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Saturday is looking good!

baby piglets nursing

I mentioned before about our testing this weekend vs. last weekend. We’d hoped to get a good comparison between the 15 tours we had booked last weekend and what we would have this weekend. We currently have 19 tours booked for this weekend with a few spots still open. This is a perfect comparison between this weekend and last so thank you to all the folks who are coming and making this a great weekend for us. Now my experiments will be complete! Ha ha ha.. Oops. Sorry.

We do have a few spots left open. Mostly in the early morning and the late afternoon. If anyone wants to still get in, there is time. All the tours will be given by yours truly as Spork will be off camping with his cousin and Uncle.

Don’t forget, we have baby piglets on the ground just born. Those are the actual piglets in the picture above.

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Free tours and tasting (again) this Saturday

We are gonna do this again. This Saturday we are having free farm tours (normally $20) and free tastings like we did last Saturday. We have the schedule opened up to take even more people this weekend so hopefully everyone will be able to get a spot although no promises. To reserve your free tour, you need to book it through our online application.

Will we do free tours again? I don’t think so. Kinda depends on how this weekend goes.

So why are we doing this again, especially back to back?

One, we have Sweet Willie’s sauce coming and he’ll be cooking up some of our meats using his awesome sauces. Sweet Willies is one of the carefully selected new products that we put into the store during our recent expansion. It really is a great compliment to our meats and having the grill master himself onsite will really give you a chance to see what his sauce is all about.

Two, as I talked about in my post yesterday, we need to see how this format works on a normal weekend vs. a holiday weekend. So we are going to try this again as a compare and contrast. Did I mention that we have no clue what we are doing? Well this is how you get a clue, experimenting.

Does that mean you are part of a science experiment? That you are not a valued customer but are instead a rat in a maze? Did I mention that we have cheese? Just kidding.

The only way to see what works and what doesn’t is to try new things and compare and contrast. So what that means for you is:

Free tours, yes really. Our normal personal 1 hour tour is really free.

Free tastings. No corners cut. Our awesome meats, with Willie’s fabulous sauces.

And cheese (for you lab rats of course 🙂

How can you go wrong? Book your appointment before they fill up.

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Retail and marketing advice from idiots

We don’t have the slightest clue what we are doing. This whole farm store thing is a lemonade stand that has grown out of hand. Yes we’ve grown it on purpose but not according to any plan as I would recognize it. There were no pro formas, no budgets, no market studies. We’ve not done an ROI on our investments and we do not have a 10 year plan for capital expenditures.

That’s all the stuff I did in my past. Now we are just winging it. You see, I’ve never done retail. I don’t like advertising, either consuming it, or purchasing it. All my previous customer experience was business to business. Selling $500,000 worth of something one time to someone has a different sales cycle than selling them a chocolate milk for their kid to consume on the spot. And frankly, that is part of the appeal for me.

Plus there is the whole “kids learning a trade/skill” and giving people like Miguel, Vicente, and Hilliary a job. Plus the kids having a job is important. And then there is the Mrs. and her shopping habits and our diets, etc. All in all, we have a myriad of reasons for WHY we are doing what we do. None of which mean we know WHAT we are doing. That’s a big difference!

So a few weekends ago, we had an Open Barn Day. It was a combination of an amazing success and a failure. Through a combination of social media, word of mouth, and plain old posters around town, we had over 2000 people to our farm. That is simply amazing. Staggering actually. With those 2000 people however, we only had 207 transactions in the store. Now a normal Saturday has 30-40 transactions so that’s roughly 6x a normal Saturday. Amazing! But we only had 10% of the people who attended come through the store. That’s bad. Also of the 2000+ people, we only captured contact information on a few. There were no sign-up sheets, no newsletter sign-ups, etc. That means that the next time we have an event, they won’t know about it. That’s bad. We did great at marketing the event, but terrible at capturing that success either in revenue or future marketing abilities.

This past Saturday, we did a different kind of event. We offered free tours but with our normal scheduling system and our normal one on one tours. We also had SWMBO here doing samples (our vendor got sick last minute). Spork and I were booked from 8am to 5pm solid. That’s 15 bookings. We had three no shows (grr!) so we ended up with 13 tours we conducted. Of those 13 tours, plus our normal Saturday walk-in traffic, we did 40 transactions. That’s on the top end of what a normal Saturday would be like. BUT, it was a holiday weekend. Many of our regulars were not in town. So that’s actually a good Saturday when it would have otherwise been a bust. So that’s good.

