Ninja Cow Farm LLC

And now our final part in this series

Events work

We showed in 2017 that we can produce large events here on the farm. We can get thousands of people on and off the farm with relatively little trouble. We have also demonstrated that we have a desirable location, being only 15 minutes from downtown Raleigh.

So what does that mean for 2018? I think events need to become a larger part of what we do. It is a natural fit for our advertising model. It’s something we can spool up for, have a big day, and then go back to our normal farming lifestyle. It’s something where we can choose the dates we are willing to be occupied and the days where we are already engaged. Events work for us.

So what do we need to do to have more events? First, we need an event coordinator. I don’t like putting on events. I don’t mean the event day itself, those are kind of fun. I don’t like all the logistics, the phone calls, the last minute changes, etc. If it is up to me to coordinate all that, we aren’t going to do events. Plus I’m married to a German by heritage, GE trained project manager. SWMBO is a force of nature. But because of that, my event planning skills have atrophied to the point of non-existence. That’s saying something since I’ve actually been President of two organizations that put on six figure events as their major event of the year. I do have pretty good experience, but that is all gone now.

In the past we’ve done some events in conjunction with other people who did events for a living. I think a partnership where we work with someone more formally would work. That’s a to do for 2018. If you know of anyone, please send them my way. People like that are always looking for venues and I’ve certainly turned enough of them down in the past. Now I need to hook up with them.

What kind of events? Maybe weddings? Corporate events?

We did a beer and BBQ tasting event here once and that worked well. I don’t know, it will probably depend on who we work with.

Also, Lucy did a good job of spooling up the events we had in 2017. I think we can have some farm only events that are smaller but maybe more frequent. Maybe a few in the spring, and a few in the fall. Something to keep the farming thing going and out front because that is what we do primarily.

One last thought on events. If you’ve been here, you know that we primarily run this farm for the education of our kids. The Princess is not far from turning twelve, which means before I can blink she’ll be sixteen. When she’s sixteen, she’ll probably leave my employment and go get a job somewhere else. However, if we start doing events, then should would have four years of event planning experience when she’s sixteen. Definitely not as the primary, but certainly exposure to the process and experience with what it takes to be successful. When she starts working elsewhere, she can work her other job until we have an event day, then take the day off to help with the event. It lets her have her primary W2 pay for gas job, but also continue building her experience as an event planner.

Plus the three girls in the store on Saturdays is going to get old at some point. Eventually Wildflower needs to move up to cashier so where does The Princess work then? Events maybe?

Fast forward two more years. Do you think an eighteen year old with six years of event planning experience, and nine years of cashier experience is employable? Does she have something more on her college application than “played soccer?” A parents primary job is to work themselves out of a job. I’d say this plan could work.

Facilities

Lastly, we need to continue to improve our facilities here.

With the reduction in pig numbers in 2017, we are finally able to limit and hopefully in 2018 eliminate the hog smell from our pig paddocks. I turned down event opportunities in 2017 because I wasn’t comfortable with the smell. Come spring we’ll begin our first full paddock rotation since 2015, as we have multiple paddocks now laying fallow. Once we start the spring rotation, we can continue with our rotation program going forward and once that starts, that should be the end of the hog smell. It’s 99% gone now, I’m just looking for the last 1%. This was always the plan originally, but things didn’t work out as planned.

We added a second road on and off the farm in 2017. Since we have a one lane road it’s a bit difficult to have people egress when the traffic is flowing in. We make it work, and work well, but a second road and dedicated exit is preferable. It will need additional work in 2018 to make it usable by cars, but at least it’s usable by trucks and tractors at this point.

Lastly, we need to look at building another building here on the farm. I already have the spot picked, as well as the general plan for what we’ll build. What I haven’t done is decided that this is indeed the plan going forward. I also haven’t gotten quotes from builders so there is still quite a bit to do on that front. But it’s in the concept stage. Hopefully we’ll break ground in late 2018 or 2019.

All in all, 2017 was a very good year. Once again I am very thankful to all of our customers and supporters. For a small business, every single customer, referral, review, etc is critical.

I’m also thankful for all of our employees, both Miguel and Vicente as well as all the girls in the store.
Lastly I am thankful for all of our partner farmers. While the large percentage of what we sell is meat from our farm, we have a lot of partner farms that we proudly represent in our store. I don’t want to be in the chicken business (Hi Christy!) or the honey business (Hi Jennifer!) or any of the other businesses that we represent by carrying these products. I’d prefer to be good at what I do, and help lift up other farmers who are good at what they do.

