Category: News, etc.

The USDA recently put out this article which summarized a study they performed comparing farmers market pricing and local grocery store pricing. The comparison is only for Vermont, and only during the summer, so it is a pretty limited data set but it does give a great comparison to retail food and farmers market food pricing.

But wait a minute, we all know that prices at the market are higher than at the store. How can this be? Note that this survey was done in the summer. The first watermelons, or squash, or whatever to come into the market are often expensive. In fact, they’ve probably ridden a truck from another farm in Georgia or Florida to be here. They are the first ones of the season and they are expensive. But give it 30 days and vendors are using watermelons as a door stop. They are everywhere and cheap.

This is the key to shopping at the farmers market. Shop in season! Not the edges of the season, the actual season. That’s when pricing is cheap. And unlike your mega mart, the local farmers don’t have huge drive in coolers to keep their produce sitting around waiting for the end of the season. When the farm is producing, it’s producing literally by the ton so it has to be priced to move.

When I was growing up, we went to the market to buy corn and beans every year. Always whenever dad decided it was time based on some agrarian clock in his head. We’d buy it by the bushel at that time, and then bring everything home and cut, snap, prep, and freeze. Then, when Thanksgiving and Christmas came, dad broke out the frozen bags of corn, peas, beans, etc, and we had our sides ready to cook for the 50 or so people who showed up for the holiday. Why did we do this? Because the corn in season was better and cheaper than anything you could buy in the winter. The key was to buy during the best part of the season.

If you show up on the first warm March day at the farmers market and are shocked at the prices, understand that nothing is producing yet. Anything you see for sale has a story of how it got there and that story has a cost. If you don’t know about food miles, take a read here to learn what it is about. This is a great book about eating local.

If you come back to the market now (mid July if you are reading this later), you can see in the chart above is the heart of the season, and you’ll see the price of abundance. It’s pretty cheap.

If you’ve been here, you’ve heard that we don’t feed commercial feed to our animals. Instead we feed produce from the farmer’s market in Raleigh. Maybe you were lucky enough to pop in when the truck rolled up and see what we were talking about but usually we are out picking up produce and the food we do have on hand is already being fed.

Saturday I received a routine summer call from Miguel. “Can you bring the big trailer and come to the market?”

You see, we don’t often know what we’re getting till we show up. Sometimes we can get everything on one load. Sometimes it’s two loads on the regular truck and trailer. Sometimes we take the box truck for our second load. And sometimes I jump in my truck and take our 36′ trailer and get the additional load. On Saturday I got the call to come get a big load.

We stack the produce, and restack it, so we can get as much in every square foot as possible. This is 16 pallets of food on one trailer.

In the distance, you can see our normal truck and trailer also loaded.

Here is a better view of that truck and trailer. This is another 10 pallets of food, at least. That gives us a total of 26 pallets of food, all of which would have gone to the landfill had we not come by and picked it up. Nearly all of this will get fed to the animals, and the pallets and cardboard will be recycled.

Just another day on the farm.

Lucy is home so she’ll be in the store Wednesday and Friday, 2-5 with no appointment needed.

Saturday I had blocked off because the family is at the beach. But I didn’t realize I had the entire schedule blocked off and the store effectively closed. We are OPEN on Saturday 8am-5pm. Tours are by appointment and shopping will be with Lucy with no appointment needed. I am picking up a cow on Friday morning so we’ll have a fresh batch of awesome steaks and assorted beefy goodness come Friday afternoon and Saturday morning.

Come see us!

Yesterday was Adam’s last day.

Adam has been with us for over a year, since he was in high school. Adam started out working Saturdays and when he had extra time in his schedule like during the summer. He was always on time, always hustling to  do whatever it takes, and always quick with a smile.  He told me once he never thought he’d be doing something like farming. I laughingly replied that none of us thought that. However now it’s time for Adam to move onto bigger and better things. First he has to get his sister married off. Then he is going to Salt Lake on his mission trip. And then finally he will be attending BYU in the fall.

I don’t know what Adam is going to do when he is an adult, but I hope he’ll remember an old farmer he used to work for and give him a job when Adam is running his own company. Whatever he does, I know he’ll be a success. He’s too good, and works to hard, to be anything else.

With Adam leaving, we have an opportunity for someone else to take a position with us. This will be general labor on the farm, feeding animals, going to the market with Miguel, handling produce. That kind of thing. I get questions all the time from parents looking for something for their kids to do during the summer. If you have someone with a strong back and a good work ethic, send ’em our way.

