We had a series of surveys recently that many of you participated in. First, thank you for everyone who took the time to give us your feedback. It is invaluable.
Since conducting the surveys, we have hired a new person to work the store and had a good amount of internal dialogue about what we should do for 2018. After looking at all the results, and going through our own logistics, we’ve elected to implement the following.
Our new hours will be Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 2-6pm. We will be open on Saturdays from 9am-5pm.
Now, for the thoughts behind the changes.
One. Why not 12-7pm? Basically it’s logistical on our end. 2-6 allows us to still conduct our days as relatively normal. Dinner can still be with the family at the normal 6ish time frame. Lunch can still be with hubby/wifey/kids. If we open 12-7 it means that the days we are open are pretty much work only with no family life. We do take family life seriously.
Also, a good reason for the earlier or later time frame is to avoid the congestion on Old Stage at 5pm. However, Old Stage is beginning to still be congested even at 6:30. And our slowest part of the day is usually from 5:30-6 so there is a hesitation to open longer through the slower time. Yes, the thought is that folks would now come at 6:30, but the family time thing outweighed it, sorry.
Two. We have a good group of regular customers who come every week. When we do bump into them at the grocery store (yes it happens) the response is that they messed up their schedule and ran out of something before we were open again on Wednesday. Totally understandable. We feel that by being open basically every other day, we can make it easier for people, especially our regulars.
Three. Saturdays have been moved back to 9am opening instead of 8am. This request was from SWMBO. She, um, HATES mornings. More than pretty much everything else on the planet. Since I spring out of bed like a hyperactive child mainlining powdered sugar at 5am, it’s quite surprising we are still married. The kids are, as you would expect, a mixed bag in between. The cookies that we have not been making this winter have been because nobody wants to get up in the morning and make them. I’m bumping us back an hour so that the cookies can come back and so that there is less whining in the morning. The high pitch is hurting my ears.
Four, the hours are starting in March, rather than now. January and February are our slowest times of the year. It’s cold, everyone is broke from Christmas credit cards, etc. No sense adding on additional hours and additional payroll right when we are doing the least amount of business. So we’ll start these new hours/days on March 1st, except for the Saturday hours. We’ll start them next week.
Five, we’ll keep our tour times starting at 8am. That way when a summer time tour starts at 8 (makes sense when it’s hot as blazes) it will finish just as the store opens at 9am. The boy, who gives the tours on Saturdays, isn’t one of my problem children for getting up in the morning so no big deal for him to start at 8am.
We’ll announce this again as we get closer, and of course update the website, Yelp, Google, etc with all of our new hours. Till then, dream of chocolate chip cookies and warmer weather.
I woke up on January 2nd at 5am, to a stupidly cold day. I thought to myself, “Self, this is a good day to do some office work. Where the heat is. With warm socks on. And a hot mug of tea.”
While I was having my little day dream, I checked my phone to see what the world had to offer.
So at five o’something AM I see this text above.
A deer has somehow hurt itself and is laying on the ground near our fence. It’s alive but mortally injured. Rather than let it suffer, I need to go out and shoot it. Great. That’s a nice start to a day. Murder. But as the owner, boss, and resident gun nut, it’s up to me.
Then the second part of the text pictured above comes through.
“Oh, by and by. I thought I’d mention that the 1300 pound crazy milk cow has scampered off and is running loose in the dark.”
Um, what?!
Hopefully I suggest that she’ll come back to her calf. I mean, surely they only brought mom up for milking, not the calf too. That means that mom, after a quick job, will turn around and head back to baby. So maybe I’ll still get my morning in front of the heat vent??
You can’t see the time stamps next to these, but they happened over several minutes. Several tense minutes between the next to the last, and the last text.
Before the last text showed up, I looked outside and saw that it’s, oh I don’t know, this cold.
I grab my 19 layers of clothes and pile them on. I get the last part of the text message as I’m heading to the barn. They found her. She’s circled all the way back around to the main cattle herd, where I’d taken her from January 1st. She’d jumped the wire, her calf went under the wire, and everyone was home.
