Category: News, etc.

Last winter I was able to keep all three of my hives alive during the winter by feeding them honey as a supplement. I have tried sugar water and pollen patties with no success. Honey seemed to be the ticket. Go figure.

Today I fed the first of the honey to our bees, one large batch per hive. The honey is open fed, basically shoved into the back of the hive where the bees can get to it. I’m sure there is a better way, but not without buying some contraption I don’t want to buy. I had to cut out some comb to make room for the honey but the bees will rebuild it next spring.

I’m not sure why the bees sometimes don’t put enough honey away. We are going to put in a pollinator patch near our pond next year to help but I don’t think our bees suffer from lack of opportunities. Anyway, the honey is loaded and the bees are already putting it merrily away. The next batch will get loaded in December when we get a warm day.

George Monbiot shares his correction on being vegan and why he was wrong.

They go to Ninja Cow Farm. A few of our farmers unloaded on us their post Halloween pumpkins. What you see above is HALF of what we will be getting. Fortunately cows, pigs, and chickens all love pumpkins and pumpkins also keep very well. We will make full use of these pumpkins to give our animals a boost through the rest of this year.

A few months ago we were contacted to see if we would allow a home school co-op to tour our farm. Being home schoolers ourselves, I of course said yes. The group was well-organized and behaved, at least as far as a bunch of young kids can be when given room to run and play. We had a good time and spent about 2 hours doing a walking tour of the farm and answering questions. One of the mothers was busy taking pictures and was kind enough to share with me some of the pictures she took. Below in no particular order are the pictures from our tour.

Thank you Jennifer for sharing these wonderful photos.

 

Miguel and I started out our day talking about winter setting in, the last of the grazing, getting hay for the cows, and having to limit our pigs for the remainder of the winter because our loads from the farmers markets have been dwindling. We should be ok for winter, but we don’t have any extra carrying capacity at this point.

http://instagram.com/p/uTvcIbjgqh/

With our limited amounts of food in mind, I stopped and took a picture of the pigs merrily eating their breakfast of fresh produce this morning. The sun hadn’t been up long and the pigs were happy to dive into breakfast since there was plenty for everyone. In fact, I gave a tour to a nice lady at 10:30 who we are trying to help with a school project and these same pigs were passed out in the sun sleeping happily, so breakfast was a hit.

However as a farmer you have to always be looking ahead. Winter is coming (Game of Thrones music playing in anyone’s head) and food will be getting scarce. We have a plan thought so no worries and off to the market we go. Suddenly our little trailer is swarmed by forklifts. We get loaded to the gills and ease away to go and pick up from our smaller farmers where we hand load the produce. Miguel spots and entire pallet of potatoes and we load those onto the truck bed. Back at the smaller farmers we cram a huge load from them in every nook and cranny and limp home way overloaded. This is what it looked like when we got home.

http://instagram.com/p/uTvgIljgqm/

That’s a huge load. Enough for a few days of all the animals eating their fill and then some. Hopefully the other market will be a little slower today.

http://instagram.com/p/uTvi1Rjgqs/

Um, not so much. Another full load. I sure hope everyone is hungry!

Today I attended a tax class for farmers put on by the North Carolina Cooperative Extension. It was taught in Silk Hope by Guido Van Der Hoeven of NC State. Taxes can be infuriating to deal with but as an unintended benefit, reading or learning about them can put you right to sleep. Frankly that was my thought as I drove to Spring Hope, that I would spend the afternoon trying to stay awake however Guido did an excellent job of making the topic interesting and the crowd of nearly 50 people certainly had a lot of questions on all the topics. Guido ended up having to hurry up the last bit of the schedule just to make up some time because there were so many question.

Guido covered the recent changes to farmers sales tax exemptions from stem to stern. Luckily we had already figured out how to apply for our new exemption number so the issue was moot for our farm. However for a surprising number of folks it sounded like they had not even made application to the NCDOR for a new number. That was troubling since the old number will expire by law on October 1st, 2014, just a few days from now.

