Category: News, etc.

This afternoon, starting at 1pm, we’ll be part of the Eastern NC farm tour coordinated by the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association. Of course we are open our normal hours today from 8-5 so feel free to stop by this morning as usual.

The CFSA tour runs today and tomorrow, from 1-5pm each day. Tickets are $35 dollars PER CAR and allow you to see as many of the 26 farms as you can during the time period. They are also good for both days so you can see farms on Saturday and Sunday and really get your money’s worth. Before we were on the tour, we attended as often as possible and really enjoyed it every time. It really is a great tour with some fabulous local farms.

This is I think our third year on the tour. The first time we did it, I remember being a bit freaked out by all the people that were coming. We had all hands on deck here, ready for any eventuality. After some of our other events, it’s now just another Saturday/Sunday around here.

But, we have improved our ability to host people. This was based on what we’ve learned from other events. Number 1 was signage.

We also have signs for where you can’t go without an escort and one for where the tours start. They weren’t cheap, but I do think they will be worth it. It certainly dresses up the front of the store. I’d been meaning to get them forever, thankfully they are finally in place.

Inside the store, Lucy has been slaving away all week. She’s been ordering and picking up products like crazy getting us back to normal stocking levels. We also moved out of a fridge/freezer combo unit in the stock room and instead have moved it into the store where it is in freezer mode ( I LOVE these combo units, which are now discontinued. It’s so handy to be able to switch them back and forth.)

Having another freezer in the store allowed us to finally organize the goodies from Weeping Radish which up till now had been buried and hidden in the pork freezer.

We pulled a lot of new items into the store this year. Over the course of the past few months, we’ve been watching what sells and what does not. As products have finally sold out, or aged out, we’ve not replaced them if they were not good sellers. What we didn’t do was reset our stocking so that our shelves were full of popular items. Some of that was due to our farmers not having items available, some of it was we just didn’t get it done. But Lucy has worked very hard the past few weeks getting everything back in the store and now our shelves are fully stocked again. It looks much better.

I of course, have been picking up pork, beef, chicken, ice cream, etc, etc. My normal stuff. Oh, did I mention we just picked up a cow yesterday and we have ribeyes in the freezer unclaimed? See how I slipped that in there for those of you who actually read these posts? Yep, you get the gold star, swing by this morning. We have all the steaks in stock. Shh, don’t tell anyone.

We’d save the old bakers rack that used to be in the store because I didn’t want to throw it away (it was my mom’s) but it didn’t have a place. Lucy pointed out that if we moved this, tossed that, and stored this, we’d have room for the bakers rack in the stock room and finally have some shelves. It was a perfect idea. The problem with the bakers rack is small items fall through. But boxes of stock? They fit perfectly. The entire stock room was able to get some attention and it looks much better. Everything is off the floor and up on shelves and you can actually get around in there.

Normally when we are on the CFSA tour, they loan us materials for the event, then we give them back after it is over. It’s absolutely fine as they are a non-profit and every dollar counts. However they apparently received a grant this year and were able to purchase wash tables for the farmers to use and to keep. Woo hoo! Free stuff!

We’ve been meaning to get a wash table for a long while so this worked out perfect for us. We always end our tours with feeding the cows so folks always want to wash their hands before entering the store. Now we finally have a real wash table where they can do so. Of course, I didn’t use their soap they provided, I set one of ours out so people can get a free sample and clean hands at the same time. Plus now they smell lemony fresh!

This morning will be spent getting everything ready for the tour this afternoon, plus seeing all of our normal customers as well, oh, and actually running the farm because everybody still wants to eat. Starting at 1pm, we’ll be in full tour mode. If you haven’t already bought your tour button, you can get them at any farm on the tour, including ours. Just load the kids in the car and stop at the first farm and pay your $35.

If you are receiving this email for the first time, then you are one of the 700 people I just imported from our point of sale system into our weekly newsletter.

Now before you look for the unsubscribe button (it’s there, at the bottom of the email) know that this email only comes out once per week. It’s a simple summary of all the weeks posts. No pushy marketing, no crazy buzz words.

This list is also how I let everyone know when we get something special in, like ribeyes, or lamb, or turkeys. Or maybe we are having a customer only sale which isn’t uncommon. We don’t post anything in the store, we just send the news out via this list so our customers know to ask about the sale when they come in. Everyone not on the list doesn’t know.