There were some attempts to get her back to the barn, which were fruitless. Instead of being part of that craziness, I instead went over to see about this deer. I have no idea what happened to the deer, but it was paralyzed in it’s back two legs. It would either die of exposure, predation, or starvation. Rather than those terrible outcomes, I shot it and drug it back to the barn.
Well most of the way. Miguel met me with the tractor and a pallet to place the deer on so I didn’t have to drag it all the way.
So we had an escape, a murder, and no milk. And it wasn’t even 7:30 yet.
Fortunately the next day ended quite a bit better. After another merry chase involving the Clarks and myself, we finally got Betsy not just in the correct pasture, but in the barn itself.
The advantage of being in the barn is it is warmer but more importantly it is only a short jaunt over to the milking parlor so there really isn’t much chance of escape.
The end product
Milking for the first week is always the hardest. Once the cows discover that we are just milking like normal again, they are waiting at the gate mooing wanting to get started. But that first week is always tough to get them back in the habit. It’s kind of like getting the kids back to school the first week. That first day is awful, the second day, hopefully better but not really. But by the last day of the week, everyone is in a routine and it goes reasonably well.
I mentioned that Betsy had had her calf and that we’d start milking on January 2nd. The way it works here on the farm is the Clarks handle the milking chores. That means that other than random exceptions, I don’t really have anything to do with the milking. But with milking starting up again, along with it being New Years, it meant I had a wee bit of involvement. Or so I thought.
On New Years day, after feeding everyone else, I say that Betsy, Hedy, and the calf were all not too far away from the pasture where we normally keep our milk cows. Moving the milk cows is traditionally pretty easy because they are quite tame and they are used to eating out of your hand. I still had Spork with me so I grabbed a bale of hay that they’d need and some bananas and headed down to the gate. Both milk cows eyes me as I approached and Hedy came immediately when she saw I had bananas. In fact, she walked past me and got in before I realized she was even in the pasture. With Hedy happily munching away, I walked down to Betsy.
I could see immediately that she looked flighty. She wanted a banana but she had a calf and she had no interest in behaving. I got her to eat a couple of bananas but after that she took off and ran away. Sigh. Spork and I closed off that section of pasture and walked her around to where the gate was, and into the pasture. She immediately took off running down to the other gate to escape. Fortunately it was closed already so in the pasture she went.
Understand, this is the pasture where she lives 99% of the time. It’s where her friends are. She’s only being hard headed because it’s different than where she was the previous few weeks. But with everyone where they were supposed to be, I let Erin know she was ready to start milking on January 2nd.
So ends my involvement in milking, or so I thought. For that part of the story, see part 2.
Sometimes I have really cool projects that I’m working on. For instance the golf ball cannon we made for Christmas, along with the brass monkey shot holder was about as cool as it gets. Or the hydraulic lift/drop trailer that we made for moving pigs around the farm. Those are fun and exciting projects.
But sometimes you just need to knock something out to get it off the list.
Old original GE motor
I had this really old GE motor hanging around the shop. I don’t recall what it came off of, but I think it was from my dad’s time. Based on the name plate, and the condition and type of cable attached to it, it’s really old. Like 60s or 70s.
Step 1 was to find out if I’d been keeping this motor around for all these years and it didn’t even work. Luckily I had a cable in the shop already so a quick rewire and test.
It works!
For all the grinding stuff I have in the shop, the one thing I don’t have is a wire wheel. Wire wheels are great for cleaning up rusty metal, or cleaning up uneven surfaces. They don’t remove metal, just polish it, which is perfect for when you are welding something made from scraps and cut offs. Something we do all the time here.
Metal in its natural state after hanging around the shop.
The above is a good example of what we deal with. This is a cutoff from a previous project. It’s perfectly good metal, once all the surface rust is taken off. Normally we’d use a hand held grinder to clean this up for welding. However with a wire wheel, and about 20 seconds of work, it can look like this.
After about 20 seconds on the wire wheel.
This is really handy when you are putting together quick projects. But despite having two belt grinders, and a bench grinder, I didn’t have a wire wheel grinder. But I did have an old motor that ran 1750 RPMs on 110 volts.
Step 2, after figuring out that the motor worked, was to make a shaft that would extend the short stub from the motor out about 8″ so there is room to work around the wire wheel. That is important when you are trying to clean up all sides of something oddly shaped.
