Now is your chance to meet the Farmers and Vendors of Ninja Cow Farm. There will be cows and baby goats to feed and pet, tours, samples to taste, as well as a chance to meet many of the farmers and vendors in the Ninja Cow store. Ninja Cow Farm LLC is a small, 84 acre family farm located just outside of Garner. We are the closest large animal farm to downtown Raleigh, just 15 minutes from the heart of downtown. We raise grass fed, grass finished (an important distinction) cows and heritage and rare breed hogs. We utilize no commercial feed in our operation, instead relying on produce we glean from various sources as our primary food stock for our pigs. Our produce recycling/upcycling efforts now divert approximately 7 million pounds of produce from the landfill each year. In addition, we recycle 250,000 pounds of cardboard, 24 truck loads of pallets, and 12 truck loads of plastic totes per year. We sell our products direct to the consumer and to a few select restaurants. In addition to our beef and pork, we also aggregate products from 11 other small family farms and sell the products in our small store. Unlike many operations that pass off others products as their own, we proudly represent our partner farms in our store, giving them equal billing. We are beyond a family farming operation. We actually have five families directly involved in our operation, not counting our employees. We are a true community effort, all working together.
I think I’m more excited about this than most anything else we have going on. We’ve discovered a way to get our hogs out to the Weeping Radish Brewery, Butcher, and Pub to be processed and returned to us as awesome new products!
This is a big deal, not because I get to drink beer on delivery and pickup, which I won’t. It’s a big deal because it gives us access to what we’ve needed for a good while, new products for our pork and beef.
Some of the things we can have coming from our pork are:
Apple Bratwurst
Beer Bratwurst
Bologna
Hot dogs
Cheese hot dogs
Cranberry, apple, pecan sausage
Ham
Linguica (spicy Brazilian sausage)
Sweet potato liverwurst
From our beef we have coming:
Corned Beef
Pastrami
Roast beef (maybe)
There are more items that are not on this list, and apparently they are adding items to their repertoire as well so I’ll be learning about my options. But for now we’re ordering based on the list above.
We get requests for ham all the time. We also get requests for cured meat like pastrami. Heck, SWMBO wants it. That’s enough of a reason around here. For the past few years I’ve been trying to figure this out. Well now we have it figured out. Some of the items are supposed to be arriving as early as next week so this isn’t a far off in the future dream, it’s now.
Plan on swinging by and checking it out. And all the other new goodies we have in the store. We are open today from 8-5. There is so much new stuff in there I haven’t even been able to talk about it. We’ve just been putting it away as fast as it comes in. But details are coming as I can get the posts up. But rest assured, the store has a LOT of new stuff in stock so it’s worth the trip.
When I used to work off farm for a living I had an employee who used to go home every year to Wisconsin. She’d always bring me back a couple of bags of “squeaky cheese” or cheese curds. I’d never heard of them before she brought me some but it became one of my favorite things.
If like me, you don’t know what squeaky cheese is, its little misshapen balls of cheese curds and it’s a special thing. Kinda like doughnut holes I guess, a neat oddity. The name comes from the fact that as you eat them, they start squeaking against your teeth as you chew. Not loud enough that anyone but you can hear it and not always, but often. It seems the better the curds, the more they squeak, but maybe that is just me.
So SWMBO found this local cheese maker in Western NC and asked if I wanted to get some in for the store. I’d already had their cheese before and they had some really awesome selections so I said sure, bring it on. A few weeks later I get home after a day of driving all over to various pickups and drop offs and the wife, as an aside, mentions that the cheese has come in. That’s nice. It’s all over at the store, packaged for individual sale and ready for customers. Doesn’t affect me. Then she mentions that there is squeaky cheese in the order and I’m like…
But I’m not going to open a bag that is destined for the store, just so I can get my fix. So still, doesn’t affect me.
THEN she says, there is an open bag in the fridge, the kids have already had some and you can have the rest. Woo hoo! I jump and run to the fridge and grab the bag and it’s…light.
Really light.
And sad.
The saddest thing I’d seen all day
There were a few crumbs left in the bottom and maybe two cheese curds. Now make no mistake, I gobbled them as fast as I could, lest one of my crumb snatchers happen by and realize there were still some left and want me to share. Then I sat and stared at this sad, empty bag of former happiness and wondered if gypsies still purchase children. And how do you contact them? Craigslist?
So um, yeah. We have cheese in the store. And it’s good. Cheddar, colby jack, romano, and squeaky cheese. These compliment the speciality goat cheeses from Celebrity Dairy and cow’s milk cheeses from Chapel Hill Creamery that we carry. Sometimes you just want some cheddar cheese and now we have it.