We look forward to seeing you in 2018 where we already have some new opportunities that we’ll be announcing shortly so stay tuned.

 

This is a continuation of our series on results from 2017 and plans for 2018

We are not a grocery store.

Last year, we made an effort to turn our meat store into a bit of a grocery store. That effort certainly hasn’t been a bust, but it hasn’t been the success we had hoped either.

People come here for meat. Meat that is ethically and sustainably raised. Maybe they get some salad dressing, maybe a rub for their roast, but by and large they stock up on meat, look around vaguely, and are out the door. While some things are now on continuous reorder like our cheeses and our chips and salsa, we still have the initial orders from summer of some of our products sitting here. That’s enough to last about 30 minutes on pig day. Six months later, we’ve sold maybe two or three. At the same time, we’ve sold thousands of pounds of meat.

So does this mean we are going to drop all non-meat items from the store? Oh heavens no. The reason we pick the things we do is because we eat it in our own kitchen, first and foremost. We don’t sell things we don’t like and use. Also, we have some items that are definitely popular so those will stay as well. But we are phasing out some items, and will be much slower to bring in new items in the future. In 2017, we were effectively wide open on bringing in new stuff if it met the criteria. In 2018, we’ll simply be more selective.

No need to expand again anytime soon

It seems that each year we’ve expanded the store in some way. In 2018, I don’t see the need to expand. If anything, we may have a touch too much shelf space as it is. What we could do is a better job of merchandising the products we have in the store. Put simply, items that are displayed at eye level move well. Items that are displayed at knee level may as well be invisible. We have a lot of knee level shelves and not enough eye level shelves. Something to look at going forward.

Matching production to sales makes life much easier.

When we sold off 80% of our pork, it was like we suddenly went on vacation. Just running a 50 cow and 40 pig operation was peanuts compared to the 135 pig and a 50 cow operation. We are actually getting ahead on the to do list, rather than constantly being behind. I’m not sure that 40 pigs on the ground isn’t too many and I’ll take a harder look at that going into 2018. We may drop back to 30.

Despite such a drastic reduction in pork production, we are still more than stocked up in the store. Customers have no idea we’ve reduced our headcount based on the freezers. Reducing our pork production has been the single biggest positive step we’ve taken in 2017. I know it was a good idea because now I wish we’d done it in 2016.

And for the rest, see our last post in this series.

And now, part 2 of what we learned in 2017, and where we are going in 2018.

Word of mouth matters

You wouldn’t believe the number of people who walk in the door and say, “My friend said I HAVE to come and see your farm!” There is no better validation of your work than having someone recommend you to a friend. It shows a trust that the original customer places in you, that you will live up to their billing and not make them look stupid by recommending you. We take that trust seriously and really appreciate every one of our recommendations. I try to find out who the customer was if I can and thank them personally but things have grown to a point where I cannot do that much anymore, which I don’t like.

What has been interesting is that these word of mouth referrals may come in more than a year later. “Well duh, of course it takes a while for someone to come for the first time.” But when the person comes in, we find they live in Eagle Ridge which is literally next door. That means they’ve been driving past us for over a year, with a referral from a trusted friend rolling around in their head, and yet they took a year to stop in. Nothing exactly wrong there, but certainly an opportunity.

Always recruit new customers

This one seems to be the opposite of our focus/no advertising philosophy. I’ve heard it said, and our experience validates it, that 90% of your customers will be gone in 2 years in this industry. They move, change jobs, change shopping habits, go on a new diet, go off of the new diet. Whatever. That means to be viable, you have to ALWAYS be gaining new customers. This is the opposite of my previous industry where I had customers who’d done business with my father in the 60s and who I still did business with when I sold out.

The realization that most of your customers will leave despite your best efforts almost makes you think that customers should be viewed as disposable. I mean, why bend over backwards if they are going to be gone shortly anyway, right? Ahh, not so fast Grasshopper (anybody know what that’s from), that’s the Wall Street in you.

No, you have to treat your customers like gold because your reputation is what keeps bringing in new customers. Plus after three years of this, we are starting to see customers 2.0. Originally they showed up on a new diet/plan/etc, bought for a few months, then disappeared for a year or so. Now, three years in, we are starting to see some of those customers come back for round two (Hi Drew!). They are even more passionate this time than the last and they immediately get back to business rather than sampling and testing you out because at this point, we are a known product.