Next we covered what items were exempt from sales tax for farmers. Here is a quick list:

• Pesticides (no need for us)
• Baby chicks and pullets (I know I’ve paid tax on them, not knowing)
• Commercially built facility and building materials for raising or feeding of animals
• Bulk tobacco barns, racks or accessories to cure or dry tobacco
• Fuel or electricity (must have a separate meter)
• Fertilizer, plastic mulch, seeds, lime, land plaster (this includes organic fertilizer)
• Farm machinery, repair parts and lubricants
• Containers
• Grain, feed, soybean storage facility and parts

This was just a partial list of the items exempted from sales tax for purchase by a qualified farmer.

Guido also covered charging sales tax as a farmer. This topic covered a lot of detail as each product can have no tax, or a variety of taxes. For example, flowers you grew and offered for sale are not taxed. But flowers arranged as a bouquet are taxed. Even putting a ribbon on flowers instead of a rubber band to hold the bunch together causes them to be taxed. This is just one example of the byzantine tax code for collecting tax as a farmer.

Two big takeaways I had from this section was:

1. If 50% of your farm sales are from items you purchase off farm, then ALL of your sales have to collect tax.
2. Any items you buy from another farmer and sold by you must collect tax, even if it would otherwise not be taxed. In other words, if you sell peaches from your farm then you don’t have to charge sales tax. If however you get peaches from your farmer friend to supplement your sales, you have to charge sales tax on your farmers peaches.

Basically any resale item has to be taxed no matter what, and if your resale amount exceeds 50% of total sales, then everything gets taxed. Of course, for us it’s not that big of a deal because all of our meat is taxed at 2% no matter what. However The Princess keeps asking me to build her a farm stand where she can work. In order to make it work, I’d need to add in produce and value add items. Suddenly all these distinctions become very important.

The last big item covered by Guido was how to file a Schedule F tax form and a form 4797. The schedule F was pretty straightforward but I learned something I didn’t know on the 4797. It turns out that there is a big distinction on selling breeder animals from your farm vs. selling traditional animals. Selling a grass-fed beef from our farm is treated as ordinary income, however when we cull a brood cow from our herd, the sale is treated differently. The income is treated as capital gains and taxed at a lower rate. There is also no social security tax charged on the income. For someone like us operating a cow/calf operation, culling brood cows is a normal and regular event.

All in all it was a good class and I learned some things that will change our tax strategies and operations.

After spending our morning on chores and whatnot, Justin and I took off for the farm tour. We were limited on time because we’d spent too much time at the farmer’s market, and I was determined to eat a good lunch at Angie’s. It was all worth it and there really weren’t many farms on my side of town that I wanted to see anyway.

Our first stop was In Theory Farm in Angier. The farm was small and well run and the people were super friendly. I ended up talking to one of the farmers and learned that she wanted to sell two of her pigs. Since I needed pigs I gave her my card and told her I’d be happy to buy them. She also needed some help processing some Cornish cross chickens that were 11 weeks old (that’s old for a Cornish cross). I offered her what little help I could and she said she’d likely take me up on it. Hopefully we’ll get together on the pigs because they were nice looking Tamworth pigs and they were sized where we could put them in with our pigs and sally forth.