If all those reasons are not good enough to stay around, well the unsubscribe button is at the bottom of the weekly email. Just click unsubscribe and we’ll never email you (at this email address) again.

So why 700 people all at once for the import? Because I just didn’t get around to it and next thing I know it’s almost October and I haven’t done an import since April. Oh well, maybe one day I’ll get caught up. 

Or not.

Based on the number we already have pre-ordered, I’d say people are definitely planning on a turkey Thursday in November.

I may have mentioned this to our chicken/turkey farmer, who may have mentioned to the turkeys. 

Better get yours ordered before they are all gone. It seems that they are getting out of town as fast as possible.

I stopped at a little store Sunday while picking up Spork and the retailer noted that they had pumpkin spice something or other in stock. I’d just seen this.

I started giggling to myself. I had a smirk on my face for the next 15 minutes, which I’m sure worried Spork. Usually when a parent is inexplicably happy, it means we have some new, unknown torture planned for the kids.

Luckily for him, not this time.

So my post yesterday was basically a big whine about why I can’t get anything done. And that took me two days to complete. I was feeling a bit like this. 

But today, my plans were cancelled due to Irma freeing up the entire day. And it looks like tomorrow will get cancelled as well. That means that in all reality those two days worth of things I was to do were just deferred but for now, it leaves me with blessed quiet and office time.

I have the windows open, a cool breeze blowing through, and time to get things DONE!

Step one, post the picture of the chicken with the crazy head feathers. CHECK!

Today is going to be a good day.

This past week you’ve only heard from Lucy with new and tasty recipes. I’ve been MIA on the blog. There are a few reasons for that. First, a lady named Irma had everyone scrambling to get ready, both on the farm and with the Civil Air Patrol (CAP)

On Sunday, I normally cover the farm along with Spork. Miguel and Vicente have the day off. Having half as many hogs has made Sunday a lot easier but it still occupies a good chunk of the day. That and regular farmer/dad stuff kept Sunday pretty busy.

Monday was Labor Day, and for once my guys didn’t need to labor. I gave them the day off and instead Spork and I covered the farm again.  Monday afternoon I interviewed a person to begin working for us as a part time book keeper here on the farm. A successful interview that I feel really good about. I know I can use the help!

Monday afternoon and night we had a special work detail at the airport for our CAP squadron. We are in the middle of “moving” into a new place. Oddly it’s the old place but everything has changed so we had to move back in to be ready for our weekly Tuesday meeting. It was a bit of a mad scramble getting everything handled but as usual, it was fun working with all the folks who showed up.

Tuesday, I flew with CAP down to SC to check on an airplane that was being worked on.

Nothing dramatic but it also occupied a good part of the day.

Tuesday afternoon is the day that I teach science to Spork, which is a new thing for me this year. Normally SWMBO does all the teaching and I do all the other stuff. But this year’s science is Aviation and for once I’m qualified to do something around here. Science lasted till dinner time, where we then loaded up and headed to our weekly CAP meeting, which puts me home about 10:30 (I go to bed at 8:30 normally).

Wednesday, finally some farm work! We loaded up 10 piglets into the trailer and I hauled them to Mt. Olive to sell. These are the piglets you saw on the tour if you came through in the last couple of months and all the piglets we had on the farm currently. As we bring our hog numbers down, we don’t want piglets on the ground getting bigger till most likely this spring. That means that we will sell off any late fall piglets as well. Late winter piglets to spring piglets will be our next batch of keepers.

I’m going to watch closely as we have our first keeper batch of piglets this spring to get a better handle on our ability to push hogs through the system. I’m shooting for 8 months from birth to market weight. This compares to 6 months for a commercial operation. I’m not sure I’ll get there but we are going to try. At 8 months, that means we can keep the 40 or so hogs we have and have normal turns of pigs. Since we have 9 paddocks that means only 4 paddocks are in use at one time, with 5 fallow. This is how we are going to eliminate erosion. Thankfully the hog smell is already gone. I couldn’t be happier about that.

Thursday is my normal crazy day where I drive to pick up pork, chicken, milk, rabbit, lamb, etc. It’s our big restock day and I spend a good portion of it driving every week. Thursday afternoon I had a meeting back at the airport to finally secure our facility once and for all for the CAP squadron. This allowed us to have a home that is OURS, as opposed to borrowed. This is a huge deal for us and something I’m proud to have been part of. The meeting took a few hours and had me home at basically dinner time.