Shaft and collar for wire wheel
This was a fun little lathe project. A few pieces of scrap metal and some lathe work and we go from scraps to something useful. First I turned down the larger coupling you see on the left. Once I had it the correct size, I broached a keyway so that it could mate to the key on the motor. Then a different piece of metal is turned down to the extension. That’s the shiny bit. Then I TIG welded the two together and turned the extension to final size, truing it up on the lathe in the process.
Wire wheel with keyway
This end of the shaft had a keyway cut on the mill. That’s the slot you see cut into the end of the shaft on the top. I hand filed a keyway into the wire wheel, attached two locking collars purchased from Agri Supply, and fired it up.
The finished project, ready to go to work
The intent of this project was to get it knocked out quickly. With that in mind, I purchased a stand from Amazon.com. Of course I ended up having to fix the machining mistakes on the stupid thing, plus deal with the fact it was too short (missed that in the description). I also had to redrill the holes in the “universal” mounting plate, because of course they didn’t line up. I could have built a better stand in the time I spent fixing this one but oh well, it’s done now.
I already had a switched outlet at this location so it’s simply walk up, put on safety glasses (wire wheels are scary), and flick the switch for a quick clean up. Easy. Total direct cost, about $15.00 and about 4 hours of labor. Everything else was scrounged around the shop.
The girls have the day off today, which means no cookies. But instead, you have Jeanette working along with Crystal. For those of you who haven’t met her yet, Jeanette is our newest employee and is covering either Wednesday or Friday shifts for us, depending on the schedule. Today is a great opportunity for our regular Saturday customers to get to meet Jeanette and see what a wonderful and knowledgeable person she is.
It’s also a rare day off for the girls so send happy thoughts their way and hope they are enjoying their day off.
135 bales of hay for our cows. We’ve already fed this much by January.
This past week I finally received in the last hay for the winter. I switched hay farmers this year because my new farmer would deliver the same hay, for the same price, as I was picking up hay from my old farmer. Since it takes an entire day to haul three loads of hay (51 bales), and we go through about 250 bales of hay per winter, that means it takes me 5 full days of hauling hay to get all the hay here. When the price is the same and I get 5 days of my time back, I switch.
Except that’s not how it worked out. Last year my new hay guy delivered like magic. All I had to do was send a text and hay was here the same day or at the latest the next. New equipment, nice people to deal with. It was all good. This year, the first few loads showed up, and then it stopped. And then things got flakey. He kept promising to call, but never did. Over and over again. He threw on a delivery charge when I finally receive the bill I’d requested a couple months before. A delivery charge I’d never paid before. It took several months to finally get one more load of hay and then things fell completely off the rails and he stopped responding completely. Not, “I’m sorry I can’t bring you more hay like a promised”, just stopped talking leaving me high and dry with promises broken. Sigh, I hate relying on other people.
Luckily, the old had farmer I had used for years had a SNAFU of his own and hadn’t sold any of the hay he normally reserved for me. The property owner (the actual land owner, I deal with the farmer who cuts his hay) called me about this time and asked why I hadn’t been by to pick up my hay this year. I explained that I’d told the farmer I needed it delivered and the farmer couldn’t do that, but if my normal allotment of hay was sitting there in his way, I’d come and get it. Since I had about four days of hay left at this point, this was an extremely lucky turn of events.
Three days of hauling hay later and we have the rest of the hay we need to get through the winter. Of course, I had plan B, and C, but I sure am glad it worked out that I was able to go back to my original hay farmer. I think next year I’ll keep him and just find time to haul hay.
We have a lot of family and friends who follow us on this website. So please indulge me while I share something that is pretty much a family story but obviously wouldn’t be possible if we didn’t farm and farm the way we do. Plus folks seem to enjoy more than just pictures of cows so here is some behind the scenes views of what we do on Christmas here at Ninja Cow Farm.
