Adam has been with us for over a year, since he was in high school. Adam started out working Saturdays and when he had extra time in his schedule like during the summer. He was always on time, always hustling to do whatever it takes, and always quick with a smile. He told me once he never thought he’d be doing something like farming. I laughingly replied that none of us thought that. However now it’s time for Adam to move onto bigger and better things. First he has to get his sister married off. Then he is going to Salt Lake on his mission trip. And then finally he will be attending BYU in the fall.
I don’t know what Adam is going to do when he is an adult, but I hope he’ll remember an old farmer he used to work for and give him a job when Adam is running his own company. Whatever he does, I know he’ll be a success. He’s too good, and works to hard, to be anything else.
With Adam leaving, we have an opportunity for someone else to take a position with us. This will be general labor on the farm, feeding animals, going to the market with Miguel, handling produce. That kind of thing. I get questions all the time from parents looking for something for their kids to do during the summer. If you have someone with a strong back and a good work ethic, send ’em our way.
The best thing to do is to contact me directly via email with a resume.
There is some chance of rain this afternoon for tours but the girls are happily working away in the store all day where it is dry and cool.
Porky goodness from the farm
The girls have fresh bakes cookies they made themselves sitting on the counter. Also we still have steaks left, plus all the assorted cuts of beef, and plenty of pork, lamb, chicken, dairy, etc. all on hand and ready for your next meal. Stop by and see how the girls are doing today and get some fresh, farm fresh, hippie farm food!
I mentioned a few weeks ago that we had a power outage at the barn. The culprit for this outage is a tree that has been dying for a few years now and is now officially dead.
To make it more complicated, this tree is inside of the pig paddock, with fencing on two sides. The power for the barn is on the third side, and trees are all around it. It’s also leaning towards the power line and the barn and behind it is another tree that is in the way.
First, I had Duke Energy come out and disconnect power from the barn and get the cable out of the way. That was if we dropped anything the wrong direction, we wouldn’t accidentally lose power and tear something up.
The dead tree. A red oak about 35″ across at the cut mark.
By the time the above picture was taken we’d already dropped the small tree behind it. It was only 25″ across at the butt. You know, the kind of tree that would all by itself be a major issue you’d need a tree service for. That one I dropped without even waiting for Miguel to finish feeding to help me. It paled in comparison the dead tree.
Now onto the scary tree. The real killer in tree work is falling limbs. A dead tree is ripe to drop a limb on you and kill you so it’s extra concerning to be working on a tree that is dead.
Since the tree was in the pig paddock and next to the fence, we couldn’t use a tractor to push the tree where we wanted it to go. We brought in our digger derrick with its massive hydraulic winch.
The winch on our bucket truck
We rigged a chain to a tree about 25 yards away and put a pulley on that chain. Then we routed the winch cable through the pulley and back uphill to attach to the dead tree. This allowed us to pull the tree in the direction it needed to go, and more importantly against the direction it wanted to go. Remember it was leaning towards the barn.
Once the tree and winch setup were rigged (after Miguel rightly pointed out I should have the cable higher on the tree), it was time to cut the felling notch in the front of the tree.
Cutting the notch into the front of the tree
It’s actually been a little while since I’ve done any chainsaw work, so it was fun to get in here and do some cutting.
Once the notch was in I checked everything again and then moved onto the back cut. Once the cut was partially in, I inserted a couple of wedges so that the tree would not try to move the wrong direction and then finished my back cut.
A simple drawing of the cuts I’m talking about. The hinge wood is the bit between the red notch cut and the green back cut.
We pulled on the tree a bit with the winch and it wouldn’t move. I’d left plenty of hinge wood so I went back in and cut a bit more. This is the scariest part of working on the tree. It’s too strong to fall, but not strong enough to stay up. You are right at the base of the tree with all kinds of forces at play. I cut a bit more, weakening the hinge, then got back out of there and we pulled with the winch again. Again the tree wouldn’t move.
Finally I remembered the winch was hydraulic, not electric so it would have a little more power if we revved the engine. Miguel gave the truck the gas and the tree finally moved.
Just starting to fallJust about to landThe aftermath
After we had everything on the ground, we went back to work as normal. I called Duke Power and they came right out and hooked our power line back up and Miguel and I cleaned up the tools, trucks, etc. Then Miguel and the boys moved the pigs back out of the barn and into the paddock where they were excited to see this big addition to their home.
