Category: News, etc.

Sunday was the last day of the CFSA farm tour. We had amazingly perfect weather both days. Well, Sunday was a bit cool but as long as you had some clothes on it was fine. A few of us showed up in shorts thinking it was another 80 degree day. That didn’t last long.

We had all hands on deck for the farm tour again this year. Lucy was coordinating everyone while her husband Jason (aka Abe Fruhlman) manned the grill cooking up bratwurst samples for our guests to enjoy.

Crystal stayed over for the weekend and worked her normal Saturday but also Sunday as well. Plus she helped make cookies Sunday morning, getting in on my girls normal Saturday morning routine of wake up, fire up the bakery, then get to work.

Spork did his customary tour guide duty on Saturday, giving our normally scheduled tours as well as CFSA tours all day. Sunday a cold he’d developed got the best of him and he convalesced while SWMBO took over tour guide duties.

Wildflower and Crystal both manned the store, and directed traffic. The Princess was everywhere, manning the store, directing traffic, and giving tours as you see above.

Erin and Mark were both on hand to teach people about milking cows, and Erin’s girls brought their award winning show chickens up to the yard and taught people about chickens and more importantly gave people a chance to pet a chicken.

Dustin broke out his drone and captured some video from the farm while the tours were ongoing. It is always cool to see your environment from above. I especially enjoyed getting to check my roofs without crawling up there!

Overall we had a pretty good turnout on Saturday. Sunday started off slow, but by the end we had a good crowd visiting and at one point we had three tours going at once.

Takeaways for our 2018 CFSA farm tour were:

1. This is the easiest event that we do all year. We don’t do the marketing. We don’t schedule the people. All we have to do is open our doors and host everyone when they show up.
2. This event is fairly sedate. We probably maxed out at 20 people here a few times. Usually it was 4-5 at a time. Easy. We could double the number of people without even noticing.
3. We did 75 transactions in the store Saturday and Sunday. Most transactions represent about 3 people visiting, which means we had about 225 people here total.
4. We did a little more than double our normal Saturday business dollar wise. But we were open another day so that sort of evens out.
5. Probably the most actionable takeaway is that we had roughly half of our visitors stop in because of the signage we put out rather than because they were part of the CFSA tour. Putting out signs on Old Stage Road, and at the entrance to our farm, brings people in. I’ve been reluctant to put out permanent signs but I am going to have to rethink that strategy. Signage works.

We’ll do the event again next year, CFSA does too good of a job not to be part of it.

I’ve never worked in an industry where everyone is trying to help you. Usually the government is trying to either shut you down or regulate you out of business. The tax people are taxing you to death, customers are trying to steal or at least beat you down to the point where you are loosing money doing business with them. Employees are either wanting a raise, or in some sort of HR involved tiff with one another. As a business owner, it sometimes feels like it is you against the world.

Then there is farming. Nearly all the government people I know are actually here to help. We are exempt from many of the requirements of a normal business, for things like a business license, unemployment tax, etc. Even our license plates cost 1/2 as much as normal.

Our customers routinely remind us we forgot to charge them for something rather than stealing products off the shelf as happens in a normal store. We have people routinely asking if they can volunteer to work here, for free.

Recently we had the daughter of one of our customers mention that she was pretty good at Instagram.

Grumpy farmer who accidentally walked into this conversation, “That’s nice. I used Instagram before. My Goddaughter signed me up. I didn’t really like it. Too cumbersome.”

Random girl I’m being nice to, “Well it works pretty good. We have a tiny little farm and we have a lot of followers.”

Mostly distracted farmer, “Uh huh. Good for you. I use Facebook because, you know, I’m old. That is what old people use. We’ve got like 1800 likes or something so we are doing pretty good.”

Girl who seems to know what she’s talking about but probably doesn’t, “Well, we do well with Instagram. I have about 23,000 likes.”

Idiot farmer who should have been paying attention, “Wait, what? On a farm that doesn’t sell anything?”

Really smart and beautiful young lady, “Yep.”

Stupid farmer who is now paying attention, “Soo…. Do you work for chocolate milk?”

So everyone, meet Emily of Wilders Homestead. She is taking over our LONG dormant Instagram account and teaching me the dark and mysterious ways of internetting and socializing with media. This will be a stretch since I’m not exactly social anyway, preferring to stay home and mind my own business. But according to Emily, if I want to be one of the cool kids, I have to step up my game.

Emily has already started posting some items to our Instagram page and there is plenty more to come. Emily is indeed working for chocolate milk. She just wants to help us and see us succeed, and we are very thankful for the help. There is no way to tell who is doing the posting because she is basically logged in as me. However for our normal followers, you’ll know because her posts are well written, thoughtful, positive, detailed, and uplifting. Mine, as usual, are not those things ranging more towards sarcastic, snarky, funny, and usually completely skipping the info you needed in the post in the first place. Hey it’s not a bug, it’s a feature! This way you’ll be able to tell us apart.

I was looking for something in an old post recently. Remember, this blog is my record book. What cow was born when, did we process number 23, how much hay did we buy last year? That kind of stuff. While scrolling back through the archives, I came across a post about the girls and what they do on a slow day in the store.

