I don’t know what the rest of you did this weekend, but I soaked up as much of the outside as I possibly could. No humidity, barely any wind, perfectly blue skies, and warm weather. I know that soon it will be cold, and the grass will all be brown, and we’ll be dealing with mud, snow, etc. But for now, it doesn’t get any better than it was this past weekend.
My neighbor decided to do some drone flying, and happened to catch a still picture of our pastures, one of our ponds, and surprisingly a flock of birds enjoying the perfect flying weather. It’s also probably the last pic we’ll have of green pastures, so I wanted to save it to look at in February when I’m sick and tired of brown and grey!
Another shot of the farm. Goodbye green grass and blue skies. Hello winter.
Last Saturday was SLOW in the store. Slower than a normal weekday. It appears that with the story book perfect weather, everyone was at the fair, which makes sense.
However that left three girls on the payroll with little to do. I was busy doing farmer paperwork stuff, Miguel and Vicente were busy doing actual farmer stuff, SWMBO was busy doing yard work stuff. That left the girls to their own devices.
“Daddy, do we have a rake?”
I handed her the leaf rake and went back to work.
Later the girls tell me that they had a big pile of leaves, but Miguel came by with the tractor, scooped it all up, and hauled it off. They had their lips poked out.
“Oh well girls, he’s just cleaning up.”
Shortly thereafter.
“Daddy, can we use the wheelbarrow?”
So I turned them loose with that.
Several hours later I walked outside to find this.
The girls, building their leaf pile
It seems the girls, undaunted by the 17,000 lb backhoe’s work, took the wheelbarrow down to where Miguel dumped their leaves and loaded, by hand, several loads of leaves and hauled them back to where they had their original pile.
The Princess and Myla sweeping up
Then they took the brooms from the store, and starting sweeping up all the leaves they could get, making lines through the yard.
Crystal raking up a path through the yard
Once their work was done, it resembled something like this.
They used the leaves to make a riding/obstacle course for their bicycles. They then spent the rest of the afternoon riding bikes around their course and making plans for expansion this coming weekend.
They were so proud of what they’d done, they even asked to borrow my phone to take pictures, which is where all these pics came from. The girls took them all, and many more I didn’t utilize for this post.
You come here and see kids working. You don’t see what they do when you aren’t here. This is a glimpse of what goes on in between customers. I couldn’t be happier with how their day went. So I’m glad everyone went to the fair and had fun. Now swing by the store and get some real food. Man does not live on fried twinkies alone.
When I say I’m a farmer, people have this image in their head.
Or this
Or maybe even this
But nobody, unless you are a farmer yourself, thinks of this.
Yep, that’s farming.
Our dually truck that we use daily here on the farm has had some serious ills lately. It began with a set of bad injectors which to you gasoline people, sounds like maybe changing spark plugs. It’s not. On our particular engine, you have to nearly remove the engine to replace the injectors. And the injectors themselves are very costly, there is a comma in the price. So we ordered new injectors, spent weeks working on the truck, and put everything back together. The truck ran much better and everyone was happy.
Except we still had a fuel dilution problem (the reason we knew we had back injectors). That meant that somewhere in our work, there must have been a leak. So apart it came again, and everything was inspected. No signs of a leak anywhere. Maybe it’s the fuel pump? That price has a comma in it as well. Ugh.
In the process of buying fuel injectors, buying gaskets, getting a fuel pump, seals, basically the never ending stream of purchases to work on this engine, Miguel mentioned to me that the Y pipe needed to be replaced as well. What is a Y pipe?
The broken bit of the Y pipe, with an arrow showing where it was broken
Just a cast aluminum pipe that is part of the intake system of the truck. Basically it feeds air to the engine. Probably another few hundred dollars.
So I ask at my friendly diesel repair place. Nope. They can’t get them. Uh oh, that means going to the dealer, which just doubled the price. Now it will probably cost $500 or more. Maybe I could just weld up the broken bit. But its cast aluminum, and soaked in oil. It will be a MAJOR pain to weld. Nah, better to spend the money and just get it over with.
And then the dealer said they couldn’t be purchased. There were none available in the US, period. Ba ba BUM!! You know it’s bad when you life has a sound track.
I was left with two choices. Scour the junk yards trying to find a truck with the same pipe, take a bunch of tools to the junk yard and work 1/2 of a day to remove the pipe and bring it home. Or weld up the one we had.