I reminded SWMBO (She Who Must Be Obeyed) that we had new lamb in the freezer and that we needed to get it out and cook a meal. This Saturday, she popped over to the store and said, “Ok, I’m here for the lamb and for the meat for the rest of the week.”
You know how you are at a restaurant, and you see the wait staff and the kitchen staff eating there? You feel like this must be a good place to eat because they work they, know everything that goes on, and they like the food. Yeah, that’s our place.
So Saturday SWMBO gets back to the house with this meat and then tells me, “You know we are having lamb on Sunday, right?”
“Huh?” Says I. No I didn’t know that. And by the look she’s giving me, I’m apparently cooking the lamb.
So I break out the sous vide cooker and take the solidly frozen lamb shoulders and conjure up some kind of recipe in record time (like 45 seconds).
Frozen hunks of lamb shoulder
I didn’t have a recipe for lamb shoulder, or especially frozen lamb shoulder. I also didn’t want a bunch of marinades, glazes, etc. I wanted to taste the lamb because I want to be able to tell customers exactly how it tastes. With that in mind, I cut open the packages, placed a couple of shoulders in a new package and sprinkled it liberally with plain old garlic salt from the pantry. I then placed a small sprig of rosemary in each bag, cut from our rosemary bush in the front yard. No muss, no fuss.
Frozen lamb shoulders just starting in the meat aquarium
I then sealed the bags and put the still frozen lamb shoulders in the sous vide cooker. The recipes I glanced at in the 30 seconds I looked ranged in temperature from 131 to 158. I guessed and picked 143. Seems legit.
This was Saturday afternoon. The recipes I looked at also called for cooking from 2 hours to 48 hours. We’d cooked 24 hours for other cuts before and it worked well. Plus, I only had about 15 minutes to do this entire operation because I had customers coming for tours so I was limited on my choices.
On Sunday, SWMBO informed me that we’d eat at 6pm, our normal meal time. Then about 5:30 she decided that the boys would be home at 8:15 so we’d eat then instead of 6pm. Just a 2:15 swing in when things would be done with meat already in the cooker and the oven already preheating!
No worries, I just let the lamb swim in the meat aquarium a bit longer, then pulled them and put them on a sheet pan to dry. I took all the juices that came from the bags they cooked in and put them in a sauce pan to reduce. The juice was really salty so I added about 1 cup of red wine, a bit of water, and about 3/4 cup of balsamic vinegar. I was debating adding a touch of sugar to help with the saltiness but extra vinegar did the trick. I reduced this mix by about 1/3 and took it off the heat.
Meanwhile I’d been taking my now dry lamb shoulders and broiling them in the oven on high broil till they browned nicely. With the lamb shoulders hot from the broiler, and my reduction cooled and thickened, we pulled SWMBOs veggies from the pot and served dinner.
I didn’t’ want wine, but since I had to open a bottle to cook with…
I’ve traveled all over this country and eaten in some seriously expensive restaurants. I’ve also eaten in pretty much every high end restaurant in Raleigh. Folks, I’ve not had a better meal. We dropped frozen hockey pucks in a bag with cheap garlic salt and leaves from the lawn and cooked it six hours longer than we originally planned! We used a meat aquarium and 5 minutes of a broiler. This was as simple of a meal as you could make and it was AWESOME!
A closer look at doneness
The meat was fall off the bone tender but still had good texture. The sauce was sweet and salty and everyone asked for more of it. We had my kids, plus the cousins over. Many people at the table had never had lamb. They all agreed it was stellar. I had two pots to put away, and two sheet pans to clean.
You probably don’t have a sous vide cooker. That’s fine. Bake the lamb, or crock pot it, or boil it. I don’t know, do something with it. But try it. Americans, including us, almost never eat lamb. We have no idea what we are missing. We have this lamb in the freezer now, with more coming. If you haven’t tried lamb, or haven’t since the 70s with some weird green sauce, then you owe it to yourself to give it a try.
My thanks to The Princess, who is the one who pushed me to get lamb in the store. And to The Stanbury who cooked lamb for her on our date night giving her the idea.
Spork, his cousin, and I all worked this morning on the farm, feeding, moving cows, going to the market, etc. After working the boys all day, I thought we’d relax for a bit and do something fun. We had some watermelons from the market and we have way too many squirrels on the farm. Also, Spork received a new 22 rifle for Christmas and he’s had little chance to shoot it because I’ve been too busy to take him.