We also had 31 items sold that I can directly attribute to SWMBO’s samples, or nearly one item per transaction. We sold out of a few items that she was sampling so that’s about as good as it gets. Samples work.

So, we are looking at this past weekend as a manageable success. Nothing dramatic, not crazy busy, but very steady throughout the day. We did have some folks who wanted to come for a tour who couldn’t get in this past weekend. That’s bad. But of the folks who came, we captured their information and showed them a good time. That’s good. We also left enough capacity in the store that our regulars could get in and out without any trouble. That’s good. BUT we need to do more business than we did. So there is more to do.

So this Saturday, we are going to try this again. We are going to do the free tours thing again, which will be announced with more fanfare later. We are also going to have a vendor here cooking samples of our meats with his awesome sauce. I’m going to market our weekend exactly like I did this past weekend. Same budget, same source. That will give us a good comparison from last weekend to this weekend.

We are also going to try multiple tour availability in one time slot. By that I mean we are going to book more than one family per tour with one tour group leader, something we’ve not done before. We experimented with that late in the day yesterday and nobody seemed to mind at all. In fact, the seemed to expect it. This will allow some more folks through the system with the same amount of manpower. And with it not being a holiday weekend, we should have a good comparison this weekend to last weekend.

If we can get our regulars back in town from the beach, plus new folks coming for tours, maybe we can break the 50 transaction barrier. That would make us 25% better than last weekend. And with multiple slots per tour, maybe we can get a little better still. We’ll see. I’m making this up as I go along.

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We are full for Saturday

Just a quick note, we are full up on tours for this Saturday. We have plenty of capacity in the store for those that just want to stop by and go shopping. There is no need for an appointment to shop so stop by anytime between 8-5 tomorrow.

We may have a last minute cancellation for a tour tomorrow but for now we have no more tours available.

We will be doing more events in the coming weeks (June 3, 17th, and 24th), so feel free to book another Saturday and get on the schedule for one of those days. No details yet as to what we’ll be doing, but we know we are doing something!

As a reminder, you can always change your booking so it’s better to book early and get your place reserved.

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Reminder, free tours and tastings this weekend

Just a quick reminder, we are having free tours of the farm this weekend. Spork and I are working double duty to accommodate everyone and there are a few spots still left. Just pop over to our scheduling page and book either Spork or myself for a tour. This is our normal full fare tour, no shortcuts.

For an idea of what it’s like, here is a video that one of our customers created for us.

We are giving tours away for free this weekend so stop by Saturday and see the critters. We should have baby piglets on the ground by Saturday. She’s about to deliver any minute now.

Also, we’ll have Palace Green Freezer Jams on site doing samples of their amazing freezer jams.

Palace Green freezer jam on vanilla ice cream
Palace Green freezer jam on vanilla ice cream

So, in summary. Free tours. Free tasting. Baby piglets. Oh, and the weather looks good too, for the first time in forever. You don’t want to go to the beach anyway, farming is more fun.

Grab those last appointments while they are still available.

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There are some perks to this farming thing

Alec Baldwin talking about not being a farmer
I’ve been in a tux, can’t say I enjoyed it.

This is meant as a dig at farmers. He’s too sophisticated to be in anything but a tux.

The last time I was in a tux, I went home with a lady who I still haven’t gotten rid of yet. (Hi SWMBO!)

Whenever I start feeling uppity, she reminds me that she put the mom curse on me, multiple times, to get remarried if I were to leave her. I’m NOT putting on one of those things again.

I’ll take being a farmer in my comfy clothes any day over being a Baldwin, or whoever he’s supposed to be playing. I actually feel sorry for people like he’s portraying. I wouldn’t give up this life for anything resembling theirs.

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Happiness is a full bag of squeaky cheese

So I’m in my office, working away on paperwork, emails, etc. And on this particular morning, I’m hungry. SWMBO said no breakfast this morning when I asked, which is probably smart because the scale isn’t exactly at record lows at the moment. Nothing dramatic but skipping a meal wouldn’t kill me, especially since I’m desk bound this morning, and truck bound all afternoon.

But I’m hungry (insert whining here). And it’s hard to work when you are hungry. Then I remembered!! Squeaky cheese came in on Wednesday! I scurried down to the store and snagged a full bag and ran back to my office to hide away, work away, and squeak away.

There is still some left in the fridge if you need your fix as well. We ordered extra this time. No idea how long it will last but we are open today from 2-6 and tomorrow from 8-5. I wouldn’t recommend coming on Saturday at 5pm.