Since I’m a welder, not a mechanic, I chose plan B.
Welding aluminum isn’t something I have a lot of experience with. I’ve done a bit of it, basically enough to know I don’t want to do it again. But that was back when I MIG welded aluminum, and now I have a TIG welder so it should be easier.
But its cast aluminum. Cast is much harder to weld because it has a lot of porosity. And it’s prone to cracking from the heating and cooling. And this particular cast is soaked in oil for 300,000 miles. The number one rule of welding aluminum is it must be CLEAN! Brand new cast isn’t clean, and this piece is far from brand new.
The broken bit of the Y pipe, with an arrow showing where it was broken
You can see how dark and oil soaked this piece is. It’s also brittle from corrosion, which is why it broke in the first place. Step one was to grind out all the broken bits and get down to clean(ish) metal.
Welded and ready to machine
You can see on the face where I cleaned up the metal. Some bits of it are even slightly shiny so there is some good metal in there. It took several days and a trip to the welding supply store to get this finally done correctly. The old guy at the store shook his head and wished me luck. Not a good sign. But I got it welded!
Well, after it cracked and broke an entire corner off. But whatever, I’ll just fix that too. I’m already here. You can see that this is sitting on a white blanket. The piece had to be preheated before welding, and then kept in this blanket during and after welding. This is how we mitigate against cracking. Slow heating and cooling.
Machining a base plate
The problem with working on something like this, is that it’s a funky, one off piece. There was no way to hold the Y pipe in the mill for machining. That meant that I needed a special jig to hold it in place, which means making an entire part, just to hold a part. It takes longer to make the jig than it does to repair to actual part, but that’s just the way it goes. I had some aluminum cut offs laying around for just such an occasion so I gathered up likely pieces and began cutting, milling, and shaping for what I needed.
Welding up the legs onto the base plate
Getting the angle on the cuts just right was the toughest part. Oddly I did it right the first time. Nobody was more surprised than me. Here I’m welding the two legs that the Y pipe will mount to. Time spent machining here is just wasted time so I didn’t cut out any more than I had to. The base plate was trued up, and then the mating surfaces of the legs were trued. Beyond that I didn’t remove any metal. So I have a thick leg, being welded to an even thicker base plate, sitting on my welding table which is 1″ thick aluminum. My poor welding machine was unhappy trying to put heat into this much metal but I managed to squeak by.
Drilling and tapping for mounting
Once the pieces were welded, it was time to drill and tap for the mounting holes. They didn’t have to be pretty, just solid enough to hold the Y pipe for milling.
Finished! And ready for the actual repair.
The pipe is mounted with just hardware store hardware, nothing special. You can see the pipe hanging down below the table. It’s a really funky setup to try and hold square and true.
The finished Y pipe, with the seal installed
There is some porosity in the outside of the flange, but none on the inside bit which is the part we need correct. It’s also a bit thinner than I wanted, but there was a boo boo in the machining. However it wasn’t so thin we wanted to weld it up again so we let it ride. You can also see the top left corner and hole. That was where the corner broke off. It’s built back and drilled and cleaned up.
Now Miguel is going to put the truck back together, which is the real job. This was just a little side job. All in, I have about 7 hours total in this entire project. If I had to do it again I could do it in half that but that’s the way it is when you are doing something for the first time.
Mamasita’s chips have been the surprise hit of the year this year. I’d heard they were good, and of course we really liked them in the sampling we did, but I had no idea how popular they would be with our customers. We’ve been continuously reordering them ever since we brought them in.
Last week we reordered them, again, and I thought to myself.
“Self, didn’t they have other products we’ve never ordered?”
$6.00 per bag for yellow or white tortilla chips
A quick check and yes, yes they did. They had yellow corn chips to compliment their white corn chips that we’ve already been carrying.
Dessert chips are $5.50 per bag. They aren’t as sweet as you’d think. I like them.
They also had a dessert chip which we already have sampled this morning. I think the entire bag lasted about 3 minutes with the girls.
My new favorite, ready made taco shells at $5.75 per package.
And lastly, and the one I’m most excited about, they had taco shells.
We sell a lot of hamburger to people who are going to make tacos. And even more importantly, we eat a lot of tacos ourselves. Having some ready made, Mamasita’s style taco shells is going to be awesome. Wildflower already asked me this morning if we could have tacos tonight. Sadly no, but maybe Sunday night. I’m ready for some tacos!
