7125 Old Stage Road Raleigh NC 919-322-0197
One of our pastures floods whenever we have very heavy rain. I’ve shown it before when it flooded. That time we had carp swimming in the pasture.
Yesterday, my neighbor Dustin sent me this picture.
Apparently this guy got washed into the pasture when it flooded, then decided to walk back to the water. Unfortunately for him he must have started walking the wrong direction and never made it. I’ve never found a crawfish in the pasture before, another first for us at Ninja Cow Farm.
I’ve made no excuses about the fact that on occasion, we may open a bottle of wine after the days work is done here on the farm. We may even have friends over and share some vino with them occasionally. Heck, if you stop to buy meat at just the right time, we may even offer you a glass. But we NEVER offer any alcohol to our cows. So how did we end up with drunken beef in the freezer?
A farming peer of ours raises grass fed, anti-biotic free, hormone free cattle. He is successfully doing what we do, just in a different market and in a different way as he has a relationship with a local brewery and gets all of their spent brewers grains. This is something we’ve been offered in the past as well but we elected to go the way of produce rather than brewers grains as a supplement. We are working with a new processor for our cattle and in conversation learned that this peer of ours, whom we’ve never met, had just learned that his wife has bone cancer. He was in a bad state, as you can imagine. He had three cows already at the processor and simply no time or energy to focus on the meat business. The processor mentioned to me that this farmer needed someone to buy the cows and help this guy out. As you well know, we have empty freezers now so we had the room.
It’s a big commitment to buy a whole cow without tasting the product first, something I’ve warned about before to my own customers. However I felt led to help this man out. The fact that he is a minister as well may have helped steer the prayers my way as well. Last night SWMBO and I tried two ribeyes, and the boys tried two sirloin steaks. All said the beef was good so therefore we are announcing we are back in stock on beef. Because this cow was receiving brewers grains, we are discounting all cuts 10% from our normal no-grain pricing. We still have plenty of our ninja hamburger in the freezer along with plenty of chuck roasts and some various other cuts, all grain free. We of course have all the cuts of the just arrived drunken cow, including some osso buco that’s I’m itching to try. Take a look on our beef page to see what we have in stock.
I hopped onto our JD Gator the other day and happened to look down at the hour meter. That’s as close as it gets.
1000 hours on a Gator is getting to the point we may need to think about replacing it with a new one. If anyone is looking for a Gator, let me know. 1/2 of getting a new one is selling the old one.
This past weekend, SWMBO went to the beach with her girlfriends, leaving me and the kids here to fend for ourselves. I had a weekends worth of work to do anyway so it was a relatively normal weekend with no big adventures planned. However, there was one thing we could do because the timing was just perfect. I could introduce the kids to the fun of peeps and a microwave!
I know we already have lots of traditions for Easter, but how many involve both sugary goodness and grotesque transformations before your eyes? I had the kids suitably wound up to blow up peeps and they were chomping at the bit to get started. Not till after dinner, I kept telling them.
Now that dinner was done…
This is what it’s about. Taking something simple and sharing it with the kids. They had a large time blowing up the peeps, then scooping up the sugary goodness. There was lots of make believe, joking with each other, and general happiness. You only see peeps out at Easter so this is a once a year event which makes it special. Hopefully it’s something we can do again in the future, I certainly enjoyed it.
And since we were being nostalgic. Who remembers Jiffy pop? Thanks Sarah for reminding me about this and telling me where you can still get it (Food Lion).
We get produce year round. In the winter, we get just barely enough. In the summer, we get inundated. Today, the first warm day we’ve had in forever, we got this.
That’s 1/2 of what we are getting today! There are 8 pallets of grapes in this load and that’s only half of this load! Anyone want grape juice?
In total, we picked up 32 pallets of food in one day, most of them 8 feet tall! That’s one and one half tractor trailer loads! I can’t even begin to estimate the amount of weight we hauled. The lettuce was all the farm tractor could hold, and the avocados were heavier than I could pick up. I had to change to the skid steer to pick them up.
There will be some full bellies on the farm tonight.
For those of you who haven’t been here in the last week, I thought I’d let you know that we’ve started remodeling our on farm store. That’s the room where we keep all of our freezers and our point of sale system.
This room was built in the 70s, for those of you who can’t date it by the wood paneling. It wasn’t the best for a sales room, but it was good enough and at least it was dry and safe. We had talked about updating it at some point in the future but this bitterly cold winter we just has decided to speed up our plans.