The best thing to do is to contact me directly via email with a resume.

There is some chance of rain this afternoon for tours but the girls are happily working away in the store all day where it is dry and cool.

The girls have fresh bakes cookies they made themselves sitting on the counter. Also we still have steaks left, plus all the assorted cuts of beef, and plenty of pork, lamb, chicken, dairy, etc. all on hand and ready for your next meal. Stop by and see how the girls are doing today and get some fresh, farm fresh, hippie farm food!

I mentioned a few weeks ago that we had a power outage at the barn. The culprit for this outage is a tree that has been dying for a few years now and is now officially dead.

To make it more complicated, this tree is inside of the pig paddock, with fencing on two sides. The power for the barn is on the third side, and trees are all around it. It’s also leaning towards the power line and the barn and behind it is another tree that is in the way.

First, I had Duke Energy come out and disconnect power from the barn and get the cable out of the way. That was if we dropped anything the wrong direction, we wouldn’t accidentally lose power and tear something up.

By the time the above picture was taken we’d already dropped the small tree behind it. It was only 25″ across at the butt. You know, the kind of tree that would all by itself be a major issue you’d need a tree service for. That one I dropped without even waiting for Miguel to finish feeding to help me. It paled in comparison the dead tree.

Now onto the scary tree. The real killer in tree work is falling limbs. A dead tree is ripe to drop a limb on you and kill you so it’s extra concerning to be working on a tree that is dead.

Since the tree was in the pig paddock and next to the fence, we couldn’t use a tractor to push the tree where we wanted it to go. We brought in our digger derrick with its massive hydraulic winch.

We rigged a chain to a tree about 25 yards away and put a pulley on that chain. Then we routed the winch cable through the pulley and back uphill to attach to the dead tree. This allowed us to pull the tree in the direction it needed to go, and more importantly against the direction it wanted to go. Remember it was leaning towards the barn.

Once the tree and winch setup were rigged (after Miguel rightly pointed out I should have the cable higher on the tree), it was time to cut the felling notch in the front of the tree.

It’s actually been a little while since I’ve done any chainsaw work, so it was fun to get in here and do some cutting.

Once the notch was in I checked everything again and then moved onto the back cut. Once the cut was partially in, I inserted a couple of wedges so that the tree would not try to move the wrong direction and then finished my back cut.

We pulled on the tree a bit with the winch and it wouldn’t move. I’d left plenty of hinge wood so I went back in and cut a bit more. This is the scariest part of working on the tree. It’s too strong to fall, but not strong enough to stay up. You are right at the base of the tree with all kinds of forces at play. I cut a bit more, weakening the hinge, then got back out of there and we pulled with the winch again. Again the tree wouldn’t move.

Finally I remembered the winch was hydraulic, not electric so it would have a little more power if we revved the engine. Miguel gave the truck the gas and the tree finally moved.

After we had everything on the ground, we went back to work as normal. I called Duke Power and they came right out and hooked our power line back up and Miguel and I cleaned up the tools, trucks, etc. Then Miguel and the boys moved the pigs back out of the barn and into the paddock where they were excited to see this big addition to their home.

Just another day on the farm.

Spork, his cousin, and I all worked this morning on the farm, feeding, moving cows, going to the market, etc. After working the boys all day, I thought we’d relax for a bit and do something fun. We had some watermelons from the market and we have way too many squirrels on the farm. Also, Spork received a new 22 rifle for Christmas and he’s had little chance to shoot it because I’ve been too busy to take him.

As we got back to the farm I told Spork to take all of our produce in the house, and to grab the watermelon, his rifle, and a magazine and we’d sit on the porch and eat watermelon and shoot some squirrels if they happened by. For those of you who aren’t shooters, a magazine is a removable box that holds the bullets in the gun.

When I’d put his gun safely away earlier I’d detached the magazine and had it laying there beside the rifle. I didn’t want him to forget the magazine when he came back so I made sure to point out all three things to bring.

1. A watermelon
2. The rifle
3. The magazine

It took him a bit longer than I’d expect but soon enough Spork and his cousin showed up. They had three things.

1. A watermelon.
2. His new rifle
3. After some hunting around in my room, he’d brought a magazine.

   

   I really need to take the boy shooting. I’ve got to figure out how to get some more free time.

We did eat 1.5 watermelons and enjoy a few minutes of rest. It was awesome just hanging out and joking with the boys on a sunny day. So at least I got some good dad points in that regard.