We are open from 8-5 today so swing by, see the girls, and grab some chips and salsa, or hamburger meat and shells.
This is by far the most read post on our website. We get thousands of hits on it. This post was originally written in 2014. I’ve gone through and updated it to be current in 2017 and reposted it.
I talk to a lot of people who are overwhelmed by all they’ve learned about processed food, local food, organic food, etc. They arrive at our farm trying to find food they are comfortable with but they aren’t even sure what questions to ask. Luckily CFSA has posted a list of questions to ask your farmer that should help you narrow down your search for real food.
In addition to posting the link, I thought I’d answer for our farm here for anyone who discovers us.
BASIC:
1. Why do you farm? Good Lord! That’s a doozy, and the first question too. Because I’m dumb/crazy enough to? People ask what we produce here on our farm, and my answer is, “losses.” I grew up on this farm. I moved here when I was seven. My father had grown up on the family farm in Flat River, NC, near Roxboro and he wanted to return to his roots. In researching my lineage, I found that our family has been farming in Flat River since 1793. I guess it’s in my blood.
Beyond that, I enjoy farming, especially since we don’t do it conventionally. We live on our farm, and we eat what we produce, often more than we sell. Like many of our customers who have young children and decided they wanted to have healthy food for them, we did the same. As our kids came along, we got into producing a product that we were happy feeding them. As a byproduct, we produce healthy, sustainable product that we are happy to feed to your kids too. The best thing I can say about our product is that you’re eating out of our freezer. My number one customer is still my wife.
2. How do you decide which products to grow? We base it off of demand, and what we can grow sustainably on our farm. I’ve been offered sheep for free which I refused because we didn’t have the carrying capacity on our farm for them and the cows. I’ve been questioned about goats, which are verboten on our farm. I’ve had goats before, never again.
Currently we raise cows, because I like cows and that’s really our main product. We also raise pigs because they do well in the woods and about half of our farm is wooded. Otherwise half of our farm would go unused or we’d have to log it. Plus we can turn pigs in about 8 months, vs. 2 years for cows so it’s a quicker turn around on our investment. Lastly for pigs, I REALLY love our pork so even if we went 100% to cows, I’d still keep a few pigs on the farm for our family.
3. What kind of fertilizers do you use? We use no commercial fertilizers, nor organic ones. Our program is all about building soil health, not about applying a band-aid to resolve a problem. If we build the soil health, we don’t need fertilizer. We are into our fifth year of building soil and have over 3″ of topsoil, which is up from the 1/8″ when we started.
About 2″ of topsoil, from 2014, in an area that has underperformed other areas of the pasture.
We feed produce daily (from the farmers market) and much of that produce goes back into the soil either through a byproduct of ingestion by our animals (poop) or by direct contact with the soil (biodegradation). Fresh produce is the only thing we add to our farm and we bring variable amounts in every day, depending on the season. Since 2014 we’ve brought in over 19 million pounds of produce to our farm! That means we diverted from the landfill 19 million pounds of organic material where it instead goes into our soil every year. Obviously much of it is water in the produce but we are still adding quite a bit of actual organic matter to our soil.
4. How do you deal with your weeds? insects? diseases? We encourage insects. We do not deworm our cattle or pigs unless they are showing signs of distress. We will then do a fecal analysis and see if worming is warranted and if so, we will then deworm.
Dewormers cause cow poop to be toxic to bugs which means we have poop that stays on the ground as dried up patties rather than being turned back into the soil by the big and little critters. We rotate our cows with daily paddock moves. It takes about 30 days for the cows to make a lap of the farm. By the time they make a lap, the poop from last time is gone. When we wormed cattle, those patties would stay for months.
For weeds, when we have an area that is growing something we don’t like (thistle, bitter weed, etc.) we make sure that is the area where we drop off our produce for the day. This causes a few things. One, the soil is disturbed by the high impact of cattle as they feed. As the cattle do their thing, they poop, pee, and spill a lot of produce which is then trampled into the ground. The end result is a bare patch that has high concentrations of manure, urine, and organic matter. We’ve just changed the soil biology in that spot, which will result in a more favorable plant growing there.
We do not seed an area like that, we let nature decide what is optimized to grow there. Most often, it’s the grass that we want. If it’s not, then we wash, rinse, repeat till it is. If weeds are what comes back up, then we needed more soil health in that patch of soil. Not better grass seed.
