Category: News, etc.

Sunday morning Spork and I got up to do our normal routine of feeding all the animals on the farm. Fortunately the guys had pretty much pre-loaded everything so most of what I had to do was drive the tractor and truck, which was great because that is about all I could do. Spork did the lion’s share of loading the few boxes we had to and we got everyone fed. Then I went back to bed, something I NEVER do. I spend all the rest of the day in bed on Sunday, finally breaking down and taking a muscle relaxer which absolutely nothing for me. As evening came, the pain was still pretty bad, enough that I wasn’t able to go to sleep so at 2am I brought out the big guns, the steroids. I still had some from an injury past and I knew that they would help with any inflammation and hopefully whatever else might be the problem. I can only take them once per year so I really don’t like to take them if at all possible.

Even after taking the steroids, I was unable to get to sleep all night due to the pain. Fortunately I have plenty of experience not sleeping from when I used to work for a living, so getting up and making due the next day is normal for me. I didn’t have too much of a hard day. Miguel and Vicente were both working, it was raining off and on, and I only had one appointment and some errands to run. Nothing that I couldn’t handle, back pain or no. First, the appointment.

While I was on the phone with the insurance company, Miguel unloaded the implements and when I came down he pointed out this.

Looks like some of the force of the impact made it all the way to my truck. I know how much load I’ve put on this hitch and it was all it was designed for and more. It’s never so much as wiggled. Now it’s bent up 20 degrees. Hmm. A little harder than I realized but oh well, just more bent metal. No big deal. The truck is still fine and since it only had 4000 miles on it, that’s a relief!

This all happened last Friday. Saturday day I went to Holly Springs to see Jennifer with Buck Naked Farm as she sat up and worked her first farmers market booth. She had a cooler of our meat (plus an awesome display of her wares) and as I was there she sold a few packs of beef and pork. As I was hanging out, I noticed that my back had started hurting. Not unusual if I stand for a while but it was hurting in a place it never hurt before, and in a way that felt odd.

Saturday night we had dinner with the owners of the new farm we are leasing, and where the cows are right now. They were super nice and awfully gracious. After dinner I sat outside and talked to the father for a bit and just couldn’t seem to get comfortable on his chair. That was odd because the chair was plenty nice, but my back hurt no matter how I sat. Maybe I’d stood too long at the market. I should have known better than to show up without a chair but I sat on the cooler instead. Hmm. I wonder what that’s about?

 

It wasn’t a big deal. Just a little bent up metal. A young girl who goes to Garner High School, my old school, ran into the back of my truck and trailer as I was waiting to turn into my drive way last Friday. It was wet, she was likely distracted (texting, talking, singing along, who knows), and she bumped the back of the trailer. It bent a little metal but not too much.

It didn’t seem like that bad of an impact. Of course I’m pulling a 1000 pound trailer, carrying about 4000 pounds of implements, behind an 8000 pound truck so I think I outweighed her car a bit.

So it looked like everyone was ok and only a little bent metal on the trailer. No big deal except this wasn’t my trailer. Oops. I had her pull into the farm and come up to the office to call her insurance agent. Turned out she had a train of cars following her home with all of her friends so we had an impromptu party with a bunch of high school kids while being on the phone with her insurance company for an hour. I made every effort to be nice while she was here. I know how nerve wracking it is to have an accident at 16 years old. Having to call mom, dealing with an accident the first time ever. She was shaking just a bit in the beginning but only for a short time. She quickly settled down and handled everything like a pro. Fortunately nobody was injured and everything would be a simply fix. Or at least I thought. But that is the next post.

 

 

Today started at 3:30am. Most people wince at the thought, but I’m a happy camper. Today is my birthday and I started off early. I woke up as I normally do, no alarm clock so it doesn’t feel quite so early to me.

I’m spending my morning getting office work done, doing payroll so my guys are taken care of, answering emails, planning out the next few days, etc. Once the guys get here and I go over today with them, I’ll go over to the house for breakfast with the family.

After breakfast, a bit more work around here, and then I’m heading to a field trip with the kids to Yates Mill Pond. I’ve been before but it’s 4 minutes from here and really cool. Plus, small world, Miguel put the roof on the building when they were building it.

After the field trip, I’m having lunch with my friend Paul that I grew up with. I’ve literally known him all my life. We were neighbors when I was born. He and his wife have started Buck Naked Farm and they are the source of our honey and soap now.