As we got back to the farm I told Spork to take all of our produce in the house, and to grab the watermelon, his rifle, and a magazine and we’d sit on the porch and eat watermelon and shoot some squirrels if they happened by. For those of you who aren’t shooters, a magazine is a removable box that holds the bullets in the gun.
Something like this
When I’d put his gun safely away earlier I’d detached the magazine and had it laying there beside the rifle. I didn’t want him to forget the magazine when he came back so I made sure to point out all three things to bring.
A watermelon
The rifle
The magazine
It took him a bit longer than I’d expect but soon enough Spork and his cousin showed up. They had three things.
A watermelon.
His new rifle
After some hunting around in my room, he’d brought a magazine.
Spork with his “magazine”
I really need to take the boy shooting. I’ve got to figure out how to get some more free time.
We did eat 1.5 watermelons and enjoy a few minutes of rest. It was awesome just hanging out and joking with the boys on a sunny day. So at least I got some good dad points in that regard.
**No squirrels were harmed in the making of this post.
We are a very unusual farm. Most farmers have some cows, a bull, and every year a crop of cute little calves are born. Then later that year, the truck backs up and loads all the now six month old calves and away it goes. The farmer gets a check, minus trucking and auction fees, for his calves and that’s the end of the cow business for the year. This is called a cow-calf operation.
Then there is another type of farm where the farmer buys cows from someone like our first farmer. He brings these six month old calves into his operation and raises them till they are 16-24 months old. At that point, the calves are fully grown and he sells them as steaks/hamburgers/one half cow/etc. This is called a finishing operation.
To be good at something, you have to grow it to a certain scale to make it efficient. You also have to specialize. So what do we do on our farm.
Neither. Both.
We are a small farm that has bulls, cows, and finish cattle. We do it all the way through from just born to slaughter. This creates challenges. For instance, what do you do with a female calf that you don’t want to breed? You can’t leave her in the herd with everyone because by 24 months, she’s having her first calf. Up to now, we would sell the females at the market and keep only the males. But Miguel has come up with another solution.
We are splitting our herd.
We have another farm that we lease. On Wednesday we worked all the cows through our corral and across the scales. We also sent the finishing cows one direction, and the mommas, bull, and babies another direction. We then loaded up the mommas and babies, and the bull, and took them to our other farm.
Off loading the cows and calves at our leased farm
This leased farm has ample water, shade, and tons of grass. We won’t intensively manage the cows here. Instead we will let them roam and graze as they like. And make babies, and raise them. Then every couple of months or so, we’ll do a roundup at this farm and we’ll take the calves that are old enough to our main farm. Boys, girls, doesn’t matter. These calves that are old enough (around 8 months old) will come here to the finishing herd where they will be moved to fresh grass daily, supplemented with fresh produce, and basically handled multiple times per day, in other words, intensively managed. We will keep the finishing cows here, till it’s time for them to go to the processor. This means our finishing herd will no longer leave this farm but will simply rotate around as long as it takes them to graze the grass. But since there are half as many of them, that should work just fine.
Hopefully the end result is we will have more cows ready for the freezer and purchase less in the process. I already know we handle them less since it only took two trips to move the cows to the other farm instead of the typical four which saved us hours of work.
I was contacted recently about a simple job. Removing the factory sights from a M&P pistol and installing aftermarket night sights.
M&P pistol on the bench waiting on night sight installation
The customer was very friendly and accommodating, but he needed the pistol back the same day. Shouldn’t be a problem. It only takes a little bit to swap sights.
Then I started looking for my sight tool. Dustin borrows it, maybe he has it. Nope. Maybe when I reorganized? Nope. Maybe it went into my tool box when I went to school. Nope. Maybe it’s in the wrong drawer in my tool box. Nope. Lost on a shelf? Nope. Behind 500 different things in the gun room? Nope. Under something? Nope.
So all in, I spent about 3 hours looking for the tool to do the 30 minute job. Typical.
Sights installed and set to the center.
Getting the front sight off was a bear. I guess they didn’t plan on it coming off, ever. But eventually everything worked out and the new sights went on without much fuss. I cleaned up the brass marks and got the pistol ready for the customer.
When he picked it up, he was happy with the work and then inquired if we had any openings for work on the farm. Actually yes, yes we do.
So I made an hours labor off of him for gun smithing, and he made it back plus some on his first day.
Monday was supposed to be an easy day, at least for me. Michael, one of our workers out here finished his employment on Friday. But I’d already hired both Landon and Chris a couple of days prior to his last day so for the short-term, we had extra help around here. Inexperienced help, but help nonetheless. Plus the kids were back from camp so we’d have Spork out to help with the busy time of feeding first thing in the morning.