For diseases, you can look at what we did with Benjamin when he was sick. There are multiple posts about what we did to treat him, including showing what drugs we gave him. If our animals are sick, we will treat them with whatever medical science says can make them better. If they survive their illness, we will most likely cull them from our herd and not use them for future needs. Not because we have an issue with medications, but because we don’t want their genetics in our herd. Had Benjamin lived, we would have sold him to someone else.
5. Do you grow all the products that you sell? I’m proud to say that we do not.
Many small farms try to be all things in the beginning. You get some chickens (the gateway drug to farming), then add a farm dog to ride in the farm truck of course. Then a miniature milk cow, or milking goats. Then a couple of pigs, then meat goats. Then a donkey because somebody heard a coyote, then some alpaca, or turkeys, or geese, or ducks. You get the idea. When I go to a farm and see that there are two of everything, I see a farmer who is running a zoo, not a farm. There’s nothing wrong with that but as time passes, most farmers will find the animals they work best with and focus on that.
We’ve had goats, different breeds of cattle, meat chickens, etc. We’ve returned to our roots with our current cattle and we’ve added pigs. Everything else is gone or going away.
We can focus like this because we’ve instead partnered with over 40 other small family farms (as of 2017) like us who are really good at what they do. For our poultry and rabbit, we work with Brittany Ridge Farm (who supplies The Chef and the Farmer and has been on the show). Buck Naked Farm handles our bees on our farm. They provide our honey, candles, soaps, jams, lotions, and whatever else they craft up. She’s always tinkering with a new product. Jennifer from Buck Naked is also my master marketer and helps me set up our store so it looks presentable. We also have lamb farmers, dairy farmers, goat farmers, etc. Most of the products we sell are detailed on the links at our product page. However some of the stuff comes and goes so fast it doesn’t make it to the page, so stopping in the store to browse is the best idea.
We are always looking to add new farms to our store because it gives our customers more choice, and more reason to come see us. The requirements are that they be sustainable, small family farms, and something that compliments our existing products and farmers.
1. What type of livestock do you manage? Cattle, pigs, chickens, and bees. The cattle are baldy Angus. The pigs are various heritage breeds, mostly Large Black and Chester Whites. We do have Berkshire as well. The bees are Italian honey bees.
2. How do you feed them? What do you feed them? Do you use organic feed? We feed everyone except the chickens grass, produce, sunshine, and water. The bees pretty much feed themselves. We do give them honey/supplement in the winter.
3. Do you use hormones? antibiotics? Nope! Unless we have a sick animal, but that was addressed previously.
4. Do you provide them with access to the outdoors? Are they pasture based, free range, or confined? The real question is do we allow them indoors? For the chickens, yes we do. They have a coop where they come and go as they please. Everybody else spends all their time outdoors. Our barns don’t have areas for animals, everyone stays on pasture or in the woods.
5. How do you process your animals? Do you do it or does someone else? We process some pigs for our own use and we did process a cow once. If you are buying from us, your product was processed in a USDA inspected facility. If it’s beef, it will be Chaudhry’s in Siler City. If it’s pork it will be Dean Street Processing in Bailey.
We announced a few weeks ago that we were going to begin rationing milk. This is because one of our milk cows had dried off and were therefore limited on milk production.
Since then we’ve been able to make do and most people who wanted milk have been able to get it. Maybe not today, but the next day. Definitely not as much as everyone would like, but at least a gallon. All in all it’s gone fairly well. Except for one thing. We are getting a lot of people who are continually asking us to hold milk for them. As we said in the initial post, we will not hold milk for anyone. It is first come, first serve. It’s also limited to one gallon per family. We have folks showing up with the daughter, nephew, hamster, whatever and claiming one gallon for each.
Let me explain something to everyone. The very first families to get completely cut off from milk is all three families here on the farm. As soon as we knew we’d dried off a cow everyone here switched to Simply Natural milk or went without. We do that so that our customers have maximum availability. When you are telling us hardship stories about needing two gallons, or asking to buy five gallons so you can freeze it because we are running low (therefore keeping four other family’s pets from getting any) you are telling these stories to people who aren’t getting any milk. This means we are a bit jaded. It’s one gallon, per family. First come, first serve.