Except with Irma bearing down on us, it was imperative that we get our communications equipment installed, which involved mounting an antennae on the hanger, on the top. This involved drilling holes in steel way up the air. Thinking I’d make things better and quicker, I grabbed our bucket truck and headed down, hoping to knock this thing out in just a few minutes. About 10pm, after the truck had broken down, been fixed, and broken down again, we gave up. Bucket truck – 1. Farmer Dan – 0. I wasn’t happy. I got to bed about midnight.

Friday dawned bright and early. Actually about 1:30am. Wildflower came in crying that she was sick, and indeed she was. The only option was to take her to the doctor with no appointment first thing Friday morning. I’d taken the entire morning off to pack for a planned trip with Spork, his cousin, and my brother-in-law. This trip had been on the books for a several months. Instead of packing, I spent the morning at the doctor’s office, then dropping Wildflower off at school in Cary, then dropping off a prescription, then coming home to empty out the bucket truck from all the tools and whatnot I had packed in there from the previous night’s failed mission.

In unpacking the bucket truck, I shoved a bunch of stuff into the back seat of my truck to take back to the house, which I figured I’d take inside Sunday when I got home. Then I had to go back to Cary to pick up Spork from the same school where I’d dropped off Wildflower earlier. I was on a tight time table at this point as we had to leave my brother-in-laws at 3:15pm.

When I grabbed Spork and was loading him in the truck, I asked him where his sleeping bag was. “Uh, I forgot it.” It was going to be in the 40s where we were going. No way could we go without a sleeping bag. I high tailed it from Cary back to Garner, then headed back to Pittsboro, still arriving 6 minutes before our scheduled departure! Whew, that was some driving.

I began tossing gear out of the truck, only to discover that I had at least one of everything, except my own backpack with my gear for the trip. It was safely sitting at the house!!! Argh! I packed Spork into the truck and bid the guys goodbye. My planned trip was no more. I headed back home from Pittsboro, trying to find someone I knew with an airplane who could fly be to Western NC that evening. No luck. My vacation didn’t happen, and my trip with my son didn’t happen because I shoved 10 gallons of to do into a 5 gallon bucket.

But at least I had the weekend to get caught up, right? I started this post first thing Saturday morning. After all but showing my rear to my family so I could get 45 whole minutes of office time, I’m finally rushing it out just before dinner on Sunday evening. No, I didn’t get caught up this weekend.

But thankfully this week is… Well Monday is toast, but Tuesday…. Ugh. No, not Tuesday. Wednesday though will be…awful. Thursday is always crazy…And there goes Friday, it’s already booked.

Yeah, no. This week will not be a week of catching up. But I do hope to actually do some farming at some point and do some posting. We are busy here on the farm and I have material to get out there. I just need about 40 hours uninterrupted in the office. At the rate I’m going I’ll get that about 2019. How did I used to do this and have a job?

For the next two weeks we are having a sale on pork and beef bones. 15% off all bones. All you have to do is ask about the sale at checkout from now till September 20th.

Fall is around the corner, and the cool weather has certainly gotten my attention. It’s time to get back in the kitchen after the summers heat and start cooking again. Nothing makes everything come out better like homemade bone broth and homemade stock. It’s easier than you think and 10 times better than you realize. Stop by and stock up before the CFSA farm tour crowd hits and wipes us out of whatever is left.

This year we are going to be on the farm tour again. I remember the first year we did it, we were completely freaked out that we’d not be able to handle all the people. Why, there could be HUNDREDS of people on the farm! After some of the events we’ve had this year, I think a few hundred people on the farm should be relaxing.

Not to diminish the event. We really enjoy the CFSA farm tour. It brings a lot of people in that we wouldn’t otherwise reach and gives us a chance to show them why we are different. The number one comment we receive is, “I didn’t know this was back here.” We really are tucked right off of a major road and we’re only 15 minutes from downtown Raleigh. We often have first time customers who have been driving hours to buy what we quietly carry in our little store every day. Getting the word out is our biggest need.

So far, the best part of being on the tour was that our friend Taylor from Farm Bureau was selected to do the write-up on us for CFSA. Taylor is a master wordsmith and always sees the best in everyone, even me. I was excited to see what she’d write about us. I was not disappointed. 

Hop over to the link above and see how cool the write-up is, and if you are so inclined, purchase some tickets for the farm tour. For one fixed price, you can visit as many farms as you want on Saturday and Sunday. Or you can volunteer at one farm for one day, and get free admission for the second day. All the money goes to a good cause and almost everyone involved, including the farmers, are volunteers.