**No squirrels were harmed in the making of this post.

Monday was supposed to be an easy day, at least for me. Michael, one of our workers out here finished his employment on Friday. But I’d already hired both Landon and Chris a couple of days prior to his last day so for the short-term, we had extra help around here. Inexperienced help, but help nonetheless. Plus the kids were back from camp so we’d have Spork out to help with the busy time of feeding first thing in the morning.

I’d spoken to Landon about his schedule on Saturday and all was good. That meant that we’d have Miguel, Vicente, Landon, and Chris all here working all day, and Spork in the morning, meaning I could do boss stuff like blog posts, updating the site with lamb prices, recovering from the party the night before. Things like that.

Instead I woke to find a text from Landon reminding me he’d told me originally he couldn’t work on Mondays. He’d forgotten to mention it when we talked on Saturday but he wasn’t coming in. Oops. Well, we’d still have three guys, plus Spork, which is enough. Not enough to have extra help but enough I can still get my stuff done.

Then Vicente texted and said he was sick and couldn’t come in. Uh oh. Now we are staffed at a level that is below normal. That means I’m going to have to do some actual work around here. Probably not much, just during the morning. I can still get some of my stuff done later in the day. Oh well, at least I know how. So 7:30 comes and goes, and no Spork. Finally I walk over to the house where SWMBO informs me that Spork is really tired from being at camp all week and that she’d told him he could take the day off. Of course, she didn’t tell Miguel or I so we were clueless. I went to his room to give him the bad news.

There are no days off on a farm.

He wasn’t exactly awake but trooper that he is he got out of bed and got dressed. I promised him breakfast if he’d get up so SWMBO whipped us up her typical amazing breakfast and we showed up for work about 8:15 (we start at 7:30).

Once at the barn, I learned that we had a cow that was acting strange. I hustled down to see and sure enough, one of the new cows was acting bloated. Prior to doing anything with the bloated cow, I had to wrangle a calf back into the paddock because he’d gotten out in all the 4th of July excitement the night before and momma was none too pleased.

With the calf back in place, I got the bloated cow up and confirmed that yes indeed, he was bloated.  Back to the barn to get my medical gear out and get a plan on handling the cow. Miguel was tearing around trying to get everyone fed so he could get to the market and pick up our produce. There was a rush because it is a holiday and he needs to be there early to get anything we can.

So Miguel, Chris, Spork, and I walk this cow through the pastures and up to the barn. Once he’s in the corral, Miguel takes off with instructions to me on who is left to be fed. Once he’s gone, I take Chris and Spork and we do some home surgery on our wayward cow. It was #A2, one of the cows we purchased from the stock yard.

By now, inserting a trocar is relatively old hat. But Spork things it’s cool and Chris has never seen anything like this so I spend a little time explaining what I’m doing. I also take this opportunity to explain to Chris what the signs of bloat are and how he can tell. It’s one of his jobs to check the cows daily so this is a good opportunity for him.

After getting the trocar in the cow, we gave him a minute then turned him back in with the rest of the cows. I then spent a few minutes instructing Chris on how to herd and move cattle. Again, he’s brand new so this is information he needs. Then back to the barn to finish feeding all the pigs. And to get the momma pig with the babies back in the barn.

Oh, did I forget mention they’d escaped that morning and were roaming around the barn yard chasing chickens? In all the excitement I’d simply overlooked telling you. It’s Monday, right?

So I finished feeding the pigs. Then I grabbed the dump trailer, hauled it over to the barn where I had to clean up the debris from Lucy’s new chicken enterprise, then over to the 4th of July celebration to clean up all the detritus from that adventure. Then finally to the house so we can load construction debris that needs to go away. Yes, the house is under construction as well during all of this. It has been since October of 2015.

Once the trailer was dropped off, I stopped in to speak to SWMBO. It was 10am. Only 8 hours to go before my day ends. But it’s better than a Monday at work!

We are open today from 8 to 3 and we have some ribeyes and New York strips left in the freezer! They are first come, first serve! Lucy is here and no appointment is needed to stop by and see her.

We also have an 8 pound pork butt in the freezer for your 4th of July cookout. Time to fire up the smoker and make something awesome for the 4th.

Lucy is going to work the store from 8am-3:30pm tomorrow. No appointment needed!

We have steaks, hamburger, pork, goat cheese, lamb, honey, jams, pretty much everything in stock. I just got in a load of bacon so we’re ready for you when you stop by. I’ll be out giving tours all day so you’ll see me too.

We do have seven new little piglets in the barn if anyone wants to see baby piglets while they are here.