On another note, I also made mention of prioritizing our regular customers over milk only customers. We haven’t implemented that yet but rest assured we are planing on it. We have customers who get two pounds of hamburger, pork chops, some mustard, and a gallon of milk. We also have customers who are here 5 minutes before we open, who buy 4 gallons of milk and nothing else, ever.
Folks, we love and appreciate all of our customers but we are not in the pet milk business. We are in the farm business. As some point we are going to prioritize our full customers over our milk only customers. Nothing against anyone but if we are limited in our supply we are going to take care of those who fully support us first. I know the four gallon customer is buying food somewhere, and they are choosing not to buy it here. That’s absolutely their choice but that means they only care about getting pet milk, not about supporting our farm. It’s nothing personal, but with limited supply that’s part of how we’ll make the decision of who we have milk for. At some point you may be told to “put your milk back, I’m sorry.” And I am, but when you are shocked I’ll point to this post and tell you that I already told you prior.
Our momma and baby cows spend most of the grazing season at a farm that we lease near our farm. Usually we like to leave the cows at that farm till late October to early November but we’ve been short on grass over there this year and this week we received a call from our property owner that the cows were out. Fortunately our landlord, despite being a successful doctor now, grew up as a farmer. He had the cows back in before we could even get there.
One way to make your landlord your ex-landlord is to have him chase your cows with any frequency. We love our landlord so we try to make his life as easy as possible. Regardless of how much grass was left (not much) we decided to go ahead and bring the girls back here and start prepping for winter feeding.
We still have a weeks worth of grass here (with everyone present), maybe a bit more. We’ll graze the rest of what we have, then start feeding hay and produce instead of grass and produce. That will last till April of 2018. That means we are going to have an expensive winter but some of that time they’ll be getting grass, hay, and produce so it all balances out.
Yesterday we took the trailer, truck, backhoe, ramp, and everyone who was present to our leased farm to haul cows. The process is we start about a week prior feeding produce near or in our portable corral. The cows love the produce and they’ll happily walk into the corral to eat it. After about a week, they have the habit down and on moving day we simply bring one load of produce, drop it in the corral, and everyone walks in. Close the gates and viola!
Except it didn’t work that way, of course. The cows had already wandered off by the time we got there so we took the produce and drove across the farm to lure them back. Once we had them back, we dropped the produce and closed them in. Yeah! Success!
That’s when Vicente noticed that they weren’t all in there. A few minutes later some of the younger cows came wandering up. We opened the corral and they scurried in to be with mom. Ugh. Kids! Always late, always causing trouble.
Then a couple more wandered up. We scooted them inside as well. Stupid kids, why wouldn’t they listen and come with mom when called.
Then three more wandered up. By this point the food in the corral was running low which means the moms are ready to go back out. That means we can’t just simply open the gate because now somebody will come squirting out. Also, one of the young cows was obviously not going to behave. You could see it in how he acted immediately. We chased these three cows all over the woods and they went everywhere and anywhere except where we needed them to go. Why is it always the kids who cause the trouble? The moms I could just about verbally tell what to do and they’d do it.
Teenagers, there is a lesson here. Sometimes you are too smart for your own good. We were trying to move the cows back to food, water, and comfort, and these knuckleheads were stopping the process.
So after several attempts we finally got the cows in the corral and loaded onto the trailer. But not before a whole gaggle of young cows couldn’t figure out how to get onto a trailer and blocked the ramp entrance with their idiocy. Once again, the moms had walked right on. The kids were clueless. We walked a mom back off, then walked her back on to show the dummies how it was done. Then we pretty much just pushed the young ones on the trailer because they still didn’t get it.
Once we had a trailer load of cows we’d drive the five minutes to our farm, back into the pasture, and simply open the gate. The cows hop off and realize they are back home. They immediately go over to see all the other cows already here and have a big running around party. There is some pushing and shoving as the pecking order is reestablished. You can almost hear the, “Mom’s home!” from the cows as they assert their roles as herd leader.
Heading over to rejoin the beef cows.
We took 30 cows to our leased farm last time we offloaded this summer. We brought back 33.
We don’t sell whole hogs very often. 95% of what we sell is by the cut, in our store. But occasionally we sell a hog here or there. That’s not to say I don’t get calls often for people wanting a BBQ hog. Usually it’s Friday morning, and after 10 questions from them, I ask when they need the hog.
“Today. The party is tomorrow.”
Um, No.
Who plans a pig picking and then starts looking for the hog the day of? It’s not like we are talking hamburger at Food Lion here.
