We give a lot of tours here on our farm. Sometimes to large groups, sometimes to just a single family. One thing we get a lot of is kids.
I always try to make the tour fun for the kids while informing mom and dad about our farm and what we do. On the day this was taken, we’d received in a pallet of grapes that had nothing wrong with them. As we headed out for the tour, while I was getting some food to feed the cows I grabbed a bunch of grapes and handed them to the kids so they’d be entertained during the tour.
Just as we were finishing the tour, I was able to capture this picture which pretty much summed up the whole tour. Sticky, happy, grapes still clutched in one hand, flowers in the other picked from the pasture. I’m sure she slept all the way home but at this point she was wide open and too cute.
I talk about getting a huge load of produce often on here. Sometimes we get 10 pallets of food, sometimes we end up with 20 pallets after multiple runs. However I think we’ve set a new record for hauling produce for us.
Miguel received a call that there was a truck load of watermelons that we could have at the market. The watermelons were still on the truck, all we had to do was get it to the farm.
Sure, no problem. We can get trucks in and out of here. It’s tight but it can be done.
One problem though, their truck was broken so could we get our own truck? “Ugh! Um, I sold my company. I doubt they’d let me borrow a truck.”
“Oh, and our driver isn’t here, so you need a driver too. ”
Even if I could borrow one of my old trucks, I don’t have a CDL so I cannot drive them. I’m not hiring a truck and driver to haul watermelons. Then I remembered one of my farmer friends had a truck. Some quick communication and he was kind enough to let me borrow it. It had farm tags so I could drive it with no CDL (I love being a farmer!)
Unfortunately he wasn’t sure that the tags were current. Uh oh. Looks like we’ll be smuggling watermelons in an illegal truck. Oh well, we’ll give it a shot. Expired tags isn’t a huge offense and I haven’t had a ticket in over 20 years so I shouldn’t get in too much trouble. We went and borrowed the truck, hooked to the trailer, and hauled the whole rig back to the farm. We unloaded them as fast as we could and took everything back as it was getting late. All the while hoping not to get pulled over and dodging thunderstorms. It was an exciting afternoon.
While we were unloading, I kept trying to give our intern, Adam, some watermelons to take home to his family. He didn’t seem to interested. I asked if he was going to have nightmares about watermelons and he confirmed that he was indeed planning on it. Too funny.
Our chickens are behaving badly. I think they found out that I bought some eggs from our chicken farmer so they’ve gone on strike. We are getting almost no eggs from them now. Now I know that they are laying somewhere, they’ve just decided to be hard headed and lay anywhere but in the coop. With that in mind we went looking around for eggs around the barn yard. We are finding them here or there but we also found this.
The winch on our bucket truck
This is the front of our huge bucket truck. To go along with the huge truck, there is a huge hydraulic winch. I’m not sure what the capacity of this winch is, but I’m pretty sure that with a decent snatch block and somewhere to tie off, I could move the Earth out of orbit with it. Beside the hulking rusted winch, we have this.
Baby bird eggs
Not exactly the chicken eggs I was looking for, but very cute. We didn’t mess with the nest as Miguel had seen the bird just fly off. Hopefully we’ll have little peepers soon. I sure hope we don’t need the bucket truck for anything in the next month or two.
A few Sunday’s ago, Spork and I were feeding everyone and the girls pulled up on the Gator. They said they were going to have a picnic and wanted know if Spork wanted to attend as well. I thought it was very sweet of them to invite their brother, who was sweaty and had been working since before they got out of bed. As you know, brothers and sisters don’t always get along so it’s always great to see them look out for one another. I of course told him to go ahead, I’d keep working.
What you see above is what I found a little while later when I passed by to go feed some pigs. They were finishing up their picnic and Spork is about to get on the tractor and go back to work with me. They had a full spread of food, blankets to sit on, silverware. It looked really nice. The girls had put the entire thing together by themselves and were cleaning up everything. I was so proud of them, till I got back to the house that evening and found all the blankets still in the back of the Gator. Oh well, they almost cleaned everything up. Still, I was proud of them and glad to be farming so they could do things like this.
