Every once in a while we’ll have someone come out to the farm and bring their kids and the following happens.
The kids are excited and running about, the moms are chatting, when suddenly the mom will whirl on me and ask, “There aren’t any (ticks, snakes, dangerous critters, etc) are there?!”
“Um, yeah. It’s a farm. We have all those things. Outdoors is where critters live.”
However this year, I’d not seen something I usually see a few times a year which is a copperhead snake dead on our road. I really hadn’t even thought about it until I passed the guy pictured above after our CFSA farm tour weekend. I guess all the traffic was just too much for him and he didn’t make it across the road, which didn’t hurt my feelings any. I don’t actively search out snakes, but I don’t lament their passing either. Especially poisonous guys like this one. Score one for our customers.
Last week we had a class from NC State come and visit for a field trip. These were students from a niche marketing class who wanted to find out how a farm like ours went to market, and made it profitable. I had no problem sharing the first part. The second part, I couldn’t really help them.
They were about 30 people, which is over our normal limit of 20 on a tour but since everyone was an adult it made things easier. They were a good group of kids and after spending some time on the farm they did finally open up and ask some questions.
This is just one of the school groups we hosted last week. However, this one made the cut because of the cool bus they arrived in. I’m sorry the kids weren’t here to see it. They would have wanted to go for a ride.
A few years ago one of those boxed dinner companies came out with seasoning packets. You were just supposed to throw it in your meat and pasta or rice and poof dinner is served. Upon looking at the ingredient list I was mortified. And then I looked at the nutrition. Whew! Who knew so much sodium could be packed into a couple of tablespoons.
A few months back the NCF Store started carrying flavored Goat Cheeses from Celebrity Goat Dairy. Since then I have been playing around with them and having a blast. The little tubs sell for $5 each and are loaded full of flavor. The flavors are Chocolate(hello adult s’mores anyone), mango, chipotle, garbo (herb), dillamon (dill with lemon pepper), chevre (plain), jalapeno, and curry. Commonly I add goat cheese to dishes, it packs a punch of flavor while low in fat.
The next few meals I present are easy dinner on the run. Currently these 4 weeks are packed to the gills with activity. And if I ever schedule this much at once again… well lets just hope I don’t. The amount of time I have doesn’t allow for dinner out and fast food is being phased out of our house unless we are traveling.
Here we go, the NCF Chicken Skinless Boneless Chicken Breast is $11 lb, Garbo Goat Cheese $5, Peas-$1.69 (broccolli or carrots can be substituted), and Pasta $1.89 16 oz box. Tell me can you feed a family of 4 at a fast food place for under $20? I can’t and keep everyone happy but I can with this and it’s done in 15 minutes.
Ingredients
Gemelli Pasta
Boneless Skinless Chicken Breast cut into bite sized pieces
Garbo Goat Cheese
1 Cup frozen Peas
Salt and Pepper to taste
2 TBSP EVOO
Directions
Prepare Pasta to package instructions. Reserve 1/4 of pasta water
Season Chicken with Salt and Pepper
Over Med-Hi heat EVOO.
Once heated brown seasoned chicken
Add Pasta water & Peas cook for 2 minutes
Add Pasta and Garbo Goat Cheese mix thoroughly
Serve immediately
There are a few ways to dress this up and down if you have time. Mushrooms & Onions for instance. However on over scheduled nights I recommend this dish to meet the Carb, Veg, & Meat criteria many of us try to have for a meal.
This past week, I picked up our first load of hay for the winter. This is the first of about 140 bales of hay we’ll bring to the farm this fall in preparation for winter munchies. Our cows are grass fed and grass finished so besides the green growing grass we have currently, this is what they get all winter. I get the vast majority of my hay from one farmer in Clayton but Dan the Hay Man, pictured above, had some cow hay he was willing to let me purchase again this year so I grabbed a load while he still had some available. This is a good deal because Dan only grows horse hay (a higher quality hay) but occasionally he’ll have a bit of hay that wasn’t just perfect, making it great for cows (they are less finicky).