I giggled reading the post, remembering that day. The girls are crazy, and they were kind enough to document their craziness for me this time. Maybe it is funnier to me because I get to see them when customers aren’t around but I thought it was worth reposting for those of you who don’t get to see them off duty.

Here is the original post. 

We have two seasons here on the farm. Grazing season, and winter feeding. The goal on a cattle farm is to make grazing season last as long as possible, thereby shortening winter feeding to be as short as possible. Winter feeding involves purchased hay, which is a large expense on a cattle farm.

Part of achieving that goal is completely counterintuitive though. Step one is to keep the cows off of our pastures as long as possible in the spring. This lets our grass get a good jump on growth, establish plenty of leaf material, and be more than ready to graze. That means grass that is at least 12″ tall before we turn the cows on it. The cows then graze off about 4-5″ of grass in their one day grazing rotation, leaving 7-8″ of grass soaking up the sun and steady making new grass to eat. By leaving grass behind, we actually grow more grass long term because the grass is a much more efficient solar collector when we leave some leaf material. Basically we have more grass on the second grazing than if we turned them in early and/or let them eat more of the grass.

Back in February, when it was 80 degrees and it seemed that summer was nearly here, we had grass that was already 6″ tall and looking great. I had a wall of hay left and we were discussing how long till our momma cows went to our leased farm, and what we were going to do with all the leftover hay.

Enter March. Which was colder than February on the East coast. Argh! March is supposed to be when spring has sprung. Instead it snowed, it has frozen all the buds off of my fruit trees, and as I sit here on April 10th, typing away, I’m still wearing long pants, shoes, an overshirt, a vest, and I’m cold. Basically my winter apparel. I should be in shorts and flip flops in April, in NC.

Yesterday we fed our last bale of hay. We ran out. Today our cows go onto grass that is basically the same height as it was in February. The sun hasn’t been out, except on cold clear days, and I cannot recall an 80 degree day although we are supposed to finally get to 80 degrees by Friday. Instead of being well ahead of the curve, this cold weather has us behind. No hay, not enough grass, and cows that need some fattening up asap. We’ll be fine, once the heat shows up the grass will explode and we’ll be playing catchup. We have so much organic matter in our soil that the grass really responds once it has some spring weather to work with. But I don’t like running up against the edge of things.

The good news is we’ll be able to start our tours going back out to the herd in their daily paddocks. And the sacrificial paddock will finally be able to start recovering. I flew over the farm a few weeks ago with a cadet while on an O flight. It looked green, except for where the grass hasn’t recovered yet, which was a fairly large area. It kinds looked like the farm had been bombed. I’m looking forward to my next flight and seeing everything green everywhere!

I had a surprise visit on Wednesday from our CSA farmer. She’d apparently lost her phone and couldn’t text me she was coming, but that was ok. I was just glad I saw her and all her fresh produce!

With this never ending winter, even a few warm days didn’t have me feeling like spring yet. Isn’t there still snow in the forecast for Saturday night?!

But seeing boxes of fresh produce unloading from the car, and seeing all the customers come swarming in to pick them up, made me feel like for just a few hours it was indeed spring.

We are super excited to finally have a produce CSA. Thank you to the customers who stepped up and committed for this spring season. We’ll have signups for more CSA positions later in the year for those who missed out this time.

When we first decided to be part of the farm tour, we wanted to be part of the spring tour because that was the big one. However they had implemented a fall tour and we ended up on that one instead. We enjoy the fall tour, and we’ve had good weather, but I always wanted to be on the spring tour to kick off our warm season rather than winding it up with the fall tour. Plus the spring tour is the original one, it is where all the cool kids hang out.

Guess who is on the spring tour this year?! Actually, everyone is. They have consolidated the fall tour into the spring tour making for one gigantic tour this April 28th-29th. You can see all about the tour  and purchase tickets here.

We’ll have brochures showing up this week so you can grab one when you are in the store but mark your calendars. This will be the biggest farm tour I’ve ever seen with many, many farms that you can go and visit. The cost is per carload, not per person, so designate a driver and grab some friends for a fun weekend. And make sure you come and visit us. We’ll have on our Sunday best.

Miguel sorta casually mentioned there was a truck coming. Not too unusual. Normally we go get the produce but sometimes we get a delivery. We like deliveries. They save us time, fuel, tires, brakes, etc.

Then he slipped in it was an 18 wheeler. Oh, now that is a little different. We usually get one or two of those a year. What are we getting this time?

Cantaloupes. Oh goody, those are almost as good as watermelons. Everyone on the farm eats cantaloupe and they are easy to unpack and get ready for the animals.

The truck was late, of course. The downside to deliveries is they are never on time. Apparently the driver had had a flat tire so that is understandable. Often it is just they didn’t come when they promised so at least this time it was legitimate.