However a few weeks ago I received a request from our friend Mike who runs Brew ‘N Que in Cary and Apex. He had a catering job and needed a hog for the event. Mike’s been a customer and a friend for years now, and he also understands what it takes to get a hog from hoof to spit, so I jumped through some hoops and made it happen. He asked for a 150 lb (that’s hanging weight) hog. I passed along this request to Miguel and he selected and loaded a hog I thought weighed about 240-250, which would put his hanging weight about right. Then Mike updated me that he actually needed a 120 lb hog. Ugh, we already had our hog loaded. But I like to be a little heavy rather than a little light if I can so it’s all good.
When this hog hit the scales at the processor, its hanging weight was 248 lbs! 100 lbs roughly over our target weight, 130 lbs over the updated weight! And when Mike picked it up, he told me it was too big to fit on the cooker. Ugh. We’ve been processing 400+ lb hogs so long that our sense of scale must be off. This guy looked little to me and to Miguel. We pride ourselves on picking the right hog and getting as close to target as possible and usually we are pretty good at it, and now we’ve screwed up our customer and his event. I apologized profusely and Mike said no worries, it’s all good. I told him I’d only charge him for the 150 lbs he ordered so I gave away 100 lbs of premium pork. Expensive lesson.
But that isn’t the story. It’s just the setup.
I figured Mike would use the pork in his two restaurants. I mean, he does run a pork based operation and some free product would certainly help the bottom line. Then I received this a few weeks later.
Michael is in the foreground with the awesome beard.
So Mike ordered a pig for an event and his farmer (me) screwed up. Most people would yell, threaten, refuse to pay, whatever. Mike says, no worries, I got it handled. He then BBQs the free meat and holds a quiet fund raiser for hurricane victims. He did all this just to try to do some good. Yes, he’s on TV. No, he didn’t know that was going to happen and he doesn’t really know how it happened. They just showed up. Kuddos to Mike for thinking beyond himself.
People wonder why I don’t worry about much. Because I’ve learned that the Lord’s plan is so much better than anything I could cook up. I was frustrated we’d let Mike down when I found out the weight, but look at the end result. Our mistake in estimating a hog’s weight, led to a customer having extra pork, which he turned into a way for a family we’ll never know to get back home. If we hadn’t screwed up, those folks might still be here struggling. You don’t think they were praying for a little help in their situation?
“Lord, please help us find a way home?”
What would we expect from that prayer? An Uber to pull up. Money to fall from the sky? How about a farmer who suddenly can’t estimate a hog’s weight.
I looked at that hog myself, after Miguel had. It’s not our first rodeo. We both know he weighed 250, maybe 260. Think maybe the Lord put his thumb on the scale when we were estimating and got us a hog big enough to make all this happen? I don’t know, but I hope so. It’s pretty cool being part of something bigger than yourself. Thanks Mike for sharing the end result.
Effective immediately, we are changing the way we handle our tours on the farm. Saturday tours, which are conducted by my son Spork, will now be free of charge. This is the same tour that we’ve given for years and charged for. The only change is that we will no longer charge for them. (We always reserve the right to change prices in the future, of course.)
Tours on Wednesdays and Fridays used to be $20 per booking, with sizes up to 20 people max. Now tours will be $20 per booking, up to 7 people. After 7, we will charge $2.50 per person (not counting babies.) This means a 10 person weekday tour will cost $27.50
Why the difference in Saturdays and weekdays you might ask?
I give the tours during the weekdays. Spork, my son, gives the tours on Saturdays. We run this farm by and large for the employment of our kids. As I sit here this morning, we have had about 30 minutes without any customers. We were slammed starting at 7:59 and have been till just now, but I want a steady pace for the kids to stay busy all day on Saturday. It keeps them busy, interested, and NOT BORED! Tour groups give me just that, a steady group of people coming through the store. I like tour groups on Saturdays.
Wednesday and Friday, we have tours as well. However the kids are busy home schooling so I do the tours. I enjoy giving tours, having time to meet and talk to our customers and learn about them. However I’m a farmer and I have a lot I need to accomplish each day. Routinely, I need to go pick up a part, go out of town for a day, work cattle, whatever. Invariably when I look at my calendar trying desperately to find a day when I can get X done, I have a tour on the schedule, at 2pm (basically the middle of the day).