The trick with getting hay to the farm is:
You need a day where both you and the farmer can meet. That means no tours or customers for me, and no day job or other commitments for the farmer.
You need a day where it hasn’t rained in at least a 3-4 days because, fully loaded, a hay trailer is very heavy and will get stuck in the field trying to get out.
You need a day where all vehicles are running with no break downs.
All employees have shown up work
And nothing has gone wrong on either end (sick cow, escaped pig, down tree, etc).
By the rules above, that means we can get one, maybe two loads of hay every third alternate Tuesday. Since it takes 9 loads of hay to get us through the winter, by my math it takes about two months to get our hay to the farm. That means I’m already behind! Only 120 bales to go.
This is a picture of one of our ponds. The past few years, I’d noticed that a green algae had started growing on it. This started after we’d fenced out the cows, a requirement of Wake County Soil and Water. I figured something green growing was progress, so whatever. Plus after at least 80 years of cows dipping in the pond daily for a bath, the pond was due to cycle through a few versions of itself before it settled down.
This year, the green algae was back in force and again, I didn’t pay it that much mind. But then this summer, I noticed the algae had developed some depth, or better said, some height. While on a tour I took a closer look at it and was shocked to see that grass had taken root and was growing on the algae, floating on the pond. Now I’m all in favor of growing grass, and Lord knows it was a great year for grass, but floating grass?! I’ve never heard of grass growing on water.
The grass has spent the last 60 days merrily floating about, drifting from one end of the pond to the other, riding its algae life raft. It hasn’t gotten very tall but it has certainly stayed green and vibrant.
I guess I need to start looking for some Jesus cows so they can graze it.
Our pork processor let me know a few weeks ago that they were working on a new sausage formula, maple breakfast sausage. They asked if I was interested. Does a cat have a climbing gear?! Of course I was interested!
Ninja Cow Farm is the first farm to have the new maple sausages and of course I had to try them immediately. As in, I left the processor and drove down to the little country diner 2 minutes away. I walked in the door and handed them a pack of Ninja Cow Farm sausages. “Cook these please, with some eggs.”
The wait staff was all laughing, saying they’d never heard of someone bringing in their own meat before but sure, why not. I kept a straight face acting like it was totally normal. The plate above was the result.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t a fan of the way they cooked the sausages (fried in the deep fryer) so the flavor was hidden by the cooking method but I could tell it was there and would be better served if it was cooked properly, on the griddle. That’s ok though, we have 75 pounds of these little guys tucked in the freezer and it’ll be breakfast time at the NCF farm house shortly. In the meantime, we’re open from 2-6 today, and 8-5 tomorrow, so stop by and get some goodies for breakfast. We are still hugely stocked on beef, overflowing on pork, and we have eggs and dairy stuffed to the gills again.
The only thing we are short on is chicken as we keep outrunning our poor chicken farmer. But they will hopefully catch up next week. In the meantime, better get the chicken you need for the week. It’ll go fast this weekend.
To look at our public page you’d think that I haven’t been doing much. Unfortunately, I’ve been doing too much on our website, none of which is fun.
It all started when I received a notice that our website was down. It was down a couple of minutes during the middle of the night so bad, but not the end of the world. Then I received a notice that the site was down for almost an hour. That’s extremely unacceptable. Like sirens going off in my head unacceptable. So first thing that morning I hopped onto our admin site and found…..that…….the…….site……….was………sloooooow.
I’d had an issue with this before, and our hosting provider ended up having had an issue with the server we were on. Surprise, spending more money had solved it so I planned on calling, yelling at them, and getting them to fix it on their dime this time.
The nice support guy answered immediately (Why I love GoDaddy) and jumped right in. Server issue? Nope. Configuration issue? Nope. Hey wait, what’s this? You have 91 gigabytes on your website storage?! That’s insane for a small site.
Hmm, I do upload a lot of pictures. Maybe I’ve gone crazy and didn’t know it?
Hey, what is Updraft plus? That folder is HUGE!
That’s my backup program.
