Ninja Cow Farm LLC

Today we are short staffed. Spork and the Princess have taken off with SWMBO to go to a practice tournament for public speaking. Yes there are tournaments for these things. No I had no idea.

So that leaves the wee one and I home alone to mind the store. This means I’ll be doing the tours today while my youngest daughter and Crystal will be running the store. That meant I was tasked with helping with the cookies this morning.

The last time I helped her with cookies, I had to explain teaspoon vs tablespoon and whatnot. This time I watched her flawlessly perform the steps, adding the wet and dry ingredients in the proper order, creaming the butter to the exact perfect consistency all while singing along with the music and only really paying attention to me to keep me from messing something up. 10 years old and a professional baker. But I guess she does have several years experience at this point so why am I surprised.

So we’ll have cookies in the store today, fresh baked as always. We also have new items like hot dogs and breakfast pork chops from a new processor. In fact, we have everything you could think of including steaks from the cow I just picked up. I’ve spent the past week doing nothing but driving. Dropping off a cow here, picking up bacon there. It has been nearly every day for the past 7 days of so. The freezers are stuffed to the gills with pork chops, bacon, steaks, hamburger, etc. Everything is here and ready for your new post Thanksgiving diet. You did finish the pie by now, right?

Despite several conversations about me coming today to pick up our latest cow, the processor was closed when I went this morning. So beef will be picked up now on Monday. My apologies. I wasn’t happy about it myself.

Just a quick reminder that we are closed today during our normal store hours of 2pm-6pm so that our employees can enjoy their post turkey day couch sitting.

I put on 2.8 lbs yesterday, so I’m certainly not making fun.

But with that new found jelly roll around my middle, I’m up early to go pick up a cow at the processor. This will fully restock us on beef meaning we’ll be ready to see you on small business Saturday. Plus the girls should have cookies this Saturday. Last weekend we were celebrating the wee one turning 10 so unlike last weekend when folks were disappointed at the lack of cookies(yes Dustin, I’m talking to you) expect her to be up and baking tomorrow morning with fresh cookies for the weekend.

Enjoy your Black Friday shopping today, but save a bit for dinner this weekend and stop and see us tomorrow.

If you’ve been in our store one of the first things we point out is that not everything we carry comes from our farm. We are quite proud of the fact that we support other farms in our operation and we always share who everyone is that we do business with. This is actually unusual in our industry as a lot of people slip other peoples products into their offering and relabel it under their name. Even at the State Farmers Market this is allowed as long as it is less than 50% of the offering, if I recall the percentage correctly.

With all this “other” stuff in the store, there is a lot of meet and greet that goes on to meet these small scale farmers and exchange wares and checks. Jeanette spends a lot of her days off meeting people for crackers and whatnot. I don’t have the flexibility to meet on various days so what I do is try to make all my meets on the same day. My main pickups are to meet our chicken farmer, who I meet weekly, and to stop by our dairy operation and restock on milk and milk products. I can’t drive all the way to the other farm (it is an hour away!) for a few gallons of milk so going once per week and meeting other people on the same trip helps offset the gas and the time.

We had been meeting on Mondays, which worked out great because I could bring everything in before we opened on Monday. But then we had a scheduling conflict and now the pickup day has been moved to Tuesday. That works well because it takes the pressure off of me to be back before we open at 2pm, but it means now the new product shows up in the store on Wednesday. For those of you who want to be here when things are freshest or when you know we’ll be fully stocked, Wednesdays and Fridays are now your days.

We are continuing to process a cow once per month and pigs about once per month (not the same time of month) as well. I haven’t been posting when we receive a cow in like I used to. I’m going to try and remedy that so you have some visibility to when we have steaks in stock. In reality we’ve had a lot of our steaks pre-sold so I’ve been kinda lazy. But that is no excuse, plus we have an extra cow going this month so we’ll have extra stock coming shortly.

I just picked up three hogs worth of product so we do have the pork freezer stocked again. I’m sorry we got down so low, we had a series of problems that kept things from making it back to the freezer. But that is mostly behind us now (there is still a tractor issue, but that is getting resolved).

At the request of several of our customers, and of course our employees, I’d like to post out holiday store hours for this upcoming holiday season.

Thanksgiving week we will be open the 19th and 21st. We will be closed Friday the 23rd and then open Saturday the 24th.

For Christmas we will be closed Christmas eve, December 24th. We will be open the 26th, 28th, and 29th as normal.

For New Years, we will be closed Monday December 31st, then open our normal hours going forward.

We look forward to seeing all of you on all of our other open days for your special order standing rib roasts, egg nog, turkeys, and whatever else you have ordered for those guests coming in from out of town.

It isn’t like it was the mid-term election or anything. This was actually important! Our customers have voted us the number one activity and farmers market! Our competition was the State Farmer’s Market, amongst others. That truly is a David and Goliath competition. Thank you so much to everyone who supported us. I have absolutely no idea what to do with this information except feel warm inside on this cold, rainy day.

If you want to see the full recommendations list, you can click here.

Looks like it is time to blow the dust off and read chapter 2.

Seriously though, thank you everyone for supporting us. We have ZERO dollars in advertising budget, we don’t go to farmers markets, have a stand by the road side, or heck even have a real sign telling you we are here, so things like this are huge for us.

With the advent of herd shares in North Carolina, we are now able to offer products in the store you’ve never seen before (because they were illegal).

For members of our herd share, you will now be able to purchase raw milk butter, honey butter, and yogurt. All of these products are made from our raw milk at our dairy farm.

These products actually showed up for the first time last week. However I didn’t announce them when they came in because almost immediately it all went back out the door, so there wasn’t much to talk about. 

We’ve had requests for years for raw milk butter. I’m glad to finally be able to help out our customers.

We’ve also had requests for raw milk yogurt, but of course all I could offer there was that you could make it yourself. Now we have ready to eat yogurt in the store!

In addition to our raw milk products, next week we’ll have our holiday favorite, egg nog from Simply Natural Dairy, back in stock. As always, Simply Natural products are pasteurized, but they are as good as it gets for traditional dairy products. Egg nog is only available during the holiday season and we only get a gallon or so a week so if you know you want some, make sure to put in a special order with Jeanette or the girls. We will have some for you the next week.

Just a quick note. One of my farmers I meet on Mondays suddenly couldn’t meet till Tuesday this week. That means my normal trip to our dairy farm that I do at the same time will now be on Tuesday as well.

Therefore, we will not have fresh pet milk in the store today but will instead have it on Wednesday. My apologies to everyone, these things are out of my control.