Ninja Cow Farm LLC

In our last post, we talked about how and why we publish all of our farming records, both the good and the bad, for all to see. We talked about the positives and the negatives associated. In this post, we’ll talk about the record keeping aspect of publishing our records to the internet.

So how does having all this info out on the web make me a better farmer? For one, simply having records is a huge step. Every time a calf would be born, I would assume I’d remember who the mom was, or when it was born. But when I’m trying to recall two years later I might get the season right, but was it warm and sunny or cold and rainy? Was the grass coming in well or were we still on hay? Was the mom #25 or was it #26. I always think I’ll remember, but when it comes time, I usually don’t. So now that I’m keeping records, do I meticulously record all kinds of data when a cow is born? Nope. I take a picture like the one below.

This is a calf that was recently born. In the post, I will put the mom’s tag number and the calf’s tag number in the post title. I will snap a few pics of mom, baby, and whatever else seems like a good pic while I’m out there. I simply take my phone and snap the pics, it takes a few seconds while I’m already there and I always have my phone with me no matter the conditions or the season.

But what about all that other information I spoke of. Well, the photo is time and date stamped so a day later or a week later when I finally type the post about this birth, I can look and see what the date was I took the picture. I can also look at this picture and tell you this was our leased farm because there is no temporary paddock setup in the picture. Based on the land visible in the picture I can tell where on the farm we were and I can obviously see the ground and grass conditions. I’ll note in my post when the calf was actually born (in this case it was two days before the picture was taken). All the info I might need is either in the post of can be inferred from the pictures. And whenever I have a question about a particular cow, I simply grab my phone and go to our website and search on the ear tag number of the cow in question. Every post about that cow comes up, from its birth to when it leaves the farm. Isn’t #11 due about now? A quick search shows that she calves in April/May every year. Isn’t this the second calf #25 has lost? A quick search shows that she hasn’t been too good of a mom and the decision to put her on the cull trailer is simple. By utilizing pictures and a keyword (the ear tag number) I can easily find all my records about an individual cow in seconds from any connected device.

Every active cattleman I know has records in the book in the office, on Excel, the wife keeps them, something. All those records are excellent but they aren’t available anytime, anywhere. That means when you are in the pasture, on leased land 10 miles away, trying to make a decision, you are doing so without all the information. With our system, when we need to make a decision, we do it standing beside the cow in a few seconds with a quick look at the phone. Then we can move onto the next thing, and if you are a farmer, you know there is always a next thing that needs your attention.

But my posts aren’t simply record keeping. They are marketing as well. What is the difference? Records look like this.

“August 21st, 2015. Male calf born to #X. Banded and tagged #Y.”

With some pics attached, that’s good enough for record keeping if you like. Make your website private and you can have online record keeping just like I do without the marketing side of things. But if you want to combine your efforts so that you are accomplishing both, you need to do two things. Learn the tools and find your voice. But that is our next post.

“I’m not sure I’d publish quite as much as you do.” Advice from a professor at one of our Ag Universities.

That statement reflects the general attitude I’ve experienced from people well established in our industry. Long time farmers, long time academics, people who’ve been there and seen it all. The general feeling is that I’m inviting trouble by sharing too much information and the look on their faces and the unspoken statement says that before too long, I’ll wish I’d kept more to myself.

The funny thing is, I’m actually a very private person. Unless I’m talking about how the grass is growing or I’m giving you a tour of our farm, I probably don’t say that much at all. But when it comes to our farm, if you want to know anything at all odds are I’ve already told you.

In 2013 when we decided to transition from the private, closed gate farm we’d been since 1980 to a public, direct-to-consumer sales farm, we decided we had to do a few things differently.

One, we had to start keeping better records. Managing a few cows on pasture and selling off once or twice a year to the stock yard is a lot different than taking cattle from birth to finish on a larger scale. Standing face to face with the customer every day and answering for your meat quality takes a lot more oversight and attention to detail.