I’d spoken to Landon about his schedule on Saturday and all was good. That meant that we’d have Miguel, Vicente, Landon, and Chris all here working all day, and Spork in the morning, meaning I could do boss stuff like blog posts, updating the site with lamb prices, recovering from the party the night before. Things like that.
Instead I woke to find a text from Landon reminding me he’d told me originally he couldn’t work on Mondays. He’d forgotten to mention it when we talked on Saturday but he wasn’t coming in. Oops. Well, we’d still have three guys, plus Spork, which is enough. Not enough to have extra help but enough I can still get my stuff done.
Then Vicente texted and said he was sick and couldn’t come in. Uh oh. Now we are staffed at a level that is below normal. That means I’m going to have to do some actual work around here. Probably not much, just during the morning. I can still get some of my stuff done later in the day. Oh well, at least I know how. So 7:30 comes and goes, and no Spork. Finally I walk over to the house where SWMBO informs me that Spork is really tired from being at camp all week and that she’d told him he could take the day off. Of course, she didn’t tell Miguel or I so we were clueless. I went to his room to give him the bad news.
There are no days off on a farm.
He wasn’t exactly awake but trooper that he is he got out of bed and got dressed. I promised him breakfast if he’d get up so SWMBO whipped us up her typical amazing breakfast and we showed up for work about 8:15 (we start at 7:30).
Once at the barn, I learned that we had a cow that was acting strange. I hustled down to see and sure enough, one of the new cows was acting bloated. Prior to doing anything with the bloated cow, I had to wrangle a calf back into the paddock because he’d gotten out in all the 4th of July excitement the night before and momma was none too pleased.
With the calf back in place, I got the bloated cow up and confirmed that yes indeed, he was bloated. Back to the barn to get my medical gear out and get a plan on handling the cow. Miguel was tearing around trying to get everyone fed so he could get to the market and pick up our produce. There was a rush because it is a holiday and he needs to be there early to get anything we can.
So Miguel, Chris, Spork, and I walk this cow through the pastures and up to the barn. Once he’s in the corral, Miguel takes off with instructions to me on who is left to be fed. Once he’s gone, I take Chris and Spork and we do some home surgery on our wayward cow. It was #A2, one of the cows we purchased from the stock yard.
#A2, in the head gate. He was feeling pretty bad at this point
By now, inserting a trocar is relatively old hat. But Spork things it’s cool and Chris has never seen anything like this so I spend a little time explaining what I’m doing. I also take this opportunity to explain to Chris what the signs of bloat are and how he can tell. It’s one of his jobs to check the cows daily so this is a good opportunity for him.
After the trocar is inserted. #A2 feels MUCH better at this point.
After getting the trocar in the cow, we gave him a minute then turned him back in with the rest of the cows. I then spent a few minutes instructing Chris on how to herd and move cattle. Again, he’s brand new so this is information he needs. Then back to the barn to finish feeding all the pigs. And to get the momma pig with the babies back in the barn.
Oh, did I forget mention they’d escaped that morning and were roaming around the barn yard chasing chickens? In all the excitement I’d simply overlooked telling you. It’s Monday, right?
So I finished feeding the pigs. Then I grabbed the dump trailer, hauled it over to the barn where I had to clean up the debris from Lucy’s new chicken enterprise, then over to the 4th of July celebration to clean up all the detritus from that adventure. Then finally to the house so we can load construction debris that needs to go away. Yes, the house is under construction as well during all of this. It has been since October of 2015.
Once the trailer was dropped off, I stopped in to speak to SWMBO. It was 10am. Only 8 hours to go before my day ends. But it’s better than a Monday at work!
We are open today from 8 to 3 and we have some ribeyes and New York strips left in the freezer! They are first come, first serve! Lucy is here and no appointment is needed to stop by and see her.
Almost 9 pound pork butt
We also have an 8 pound pork butt in the freezer for your 4th of July cookout. Time to fire up the smoker and make something awesome for the 4th.
Lucy is going to work the store from 8am-3:30pm tomorrow. No appointment needed!
We have steaks, hamburger, pork, goat cheese, lamb, honey, jams, pretty much everything in stock. I just got in a load of bacon so we’re ready for you when you stop by. I’ll be out giving tours all day so you’ll see me too.
All healthy and nursing
We do have seven new little piglets in the barn if anyone wants to see baby piglets while they are here.
