Category: News, etc.

 

So the other day while I was compacting cardboard, I thought I saw movement in our baler. Meh, a bug or something. No big deal.

Then yesterday I’m helping Spork clean up some of the cardboard from feeding and I saw this in the exact same area.

This guy was riding the ram of the baler up and down as we compacted the cardboard. He was careful to keep out of the way of getting squished. It was obvious he’d made this trip many time before because he had it down to a science.

Because of all the fresh produce, we have lots of flies around so I’m happy to have a resident spider hanging out and eating bugs. And this guy looks like the Special Forces version of farm spiders.

Spork was totally nonplussed about the whole thing. He’d been watching this guy walk up and down the ram every time it went up and down. It seemed to be some mild entertainment for him while he worked. So Spork is entertained and bugs are going to a good use. Yeah spiders!

Um, yeah. 

Stupid baler is made of steel and won’t burn! Anybody have a working flame thrower?

Despite what you might think from the pictures we post and products we list for sale, our main crop isn’t cows, or pigs, or chickens. Our main product is grass. Cows, pigs, chickens, and produce are the tools we use to seed, grow, harvest, and manage our grass. Being that we are in reality grass farmers, it may surprise you to know that we don’t own a grain drill. We don’t plant seeds, or roll out turf. We don’t have Chemlawn out to treat our pastures so they are bright green and glowing like subdivision grass. We don’t own a lawnmower or a bat wing mower. We don’t own a hay baler or bale any hay. In fact, to be grass farmers, we don’t do any of the things you’d expect of someone who raises grass. What we do is utilize what we have to work with nature to improve our soil. By concentrating on the soil, we get the grass we want. It’s that easy, and that hard.

A few years ago, we did a big project with Wake County Soil and Water to repair a huge eroded area in the middle of our main pasture. It took some heavy equipment and about 55 dump truck loads of dirt to backfill the missing soil and to get things back like they should be. We seeded the ground and let things grow as best they could. This winter, we found that not all of the areas had recovered and we had to change our process to help the new soil do better. Now this summer, the areas we were able to treat over the winter are the greenest and lushest in the pasture. However not every area was able to be treated so what to do?

Here you see an area that shows all the various stages of what I’m talking about. The area in the background where its bright green (and in front of the big orange arrow) is an area we treated this winter. As you can see it’s recovering nicely and is lush and green. All that was done to transform that area was to feed hay directly on the ground and allow the cows to do their magic. Now the soil in that area is moist, brown, and growing good grass without any application of seed or commercial fertilizer.

The areas in the picture with the beans spread on it looked like the bare patch in the foreground. Pretty much barren clay, devoid of organic matter. By next spring, or even late fall, this area will be green and rich with life. We will continue to practice this spot application of surplus produce on areas that are not growing grass till we have no more areas without grass. Then we will transition to areas that are growing the wrong kind of plants such as thistle and weeds. Once those areas are gone, we’ll transition to areas where the grass us underperforming or the wrong kind of grass. Every time we add organic matter combined with animal traffic, the end result is something better grows. This is all without disturbing the soil, and without chemicals.

We have beef coming both this week and next. As usual when we have beef coming, we need to clear some space out of the freezers. To do so, I’m going to have a sale on all of our products for making your dog happy or for making the worlds best stock in the kitchen.

For those of you who have used our product to make beef, chicken, or pork stock, you know how good that stuff is and how well it keeps. Help a farmer out and stock up at the same time. I need to make room for steaks and hamburger and need to move this stuff out.

For those of you with dogs, I have lots of beef bones which are perfect for dog treats. Just thaw them out and pass them out and watch your dogs spends hours happily gnawing away.

For you soap makers or wholesome cooks, I also have some fatback that I’ll include in this sale.

All of these products, plus some more similar bits stuffed in the freezer will be marked down 11% until we get the freezer full of beef again, likely next week. Just shoot me an email if you want to stock up and I’ll get your order pulled for you and have it waiting.

We go to three different wholesalers and two different farmers markets every day to pick up produce that would otherwise be headed to the landfill. Some days an individual farmer has more, sometimes they have less but it all averages out to a certain amount per load, per day.