Second we stopped by LL Urban Farm in Holly Springs. As we pulled up I told Justin we’d only be a few minutes because all they did there was raise hydroponic lettuce. They had a farm stand I noted as we pulled in but I didn’t pay much attention to. We hooked up with one of the farmers and took the tour of the hydroponics. There are farmers who are plant people, and there are ones who are animal people. Not many cross over. I’m an animal farmer. I can grow plants in my garden but I really don’t care for growing plants as a profession. I really don’t have an interest in hydroponics as it’s just that much farther out there from my animal husbandry interests but it’s always interesting to see what other people do and it was impressive how much lettuce they grew in their greenhouses. As we finished the tour I started talking to the farmer and introduced myself as another farmer. Of course we started talking shop. Then another gentleman came up and noted my Ninja Cow Farm shirt. He said he’d heard of us and I learned that he was the property owner. I also learned he was the former mayor of Cary! His farm was on .99 acres and he was turning an amazing amount of revenue from his small plot. We discussed farming regulations and how wonderful it was to be a farmer in NC. Then the conversation turned to his farm stand, which was his real farm business. I mentioned that The Princess wanted her own farm stand and I’d been considering putting something small in. He was very enthusiastic about his farm stand and we spent the next hour there talking about his business. He shared an amazing amount of proprietary information with me, things that take years to learn the hard way. I finally realized I’d taken no pictures of the stand so I took one to show The Princess later. This is the inside view of their road side stand.

Finally Justin and I left and headed for the Inter Faith Food Shuttle farm on Tryon Road, only because it was on our way home. We arrived to find that the tour was cancelled at their location and nobody was around.

We headed home and met back up with Miguel. We brought out a bucket of food and in about 10 minutes had sorted the pigs into two different paddocks, with everyone on the correct side of the wire. It was a good call to wait till later in the day to sort them. Food is the way to move pigs.

I had felt guilty taking off to go on the farm tour. I needed to be at work. I needed to be on the farm. My family was at the beach vacationing and had had some problems that I could have solved had I been there. I could have been doing so many things instead of visiting farmers but CFSA had asked us to be on the tour and I needed to go see what the setup was like so we could prepare next year should we choose to be on the tour. They had even given us a complimentary pass to take the tour so I felt obligated to use it, however I still felt guilty. However by afternoon’s end, I had made some great connections, met some of my neighbors, and maybe even bought a few pigs. The time on the tour was time well spent.

After sorting the pigs, I said goodbye to Miguel and Justin and headed to the house for a shower. With the wife and kids at the beach, Dustin and I headed out for dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, San Remo Italian Grill. Alas neither Johnny nor Allison were there so I didn’t get to see my friends but the food was good and we met some nice people while sitting at the bar. We also were able to witness a date where the couple arrived in this.

http://instagram.com/p/tMjz-QDggF/

That’s a 1926 Model T. You don’t see that every day. The entire restaurant turned to watch as they left. It was a very neat car and beautifully restored.

Saturday was a busy day on the farm. It began with Miguel and our new intern Justin getting to work while I ran to the office to handle something work related for an hour. I came back to find that Justin had worn the new shine off of his internship by running the tractor into the chicken brooder house.

http://instagram.com/p/tMjo_QDgv8/

Nobody was hurt except for the door on the house which suffered quite a bit. Fortunately the door was getting in pretty bad shape already so fixing it was already in the cards. We had a conversation about tractors and how quickly and easily they can destroy something and the importance of being careful. Justin has been careful so far so that one wasn’t harped on. He’s brand new to running equipment so some mistakes can be expected. Compared to running into my truck or someone getting hurt, this wasn’t too bad so I didn’t jump up and down. Having interns means that people are learning, and people learning make mistakes, it’s part of the game.

After trying to destroy the house, we went to sort out the pigs, who had all gotten together in one group. We couldn’t have our boar, Lamont, running with our little pigs because they are getting to the size that the girls might start looking cute to Lamont. After a quick attempt, we made the call to wait till later in the day when the pigs were hungry. Rather than pushing them, we could pull them with food so they come willingly.