No, you have to treat customers as well as you can, because they are what this business is about. That rule never changes in business if you are in a real business.

Continued in part 3.

I hope you are not reading this with a hangover. Or if you are, it was totally worth it.

How did it get to be 2018 already?

January 15th marks three years since I sold my company and started farming full time. We went from people who had absolutely no idea about what we were doing in the retail business, to people that three years later, still have no idea what we are doing in the retail business.

That’s not actually true. We have learned a few things along the way.

But before we get to what we’ve learned, let me say a bit about what our results were for 2017.

Results

In 2015, our first full year in business, we didn’t do much business for a “real” business. What we did do was about double what we’d done as a part-time business in 2014 so that was encouraging.

In 2016, we signed up with Groupon (a mistake) and used them to really boost our brand. It cost us a ton of money and earned us our only bad review we’ve ever had from a customer. For these numbers, I’m not tracking Groupon related sales as they are not sustainable or native. So for 2016, we grew about 135% (roughly, I’m doing this from memory). Phenomenal growth but again we were coming off of a pretty low number. Really 2016 was our first “real” year in business.

For 2017, again disregarding Groupon, we have grown 29% in sales. This is with us turning down opportunities for the last half of the year, and reducing our hog numbers significantly. Of course, part of those numbers were the actual sales of the hogs but since we sold them for pennies on the dollar to make our head count change, they actually don’t account for very much of our sales.

29% growth in a business is very strong and something I hope we can repeat next year. We certainly have the opportunities, we just have to capitalize on them. More about those later in this series.

We had a budget for sales in 2016 and I was watching it down to the last customer yesterday because it was that close. And the results? After a year of sales, we surpassed our annual budget with the second to last customer of the day! We were only $160.66 over our annual budget! It was that close! As my old controller Doug would say, that’s not a well run business, that masterful budgeting (guess who prepared the budgets back then).

99% of our sales is through our little store on the farm and is handled by our girls, both my daughters, as well as Lucy, Jeanette, and Crystal. A big thanks to all the girls for their hard work.

And of course, a huge thanks to our customers, without whom none of this would be possible!

So now onto our lessons learned from

Reviews and web results matter

Ok, this isn’t exactly a revelation, especially to someone who picks his lunch typically by Yelp. However when we started, I made the conscious decision that we were not going to advertise, except on Eatwild. Every other opportunity to advertise that has come in, and there are lots, has been denied. Some make lots of sense, some are relatively inexpensive, but all are told no.

Why? Because you can’t get anywhere by not being focused. And our focus was on good service, good products, and online presence from the beginning. That seems easier to say now that we are ranking first page on people’s Google searches, ranking higher than people who have had a store front at the farmers market for years. But when we started, I had a website with a couple of posts, no budget, and no magic trick to get us ranked. Staying focused works. And part of staying focused is saying no to opportunities that are good, but distracting.

One thing that I have joined was Nextdoor.com. I heard from someone that we had people talking about us (in a good way) on Nextdoor. I’d never heard of it so I decided I better find out what it is and what is going on. I’d say it’s like Facebook but for your neighbors. I’ve found it to be a useful website if for nothing other than I cannot believe the number of lost pets that have been returned through Nextdoor. Simply amazing. I really enjoy talking to neighbors instead of the whole world like you do on Facebook. Oh, and we do get customers from there so it does have business value.

More in the next post on what we learned, and where we are going for 2018.

One of the things I try to do this time of year is to work on the website and update things to make them better. Often that process involves breaking what was already working, then frantically trying to fix the mistakes while simultaneously having a heart attack and a stroke because I’ve lost years of work. After much struggle last winter, it appeared that the only way to really update our site was to simply rebuild the entire site from scratch, as that looked easier than fixing all the bugs and glitches that came with the new look. That task, as you can imagine, didn’t get moved to the top of the list.

However the latest release of WordPress seems to have fixed some of my problems from the past. The preview of the new theme looked pretty good. It is the same them that I used on another website I run, that was indeed created from scratch, so after a few tweaks I went live with it. Since today and tomorrow I’m covering for the guys and running the farm, I may not get a lot of time on the new layout but if you see something that looks broken or wonky, please let me know so I can put it on the list of things to fix.