Not long after Wildflower was born, our neighbor Dustin came up with an idea for a Christmas present from him that would be for all the kids. He decided to keep all his pocket change over the year, and then wrap it up as a treasure for the kids. But just giving them a box of coins was kind of boring, so he decided that the kids could find the treasure on a treasure hunt. This was a hugely successful idea as what is better for little kids than having a big pile of loot to sort through, and a fun adventure to go and find the treasure made it all the more special. The fact that is was pennies and nickels mattered not one bit.
The first few years, the kids were way little so the entire event consisted of a treasure map created by Uncle Dustin, and a treasure “hidden” right behind the house, under a bush, etc. You know, kind of like an Easter egg hunt where the eggs are pretty much just laying on the grass so the little kids can just walk up and find them? Yeah, like that.
The treasure maps were a thing of beauty though. Dustin has an art background and he’d draw them, scorch the edges, have funny sayings on them, etc. They really were over the top. To this day, I believe every single map is hanging in one or the other kids rooms for every year we’ve done this.
Like most things, the event grows over time. In 2016, the kids had gotten old enough that we felt that the adventure could get a little more, say, challenging. I checked in with SWMBO, who is in charge of safety and the kids well being (I’d dangle them by their ankles over alligators, safely of course but you know, dads and whatnot.) She was ok with ramping things up!
Dustin and I set about building some items for the adventure that were beyond the norm. I went in the shop and built a grappling hook, and Dustin and I built a fire trough from some metal channel and a model rocket igniter we had laying around. Dustin turned his treasure map into a treasure journal and we turned the simple Christmas adventure into an hour long trek around the farm.
To give you some idea of what I am talking about, here is the family video we sent out to our friends and family from 2016.
Last years adventure was a huge hit. The kids were scared, excited, and had a grand time marching around the farm following clues and tackling the challenges. The Christmas adventure has now become a solid part of our tradition and a welcome part of Christmas day.
The way we schedule Christmas is to split it into three parts. One, we get up and open stockings and a couple of presents. Wildflower and I would start at 5am. SWMBO would start at 9am. We compromise and start about 7:30am. Then usually about 9am or so, we pause Christmas and Spork and I go and feed the animals. There are no days off on a farm.
When we get back, we meet Uncle Dustin, usually at our front door, and he delivers the Christmas map/book/journal/clue/whatever. Then the entire family treks off on our adventure for an hour or so.
When we get back, we get something to eat, then continue with the rest of our Christmas. It ends up taking nearly all day and we move at a very sedate pace, opening a few presents and letting the kids play with them before we move on. At this point, I cannot imagine a more enjoyable Christmas day, unless maybe it was this.
But only if we still have a treasure hunt, just in shorts and flip-flops.
Since last year went so well, SWMBO allowed that we could step up the level of difficulty again for the kids this year. Instead of small fires, we were thinking explosions and whatnot. Several nights of planning (read drinking) went into this years plans and both Dustin and I spent several days working on projects. And the result? Well, before you can watch the video, I need to explain a few things.
One, I need to explain who Bill is. I don’t know how it started. At some point Spork was doing something, and I made the comment about his older brother. I’m always messing with the kids, telling them things that aren’t true, mainly as a source of humor to them and to me, but also for a lesson on occasion. For example, how many times have you witnessed a parent scold children who were misbehaving in public? When my kids get rowdy in public, assuming I’m not the ring leader of the misbehaving (it happens) then I’ll say in a bad stage whisper, “Hey, we are in public. Remember to pretend you are normal!” Being home schooled they are very aware that we are different from “normal” people. They smile, quiet down, and behave for at least several minutes. It gets the point across, but with some self-deprecating humor instead of a red faced parent yelling.
So back to Spork misbehaving. Spork looks at me innocently and asks, “Older brother?”
“Oh yes, your older brother…..Bill.”
Now my oldest brother was named Bill, maybe that’s where the name came from. Who knows why I picked that name, it was just random.
“I have an older brother?”
“Oh yes. Had actually. He’s not…..here…anymore. And he was bad. Actually he was doing just what you were doing just now…and that was the end of him. That’s why we don’t talk about him anymore.” A smile to let him know I’m kidding. And a crazy look in my eye to make him question if I actually was.
Message delivered.