With no pigs to move, we switched to some chores that needed to be performed. Justin began working on the mobile waterer we use for the cows. The hose had become damaged and needed to be reworked. Miguel needed to change the fuel filter on the truck we haul our produce on daily, and I needed to test and then work on the lawn mower. We all three went to work in the shop, everyone on their own project. I found that the lawnmower vacuum system wasn’t working despite our attempts at repairing it and it had to come off. I also had a blade with a stuck bolt from where we’d tried to change the blades a month back. I raised the mower up via our crane and went to work on the bolt. The head was rounded off slightly and no wrench I had would get purchase. No problem, I took a piece of scrap steel and dressed it up on the grinder. Then I ground the head of the bolt to get clean metal and welded the two together. Viola! A handle for the bolt. I held a block to keep the blade from turning, Miguel turned the welded handle with a cheater bar, and Justin held the tractor and the bolt popped loose right away. A quick minute and the new blade was on. Problem solved. There is no substitute for having the right tools in a good shop.

Justin was able to get the hose fixed and Miguel was able to change out the fuel filter, after locating the filter wrench he didn’t know I had. By this time it was 11am and we needed to head to the farmers market to meet our wholesaler farmers who had some produce for us. Arriving at the market we found that their food wasn’t quite ready yet so we had to wait about 30 minutes for them to get everything ready. While waiting, Miguel hooked us up with some of the best Mango I’ve ever eaten compliments of one of the farmers. Then I met a white guy who was wearing a hat and shirt that both were labeled Gringo. He was standing there with the same farmer cutting up with the Mexicans in fluent Spanish. I learned after a few minutes that this was Benjie, the owner of Gringo a Go-Go, a new Mexican place we were already looking to try. Benjie was an interesting character and I promised we’d give his place a try. He also was the real deal, having lived in Mexico for a number of years. His Spanish was fluent and his knowledge of Mexican food was impressive. We’ll definitely give his place a try.

Finally the food was ready so we loaded a full trailer from the guys and headed over to our regular farmers in the main market. They filled up the rest of the truck with their haul and we booked home because we were late for lunch at Angie’s.

After Angie’s, Justin and I left Miguel to do real work while we went on the CFSA’s farm tour, but that’s another post.

Yesterday we had a tour scheduled with a family who had more than a passing interest in our beef. Chris contacted me and asked a long list of questions on grass-fed beef, how we feed, etc. I recommended to her that instead of trying to answer all her questions via email, that she instead come out for a tour and we could discuss everything in person. I’m glad that she did because:

1. We enjoy giving tours of our farm. We’re proud of what we do and think that our program is unique amongst our peers.
2. There is so much misinformation about grass-fed, grass finished, organic, etc. that in my opinion the only way to really know what you are getting is to go and meet your farmer and see their operation for yourself.
3. Chris brought her kids with her. Nothing makes you happier to do all the work you do than to see kids eyes light up with the animals, the fruits, etc.
4. I was able to give Chris’ daughter a driving lesson on the Gator while we rode around and discussed beef, nutrition, pigs, etc.http://instagram.com/p/tKbslvDgg8/

   It’s always neat to see a kid go from sawing back and forth on the wheel like they do on a toy, to actually steering a tractor across the pasture with confidence. Chris took it all in stride but often parents are amazed at how quickly their kids can pick up things when given the chance. Of course you can’t let them try in the subdivision with cars on the street but out in open pasture they can have a chance to explore and learn. Within a few minutes this little cutie was driving us where we needed to go and was very comfortable.

http://instagram.com/p/tIJgD5DglK/

In the picture above, you can see the cows trying to get more of the squash we were hand feeding. We always try to give visitors a chance to hand feed the cows. Most people don’t expect to get that close to a cow so it’s a treat to have them come right up to you. Also most people don’t expect a cow to eat squash, cucumbers, etc. so that’s a neat experience as well.

Chris promised me some information that she has on glyphosphate and medical side effects that is coming to light in the nutrition world. Expect to see some posts about those in the future.

After the tour, and eating of the last of the grapes from our vines, and picking some raspberries we all went back to the barn to have what my kids would call “boring adult talk.” The kids found a patch of sand in our barn yard and this was the result.

http://instagram.com/p/tIJryoDglm/