Ninja Cow Farm LLC

1 Corinthians 13:11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

I told you before about taking Spork to Bill’s Hot Dogs in Little Washington. It was the first time he’d graduated from plain or ketchupy kid hot dogs to fully leaded chili dogs.

This week, Spork went with me to make a delivery to our friends at The Butcher and the Baker. They keep selling product faster than we can produce it which is both good and bad but for today’s story it was good because I had my man with me for company and for delivery help. When he goes with me for a delivery, he does as much work as I do and is a joy to have along. We had to depart early so we could get down and back and still have time for lunch with a friend of mine. However on the way back it turned out he couldn’t meet for lunch. Spork and I were both disappointed because we were looking forward to good conversation and food. I thought a minute and then gave Spork the choice of where he’d like to go to lunch, my treat. He said, “We are too far from Bill’s hotdogs, aren’t we?” I wasn’t even sure he remembered Bill’s so I was happy to hear he wanted to go back.

We were about 3 hours from Bill’s where we sat that moment so it was a no go, however there is a landmark hotdog place in Raleigh, Roast Grill. It’s been there since 1940 and I NEVER get to go there anymore because hotdog buns are verboten on my diet. However I was in good shape weight wise that day and could probably stand a cheat, especially for the boy.

We high tailed it back home, switched from our delivery truck to a regular truck, and ran downtown. Once we sat down at the counter and greeted everyone, we ordered two small Cokes and hot dogs from George, two burnt all the way for me,  one all the way for the boy and one emergency backup dog that was just plain. No Nancy light chili or hold the mustard for him on the all the way one, he got it loaded just like the adults.

When they hit the counter, Spork tucked into the loaded one first and declared it good and later better than the plain one. Next time, no backup dogs for him, he’s eating with a man’s taste and appetite now, as mom’s grocery bill can attest.

As an aside, if you are reading this blog and you haven’t been to the Roast Grill, you need to make the trip. They have four menu items, hot dogs, coke, baklava (home made), and pound cake (also home made). The place only seats 13 or 15 total and it’s usually packed so go on a nice day. You’ll stand on the sidewalk for a few minutes and chat with your neighbors waiting to get in. It’s part of the experience, as is sitting at the counter and sliding up and down making room as people come and go. Go be neighborly, it’s good for you.

Yesterday we went to buy some cows from a new friend of ours in Louisburg. We have our great friend Ernie to thank for introducing us because even though we are in the same business, Jason and I had never met one another. It turns out that Jason raises exactly the kind of cows we need, and he does so in volume. These cows, like ours, have never had commercial feed. Jason speaks our language.

Spork and The Princess tagged along for the adventure because where else can you go load cows in the snow and ice while freezing in the wind. You gotta love farm kids.

We picked some really great cows from Jason’s broad selection and were able to easily load them onto our trailer. In fact it was so easy that I didn’t actually do anything. It’s a pleasure to buy from actual cattlemen because they know what they are doing and how to get it done. Because Jason and Brad were doing all the work, I led the kids through the barn because I heard dogs barking and Jason said there were puppies. In fact, he joked that after the trailer was full of cows, he was going to put some puppies in the front seat.

The kids were more than entertained by the puppies while we got the cattle secured. After loading, I went back to retrieve the kids and get them loaded. Turns out they cattle were easy, the kids, not so much. Spork and The Princess both started telling me how cute the puppies were and how much they liked them. I had noted that one of the puppies was very shy and would scamper off whenever there was any increase in attention. This was while the other dogs were rolling over for scratches, climbing over each other, yapping and generally being puppies. However I noted that this particular puppy always came right back and showed no signs of having been abused, but was just very shy. I like shy dogs, for whatever reason. Probably because I’m allergic to them and shy dogs don’t get in your face like a normal dog. Jason was joking about loading dogs into the truck so I asked what kind of dog those were. Australian Heelers was the reply. Cattle dogs, now we’re talking.

I’d been looking at cattle dogs off and on for a few years now. Nothing serious but always keeping my eye out. Here were bona fide cattle dogs, not from some fancy breeder, but from a working cattle farm. Doesn’t get much more authentic than that. And there was a shy one, just like I like. I asked Jason how much?

“Free, just take one or all and give them a home. ”

I asked the kids if they really wanted a dog. They were shocked I would even consider it. I think they are still shocked I agreed. They started jumping up and down even faster and got really excited. I figured 8000 pounds of cows were already going home on the trailer, what was 10 pounds of puppy!?