Come get some before I decide I’m going to do to you what the kids did to me.
Yesterday when I was giving tours, I pointed out to our guests just how pregnant our Berkshire momma was. I told them she’d be delivering soon. I didn’t realize just how correct I was.
Momma with babies
Miguel sent me this first thing this morning. She delivered sometime during the night. It looks like about 8 piglets, although we haven’t gone in there to count yet. She needed some piglets to nurse her, she was about as wide as she was long.
We are wide open on tours today so if you want to come and see some just born piglets, today is the day!
These piglets are 1/2 Berkshire and 1/2 Large Black so they should be absolutely premium piglets. We are still selling off our piglets till we get our numbers down so for those of you who’ve been asking, here are your piglets.
Truth time. Easter kinda snuck up on me this year. Now that’s not entirely surprising because most holidays sneak up on me. Every day is kind of the same on a farm, especially an animal farm. But I had people calling for Easter hams, Easter lamb. I had the Mrs. planning Easter service after work on Saturday, which requires tickets at our church because all the heathens show up twice a year (Easter and Christmas). As opposed to us, where we show up occasionally, some of the time. Yeah, we’re holier than thou.
On my calendar, it said “Easter Holiday.”
Somehow I wasn’t prepared for Easter at all. Thank God SWMBO, as always, was.
So when I woke up Saturday all I knew was:
I’m dreadfully behind, on everything. Income tax filings, sales tax filings and payments, blog posts, gunsmithing, house maintenance, paperwork. Simply everything.
I’m dreadfully disorganized, because I’m so behind. There are stacks on top of stacks of stuff in my office, in the gun room, in my house, all just needing to be sorted into priority stacks (was due a week ago, was due today and Pbbbt! I have plenty of time it’s due tomorrow)
Everybody is looking for me, because I’m so behind and they need me to give them answers. I can’t get one thing done because someone comes and asks me about their thing before I can finish. Nothing ever gets completed.
I need to work all day to cover for Miguel who was taking a rare day off. Good for him. I’m glad he had a day off, but ugh. Today?
We have six tours today and for some reason Spork has a surprise friend over which is cool. But that means he needs the day off too. SWMBO says she’ll cover the tours. But who covers the store? We try to keep an adult close.
All this stuff for today needs to get done so we can leave exactly on time so we can get to church on time because it will be a zoo.
So Saturday started off with a bit of angst on how it would go. However it also started off with the pic you see above. A double rainbow, just for me. Then I noticed that the weather was absolutely gorgeous. Perfect temperature, a bit of rain on our dry pastures, then sun the rest of the day.
The store was humming and the girls were knocking it out with time to play in between customers. Vicente and Josh were getting everything done and every time I came over to ask what they needed help with, the answer was nothing. Go back up front. So I would, and I’d get to see our wonderful customers, smiling and enjoying their shopping trip.
Saturday ended with a great sermon at church. Easily one of my top 5s. What started out as a angst filled day ended up being an enjoyable, productive day. I’m still dreadfully behind, but I’m slowly making progress. In the spirit of being behind, Happy Easter everyone, one week late.
I cannot tell you how happy I am to announce that Yo Momma’s Style products are in our store.
No, not because they are good. I mean, they are good. And unique. The rubs have a really good flavor and the variety and choices mean you can pretty much make whatever you want. Chicken, beef, pork, whatever. And having the Colorado influence is really cool because we get some flavors we aren’t used to in NC, things like green chilis. The jams are great, with flavors not like your regular super sweet boring old jams.
And no, not because Yo Momma’s Style is now officially the closest place to us, even to our leased farms that we operate that are only 5 minutes away. Yo Momma is almost across the street, in Eagle Ridge. Yep, these products are not just home made, they are HOME made. As in they are in an approved and certified home based kitchen, just down the street from us, being made one at a time with love and care. It doesn’t get much more local than that.
No the reason that I’m so happy to announce this new product is that we are FINALLY through our two month long taste testing extravaganza. You know how you wish you could get a job playing video games, or being a wine taster, or flying fighter jets. And then you talk to someone who does it and you find out it’s actually work, like a real job. Better than screwing toothpaste caps on in a factory but still a job. That’s what being a taste tester is. It was super cool! But I put on 10 pounds doing it and had to eat 3-4 dinners per night, all cooked as test batches. The kids were groaning when dinner was served these last few weeks. But that part is over, at least for now.
So this morning, I’m down 4 pounds and we have new product in the store with more on the way. Now it’s time to transition to rolling out these products to you so that you can enjoy the fruits of our labor. When all was said and done, I’d say we had 200 vendors to choose from. Of those, we picked maybe 40 to sample. Of those 40 we picked maybe 10 to actually carry. These are the cream of the crop so we are very excited to get your feedback on what you think.