Most of the farms on the CFSA tour are not open to the public daily so it’s really a treat to get to see these farms and learn about what they do.

It’s been quiet on the blog the past few weeks. That’s because we’ve been doing some soul searching and deciding what it is we do around here, and how we want to do it going forward. We’ve now decided, and have started taking action so it’s time to talk about it. As always, I try to be open and honest about what we do and why with everyone so here you go.

For those of you who’ve been on a tour, you know that we handle a tremendous amount of produce here every day. On average, we handle about 20,000 pounds of produce daily. That’s 7 million pounds of produce annually!

The produce has to be picked up at the farmers market, hauled back here, sorted, cleaned, and fed. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. Christmas. Easter. Rain. Shine.

We routinely employ two people full time, plus various people part time, just to handle all of the produce. Most of the produce goes to feed our pigs, about 85% of it. The rest is used for compost. Produce was never our business plan, it is something that we accidentally started and have continued since 2014 because there was a need, and because it produced such a dramatically different product. But there is not, and never was, a business case for produce fed pork. We only charge the same price as pastured pork which is about 1/100th of the work involved.

If I look at the sales on our farm so far this past year, I can break down the major categories. Beef, chicken, dairy, pork.

Beef accounts for a little better than 29% of our sales.
Pork accounts for 25% of our sales.
Chicken at 17%
Dairy at 14%.

These four categories account for 85% of our total sales. However, pork, and the produce that we handle for it, account for 90% of our labor. 25% of the sales, 90% of the labor. We know we have a problem.

Part of the problem is that we are overstocked on hogs. Several years back, we had an order from a wholesale customer who went out of business before we could deliver the order. This left us with 135 pigs on the ground going into the winter of 2015/2016. By winter of 2016/2017 we’d whittled that number down to 95. We did this by selling some wholesale, doing lots of samples for wholesale customers (read: Give it away), continuing to move pork through our store, bringing in new pork products (hot dogs anyone?) etc. Basically we did everything we could to move pork, in every market. But we’ve been unable to reduce our numbers enough to get back where we needed to be, with enough hogs to supply our store.

I was unaware of any market where a small producer like myself could take hogs and just sell them live, so we were left with Craigslist and our retail store. This has been inefficient, time consuming, and frustrating. I don’t enjoy dealing with Craigslist people and pigs. For some reason I don’t understand, they are a bad combination. They routinely don’t meet their commitments and it’s hit and miss on whether they show up. They are sketchy at best and infuriating at worst. I don’t look forward to selling hogs.

It takes us about 8 months to produce a market weight hog. It takes us about 40 hogs per year to supply the store and what wholesale business we do, which isn’t much. For those of you who are good at math, it’s obvious it doesn’t take 95 hogs to supply 40 in a year, especially when I can produce new hogs in just over 1/2 of a year.

Fortunately I’ve learned there actually is (and was) a market in NC where I can take hogs and sell them as I do cows, goats, sheep, or anything else that farmers raise. This has always been one big downside to dealing with hogs, one I’ve heard other farmers complain about. No sale barn.

But no more. Thanks to Barrett at Dean Street Processing, who clued me in, I now know where to take my extra hogs so I can finally have the number I want to have, not the number that I happen to have.

We’ve worked exceptionally hard to develop our relationships with our produce farmers. We’ve worked hard on our wholesale relationships. We’ve worked hard to move more hogs through retail and wholesale. But as of Monday morning this week, we’ve begun to simply sell off our hogs  to the wholesale hog market and reduce our head count to a manageable number which will be about 40 hogs total.

However taking our hogs to market is a huge blow to our farm as we are selling hogs for literally pennies on the dollar. These are hogs that we’ve raised and fed for over a year and a half in most cases. We have a lot of sweat and effort in making these the best hogs there are, period. But sometimes you have to make the hard decisions, take your lumps, and move on.

Monday I took 19 hogs to the market. They weighed 7030 pounds all combined. That’s an average of 370 pounds each. These are huge hogs. Beyond what is efficient. Beyond what is practical. Beyond what will bring any kind of decent money at the market. But these are also pigs that eat some serious food. Kinda like:

Next Monday we will take another trailer load of hogs, with probably another 7000 pounds of pork moving out of here with one final load maybe later in the week. That should pull about 16,000 pounds of pigs off of our farm in a little over two weeks. That’s a significant reduction in head count and an even bigger reduction in pounds. Our plan for the future is to grow our hogs to about 250 pounds maximum, with a range of hogs from 15 pounds all the way through to market weight.