Two, we had to actually market our farm and get our message out to consumers. Having spent over 20 years in corporate America, I had plenty of exposure to marketing, ad campaigns, press releases, etc. By and large, I found it all distasteful and wasteful. Distasteful in that I’ve sat in the room where we discussed our value proposition which is corporate speak for how can we charge more by using marketing. Wasteful in that a 1% response rate to a campaign was considered a success. If 1% of my piglets lived, I’d be facing charges for animal abuse, not collecting a bonus for a job well done.

With this intellectual baggage firmly in tow, I came up with some key criteria for how we’d find our solution.

1. I had to be able to accomplish whatever was needed for both record keeping and marketing from the pasture if need be.
2. There couldn’t be any double work, or it had to be greatly minimized.
3. There needs to be security for our records in case of fire, my death, etc.
4. Whatever we did had to allow for our marketing and social media presence as seamlessly as possible.

In the end, we selected a very simple solution. We elected to keep our records, all of them, on our public website, built upon the WordPress content management platform. That puts us in good company as almost 75 million websites are built upon WordPress, including the one you are looking at right now, CFSA’s website.

However the struggle wasn’t in building a website, that is actually pretty easy when you use WordPress. The struggle was in what and how much do we share? If our website would be our records as well, we needed to show everything we did, both the fuzzy, cute good stuff and the gory, bloody, bad stuff.

Everyone has these pics on their farm website. This part is easy.

That is the public face of farming that we all project. Cute, clean animals out on grass or forage. Sunny days, blue skies. Aren’t our animals happy and cute? Buy our product. The problem is whether your animals look like the pictures above, or like this.

The public pictures for both farms will often look exactly the same and consumers know it, which is one reason why consumers are demanding more transparency from their food providers. So if an 11 acre local farm and a 3000 acre corporate farm both have the same public image, what is a small farmer to do?

The answer for us is that we share EVERYTHING on our website. The good, the bad and the ugly. That means that we share wonderful days that go like this, but that we also share our horrible days that go like this, this, or this. That means that the whole world can see what we do right, and what we do wrong. Some of academia and some of my peers don’t seem to be too enthused. However, I don’t sell to academia or to other farmers. I sell to consumers. The response I’ve had from them has been overwhelmingly positive. We get comments all the time such as this.

“Yours is the most honest, funny, “real” farm I have found after searching for months for the right farm for us.”

I’ve lost customers because of our pricing. I’ve lost customers because we are not convenient. I’ve lost customers because they simply drift back to the grocery store. But I’ve yet to lose a customer because we shared too much and I gain them every day because of how open we are. The marketing side of this plan works for us. But what about management and record keeping?

That is our next post.  

 

On day three we started first thing with making sausage. For once I wasn’t late for class. Well, not very late.

Day 2 was making cured meats like sopressata, chorizo, salami, etc. Once again I was pulled out on the phone for various bits of the class so my notes aren’t exactly stellar but I got enough of the class to be able to experiment with some meat here at home.

I noted while I was in this class that we had a police officer present at the door all day. I’d also noticed that each door of the building had a cop stationed there. I’d wondered what it was about so I finally decided to go ask. Turns out that PETA was across the street protesting and there were threats that they would come into our conference and try and disrupt what was going on. I was all excited to go out and join their protest but sadly I was already committed to being in this class. Opportunity missed.

Because I was in and out on the phone I didn’t get to see everything made but I got some great action shots of the various steps.  Above you can see all the cool spices the instructor brought for everyone to make their own sausages. He also gave lots of recommendations on variations of different sausages we were not making. The tips actually came machine gun style and it was a struggle to get them written down as fast as he was saying them. I like when a class has too much good information.

All in all it was a really good class and I’m glad that I went. Next time though, I’ll skip it and take all the classes that were taught during the actual conference.

We are hiring a full or part time person to help us on the farm.

We have a big project starting very shortly and we are going to need some extra labor on the farm through the winter. We can utilize someone at least 1/2 day 5 days per week and for the right person we could utilize them full-time 5 days per week. Duties will include:

Sorting produce
Operating equipment
General maintenance
Working with animals
General farm work

Should someone posses the following abilities we could utilize them full-time:

General construction experience
Plumbing experience
Wiring experience
Framing experience
Tile laying experience

Candidates must have their own transportation and be punctual and hard working. Send any inquiries to me, Dan Moore at dan@ninjacowfarm.com or call at 919-810-2530. Pay will be commensurate with experience and ability. A trial period of work will be required to be hired.