After lunch, I’ll be bringing Paul’s trailer back to the farm and loading some implements that Paul is going to borrow. Then I’ll switch trailers and drop off our recycling (that’s about 7000 lbs of recycling) then head to pick up steel for our new loading chute we are building. I was supposed to make those runs yesterday but the pigs needed some TLC instead. But that is another post.

Finally I’m keeping the girls tonight while SWMBO goes out to dinner with one her girl friends. Yes, SWMBO has a note on my birthday. Not to worry though, we are celebrating my birthday tomorrow by all cooking together as a family, my one request for my birthday.

An early start, good weather, good food, good friends, and some easy farm work. Sounds like a perfect day to me.

Thank to SWMBO for sending me this article on how farmers are producing electricity from the poop generated by their cows. It is a good article and I’ve talked to a few farmers who have installed these power generation systems and they work well. Like the farmers mentioned in the article, some were looking at installing additional systems based on their experience so far so considering how much they cost, they must be a good return for a conventional farmer.

So first, good for them. They are taking what is a toxic by-product of their farm and generating electricity, fertilizer, and cow bedding material from it. It is a closed loop system with little outside inputs besides lots of money. It’s not exactly a new idea, as anyone who has seen Mad Max, Beyond Thunderdome knows. Oh well, it is a good solution to a problem that was created by concentrated operations in the first place.

But what about on our farm? I’ve had customers ask us what we do with all the cow poo. Do we have lagoons? Do we have a discharge permit? Good Lord no. Poo is only a problem when you generate it artificially by concentrating animals at unhealthy levels. Our cows poop just as much as confined cows do. But instead of having to scoop it up and haul it to a lagoon, we let the cows poop it on the ground right there in the pasture. Then we move the cows the next day and that poop becomes a hub of life for the bugs and critters that are part of the natural ecosystem. By the time that cows come back to that same patch of grass in 30 days or so, the poop is completely gone. Biology has turned it into part of the soil. This is the natural system, the way God intended it, which means it works without ANY outside inputs.

Oh, and I mentioned previously that even Organic farms produce meat with super bugs. Do you think cow bedding made from cow poo might have some bugs floating around in it? The more you try to work around the natural system, the more you introduce new problems you hadn’t thought of.

 

Our farm orchard is pretty sad. The trees are very small and produce pretty much nothing at this point. However, whilst on a field trip with the kids to Thomas Jefferson’s Montecello we saw a sign that said apple picking, cider, wine tastings, etc. I noted two things.

1. It is apple season.

2. They said wine tasting.

After learning all about Montecello we had a bit of extra time before we had to head back. We’d absorbed lots of facts from the tour and a wine tasting seemed like the perfect way to cement those facts into our long term memory. Or purge them. I don’t really recall. But first, the apple picking.

The place we went to was called Carter Mountain Orchard. It was up on top of a mountain and everything was much steeper than it looks in this picture.

Before we started picking I asked the kids, “What is the first rule of picking?” They all answered in chorus, “One for the bag, one for your mouth.” It’s important to have rules. That’s a parenting tip for you new parents out there.

Everyone had a large time. We took back 13 pounds of apples, not counting the additional 3 pounds that got eaten. The weather was phenomenal and it was a perfect end to our day.

Actually the wine tasting was the perfect end, but we don’t have any pictures of that.

 

We raise our animals with one goal in mind. We want the best product we can produce, regardless of volume, margin, or profit.

The reason we do this is the picture above. This is SWMBO on her weekly shopping trip to our store. Every Sunday walks over to the barn and I “sell” her some product that will be used to feed our family for the week. This is the meat that is going into my body and the bodies of my children.

The fact that we have awesome beef, pork, and chicken available to everyone else is great. I’ve even been able to hold SWMBO off of certain cuts of meat just so we can sell it to people who are requesting it. Heck, one time I sold the Christmas ham right off the counter in the kitchen when SWMBO wasn’t looking but at the end of the day,  I have to please my #1 customer first and last.

So far, she seems pretty happy.

Everything else we do flows from this belief. The rotational grazing, no commercial feed for our animals, picking the right processor. All those decisions stem from doing what is the best we can for our family. And by doing that, we are doing the best we can for yours as well.