As often as not, it’s a mommies group (or school group, or whatever) with 15 kids under 5. I don’t have another tour the rest of the afternoon but because of one tour at 2pm I can’t go where I need to, get done what I need to, get back for this tour, and have enough time for everything. It’s routine that I have to look two weeks or more out to find a weekday where I can schedule an entire day. Work backs up, trips can’t be taken. You get the idea.
So in the best example of capitalism at work I can think of, we are going down on our Saturday tour price to free, and up on our weekday tour prices (if you have a larger group). If folks want to come to the farm, there is a strong incentive to do so on Saturday which is when I have the boy giving tours and the girls working the store. Exactly when I need people here.
If your schedule says it has to be during the week for a family, no problem, it’s our normal $20 fee. If it is a large group, we’ve taken the 20 person maximum limit off and added a per person charge for over 7 people. If you have a 35 person group, bring ’em on. We’ll do one big walking tour with your entire group and you’ll be in and out.
Pushing more folks to visit on Saturday will allow your farmer to farm more, which I think everyone wants.
Nobody has cooked, or eaten, as much of our product as we have. We’ve grilled, baked, broiled, sautéed, and crock potted our meats. Heck, we’ve even eaten it raw (steak tartare anyone?) Having had our products every way that you can, I can say that the cooking method definitely matters. I usually try and catch new customers before they leave and explain how they should cook their new purchase, especially the beef. Since I can’t catch everyone, I thought I’d type up my suggestions.
The first thing to know is what kind of meat are you buying. With only so many ribeyes to go around, odds are you’ll be buying a cut of meat you don’t normally get. You need to understand that “eating high on the hog” means that you’re getting the more tender cuts of meat. It also means they are less flavorful. That’s why tenderloin, an expensive and almost flavorless cut of tender meat, is always wrapped in bacon, or marinated in Italian dressing. Recipes are trying to add flavor to the flavorless, tender meat. On the other side of the tenderness scale, the French have perfected the art of taking the cheap cuts of meat and turning them into delicacies. And finding, along of the way, that these less expensive cuts of meat hold the best potential for amazing flavor. Shanks, jowls, brisket. These are all cuts that many American cooks fear but as any Texan will tell you about brisket, they are often the best part of the animal.
Basically, the higher up the animal, the more expensive and the more tender the cut. That’s because the less the animal uses the muscle, the more tender and the more bland. That’s part of the reason that feedlot beef is more tender. The animals sit around and eat and do little else. By knowing where on the animal your cut comes from, you can have an idea of how to cook it. Tough cuts need a braise (like a crock pot) or some other method of preserving tenderness.
For roasts, generally the crock pot is my friend. SWMBO does most of the cooking and she uses our various roasts interchangeably from one recipe to the next. If it’s a big four pound roast, she has no qualms about trimming it down or cutting it up to make it into what she wants. For roasts, just follow your usual recipe. If you are cooking them in the oven, remember that grass fed, grass finished beef is going to cook faster than you expect.
Osso Bucco is one of my favorite cuts. Technically it’s beef shank, sliced into 1″ thick slices. It costs the same as hamburger per pound and it’s wonderful in the crock pot. All that connective tissue breaks down and makes beef broth, which your vegetables soak up as it percolates all day in the crock pot. Just sear the osso bucco on both sides before you start. The meat shreds after cooking easily because of the way the cut is made. You pop out the one bone for Fido and serve. A $10 meal including vegetables that feeds the entire family.
For hamburger, I have to give a nod to our customer Drew. His hamburger recipe makes for a stellar hamburger. If you don’t want to do all that he suggests, make patties with room temperature burger meat. Sprinkle with salt, pepper, and garlic and grill. Simple burgers that taste awesome.
For Boston Butt, I again turn to Drew’s recipe. If you are in our store, you can also pick up SWMBO’s crock pot recipe to accomplish the same thing. Her BBQ is no muss, no fuss, and tastes awesome.
Lastly, I need to tell you about sous vide cooking. Drew turned me onto it. After one meal, I had one on order from Amazon. It’s pretty much impossible to overcook using sous vide and I can really dial in the doneness that I want, down to the single degree.
After a swim in our meat aquarium (what we call it) I simply sear the meat (mallaird again) and serve. Cook times can vary by hours with no change in doneness which really makes this more like crock pot cooking. This means that I can still get my work done and pop into the kitchen at the end of the day to finish up and serve a great meal, looking every bit the hero that I am.