We are open today from 2-6 and tomorrow from 8-5. We have more products arriving today but I won’t have time to post about them. So stop on by and get your regular goodies and see what has just hit the shelves.
I don’t think we’ve ever had this many cars here at once. Oh sure, we’ve had more people. We’ve had busloads of people show up but this is the first time a farm event has had parking that stretched all the way around to the front of the house. If you look in the background you can see the barn way off in the distance. And this isn’t even all the cars, this was just the first time I could snap a picture!
We had a forecast of rain for the morning but as it turns out, we had a perfect day for everyone to come and visit. It was also our first test of the new store layout with a large crowd. In the old days, more than about 6 people in the store and you were bumping into one another. Now with the new layout, we had 30 people wandering around and it wasn’t crowded at all. Of course, we’d opened up the stock room for extra space but it was nice to see that we can handle a larger crowd now with comfort.
Many thanks to everyone on the Wake County agribusiness council for their hard work in putting this trip together, especially our awesome President Dale Threat-Taylor!
I don’t know why everything happens on Sundays. Whenever Miguel shows up on Monday morning, the first thing he does is go check everyone on the farm. Invariably he finds a calf born, a pig out, something. Of course, Sunday is the day I run the farm so after I get done, these things happen.
Of course, the calf was healthy and happy, so there isn’t a problem.
Mom with her new calf, #82Ear tagged and banded, ready for his 30 months on the farm
Two Sunday’s ago, I walked out of the barn and saw a swarm of bees. Jennifer, our beekeeper was over here in minutes and other than a bit of adventure with someone afraid of heights going up in the bucket of a tractor, it was a non-event. Kinda neat but nothing dramatic.
The following week, Spork and I drove to Florida to attend Sun N Fun. A first for both of us.
Spork watching the Blue Angels perform their awesome show.
We had a rather large time. Partly because it was a chance to see airplanes like the above. Partly because we could talk to airline recruiters, aviation college recruiters, and even military recruiters.
Spork wearing an F16 flight helmet while talking to the Air Force Viper demonstration team
Spork says he wants to fly for a living. Or maybe do aerospace engineering.
Spork sitting in a Carbon Cub
Whatever it is, as long as it involves airplanes and pays well enough to make a living.
But the joy of this trip wasn’t that it was airplanes, it’s that it was a boys trip.
No not like this kind of boys trip
He and I hopped in the car and drove to Lakeland, FL. It took 12 hours down, and 9 hours back. We shared a room together while we were there. We ate together. We went to the show together. It was a lot of time to spend together and a lot of time with no women. When you are the only other boy in the house, that’s a big deal.
So what does this have to do with bees?
Note the 3 hour difference between our Southbound trip and our return trip. We pushed straight through to get home, barely stopping. Upon arrival I pulled up to the barn to grab the mail my neighbor had put in my office for me (Thanks Dustin!). Mail in hand I headed straight back out to the car to go to the house and actually arrive home. As I looked out, I saw a swarm just getting going in the bee yard.
Sigh. Really, this is happening now?
I told Spork to watch the swarm (we’d just done this the previous Sunday, he’s an expert now) and texted Jennifer, our beekeeper. Then I went to get the bucket truck and my bee gear. The swarm, having no originality, proceeded to work its way over to the same exact tree as the last swarm and landed on nearly the same branch. It really was wash, rinse, repeat.
The swarm, just settled onto the branch
Ever wondered what a swarm actually looks like up close? Your intrepid farmer found out for you.
Betsy checking out the weird addition to her pasture
Once Jennifer arrived, we suited up and went about capturing the swarm. With the bucket truck and the bees perfect location, it was easy.
It seems scary to be in the air, and dumping 3 pounds of live bees in your lap but it’s actually not too bad. (Says the guy who was standing on the ground filming)
Back on the ground with bees in the box
It’s funny to me that there is so much specialized gear for beekeeping, but when it comes to capturing a swarm, we use an old bankers box I had hanging around.
Once the bees were on the ground and in the box, it was time to transfer them to their new temporary home.
Now that we had them safely in their new home we could call this a day. Congratulations were passed around, equipment put away and we all returned to our regularly scheduled Sunday which for Spork and me it meant finally arriving home to see the girls and to start cleaning out the car.
It was a long day but it was great. A safe trip home from a fun trip with the boy, and a new hive of bees to add to our apiary. Once again thanks to Jennifer from Buck Naked Farm for being so responsive and fun to work with.