Turned out the backup program had gone crazy and had backed up, to itself, 81 gigs of backup files. Instead of offloading them to our storage site, it was trashing the web server instead and our hard drive space was nearly full. I’ve been fixing this issue ever since. So apologies for the lack of postings. I’m in full on nerd mode, working through the intricacies of web hosting, API calls, and whatnot. We’ll return to your regularly scheduled farm goodness shortly.
Btw, stop by Friday between 2-6. We have LOTS of goodies in the store. Including some new stuff you haven’t seen.
When we first started taking cows to the processor, we were struggling to get to 500 lbs of hot hanging weight. We didn’t have scales, we were woefully behind on production, and frankly we were pretty new at finishing cows.
A few weeks ago, I took two cows to the processor, LF07 and 63.
Our crazy cow, #63
63 was normal sized but crazy so he got a free ride.
Our porker, #LF07
LF07 was pretty big and he was the number one candidate to go.
On Friday I picked them up so we’d have fresh beef in the store for this weekend. I put 21 baskets in the truck to hold all the meat, plus a pickup at the goat dairy on the way home. I usually only take about 9-10 for one cow so that should be enough. When I got to the processor, they handed me my bill which has our hanging weights. #63 weighed 685 pounds hot hanging weight! Now that’s a great weight. That means that we really have these cows finished well. That we have lots of fat, lots of meat on the bones, and we are delivering a quality steak to our customers. Then I was I saw LF07’s weight.
820 pounds!! Oh my God! I’ve never heard of a weight like that.
So to make a long story short, 21 baskets was about 4 short of having enough. I had to scramble to get the meat loaded, and still get our dairy order on the truck. I made an emergency stop at a customer to drop off 60 pounds of hamburger just to get something off the truck and when I got back to the farm, it was all hands on deck. Lucy, Erin, and I all worked to stuff every inch of every freezer on the farm with beefy goodness. We BARELY made it, after I’d taken all of our beef bones to the dump just to make room. Don’t worry, I held back some of the fresh beef bones but we are literally bursting at the seams.
If you want some beef, or pork, or whatever, we are loaded for bear. Steaks, ribs, whatever, we’ve got it. Plus SWMBO is working the store today between 8-5 so stop by and work her hard! I’ll be at the Garner pop up market today on Old Garner Road working that event so she’s unsupervised.
I couldn’t say anything, because I wasn’t sure if the processor would have our cows ready on time. But I got the call (after multiple attempts to get an answer this week) that our cows are ready as of this morning.
I’m on the way now to go pick up two cows worth of beef and to stuff our freezer to the gills. I will be back, and unloaded, before Lucy opens today at 2pm. That means ribeyes, NY strips, eye round roasts, etc. All the goodies will be in stock this afternoon and tomorrow.
We are open 2-6 today, and 8-5 tomorrow. No appointment needed! Stop by and get some fresh beef!
Of course, we are fully stocked on pork, chicken, dairy, etc. as well so we have all the goodies for you.
I don’t talk about our leased farm that much. Other than stopping by to check on things or go catch an errant cow, we don’t have to go over there that often anymore. We used to have our entire herd over there but now with just the brood cows and babies, it’s pretty quiet.
But at least once per year, I’m fortunate to get to go over and visit with the owners and talk about the upcoming year, visit with the kids, and pay the annual lease.
The picture above was taken from their back porch as we talked about the upcoming year and some fencing projects we need to work on. The picture doesn’t do the view justice. It was absolutely gorgeous as the sun was setting. In the medium distance, you can just see the cows and calves grazing in the fading light.
It was about this time that I told them we’d be coming to get the cows before too long, to take them to our farm for the winter. Lips were poked out all around. Nobody was happy to see the cute and cuddly cows leave. Oops, I thought they’d be happy to know we’d have them at our place over winter giving their farm a rest. I guess I don’t have to worry anymore that the cows have been misbehaving and wearing out their welcome.
But truth be told, I miss them. I’d spent some time before our meeting just hanging out with the girls and their new babies in the pasture. They came right up to me and started asking where I’d been, complaining loudly that I didn’t come visit often enough. You know how moms are. I’d committed to them they’d be coming home before long and you never go back on your word to a mom. They have a memory like a steel trap!