We piled in the truck, all four of us now. There was immediately conversation between the kids on what to name the dog, was mom going to be mad, what would Wildflower say, can we really keep him, etc. I kind of tuned them out because I was watching the trailer and making sure everything was going ok, and also following Jason to his other farm where he wanted to show me some cattle equipment that he sells. We quickly arrived at his place and I hopped out to see what he had. The kids of course stayed with the puppy in the truck. After 15 minutes of conversation with Jason, I hopped back in the truck where the kids immediately informed me that the dog’s name was King Samuel Moore, King for short. Hmm, easiest time I ever had picking a name, didn’t even have to be involved. King it is!

We spent the rest of the ride talking about my previous dogs names (Prince, all of them, I’m kind of like George Foreman), was mom going to kill us (probably), where he would sleep (inside till it warms up a bit), and was this a good name (yep, suits me, suits him.) There is nothing quite like riding home with a new puppy, especially when there is the excitement that everyone thinks mom might kill us when we get home. There is no fruit like forbidden fruit.

As I secretly suspected, mom was surprised but happy. She LOVES dogs.

I’m sure there will be more pics of King to come. I’m looking into trainers for herding dogs. Luckily we herd cows routinely here so he will get plenty of practice. The only problem is I told Miguel I would teach him his commands in Spanish. Now I have to learn Spanish an herding dog both!

Oh wait. What the heck is this?

Sigh.

I’ve already told you my feelings on winter, which are as cold and icy as our frontage road was this morning. As the sun came up this morning, I heard a helicopter that was not only close, but hovering outside my window. Being a former helicopter pilot myself, I knew from the sound of the rotors what he was doing and the only reason for doing it was to film something just off of our farm. So a news chopper was filming, literally hovering over my pasture.

Not a good sign

Emily made it to work today and was busy feeding animals so Miguel and I went to see what the chopper was filming. We already knew that our road had been closed by State Troopers and there was a chance that somebody took out some of our perimeter fence when they wrecked, not an unheard of occurrence. We scooted over there in the Gator and made it to the corner of our property. There was a car in the ditch but no fence damage. Thank goodness!

I say thank goodness especially because when the snow started yesterday we decided to have the neighbor up, play some pool with the kids, make a fire in the fireplace, and open a bottle of wine.

Strangely the wine bottle was related to rabbits because this morning I found that the single empty wine bottle had multiplied overnight into an entire family of empty bottles on the counter. Rebuilding a fence wasn’t high on my list of things I wanted to do today.

The snow melted very well as the day went on but Wildflower had made sure we had plenty for snow cream before the melt started.  My iPhone forecast showed no snow the rest of the week so things were looking up. However I quickly found that my app wasn’t at all accurate and indeed we still had snowmageddon coming tonight.

More winter!? Ugh.

However, despite the cold, the snow, the sleet, the brine, the wrecked cars, and the broken water pipes, I found this.

Spring! An official sign!

I don’t care if it snows a foot tonight. There are flowers popping out of the ground and that means spring is coming. We’ve already frozen and broken all the pipes that freeze so we just have to keep the animals and us farmers safe, warm, and fed till the weather breaks, and then it will be time for warm weather and green grass. I can’t wait.

Sigh

The draft of the latest guidelines was recently released by the Obama administration. Full disclosure here, I’ve only read the article, not the guidelines themselves so I haven’t independently verified the details.

However, the latest guidelines are from the same entity that brought us the low fat craze that has people fatter than ever which means more health problems, not less.

The “shocking” inclusions in the recommendations is that we should take into account our “carbon footprint” in what we eat. Here is the type of research that these recommendations are based on. So being a vegan means you are saving the world and eating a steak means you are an environment killing, cigar smoking, fat-cat Republican.

There are so many problems with the thinking in these recommendations that I frankly get tired just thinking about rebutting them. I’m sure Joel Salatin will write a rebuttal when he gets time and I’ll link to it when it comes out. His will be much more thought out than mine I’m sure. However let me hit on some key points here and now.

1. Conventional cattle farming, with feedlots and CAFOs is guilty as charged in these recommendations and the research I linked above. Raising corn, harvesting with diesel fuel, then drying it, then hauling it with fuel, distributing it with fuel, then feeding it to cattle, again with fuel, creates a pretty huge carbon footprint.
2. Planting soybeans for your tofu burger has its own huge carbon footprint. Everything wrong with cattle farming above is just as guilty for conventional row crop farming. The same inputs, the same diesel needs, the same footprint. Add in the chemical usage (GMO is used so it can be sprayed with Roundup) and soybeans are right there with corn. Vegans can feel better about their diet because nothing with a face died, but that doesn’t make it better for the environment, a distinction that is routinely missed.
3. Grazing cattle the way we do is carbon NEGATIVE (you’ll have to read down a bit in this link to get into all the sequestration talk). Properly managed pastures, like Ninja Cow Farm and many other non-conventional farmers, sequester carbon well in excess of any emissions created. The larger our cattle operations, the better off the environment is, period.

