over the years and had a lot of leaves down at cow level, something the cows love (I’ll show you that in a second).
Vicente spent about a week working on repairing or replacing fencing, cutting fallen limbs, stringing hot wire, putting a hot box in so we could energize the wire, and basically sleeping in a Calamine lotion bath each night for about a week. On the day of the move, he strung temporary fencing right down the driveway from our main pasture to the back pasture entrance, making a corral so the cows could walk down the paved driveway like each of you do when you leave the store. The entrance is right at the bottom of the chip pile, you may have noticed it has been smoothed over recently.
The cows were anxious to move to their next pasture for grazing, but they weren’t expecting a chance to walk through dad’s front yard, down a driveway, and into a new place. This is where keeping a few moms around pays off. The young cows, nervous that something is different don’t want to have anything to do with this move. #160, a flighty, jumpy cow on a good day, hopped the temporary wire and ran off almost immediately. I watched him go, grumbling about how he was getting on the trailer next.
The moms, who’ve literally lived here their entire lives, followed the corral we had made and moseyed along till they entered the new pasture. #160, realizing the was leading a revolt of one, jumped the fence again and reentered the herd to the new area. Even the two young calves followed along, shepherded by our old and experienced moms. All in all, it took a week to setup, an hour to put the temporary corral together, and 10 minutes to actually move the cows.
The cows LOVE being in new woods. I wish I could do it for them all the time. There are trees to scratch against, leaves to eat, adventures to get into. Often I’ll see them running around acting like kids on the last day of school. This time they were pretty chill. Mainly in this video you’ll see a small cedar crashing around as one of our moms (almost completely hidden) goes to town on it, scratching everything she can think of against it.
The cows made it about a week in the back pasture enjoying their time in the woods, with a pond to bath in, and enough grass to keep it interesting. But by Saturday, they were out of grass and couldn’t eat any more leaves. We ended up feeding a bale of hay to tide them over till the first of the week.
Monday was time to move them back and we washed, rinsed, repeated the process. The moms lead the way, knowing what they were doing. #160, being the %@#$# that he is, held back, got pissed, and ran back into the woods, taking the two young calves with him who were now wound up from his agitation. Vicente and I spent 15 minutes running around the woods trying to convince these two young calves (read: young and stupid) that they wanted to go where everyone else had gone. #160, after stirring up trouble, had gone along on his own to the new pasture, leaving us with the young calves who on a good day can’t walk through a gate. I was wondering just how we were going to get these calves out of the woods when I heard a familiar cow bellow. “Oh thank goodness!” I thought. One of the moms had realized Jr hadn’t shown up. She’d turned around, walked all the way back through the pasture, through the barn yard, down the drive way and to the gate. She called to her calf, in no uncertain terms, to “Hurry up and get up here!” With mom scolding him, both of the calves ran to mom who walked them back to where they were supposed to be, in the pasture with everyone else. I don’t think I’d want a herd of cattle without at least one experienced mom.
All in all, it was a lot of work for a little bit of grazing. But it gave the cows a chance to be out of the heat for a week, to graze somewhere different, and to clean up the underbrush in our back pasture.
Speaking of underbrush. I’ve had this conversation with several farmers and extension agents. People tend to want to mow, spray, chainsaw, etc when they have an area they want cleared. Growing up on a farm where the cattle spent time in the woods, and it was like a park in there, I’ve always cautioned against doing any mechanical or chemical work. Its been years since we had the cattle clean up anything but they certainly still know how. The area I’ve been discussing was about 6 acres of gnarly growth. A week with a handful of cattle, and you can walk through the worst areas and barely touch a leaf. Cleaning up the bigger stuff with a chainsaw would be quite a bit easier now, and the cows are a little fatter to boot. A win/win.
Here are some before and after shots to show what I’m talking about.
Of course, the trees didn’t disappears and the thing hasn’t been mowed down smooth, but if you wanted to get in there and cut out some trees now you could without a machete.
In the video you couldn’t even tell there was water back there. Now I can walk down to the water.
Now if my child labor hadn’t grown up, I could send them in to start clearing.
After having to ration everyone for what seems forever, we have BOTH of our dairy farms up and running right now and one of the farms just bought two extra cows! Normally we are saying, “Sorry, one gallon only per customer.” Maybe it’s a strange week and we are saying, “You can get two gallons per customer.”
I’m here to tell you, right now it is, “How many gallons would you like and can I help you carry a few to your car!”
This is a great problem to have and for all of you who have been wanting more milk and couldn’t get it, now is the time we’ve been working towards.
We are open today from 2-6 and again tomorrow from 2-6. We’ll be restocking with even more milk tomorrow so come and get your raw milk this week.