I’d signed up for the meat conference, then in addition signed up for the “pork track” which involved breaking down a hog and making some sausage, salami, etc. What I didn’t realize when I’d signed up for the pork track was that I’d have to miss about 70% of the conference because these things went on concurrently. I can pretty much count on going back next year so I can attend all the sessions because there were definitely some good ones that I’d have liked to attend. But not great loss because the pork breakdown was very good.

When I got to class, it was already underway. I missed the introductions, learning who our instructor was, and meeting the other folks because I was in the hall talking. The last time I was late to a class like this I met SWMBO and got married so I was very wary walking in. I didn’t want to end up married again, that would have been hard to explain when I got home. To make sure I stayed unhitched I tagged in with two guys who were working a table at the back of the room. The class was about 1/3 women which in all seriousness is very good. The entire conference was about 1/2 women in attendance, and probably 60% of the presenters. But in my case, I decided to stay with the boys and I’m glad I did because they both turned out to be very cool people.

The instructor, who worked in a butcher shop full-time, did an excellent job of first showing what was going on, then working the room and checking on everyone.

The conference folks had a large screen TV and someone with a camera always shooting what he was doing so that everyone could see. It worked really well and I was impressed with the forethought in putting that system in place.

Don, one of the guys at my table, was a recently retired chef from Raleigh who’d spent 30 years in the kitchen. He was very adept at breaking down the cuts and did most of the knife work. Because of my back, I elected to take notes rather than take a turn behind the knife which worked out great because I could catch the things Don missed while he was working and the instructor was talking. The end result was our table got the gold star for always being done correctly and first. Go team!

After finishing with pork class, day 1 I skipped the rest of the conference classes and went back to the hotel to rest my back a bit because there was a dinner and cocktail hour.The keynote speaker was Allan Savory and I was excited to hear him speak.

He is somewhat of the father of the movement for healing the land via livestock and grazing and I’d seen his great TED talk years ago (if you’ve not seen it, go watch it now. It’s worth the 15 mins). Back at the dinner, I again ended up in multiple conversations with various people I knew or just met but had lots in common with. It felt more like a family reunion than a conference. Finally Allan started his speech and not 10 minutes in my phone rang and I ended up outside and on the phone for nearly all of his speech. Oh well, from what I saw it wasn’t anything new anyway. Tomorrow was a new day, and we’d be making sausage!

This Monday and Tuesday I spent the day in Winston-Salem at the NC Choices meat conference. There was much consternation over my departure because my back, although better, was still in pretty bad shape and I wasn’t sure if I could make the drive or survive being at the conference all day without a way to lie down. In the end I survived the trip and I was able to participate in about 75% of the conference so all things considered I think I did ok.

I’d asked SWMBO if she and the kids would like to go but she had too much school to get done so I trundled off all by myself to sit in the back of the room and try and absorb something useful. Or so I thought.

Walking in the door, I was greeted by a nice lady who handed me my information packet. She then reminded me that her husband had attended our Bang to Bacon class and had enjoyed it greatly. I was a little shell shocked. I really didn’t expect to be recognized but it was pretty neat. I then headed off in search of the bathroom (I’d been on the road for two hours) and as I was weaving through the crowd I heard my name. I turned and found my insurance agent talking to another gentleman from NCDA and I quickly found myself in conversation with them. Turns out Jack, from the NCDA did marketing outreach for them and handled the Got to be NC program. He promptly asked if I’d registered to be a Got to be NC farmer and I said that indeed had registered and been approved.

Unfortunately I hadn’t done anything else like download the logos, put them on my website, order any signs, etc. I had filled out my listing on their website but that was it. Jack asked if I had any of the road signs yet and I told him I actually wondered how you went about getting one of those signs. Next thing I knew I was walking out with a stack of signs, some of which were about as big as me. Look for me to be hanging signs here shortly now that I’m home.

Once I finally got out of that conversation I made it to the first class I was assigned to, but that is my next post.