A pallet of produce is heavy. I know our tractor cannot pick up 2300 pounds because that’s what one of our bales of cardboard recycling weighs and the back end lifts right off of the ground when we try. With a  pallet of produce, the back tires are barely touching the ground and often as not we walk the pallet standing on the front tires only. I’m going to guess that means an average pallet weighs about 1200 pounds which is relatively conservative. That takes into account the half pallets we receive in the mix. 1200 per pallet is a good average.

We go the market 365 days per year. Often in the summer we make 3 or more trips per day. In the winter, we can usually make it in one trip. Our normal trailer hauls 9 pallets when fully loaded, but we often have to pull out the big trailer which hauls 18 pallets. All in, it looks like we’ll average throughout the calendar year 20 pallets per day, every day.

20 pallets x 1200 pounds per pallet = 24,000 pounds per day or 12 tons per day.

24,000 pounds per day x 365 days per year = 8,760,000 pounds per year, or 4380 tons per year. That means that we are diverting nearly NINE MILLION POUNDS of produce from the landfill and into either our animals or our soil. No wonder we are tired all the time.

One of our great customers (Hi Drew and Kat!) bought a full slab of bacon a while back. I don’t recall exactly when but I seem to recall it was cold at the time so it’s been a while. While delivering meat recently to their house, I noted the slab was still squirreled away in the freezer. “Tsk, tsk”, says I. “Bacon pining away in the bottom of the freezer is no bueno.” Of course, I had some bacon in my freezer at the time that had been there since winter, but I’m not going to tell them that! For those of you that need a special cut, we can get pretty much anything you need. We even had some full length beef shank and beef tendon on the way for April as a special request.

This past weekend, Drew finally brought that beautiful slab O’ meat out and went to work on it.

First they cut up part of the slab into these huge chunks of meaty goodness. The rest will be used for actual bacon I assume. Of course there is no telling what Drew may whip up.

Here you see the bacon chunks cooked at 500 degrees for 18 minutes. They were similar to pork chops at this point. But we are just getting started.

After getting the bacon  ready, he rubbed the whole bird and pork in chili powder, cayenne, paprika, salt, pepper, and then made a marinade for the bird with lime, cilantro, a little olive oil, and minced garlic. I’m really not sure if there is a recipe for this that is being followed, or if it’s just a mad scientist at work (insert maniacal laughter here). I’m guessing the latter is more likely but having tried their cooking, I’m totally ok with it.

While the bird was cooking, they made this awesome salsa verde. Then just add corn tortillas with more cilantro and diced onion to garnish and Viola!

I really should only work on these posts after breakfast. Now I’m hungry.

I received all the above this past weekend and this note at the bottom. “thx for the awesome food to celebrate Father’s Day and I wish you guys the best!”

I used to work in an office. I had over 100 people who worked for me and most of the things that got done were done by somebody else. We did about 100 million in business in our heyday. I had an assistant, great pay, great benefits, and most anything I needed was simply a phone call away. I gave all that up to be covered in hydraulic fluid yesterday while crawling up, over, and inside a trash compactor that smelled exactly like what you think it would, on a day when the temperature was in the triple digits. I came home greasy, oily, and disgusting having worked from about 5am to about 7pm. After a shower and a quick dinner, I came back to do office work till about 9:45. I couldn’t be happier and a large reason is from comments like the above from Drew. Nobody thanked me for doing my job before. Now I get it routinely from my customers. Having someone hand you money and thank you for selling them product at the same time changes your outlook on running a business. I’m bringing people happiness by doing my job, and in the process I’m having it for myself. It doesn’t get any better than that.

Recently some of our customers have inquired about intern or volunteer positions on our farm for their kids this summer. Each time I’ve politely declined as we figured we were done with interns, at least for this year. We have both Miguel and Vicente here, and me occasionally when I do some actual work. That should be plenty of labor for all the things we have to do.

Then the summer rush of produce hit us like a tidal wave. We have averaged about 20 pallets of food a day for the last couple of weeks and there is no sign it’s going to slow down.

Each pallet weighs on average 1500 pounds so that’s 30,000 pounds of produce each day. Most of it we handle by the pallet and use tractors to move it and feed it, but a large amount still has to be hand sorted. We are also having to deal with all the boxes that everything comes in and simply baling the cardboard takes too much time with this kind of volume. We are baling about 2500 pounds of cardboard per week currently.