Thanks to all of Jeanette’s hard work, we have two chicken options going forward.
This week we received an order from Dawnbreaker Farms. And when I say order, I mean an order! 7 big boxes of chicken which Jeanette came in on her day off to put away.
Ben at That’s a lot of chicken! Unfortunately pricing on this new chicken is higher than our previous chicken. But it is here, where our old chicken is not, so you take what you can get and we are thankful to Ben at Dawnbreaker for working with us.
Dawnbreaker is going to help keep us going until Paul at Tomlinson farms can get his production up for us. Paul is a young farmer but he has it going on. He’s been ready to ramp up his production and partnering with us is allowing him to grow. I went today to do my normal inspection I do for any of our farmers and was impressed with Paul’s operation. It’ll be a few months before Paul has production enough to start supplying us, and we’ll grow together in 2023. Paul’s pricing should be somewhere between our old chicken and our current chicken so hopefully a happy medium that we can all live with.
Since my daughters have both decided they want to eat chicken almost exclusively, I know I’ll be buying lots of chicken these next few months. Until they move onto their next weird diet.
I just spoke to Jeanette and she’s very positive on the chicken farmer she’s talking to now. Good product. Good availability, at least over the long term. (There will be some ramp up time I’m sure) Good people. Hopefully the conversations will continue is a positive manner and we’ll have an announcement soon, like next week soon.
With that said, our possible new chicken farmer will not be able to supply us eggs. As someone who had eggs for lunch today and with a daughter who bakes, I feel the need for eggs as much as you do.
You fine folks have been awesome for helping us find new farmers, so I’m coming to you once again. Do you know a farmer who could supply us eggs? We’d need probably 20-30 dozen per week, and I can’t drive an hour to get eggs only. The numbers don’t work with the cost of gas and labor. I’m already heading to Wilson County and Johnston County weekly so someone in that area would make sense because I can combine trips, which does make the numbers work.
We would look at smaller producers if you have someone who had a backyard flock and wants to sell their eggs. Especially if they can deliver to the store. Enough small producers equal one big producer so that is an option.
Please let me know if you have someone you think I could work with and we’ll make contact.
As always, thank you!
As I sat in my office located just above the store in the barn this morning, wondering which thing that was due two days ago I was going to work on today, I glanced out of my window and was surprised to see this.
If you get past the focus on the window screen, you can see there is a rainbow this morning. Cool.
Of course I know I’m not a photographer so I ran outside to see what it looked like outside. It didn’t disappoint.
Low clouds scooting by, and a bright bottom rainbow and a clearly visible second rainbow. It’s gonna be a good day! But wait, my darling wife is home and the rainbow is dropping right on her head.
Calling the wife early in the morning. Or speaking to her. Or making noise. Or really anything prior to her getting up and going at her own time frame is generally a mistake.
But surely a rainbow dropping right on her head is a sign. I should call her.
This is a sign from above right? Your wife is home and you are sitting in a room by yourself working on paperwork. You should call her.
5 minutes after I called her, the rainbows were gone, the sky got dark, and it started raining for real. Crazy picture lady got her shot and all was right in the world.
What does this have to do with farming? I have no idea. But it was a cool start to the day. It’s gonna be a good day.
Update 12-20-2022.
Annnnd, it’s done. You’ve already overloaded the signup form and I had to turn it off. Dunno if Kate will do this again (I suspect so) but for now, if you made it in, you are probably in the class. For anyone still interested, stay turned. We’ll probably do this again.
We had so many signups to the class we taught last weekend that I had to cut off signups after one day. With that much interest, Kate agreed to come back and do another class here at the farm.
If you’d like to learn how to make real cheese from real milk, and butter the same way, please signup at this link.
As before, we’ll take the signups in the order they come in, so first come, first serve. I don’t have a way to cut off signups after a certain number so you’ll be notified when I have a chance to look at the responses whether you are in the front or the back of the line.
One thing we’ve enjoyed as a store for years is our relationship with Brittany Ridge Farms. Our chickens and our turkeys have come from them from the beginning and I’ve dreaded the day that Christy would get tired of farming.
We’ve received word that that day has come and Christy is going to start getting out of the chicken business, which breaks our hearts because we have had such a good relationship for so long. She says she might keep doing turkeys for us, so that would be a big help but now we are in need of a new chicken farmer/farmers. We go through a pretty good amount of chicken so somebody with a few backyard birds isn’t going to cut it.
If you know of anyone who is interested in growing their chicken business, please send them our way. We pay on delivery and treat our farmers well, being farmers ourselves we get it.
Anyone much West of Greensboro is a no go for us. East of Greenville is a stretch as well, unless they deliver, in which case we’ll take anyone in NC that raises the right kind of birds the right way.