Prior to moving our cows to the new farm we had to move our equipment there so we could work. The new farm is only about 5 miles away so there was debate on how we’d move the backhoe. Should we just drive it over? Should we load it on our heavy duty trailer? Would the new truck even haul that much weight? Whenever you see an ad for a dually, it’s always something like this.

So this truck of mine is supposed to pull a tractor. Should be ok right?  I mean, they wouldn’t show pictures in an ad that you can’t do in real life, right?

Yeah right. I look up the specs on the John Deere 310SJ and it turns out that it weighs about 17,000 pounds. The trailer I am using weighs about 8,000 pounds. The John Deere Gator weighs about 1000 pounds. The truck itself weighs a bit more than 7000 pounds. That gives me a total combined gross vehicle weight of 33,000-34,000 pounds which is right at the published limit for this truck. Should be interesting.

So Miguel and I play Tetris with the backhoe, the Gator, the forks, etc. until we finally get everything to fit and the weight distributed correctly. We then get out the 47 chains and binders and start binding things in place. After a few false starts (mainly by me) we get everything bound down in the correct positions and secure. We pull around the barn and are going to make the final preps when Miguel points out that his side of the trailer is looking a little low. Sure enough one of the tires looks sad.

We pull back around the barn and put air in the tire. We can’t really run it to a set pressure because it’s already so loaded but we can pump it up some. Hmm, this isn’t working. What about the inside tire? Air goes into it, and right back out through the hole in it.

Sigh

We grab the patch kit and try to patch the hole. Turns out the hole is actually a gash and we can’t patch it. Some head scratching ensues and we decide to unbind everything, put all the 47 chains and binders away, unload the backhoe, unload the Gator, and drive the backhoe to the farm.

Then the next day I get to drive the trailer and have the tire patched, which cost $30 but a lot less than a new tire.

Just another day on the farm.

I noted when I logged onto the WordPress dashboard that my post count had reached 666. Not a good number.

I thought to myself, “Self, you should do a quick post just to get off that number.” Then I wandered off and did farming stuff and let it sit for a few days. I had plenty of stuff to post, but there were pigs to treat, produce to pick up, things to do. You know how it is. Then yesterday while I was having my truck worked on (my brand new truck that I’ve already broken), I checked my email and saw that our site was down. I called support and they said, “Um yeah, it looks like we have an issue on our end.” I made mention of the fact that this was the third “issue” in about as many months and it had me down hard which in the hosting world is pretty bad. The answer was, “Well, you are on a pretty old server. You should upgrade to a new server.” After some back and forth, it came to be that upgrades are something that I need to ask about, that they don’t just migrate you on their own. Turns out that I would pay less for a newer setup. I just had to do the transfer myself. I thought doing my own transfer was odd since I know that hosting companies will transfer for you when you switch providers but whatever, I just rebuilt the entire site, I should be able to do it.

Long story short, two days of work in my off hours, and working on the site with tech support since about 4am this morning, we are back online. If you see anything broken, please let me know.

Most importantly, this is post 667. No more tempting the devil.

In all my running around lately I wasn’t sure exactly when I was going to be able to pick our grapes. I love getting our grapes each year. The kids, like most American kids, have no idea about seasonality when it comes to food. They can have apples in February, bananas by the bunch whenever, watermelons in April with no thought to how unnatural it is to have this things out of season.

However, we only have muscadine grapes once per year and that makes it special. I look forward to juicing grapes, picking with the family, etc. all year so I was a sad when I received this last week.

Our kids and their friends had done the first picking and had made juice. I was sitting in gun smithing school in Troy, NC and had missed it. Oh well. The kids are always so excited for grapes that they pick them early so not a big of a deal. I don’t need green grape juice. It’s bitter!

When I got home, I found that the grapes were just getting good for picking indeed I had not missed anything. That meant that this weekend it was time to get busy. The trouble was, I had so much else going on when would I get to it?

Enter Grandma to save the day. While I was working on the farm, Grandma came over and got all the kids outside and busy picking.

By the time I made it over to the grape vines, they were nearly finished.

Spork and I went back with another pot and cleaned up the grapes that anyone under 6′ couldn’t reach, which ended up being a lot of grapes but nowhere as many as they had already picked.

I still have one and a quarter rows to clean up but this is the bulk of what we got this weekend. All of these will be juiced tonight making everyone, including mom, very happy. Once the juice is gone, it’s gone till next year but while it’s here, it’s awesome.