Over the years, Bill has been killed in numerous way. Not cleaning up your room, dating girls, giving your mother lip, hitting your sister. Every way you can imagine, Bill has met his untimely demise. It has become a running joke over the years and Bill quickly became like Kenny. You know, this guy?
However, I can mention Bill, and the kids get the point quickly. Better straighten up. Well after all of our planning, we thought that this year’s adventure should be the search for their long lost brother Bill.
Also, being the mean ogre that I am, I’ve made it very clear that I don’t like our dog Ruby. I try to give her away constantly to customers, threaten to eat her, you know, the normal stuff. In the second part of our adventure, Spork has to shoot a target with a rifle, which explodes. What isn’t explained in the video is that we’d put an effigy of Ruby in a cage. She could only be “released” by a shot on target, which of course Spork had to perform.
Except the target was an explosive that blew Ruby up. That’s why you see The Princess carrying around a stuffed dog for the rest of the video. That was the blown and up and rescued Ruby dog. When we got home, and Christmas was over, the girls raided my boo boo box and had a few days of pretend vet hospital time getting the stuffed dog back to full health. I’m happy to say the stuffed dog has made a full recovery and now resides in Wildflower’s expansive collection of stuffed animals, living the high life.
One item that I routinely get requests for is fresh produce in our store. I’ve always politely explained that produce just isn’t our business and we are not set up for it.
Lynn and her daughters at our event.
We have brought produce here on occasion, for special events and we have had pretty good sales. But we don’t have enough foot traffic here day to day to sustain a good selection of fresh produce, such as what a grocery store or a farmers market maintains.
However, I had a thought in 2017 of something that we could do instead that I think would work. What about being a drop point for a produce farms CSA program? That would allow us to bring in fresh produce for people weekly. It would also help the selling farmer because rather than having to man a booth or drive to multiple addresses, they can just drop off our customers CSA boxes that morning, and we’ll handle the distribution during our store hours. We won’t make anything on it, but it is a value add to the customers. Where we’ll make our money (we need to be sustainable too) is in securing our customers coming to our store weekly. That should mean less trips to Food Lion and more purchases from what we do sell. So it’s a win-win-win.
I’ve reached out to a few people, but one has already gotten back to me with information on her CSA program for 2018. Chickadee Farms in Clayton. Chickadee is exactly what and who we are trying to help when we take on new partnerships. They are small, family run, and concerned about sustainability both for the environment and for their operation. They are obviously local and believe in the local movement. And important to a CSA, they are experienced enough to reliably produce quality produce weekly, but not so big they don’t need our help.
Jennifer has already announced our farm as a drop point for their 2018 CSA program to her existing customers. She has also sent me over a flyer for me to send out to our customers. She only has so many slots available for CSA customers, so the signups are on a first come, first serve basis. Take a look at her website, her reviews, and then her information at the below link about the CSA.
Your agreement is directly with Jennifer at Chickadee so there is nothing for you to do through me other than say hello when you are picking up your fresh spring veggies!
I hope you find this opportunity valuable. We are trying to respond to customer requests in a way that works for everyone involved.
I already mentioned that I was going to talk about my shop projects this week, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about what the difference between winter and summer farming is. This is a farm blog after all.
Summer time farming is busy. Our brood cows have to be moved to our leased farm (Hi David and Tamara!) along with the calves. That means that we need to check fencing, test hot wires, make repairs, and routinely check on the cows.
Here on our farm, the cows have to be moved to a fresh paddock every single day. That means setting up and taking down temporary paddocks so the cows always have fresh grass, and the grass has 30-90 days rest in between grazings.
Produce is coming out of our ears and we are constantly running around picking up produce, sorting produce, hauling off cardboard, pallets, totes, etc. Everything is high volume. Thrown in the occasional repairs, sick animals, etc and things can get hectic.
In the winter, things are different. All the cows come home to our farm and live in one big herd. We dry off our milk cows so milking is over for a bit. We no longer setup and take down paddocks as the cows are now on hay and produce. Yes we now have to deliver hay daily but that just takes a few minutes. Produce drops by probably 75% and we are basically scrounging from day to day for enough to feed.