The problem with something like a tractor trailer of produce is that we don’t normally have the setup for offloading them. Miguel borrowed this pallet jack so we could move the pallets from the front of the truck to the back where we could reach them with the tractor. We certainly aren’t complaining about all this goodness showing up, but it is different from what we are normally setup for. It just takes a bit of a different approach.

Everyone on the farm is munching on cantaloupes for the next few weeks, which is a God send. We have been doing well this winter on produce, but having something like this gives us a ton more flexibility. Almost as much as the truck driver needed to get out of the farm. He was too tall to get under our power lines so we had to back him up onto a side road. While good natured, it was obvious he was frustrated with our tight quarters. I felt bad for the guy, but he did a great job getting out.

Now if I could just talk Duke Power into raising out power lines up to where they are supposed to be. I’ve tried in the past. No luck.

So you may have noticed that the blog has been quiet the past few weeks. Lucy has posted a few recipes, but other than that, nothing. That is because for the past two weeks straight, Spork and I have been out of town and out of communication (no internet). We’ve been in Grantsboro, NC building an airplane. No, not like this.

But like this.

Now, I know what you are thinking. An airplane?! Is it a million dollars? What kind of money are you making farming?!

First, let me assure you, we aren’t talking about something like this.

It’s more like this. 

That’s a bit unfair.

This is actually what we are building.

If you didn’t know I was a pilot, here is the post that you missed.

This project has been about four years in the making. I’m not going to bore everyone here with my airplane talk, not today nor in the future. Suffice to say this is a father/son adventure, one that the Mrs. put us on. Spork and I are doing this massive project (1000 hours build time) together, and we will continue to work routinely on it for at least the next year. Spork will be both building the airplane beside me, and also posting on farmerflier.com his thoughts and feelings as we go through the process. Basically after we finish the plan, he should be an experienced airplane builder, a pilot, and a blogger. Not a bad skill set for what will then be a 16 year old kid.

Instead of posting the details here on our farm site, which would make no sense, over the past several months I’ve been building a new website dedicated to this airplane build. All the questions like why we decided to build an airplane, why we picked the airplane that we did, etc will be posted over there. The blog posts over there will be a running series of articles about the build. These will serve as both a journal of our experience as well as for the FAA when it comes time to certify our airplane. I also will be posting our general aviation related stuff there as well, because sometimes I get neat pictures I want to share.

There is a separate email subscription for the aviation site, as well as a Facebook page linked to the build if that is the way you prefer to follow what is going on. If all you want to know about is fuzzy critters, then there is nothing to do. If you would like to keep up with the build, and the aviation related shenanigans (flour bombing has already been discussed and tentatively planned) then head over to farmerflier.com and sign up, Like, or whatever is your choice of keeping informed.

I have a mountain of pictures and posts to get up from our first two weeks of building so expect more content over the next several weeks.

Starting Monday, our new Spring/Summer hours go into effect. We will be open Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 2pm to 6pm. We will be open Saturday from 9am-5pm.

Being open Mondays is new for us and something we are excited to offer to our customers. It means that you won’t have such a long time between close of business on Saturday and Wednesday at 2pm. We know that big gap means you sometimes have to run to the grocery store because you just can’t make it till Wednesday without butter/milk/hamburger/etc. We hope the new hours will be more convenient for you.

I’m sure it will take everyone a bit to get used to the new days we are open, including me, but we look forward to being open longer to better serve you this season.

With the colder weather, the girls have gotten back into making their famous cookies. Just in time for me to have to go onto a post holidays diet. Ugh!

I’ve been pretty slack about advertising the cookies. Partly because we’ve had a few Saturdays (they only make them on Saturdays) that the girls haven’t been home, or something went wrong, so there were no cookies. But we are back in a groove and I finally was able to get some pics.

When I tell people we have home made cookies. I mean it. The girls get up on Saturday mornings and start with flour, sugar, fancy chocolate chips, etc and make true home made cookies. It is their little side business that they do. Well, and making scarves, and hats, and whatever else the dream up. But cookies were first. The cookie sales are independent of the store, they sell them directly. At this point I don’t make them buy ingredients so it is VERY much like a lemonade stand. Plus, if nobody buys any, somebody has to eat all those cookies, right? Guess who that is. It is a pretty sweet deal for the girls (pun intended).

You’ll note that the girls are strategically cropped out of the photos. That is because we have reached a milestone of tween girls. I went from this being funny and no problem to post.

To dad! Don’t take my picture, I haven’t brushed my hair. And don’t you DARE put this on your internet thing! Ahh, girls.

But I have to admit, the girls baking skills have improved and they need pretty much no hand holding at this point. They get up on their own, make the cookie dough, bake them, pull them cookies and let them cool, wrap them, and bring them to the store, pretty much by themselves. They also wash their hands, put their hair back, and more importantly, remind me to do the same if I get near their work. (Putting my hair back is another story).

This batch of cookies came out a bit flat, which is exactly how I like them. It pained me to not eat them, to me they were perfect.

This coming Saturday, they will probably be fluffy like they are supposed to be because I won’t be helping. Regardless, grab a cookie when you come by. They are $1.00 and go directly to support Barbie dolls, Legos, and stuffed animals.