On a brighter and sunnier day, it was time for another attempt at taking the recycling to the recycler. The truck and trailer were still all hooked up so all I had to do was to make it there in one piece. I had new tires on the bad side of the trailer and all the air pressures had been checked properly this time. Funny how with proper prep things work out.

This time the trip over was pretty uneventful, other than it was a really heavy load. I was curious to see what the whole rig weighed when I got there.

Almost 40,000 pounds. That’s truck, trailer, and load. The max GVWR of my truck is 33,600 so that is 5,800 overloaded. Now we are licensed to carry up to 67,000 pounds so we weren’t illegal, just overloaded. To put the amount of overload in perspective, that means we were loaded with the equivalent of 5 Suburbans on the trailer instead of the four we thought we were carrying. Oops. It’s not like we have scales on the farm to check these things with. I think the cardboard had absorbed some water from all the rain so next time we know to just load dry bales and we should be ok. I hope.

Unloaded weight, which means we dropped off 20,840 pounds of recycling or four Suburbans. Not bad for a couple of months worth of work. Since the truck should weigh about 8000 pounds, that means our big trailer weighs in at 10,000! It’s supposed to weigh 8000 so no wonder that thing is so heavy to carry. At least now we know our weights on these different vehicles so we can plan better going forward.

And what we earned for the cardboard paid for the tires and fuel. That’s a lot of work to break even. Oh well. Some days you eat the bear. Some days the bear eats you.

As I slowly made my way onto 440 I was gently trying to accelerate to highway speed. I was in the heart of the work zone and people were of course flying. Luckily I’ve learned with a large vehicle you just have to gently make your way in and people will basically get out of the way. Just as I made off the on-ramp, I hit the first bridge. With all the construction, the transitions to the bridges are pretty brutal. With all that weight behind me, it was even worse than normal but nothing like when the trailer tires hit the transition. I heard the explosion more than felt it and knew immediately I’d blown a tire. With all the cardboard, I really couldn’t see behind me to see if I was smoking or throwing chunks. Even better, in the construction zone, there is no shoulder. It’s Jersey barriers right up to the travel lanes. Oh goodie.

I trundled along as best I could in the far right lane, looking for smoke. Fire. People waving at me telling me I was about to explode. That kind of stuff, for over a mile until I could get to Rock Quarry Road and it’s exit. Once I finally made it off the exit I was able to go see what had happened.

If you look closely, you can see that there are multiple holes in the side walls of the tire. It exploded! The inside tire is in even worse shape. I said a little prayer for getting me to the exit without the other tandem blowing because it was now carrying all the weight of that side. I then called a couple of tire companies to find one that could come and change my tires on the side of the road. About an hour later, I had two new tires on my trailer and I limped back home to try another day. I was still struggling with my back and being on the side of the road hadn’t helped it a bit. I went home and got back in the bed and saved recycling for another day. But that’s the next post.

Last week it was time to take our cardboard recycling to the recycler. Normally I take about 5-6 bales at a time but a series of issues caused me to go later than I normally go.

One, Vicente uses our middle sized trailer every single day, pretty much all day. That means it is a pain to get him to stop so I can load, then take the recycling, then hurry back so he can make his next run.

Two, we have a big trailer which will hold more so I don’t need to rush over there, right? I mean I have a dually now so I should be able to load the big trailer and carry more weight with the same fuel basically saving time and money. Then I don’t have to mess up Vicente’s day.

Three, it rained for about a month I think, and I didn’t want to carry all that weight in the rain when the roads are slippery. Safety third ya know.

So last week when it finally stopped raining for five minutes, I loaded up the big trailer as best I could. I was hoping not to double stack the bales and luckily it worked out just perfect.

10 bales fit exactly perfect. Awesome. As is my custom, I stopped at the entrance to the farm and checked the trailer over one last time. I noted that it seemed to be listing to starboard a bit and the tires looked slack. Sigh. Oh well, I’ll stop by Rockside Tire which is just a mile up the road and get them to check the air in the tires. After waiting about 30 minutes, they assured me that the air was fine in the tires and the list I was seeing was because I had a bunch of weight on the trailer. Yeah, it was pretty heavy. I didn’t quite believe them but what else could I do? So I trundled off to 440 to make my trip. That’s when everything went South. But that’s the next post.