I say all this to say, for those parents who were looking for a position for their kids on a farm part-time, we have some opportunities. The work isn’t especially hard or difficult as all these weights I listed are handled one bundle of grapes/strawberries/peaches at a time, If it’s heavy we use tractors. But for someone who is watching their kid sit on the couch and play Xbox, it’s a perfect job. I promise they will come home safe, tired, and ready for bed.

We should need this person for basically the summer and can work around most schedules. I’d prefer that when they come, they plan on staying most of the day rather than coming for a couple of hours here and there as that is too much to manage from our end.

I cannot recall exactly who asked me about interning, so I’m making this blanket announcement to everyone in hopes that whoever it was will contact me at dan@ninjacowfarm.com

Once we were done with the cowy goodness of yesterday morning, SWMBO and I took off to run errands together. The kids are all at camp this week and we have the house to ourselves. We both had things we needed to do which were mainly close to one another so we elected to pretend we were in our 20s again and do our errands together. One of the errands was to go to Justice building downtown and get’s Spork’s birth certificate. It’s a fairly painless process, after getting through security with a pocket knife that I always have on me. Luckily it was under the limit of what is allowed so we all made it in. Birth certificate in hand (sadly it doesn’t actually say Spork on it) we were walking back out of the building when this couple with unusual accents stops us. “Sir I’m sure you are really busy.” Last time I was at court I had people coming up to me trying to borrow money, borrow my phone, ask me legal questions because they thought I was a lawyer, etc, etc. I’m not inclined to be approached in the courthouse. I immediately give my leave me alone vibe and answer, “Yes I am.”

“But we are trying to get married and we need two witnesses.”

Did he say married? Yep. Holy cow! That’s neat. A quick consult with SWMBO and we hop on the elevator to ride to the 9th floor. Turns out they are both from Brazil and are leaving the country this weekend. They need to get married before they leave and the two witness thing has stopped them cold.

So we entered a courtroom where a magistrate was waiting to perform the deed. He was very nice and they were very nice, and we were witnesses to people we didn’t know.

It was a nice ceremony and we walked out holding hands remembering what it was like to get married. They didn’t want a video they said, but I’m married to Crazy Picture Lady, I know better. Sorry it’s in low res, I couldn’t get the high res version to upload this morning. We hope they have a wonderful life together and I’m glad they approached us, because it was the highlight of our day.

It’s been an interesting couple of days. I can hardly wait to find out what is next.

Since I took an entire 6 days off and went to the beach, I’ve been steadily dreaming of taking time off again and going to the Carribbean. I’ve been a few times before, and SWMBO and I went to the British Virgin Islands (BVIs) on our honeymoon. With a business to run, a farm to run, and children seemingly everywhere, going back to El Carib wasn’t even on the radar. But maybe, just maybe, if I plan enough, and squirrel away some money, I’ll be able to get the family there. I have to convince SWMBO first though.

As I’m working my way through a backlog of magazines I never have time to read, I come across the February issue of AOPA Pilot pictured above. Great Caribbean escapes by plane. I am a pilot, long out of the cockpit, but still somewhat read up on the current ongoings in aviation. I know I’m not going to fly our family down South unless it’s in the back of a Southwest flight but it can’t hurt to look. As I’m going through the various articles, I come across this little side bar.

Pigs live in the Bahamas on an island and when you boat up to the island, they SWIM out to your boat and beg for food! How cool is that. I didn’t even know the little porkers could swim.

I’ve been steadily working on SWMBO to buy into the idea of taking the family to the blue waters. After reading the article, I go find her, interrupt whatever she was doing, and tell her about the pigs in the Caribbean. “You boat up to this island, and the pigs swim out to your boat. You can feed them right from the boat!” I’m all excited.

SWMBO looks at me, kind of like she looks at one of the kids when they completely fail at something. Kind of sad and patient, and says, “You’re going to pack up the entire family and go to the Caribbean, spend all of our money getting there, risk the children drowning, to go feed pigs? Don’t you do enough of that at home?”

“Uh, no. I wasn’t going to do that. That would be silly.”