With that said, how do you like the new look? The old look was very distinctive but it was also dark. Very dark. Some of the text was a touch hard to read, especially on the side bars. This new looks really opens up the site and also promotes the side text much more. The search bar is much more visible, allowing people to hopefully find what they are looking for. This layout is also much better viewed on a phone, which is what most people use to view websites anymore anyway so this should be an improvement overall.

If you need me, I’ll be either feeding critters or nerding out on the website. No New Years revelry for me (which is totally normal)

We had a big day on Wednesday with lots of customers. But Friday was sadly slow for Jeanette. With today’s clear skies and much warmer weather, we’d love to see you out at the farm today to shop or take a tour. No really, don’t leave me here with these girls by myself! Remember what happened last time, when they were going crazy? I’m the adult in charge today, and I’m 3/4 crazy myself. I don’t think I can keep myself in check and these girls as well.

I know it is the post Christmas, pre-New Years strange time warp time, believe me. 

I haven’t started drinking at 10am…yet….but it has occurred to me. Luckily I’ve been busy doing other things. But more on that later. For now, save me from these crazy women, drop by and say hello today.

We’ve had a busy week this week. People are taking special Christmas tours (more on those later, we have some doozies), people are buying Christmas special cuts of meat, we’ve sold 1/2 of a cow and 1/2 of a hog, a live pig, it goes on and on.

Because of Christmas, I’ve had to make special trips to the processor, make special meet ups, I have to make a few deliveries to customers houses (yes we make deliveries) and I’ve had to go by our restaurant customer to make a delivery as well. It has been a busy but enjoyable week, but definitely one that is out of the norm.

Luckily, for the first time ever I timed my restaurant delivery properly and was there just before they opened for lunch. 

I never get to actually stay and eat. It’s always before hours, after hours, or I HAVE to be somewhere for my next meet. Not this day! I spent almost 45 minutes sitting and enjoying my meal, talking to the staff and other customers, and just being a regular customer. It was devine. And for those of you who know I’m on a no carb diet, yes I did eat that cornbread! Totally worth it.

After my meal at Brew N Que, it was time to get back to work. Besides all the stuff I’ve already mentioned, I had a number of special Christmas projects ongoing as well. It was no problem because I had all week to get them done. Since it’s Friday morning, and I’m not finished with the first of the many projects, I’ve got to go, but not before letting everyone know that we are open today from 2-6, and open tomorrow from 8-5 like normal. We are stocked to the gills on everything so if you need anything for Christmas dinner, come see us. I believe we even have one prime rib roast left. It’s about 7 pounds.

I’m off to be a Christmas elf working in Santa’s workshop!

Last Saturday we had a touch of snow. Since this is North Carolina and the actual word snow causes the Governor to declare a state of emergency, we didn’t really expect to see anyone at the store. But we were open regardless, at least till about 4:30.

What that meant was, the girls were in the store with very few customers to wait on. Which meant they got bored. So they asked, very sweetly I might add, if they could play with my old fashioned type writer.  Sure, why not.

I was busy in the shop working on a project so as long as they were entertained, I was happy.

There was a lot of screaming and laughing coming from the store, which is what I normally hear when there isn’t a customer in there. The girls are super polite and helpful when you folks show up, but they are wild women when you aren’t here, which is fine. As long as they know the difference then I’m glad they are having fun.

However they started bringing me type written papers and dropping them off. I’d smile and make nice but I was running a lathe that was spitting metal at me and happy to pull my arm off if I wasn’t paying attention, so I really didn’t read them very well.

Finally later in the day I collected the stack of papers and read through them. This is an example of what I found.

Since it’s a bit hard to read, I’ll transcribe what is typed here in plain text below. Most of the papers were in the form of an interview. This is probably the calmest and sanest of them. I only fix typos where it helps with understanding what they are saying.