So if you want to save the polar bears, or whatever your goal is, the answer is to eat more properly raised beef and pork, and less row crops.

So I was out of town this weekend but still trying to update the beef page to let everyone know we have beef back in stock. I didn’t have my notes with me, so I updated the beef page with our new cuts and marked what we don’t have in stock from memory. Unfortunately, I have a mind like a steel sponge and left off about half of what I should have.

I’m now back in the office and working from notes, which should be a requirement for me anytime I’m doing anything except brushing my teeth. The page is actually updated now with correct information so head over and check out what we have and let me know what you need.

The worst part of admitting you messed up isn’t telling the whole world via this page. I can handle public shame. It’s knowing your wife reads the page and will now find out. Like she needs another reason why she’s smarter than me.

I’m done with winter, officially.

Let me start of this by telling you what went wrong with my day yesterday. It was a day I’m happy to have behind me where everything seemed to go wrong.

• Miguel, like everyone else yesterday, couldn’t get to work due to the road conditions. He would have come in anyway but I told him not to risk it.
• One of the pigs needed water so I tried turning the valve to give her water. The valve shattered in my hand.
• The well that provides water to the entire farm, both humans and animals, quit suddenly and without warning or apparent cause. My guess was it froze with all the cold weather.
• The heat that was keeping momma pig number 1 warm quit, without warning.
• While lamenting the lack of heat on momma and babies, when I looked over at momma pig #2, she was going into labor. Also with no heat.
• While trying to diagnose the lack of heat in the hospital barn, I found myself in the main barn at the load center. While working in there, we discovered that the power to the freezers where I keep all of our product had become wonky. They were working, but only just.
• With no water from the main well, and animals everywhere needing water, we went to the shiny new solar well to switch over to backup water. However the just installed and shiny new well, wouldn’t work because a section of pipe was frozen solid.
• With no primary well, and no solar well, we went to the OTHER backup well (always be prepared!) and switched the system over to it. It took a few minutes to find the correct valve under the snow and weeds but finally we got it switched over. No water.
• I tromped over to the well house to discover that the well was turned off. A few switches flipped and the pump came to life. However the water was muddy brown because the well hadn’t been used in years.
• Dustin got stepped on by a cow.

Since everything else was broken, we started checking everything else.

• The chicken waterer was frozen.
• Pig waterer itself was broken.
• The solar well’s cistern was frozen.
• And because of the snow and ice, we had limited food for all the animals because we basically had to work with what was already on site.

This is just the summary list. It doesn’t include the cursing, the slipping and falling on ice, the tools that broke or didn’t work, etc, etc. It was quite a day. There was much cursing and consternation.

At the end of the day, our status was, we had brown water but we had water everywhere we needed it. We had emergency backup heat in the barn.

Power worked well enough to keep the freezers freezing, not that it mattered since it was as cold outside as in the freezer.

My status at the end of the day was that we were three bottles of wine shorter in the wine cooler and I had a wonderful home made sloppy joe that Dustin and I made pretty much on the fly. Dustin also provided the hamburger for the sloppy joe because we are completely sold out of beef till I can pick up our three cows tomorrow. I discovered that your beef tastes better after you’ve been paid for it.

So that’s what went wrong yesterday. How about what went right?

• Dustin jumped in and helped with everything that was going on. Doubling up really helped be get my head above water. It’s wonderful to have friends.
• I randomly decided to wear my Filson merino wool socks yesterday morning. That, combined with my warm boots meant I had snuggly warm feet all day, even when I was flat on my back like a turtle after falling down on the ice.
• The heat to my house worked perfectly and my family was cozy and warm all day, oblivious to the cold.
• My kids were able to go sledding on our big hill. The conditions were perfect for my old Flexible Flyer and the kids sledded farther than I ever did in my life.
• Miguel, who offered multiple times to come to work anyway, was safe at home and there were no accidents.
• Momma pig number 2 delivered 5 healthypiglets who are as cute as the first batch.

  

• The drinking water that we’ve put away over the past year came in handy. Plus I got to mock Dustin for not having any water of his own.
• After getting everything handled, Dustin came up for dinner. We had a great dinner with family and friends and really had a nice night.
• The John Deere Gator did awesome on the ice and snow. In fact today I pulled a loaded van out of the ice and onto the road with it.

The end result is that on the day we had all the snow and ice, the electrical panel that runs the barn randomly decided to give up the ghost and we lost one leg of the service taking all the 240 volt items and half the 120 volt items. We got everything fixed and all is now well.

However it was exciting at the time.