A little over a year ago we hosted an event at our farm that featured beer and our own pigs cooked into BBQ. The event was a great success and it was our first really public event we’d ever done. Everybody seemed to have a good time and I even offered to host again if the opportunity comes up.
One neat thing that happened that night was we had a couple attend who were on their first date. It was such a neat first date that there was actually some buzz in the crowd about it that made its way over to me. I made sure I went over and met the couple and exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes and that was that.
The BBQ and Beer dinner underway. This picture was taken by Laura during the event.
Fast forward a year and I receive an email that goes about like this. “Hi, you probably don’t remember me but my girlfriend and I had our first date at your farm. It’s our one year anniversary and I’m going to ask her to marry me (it’s a surprise). Can we come back and walk around to recreate that first date?”
Walk around? Heck no! You can come for lunch. We had Matt and Laura back out where I cooked up some Ninja Cow pork and the wife made cole slaw. We opened some vino and shared stories for a few hours, then wished them well and sent them on their way to dinner.
Laura, taken the night of their first dateLaura, one year later with some different pigsMatt and Laura together post lunch
So the end result? That night had a great dinner at Second Empire downtown and Matt asked the big question. The answer? She said yes!
Our first Ninja wedding will be soon. Then Ninja babies!
Our website is setup and run like a blog. That means that when I need to get the word out about something, I just post a new blog post and viola! The word flows across the interwebs like so much magic. However, either because of our setup or my mental block, I always seem to forget to go back and check our website pages which unlike a blog post, are static. The end result is I post on the blog that we have beef, but I don’t go back to the beef page and update it. So I’m telling you that we have plenty of meat on the blog post, but I check the beef page and it says we are out of stock of everything. Sigh. So much for my marketing genius.
This morning I’ve gone through the pork, beef, chicken, and egg pages and updated them to the latest info. The quick version is:
Beef – We are in stock on everything except filet mignon. We sold the last filet yesterday. Ribeyes are starting to get slim. Everything else we are loaded for bear.
Pork – We are heavy on finished pigs but due to a sudden change with the processor we are a few weeks out on taking some pigs to get processed. We have plenty of everything in the freezer except BBQ, which of course everyone who has been here is looking for. I’m getting a bunch of BBQ on the next trip to the processor so come get your bacon and whatever else while you are waiting on BBQ.
Chicken – I have more chicken cuts on the way but we have PLENTY of whole chickens in the freezer, which are cheaper and a better deal anyway. The cut up chicken moves faster than the whole chickens and we mistakenly received a double batch of whole birds so the more whole chicken you buy, the more room I have for cuts the next time.
Eggs – We have eggs coming on Friday. We have multiple people who are waiting on them but we have ordered enough to be able to fill those orders plus have some in stock. We will be keeping eggs in stock finally so in addition to your other proteins, you’ll now be able to get eggs anytime you want. If you want to get on a regular rotation for eggs, just let us know so we can include your needs in our inventory.
Our new farm store, nearly completed
As you know, we’ve been rebuilding our farm store since February when the whole thing flooded due to a frozen pipe. We are days away from being done with the store and it looks so much better. We have an issue to solve with our water, then we can finish painting, move the freezers to their final places, set up the table to go with our new counter (which is made of lumber harvested and sawn here on farm) and hang our pictures and paraphernalia. We are going to be on the CFSA farm tour this September so there is a push to get things done before then. It looks like we’ll make it with time to spare, thank God!
One of our farmer friends dropped off some surprises for us today. We have quail eggs and guinea hen eggs in the fridge for your cooking pleasure.
I asked what they were used for. Guinea hen eggs are supposed to be awesome for baking and can be used just like regular eggs. A fact that my Google-Fu quickly confirmed.
Quail eggs, ready to go.
So what about the quail eggs?
Seems they are awesome for something different. They taste normal but because they are so small and cute, they are best for garnish and as a topper, such as on top of a salad. Ready to wow your in-laws or amaze your kids this weekend? These things are the deal.
Eggs ready to be sold
I only have a few of each so speak up if you want me to hold them for you.
I also have regular chicken eggs in the fridge if you want them, and of course all the meat you could ask for. I’m around most of today and all this weekend so if you want to come out and stock up, drop me a line. Next week is going to be tough so it’s better to get with me sooner rather than later.