Today in the new[s]
You let go!
you let go!
You
Ahhhhhh!
I got it
yeah thats what I thought lady
No i have it lady
atack
atack_
uh you dumb dog [ed. Ruby was in the store]
attack that wahy
ahhhhhhh!
I dont have any arms
come here Ruby
(singing opera)
how is your story coming?
okay lets do this

More opera
charge
attack
retreat
(yelling)
hey guys
(Humming intence music)
charge
retreat
(Barking)
useless dog!
attack her already
You cant use that because thats what were fighting for
put it in Ruby’s bed
(pause)
Charge
(yelling)
you cant steal it
rin [run] ruby
i am going to fight to the enf [end] and i am going to wis[win]
54321 go!!!!!
Ruby your dezd [dead]
Ahhhhhh!
i need water
oh break time.
Crystal can you please not steal the broom
alright
this doesn’t really hurt
that was some dwlicuos [delicious] water
no toys
breaktime over lady.
if you get cornered you die…
ready no touching.
(laughing)
haha you touched me
no it was your fault
(arguing about the rules)

I must admit a few things.

One, I had no idea the Princess could type well enough to be a court stenographer for the crazy that was occurring. She has pages of this stuff.

Two, I thought it was sorta cute till I got to the “singing opera” part. Then I started cracking up.

Three, the last statement about arguing about the rules reminds me of my favorite sport in the world.

If they look back at their lives growing up and in their memories it looks a like a strip from Calvin and Hobbes, I’ll consider my work here well done.

Folks, we received in 1.5 cows this week (counting the one coming Friday). I just put pork and chicken in the freezer. We are well stocked for your Christmas needs. We even have some beef prime rib roasts available (and therefore no ribeyes). The weather looks marvelous for Saturday. Don’t leave me here alone with these crazy people this weekend. Stop by so they straighten up and pretend to act normal for a bit.

This article is really written for my fellow farmers out there, or people who like to tinker. Yes it is farm related, very much so. But this is about the technical side of farming, and how we keep our products cold and safe while being transported from the processor or from other farms.

When I first started getting serious about moving meat for the farm, I had a friend (Hey Paul!) who had a truck that was sitting idle. It was an International medium duty reefer truck that had come back in from lease and was just sitting. Since we’d put about (literally) 1.5 million miles on a truck pretty much just like it at my old company, I felt pretty good about running a truck like this for the farm. It would cool to 20 F and I was more than familiar with the operation and maintenance, so I bought it. For the past four years or so, this has been how we’ve moved meat, eggs, milk, cheese, etc everywhere.

Most farmers like myself just put some coolers in the back of the truck and figure it’ll be ok. But I never trusted coolers. What if I get stuck in traffic (it happened), what if I break down on the road in the summer (it happened). I have 600 pounds of meat, or 30 gallons of milk going bad in a cooler. Nope, I like the box truck and how it cooled itself down, independent of ice or time.

But after four years of running this truck, I’ve realized that it is simply too big for what we need. When fully loaded, with all the goodies from all the farms, everything was single stacked with room to walk around. We were not utilizing 90-95% of the space we were cooling.

Also there is a failing of the particular model cooler that I had. During the summer, if you are sitting still, it tends to overheat the reefer engine and shut down. Not a problem when you are moving, and not a problem period because I just get everything cold and then turn the cooler off when I stop to load. As I leave, I turn it back on and it quickly recools everything. But it always made me nervous that maybe it would shut down when I wasn’t prepared for it.

Plus, the fuel and maintenance bills for a large truck are, well, large. The oil costs more. The filters cost more. The belts cost more. What I needed was a different solution. One that costs less to own and maintain.

Our chicken farmer, Brittany Ridge, has a truck with a dedicated cooler in the bed. It is run from a compressor hooked to the engine. Crank the truck, the box cools. Turn the truck off, the box is a big igloo cooler. It seems to work very well and I was quite jealous. I looked for a solution similar to theirs for a year or so, to no avail.

I know some other farmers have pull behind trailers that they use. They mount a generator to the trailer and run freezers from the generator. Pretty much the same thing that food trucks do so they have kitchen power on the truck. As long as the generator works, then everything is cooling. This would also let me use my existing truck which is really nice. The radio plays my station. The seat fits my butt. That kind of thing. It’s also nice because you can back the trailer up to a building and pull a drop cord and run the freezers from that, saving the generator. That would help when we have a big load of meat like when turkeys show up for Thanksgiving, or someone orders 1/2 of a cow. We could just leave things in the trailer and cool down or freeze depending on what we need.

I wondered about insulating a trailer and putting a CoolBot in to keep things cool. I utilize a CoolBot in our walk in cooler here on the farm. It does fine to keep things cold, but I wasn’t sure about keeping things frozen. Plus I’d need to put a window unit in the trailer, then drag it up and down the highway a lot of miles. That means that some day, that window unit that was designed to sit still is going to bounce one time too many and break. That could be a very bad day. Nah, I needed something with some redundancy.