The water line for my office and for one of the cows paddocks goes through the wall of this room. It was installed in the 80s and was on an exterior wall. Whenever we had a freeze, the line would freeze but always thaw out again with no problems. When things thawed out this time, so did the pipe that was now broken. Of course, old wood paneling and water don’t go together well and the paneling was ruined. Also, in order to access the pipe, we have to tear out the wall and the ceiling partially to gain access. To keep it from freezing in the future, we needed to completely replace the pipe, and also relocate it, which meant tearing out the paneling and ceiling on the other side of the room. If we’re going that far, may as well do the whole remodel now.
The goal is to bring this room up to spec with electrical, plumbing, insulation, lighting, and looks. The electrical is already done, and the plumbing will be in progress today. Then we’ll go back with drywall, paint, new lights, and a new sales counter. We will also be replacing one of the old windows with an insulated window and a window a/c unit, which seems like overkill now but will be welcome come July. Now when you come for a tour and/or a purchase, you should have a shopping experience as good as our meat.
Thank you for understanding while we go through this process. We hope to have it done in a few weeks and of course we will document the makeover here.
I have all the internal links working again so surf away on our site. However in order to get everything working, I had to turn off pretty much every plug-in on our site. That means that much of the extra functionality and customization is not currently live. I’ll be working over the next week to turn on individual plug-ins one by one till I find out which plug-in is causing the problem.
If you note that our site is down, or you see any issues, please let me know at dan@ninjacowfarm.com so I can try to fix it.
Thank you
Dan
Yesterday our website broke. I, and tech support, have no idea why. The only thing we know is that when we turned off a feature called permalinks, the site came back up. What this means to you is that all our internal links are broken so if you are on a post and I conveniently placed a link to another post somewhere, something I do all the time, that link doesn’t work. I’m sorry. I will be working on this as soon as possible but today I have to farm instead of nerd so I’ll get to it asap. Until then, if you are looking for a certain page, just type it in the search bar and you should still be able to find it directly.
My apologies. We work hard on the website to make it useful and entertaining. Something outside of our control has jammed up the works.
Tuesday was a day for driving bulls around. I made a trip over to Taylor’s Mill Farm and met Brent to discuss buying a bull from him. Brent raises registered Hereford seed stock and that’s just what we needed. You see our breed is called a Baldy Angus which is nothing but an Angus cow crossed with a Hereford bull. Generally you alternate between Hereford and Angus bulls and that keeps the Baldy Angus line alive. However I’ve been slack on getting Hereford bulls and our Baldy Angus are turning into Angus only so it was time to get a new bull. Brent had a good selection of young bulls and I was able to go out and pick the one I wanted. Brent also is a big time believer in genetic testing and EPDs which is measure of how well the bull is supposed to pass along certain genetic traits. Whenever I talk to commercial cattlemen, or read in traditional publications, EPDs are what it’s all about. Kind of makes me wonder what my EPDs are. Based on my kids, they must be pretty awesome because I have some awesome kids.
Anyway, I don’t really go by EPDs but it was very educational to listen to someone who does. The bull I selected was supposed to be smaller framed, have smaller calves (easier birthing), and have really good fat and marbling in the meat. He is a registered Hereford so we do have some pedigreed royalty on the farm now. However I’m not sure his royal reception was what he expected.
We picked up 7 cows on Monday and put them in an isolation pasture till this weekend so they can get used to the farm and used to us. And also to make sure no diseases arrived with them. When I say 7 cows, to be specific it is 7 steers. Boy cows that have been castrated. Our new bull arrived at his new herd, ready to do his bully service, only to discover that I must think he is gay. I’m sure he is disappointed but he will get to meet his ladies tomorrow so all is good.
When I put our new bull into the pasture with the steers, it was like a hockey game. His hooves hit the ground and the gloves dropped on both sides and the fight was on. There was no pause, no sniffing, no grandstanding. He and one of the steers immediately went head to head and started pushing. Both seemed eager to see who was going to be the big man. I’ve certainly seen my share of pushing and shoving on the farm, but I’ve never seen it start so quickly. It was if that was the official greeting between cows.
Sharp eyed readers will notice something different about the cows in the above pictures, there is a white cow in the mix. He is a charolais and not something we normally will have on the farm. Charolais get to be big and do well on more conventional programs so we normally wouldn’t have one on our farm but this particular steer has been mixed with something else causing his frame size to be identical to our Angus. This allowed us the opportunity to test how black cows do in the heat vs. how white cows do in the heat, something we’ll keep our eye on as we get into summer. I’m not jumping to change breeds, but you are always tinkering and testing on a farm looking for ways to improve.
Share eyed readers will also note that the new bull doesn’t have a name. With a wife and three kids, it seems everyone gets a name, but we haven’t had time to name this one yet. I’m sure he’ll earn one soon enough.
The last thing I did on Tuesday was to deliver Hoss, our old bull, back to my friend Dal in Erwin. Hoss was very glad to get back with his normal herd and took no encouragement to get on or off the trailer once I told him where he was going.