If you take the 95 hogs we had and assume an average weight of 300 pounds that means we had 28,500 pounds of hogs here to feed every day.

If we get to 40 hogs, with an average weight of 140 pounds, that means that we have 5,600 pounds of hogs to feed every day. This means an 80% reduction in our pig operation if you go by weight vs. head count. I don’t care what you are measuring, 80% is significant. However, cutting our numbers to an appropriate level and moving forward will allow us to do a few things.

1. We will be cutting off some of our farmers at the farmers market. It’s not fun, and they won’t be happy because we are a service to them, but it will allow us to start making one trip per day instead of as many as four some days.
2. We will be able to get our time back for actual farm work. We are so busy running up and down the road, loading and unloading trucks, that we don’t have time to do the things that need to be done around here. I have items on the to do list that have been there for over a year that we simply never have time to address. That list is going to start shrinking.
3. This place smells like a pig farm. It’s not the pigs fault. We have too many pigs, on land that has had pigs for too long. We have nine pig paddocks on this farm in total. The best we’ve done to let a paddock rest in the past few years is have only seven in use at once and that was only for a week or so. With 40 pigs, we will have only four in use at once, with five resting and recovering. This will effectively eliminate the smell we (and you) have lived with the past few years.
4. When pigs stay on land too long, they begin to erode the soil. We work so hard to build our pasture soil, and then right beside it we have pigs wallowing in the mud. While we’ll still allow them to have some mud, we will do it in a way that builds soil instead of eroding it. This means the entire farm will be building soil, not just parts of it. This better fits in with what we want to be doing with our farm.
5. We will concentrate our pig operation away from the store and the house. By having our pigs located on the edge of our property, we combine the operation and move any now much smaller effects away from the store and our home.
6. We’ve seen that events are a popular thing to have at our farm. We get requests to host weddings, have beer tastings, food truck rodeos, host farm organization events, etc. It’s fairly common that someone either suggests, or actually inquires directly about hosting an event. I pretty much turn them all down. The farm isn’t up to the standard I feel comfortable with to charge someone for an event and the pigs and produce are a large part of why. We can do a lot of good for the community and for our operation by having more events. We are going to do more once we get things in order this fall.
7. We get a ton of new customers here, but the percentage that stay as repeat customers is fairly small. This is normal in our industry as people drift back to Harris Teeter but I think we can do better. Making a visit to our farm more pleasant will help bring people back. It’s always cheaper to bring a customer back than it is to bring in a new one.
8. Lastly, and most importantly. I am going to see my kids more. I sold my company in 2015 because I wanted to spend more time with my kids. While 2017 has been a year of doing more with them than 2015-2016, 100% more than 1 is only 2. I was barely seeing them before and I’m only slightly better now. I routinely leave before they get up, stay gone all day, and see them at night. I may as well work a day job if I’m gone that much. Daddy, build me a bird house? Daddy, fix my bicycle? Forget it. I’m too busy. I’m awful proud of how these kids work on the farm, what they learn, and how we interact. But it’s too little and soon it’ll be too late. I’m going to spend more time with the kids and start doing some of the projects they want to do. That’s what this was all about when we started it. It’s time to refocus on what matters.

So in summary, we WILL have pork in the store. We will also have beef, hopefully even a little more of it as we’ll have more time to focus on the cows. We will also have more time to focus on the store itself as it really has become the heart of what we do here. We will hopefully be more of what you like about our farm, with less of what you don’t. In the meantime, if you see me heading down the road with the big trailer loaded with pigs, you know what I’m up to.

Lucy informed me yesterday afternoon that we still have some ribeyes left from the cow I picked up this week. This is quite unusual as the ribeyes are usually presold before they even show up. But taking two cows in one month allowed us to have some extra beef. If only I had two cows to take every month! Oh well, the difficulties of being a small farm.

I don’t know how many we have left, or how long they’ll last today, so I’d get by here if you want some. We also have filet mignon, NY strip, sirloin, all the steaks. Plus of course roasts, pork chops, bacon, chicken, lamb. You know, all the goodies we keep here for our munching pleasure.

The girls are working and they quietly asked me for a slow day so they can work on their arts and crafts projects. So of course I’m honoring that by inviting everyone here to keep them busy all day! Never ask the boss for slow day, jeesh! What were these girls thinking?