When I was at Chaudhry’s dropping off a cow, I saw they had a flier for someone selling a used cooler trailer. It had an actual compressor and cooling, not a CoolBot. It looked pretty serious. And used it was $20,000 asking price! Yikes! That is WAY too much. So I was back to freezers and a generator.

I purchased a trailer (harder than you’d think) and then bought three chest freezers that would fit well and hold what I needed from Lowes.

I made metal corner brackets that would hold the freezers in place, and secure them to the floor. But as I was working on this project, I had another thought. Just how much power does it take to run three chest freezers? They are pretty efficient. Why couldn’t I run them from an inverter?

I hooked all three freezers up to my Honda 2000 watt generator and low and behold, it ran them just fine. Usually you do a power calculation, but I had a generator sitting right there so that was the quick and easy solution (the calculation said 1800 watts, btw, when I ran it later).

So if 2000 watts would run the freezers, what did I need for a bit of headroom and future expansion? Looks like Amazon sells a 3000 watt inverter at a good price. Click. Done.

I installed the inverter, with heat shield, and it’s associated 2/0 gauge wiring. (Don’t you just love drilling holes in something brand new? Ugh, me either. But it worked out nicely and looks good.) I routed the cables from the freezers to a central power strip, and then moved to the front of the trailer.

Here I had some issues. Everybody sells V nose trailers now. But I needed room for what I thought then would be my generator but was now my batteries. Finally I found a flat nosed trailer the right size and I had this tongue area to work with. I routed the cabling from the inverter to the batteries, but only after welding on and reinforcing a battery platform with retention. A good bit of wiring, soldering on connectors, etc. and I was able to hit the on button.

So I could run my freezers from my batteries. But that is only half the battle. Now I wanted to recharge the batteries from my truck, which is already merrily producing electricity as I drive. I looked at battery isolators of all varieties. I knew about them from my teenage job as a car stereo installer and also from boats. But I wasn’t really excited about how they worked. Then I came across something I’d never heard of before, an automatic charging relay or ACR. One side goes to the truck electrical system, one side goes to the trailer. It does the smart work in between. Couldn’t be simpler.

So I ordered 50 feet of 2/0 gauge cabling and set about installing the ACR, circuit breakers, quick connect plugs, fuses, and auxiliary grounds. After some troubleshooting (it’s called reading the instructions and doing that part you skipped) I got the ACR online.

That’s pretty much how I felt.

Thursday was the first day I used the new setup. I hooked the trailer up, which takes about .2 extra seconds with the electrical connections. I cranked my truck and watched the volt meter first show the recovery from cranking. Once it hit about 13.5 volts, it dipped back to 13.0 as the ACR switched over and bridged the trailer to the truck batteries. About 20 seconds later, it came back up to its normal 14 volt range and then maintained it for the ride to my first stop.

At one of my stops, I hopped out of the truck and purposefully took my time, giving the freezers about 30 minutes to run on battery power alone. When I cranked the truck, it was the same story. First recover the starting battery, then the ACR bridges, then about a minute before we were back to 14 volts. 30 minutes of run time is recharged in one minute? So several hours of run time will fully recharge before my next stop easily? It truly does work well. This means I can stop for lunch (remember how the box truck couldn’t run when stopped?) or spend a few extra minutes talking to a farmer without worrying about my product on board. It’s not only still cold, it’s actually freezing it down to temp which is an issue sometimes as I get fresh product that hasn’t been frozen yet.

The best part is everything is off the shelf (or off the web) standard stuff. No having to call a repair man or, heaven forbid, having to go to ThermoKing to get anything done. If a freezer dies, it’s still a heck of a cooler to get me through the day and I can stop at pretty much any store and buy a chest freezer off of the floor. Truck stops carry inverters. The ACR is solid state. Everything else is basically wiring. And the best part is I sold the box truck for about double what I have in this entire setup and the maintenance going forward is almost zero. No I don’t have the capacity of the box truck anymore, but that wasn’t a problem to start with.

We’ll see how this setup does over the years, it it can survive the harshness of driving up and down the road, but for now I couldn’t be happier.

Except I have to decide if I’m going to decal the trailer with our farm logo and info. That part hasn’t been decided.