The first slice is deaths by other animals. Aha! Now we are nowhere near the top because…. Oh. Because there are more farms in the midwest and Texas and farms are where you get killed. Uh oh.
And then we see dogs. Everybody loves dogs and, oh, The Southeast leads the US in dog deaths.
And then bees, yep. We are the winner in bees too.
And snakes. Another winner there. Oh boy.
And lastly, “Other horrible venomous things.” Guess who is number one? The South. Oh goodie. I can see the Chamber of Commerce lining up to use this article in their recruitment brochures.
Fortunately, our author has a nice closure statement for everyone so they really do feel better. “In the end, it bears repeating: you are not going to get killed by an animal. Especially if you don’t work on a farm.”
Oh great, what about those of us who DO work on a farm?!
This entire post has been tongue in cheek if you cannot tell. Do farmers get killed more often by farm animals? Yeah sure. Do surfers get bitten more by sharks? Yep. Do pilots get killed in airplane crashes more often? Of course, how else did the plane get into the air. Office workers get paper cuts. Drinkers get liver damage. Sprinters get pulled ham strings. The things you do most often are more likely to result in an accident. It’s like the statistic that you’re more likely to get hurt at home, or more likely to have a car accident within X miles of your house. I’ll most likely die covered in frozen meat, surrounded by sales tax forms I can’t get filled out properly based on the way its going currently.
SWMBO sent me this article a while back on which animals are most likely to kill you. It was written in response to the shark attacks that happened of the NC coast. Since it was written, Jaws music has been playing rather routinely up and down our coast as our selachimorpha foes have taken up the challenge laid down by this article and their land bound cohorts to kill and maim as many of us as possible.
However, as the article points out, the sharks have a long way to go to catch up to their bovine peers as cows kill 20 people per year while sharks can only manage one.
Venomous snakes kill 6 people per year. Copper heads, water moccasins. Yep, got them.
Spiders kill 7 people per year.
It’s as big as it looks
Took this pic the other day. Spiders, check.
Non-venomous arthropods. 9 people per year. Yep, got ’em in spades.
Dogs kill 28 people per year. There is a dog in every house on the farm, two in most of them. Yeah, certain death there.
Other mammals kill 52 people per year. I think we have at least one of all the mammals that are native to NC. Spork even thinks he saw a black bear one time. Check.
Bees, wasps, and hornets kill 58 people per year.
This little guy, and 10,000 of his friends, are now part of Ninja Cow Farm. I hope they stay a while.
So if you go to the beach, you could be the one person who dies each year from a shark attack. If you come to the farm, you could be one of the 180 people who die from bees, cows, dogs, or whatever else you find on a farm.
When I graduated high school, I weighed 212 pounds. I wasn’t really skinny (although I sure look skinny looking back on the pics) kind of a doughy computer gamer nerd. When I got out of college, I weighed about 222 pounds. I played volleyball, surfed, and drank lots of beer. The freshman 15 had never really left but I was still tall and relatively thin.
Bring on life, a desk job, business trips, sympathy pregnancy weight, etc. When I went on the diet SWMBO put me on, I weighed over 250 pounds. I really don’t know what I weighed when I started, 252-253 were the last times I’d looked, and it wouldn’t be at all surprising to find I was actually 255-260 when I started. When your weight goes nowhere but up, you stop weighing yourself because you don’t want new news as it is always bad. But on the diet I went and I dropped from over 250 to 205 or so. Then I sold my business and started farming full time. I don’t actively diet to loose weight anymore, I just diet to maintain. Last night I had a large snow ball at Pelican’s with the family. The night before, we had ice cream with whipped cream and a movie. I had seconds. However yesterday I ran the farm by myself on a gorgeous 80 degree day. I worked pretty much all day and didn’t have breakfast till noon. This morning I was greeted with this.
Thank God it doesn’t round up!
I haven’t weighed less than 200 pounds since about 9th grade. I’m not trying to loose weight, and I eat all I want. But I’m tan, my back hasn’t felt this good in years, I see my kids every day, multiple times per day and can usually attend their events for the first time ever, and I’m at my lowest weight since I was a kid. If I could just figure out how to get paid to be a farmer, this would be the perfect life!