In the store, Thanksgiving and Christmas are pretty busy, usually our biggest volume months of the year. We are a specialty store so it’s kind of like going to church on Christmas. In June, you can sit pretty much where you want in church, except that one good seat where that old guy always claims as his own! Jerk. Oops, did that come out loud?
Anyway, try going to Church on Christmas. People you swear have never sat foot in the place are there, with their entire extended family. There is no room in the parking lot. It’s like tourist season. That’s kind of what it’s like for us. We have customers we only see once or twice a year, and always at the holidays. During the year they eat grocery store meat, but when family comes into town, they bring out the good stuff, our stuff. We love all of our customers so we are thankful for whenever they come.
But then January hits. All the tourist customers go back to Food Lion. A lot of our regulars get their credit card bill and die of shock. They go on New Years diets both for food and for spending. So we go from our busiest time of year, to our slowest time of year in the store. January and February are SLOW in the store, definitely the worst months of the year, like 1/2 the volume of December and it happens like turning off a light switch. Stepping back from the details it’s actually rather interesting to see how people behave as a group and how events and holidays have such a profound affect on people behaviors and patterns.
So as farmers, we can either freak out that things have come off the rails, or we can find the good in the patterns. For me, the opportunity is to take advantage of these slow times. These are the times where we’ve expanded the store, looked back at what we’ve done and what is changed, and planned on what is to come.
But for this year, it’s time for getting into the shop and getting some projects done. One of the first projects for this winter, besides cleaning up and organizing, was getting ready for Christmas by making a cannon.
Kids on Christmas day, discussing the planned shot
What, you don’t make cannons for your Christmas adventures? What kind of normal life do you live? This is the secret project I referenced a few weeks ago with a picture of some brass in the lathe. That brass was converted into a working golf ball cannon, which was just one part of the overall Christmas adventure put on by our neighbor, Dustin, every year for the kids. Darling Wifey is working on a video of this years event currently so I’ll post it when she’s satisfied.
Brass monkey for holding shot for the cannon
And of course we had to build a shot holder to go along with the cannon.
Here is a test shot on the range to hold you over till the actual video comes out.
Have you ever noticed that when you see a cool old car that’s been beautifully restored, it was from some old guy in the midwest? Like North Dakota? Or upper Michigan? Ever wonder why that is? It’s because after the snow is blown, the sidewalk salted, and the wife and kids made busy, the men disappear into their garage/basement/shed/etc and tinker away the cold and dark hours of winter.
Here in North Carolina, we don’t really have the same thing going on. Heck wasn’t it 70 degrees a few days ago? I’ve been surfing in February many times. Sometimes it was cold, but sometimes it was shorts weather out of the water. We have it made compared to those hardy souls in the frozen midwest.
These past few years, I’ve spent a lot of my winter months in my office, working on year end paperwork, creating the website, doing posts and newsletters to all you fine folks. But this year, I decided I was going to do something different. No, scratch that, this year I was going to do something I used to do. This winter I was going to spend more time in my shop, like my cold cousins do during their winter time. No I’m not restoring a classic car, I’ve already been there and done that. What I’m doing is piddling.
You see, I enjoy just being in my shop, knocking out little projects. And there are SO MANY projects to be done on a farm. Often these projects aren’t able to be tackled because they ought to be done, or it would be nice if they were done, but they don’t HAVE to be done. That means they languish while actual farm work is tackled daily. Or maybe we go to the piano recital, or I get my flying credentials freshened up, or play airsoft with Spork and his friends. Basically all the other stuff that happens in life takes priority, as it should.
But this winter, it has purposefully been focusing on getting into the shop and working on projects. Shop projects. I’ve already been hard at work these past few weeks trying to get some projects tackled, completed, and off the to do list. Some of them have been there for 5 years or more. I haven’t been posting pictures or details of these projects because, well, they aren’t fuzzy animals or funny farming stories. What that means is there really hasn’t been much to post. However, I’m going to rectify that this week. I’m going to take some pics and tell you folks about what I am actually working on so you can see what else goes on on a farm. We’ll interject some cute critter stuff here and there and of course talk about farming as well, but be prepared for a little variety this week.
It’s also a rare day off for the girls so send happy thoughts their way and hope they are enjoying their day off.