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Hot Dogs Back in Stock Open Today 2-6 pm

Great news just in time for the weekend. Weeping Radish dropped by this morning and delivered Uncured Hot Dogs, Beer Bratwurst, & Linguiça. Hopefully next week they will have our  Pastrami & Roast Beef ready for delivery.

Hot dogs $7 lb 4 per pack in pork casing

Linguica $10.50 lb

Beer Bratwurst $10.50lb

We’ll be sampling the new products this weekend, stock up for Memorial Day cookouts.

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Finally, someone talking sense about grass fed beef part 4

So what does production first, last, and most important mean to us?

It means we chase production at the expense of quality. And unless you were born in the 40s you simply don’t know what beef used to taste like. All you know is mass produced, juvenile cows. That’s right, juvenile. A cow at 24 months old is the equivalent of a person in their 20s. As we get down to 18 months, we are talking a 16 year old. 16 months? A 13 year old. But how can that be? We aren’t eating veal!

Spork sitting in a Carbon Cub
Spork sitting in a Carbon Cub

Spork just turned 13. He’s 5’9 1/2″ tall. He’s lean and strong but as tall as an average adult man. If I’d put him on a diet of Twinkies (the human equivalent of a grain diet) instead of weighing 130lbs he’d weigh 180 lbs. He’d be fat and sickly, but he’d be the size and weight of the average adult male. Success! I’ve raised him to full size. But is he full size? Hardly.

Spork has years to go, and growing to do. He’s 5’9″ now, but he’ll be well over 6 feet before he’s done growing. He’s gangly and lean right now but as he matures he’ll broaden out, muscle up, and into his 20s maybe even put on some fat. I don’t need to give him a special diet for that, I just need to give him time.

It’s much the same way with cows. Can I get a 1000 lb cow, covered in fat, in 16 or 18 months? Yep, no problem. Is that cow mature, marbled, and muscled? No. This is the first article I’ve ever seen that addresses age as a factor. This is while everything else, and everyone else, is pushing for younger and younger cows in the freezer. Heck, even the USDA has gotten into this and requires that all cows processed for meat are under 30 months of age.

How old are our cows? We target the legal limit, 28-30 months. That is twice what the typical farmer targets which is 15-18 months. Why does your grass fed steak cost more? That’s most of the reason right there.

Except when I got into this, or when I talk to anyone in the beef business, they will tell you that they are finishing at 18 months. Maybe 24. I’ve never met a soul, till I read this article, that targets beyond 24 months. All the advice I’ve ever received, including school, was to push the age down, down, down. But having done it the other way, I’m pushing it up, up, up. Mature cows taste better, period.

So is finishing grass fed, grass finished cows hard? Nah, it just takes twice the time, twice the land, about 1000 other small details we didn’t even address here, and the ability to go left when everyone else is going right. Other than that, it’s a piece of cake.

Thank you Bill for sending me this article. I truly enjoyed reading it. Maybe there is hope for us grass farmers yet.

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Finally, someone talking sense about grass fed beef part 3

In the last post we asked if grass fed was worth all the hype. I’ll let the article answer this one.

Anya Fernald of Belcampo in California raises grass-fed beef prized for its deep color and flavor and its buttery fat with a yellow hue said to indicate a high vitamin content. “I wasn’t fully committed to grass-fed and -finished when I started Belcampo,” she said. “Most of it tastes terrible.” But as Ms. Fernald and her partners tested different types of feed, including barley and other grains, they found pure grass-fed cattle had a denser “knitting”—the beautiful, lacy lines of fat distributed throughout a superior cut of meat. “The driver for us is that it tastes great,” she said.

Our grass fed steak (above) beside a store bought grain fed steak (below)
Our grass fed steak (above) beside a store bought grain fed steak (below). Photo courtesy of April McLaughlin, one of our customers. 

It should say “well done” grass fed is the way. When a cow has ample forage, good genetics, a quality job done at the butcher, and is allowed to live well past normal industry finishing times (18 months), the meat is FAR superior to bland, tasteless, conventional meat. Better than “Grade A Prime” beef. There is a flavor and a richness that you cannot get from grain fed cows, period. Not a different flavor, and actual flavor. Grain fed beef is like eating packing peanuts instead of popcorn with butter and salt. The crunch is there, but not the flavor.

The best way to make sure you’re getting genuine—and tasty—grass-fed beef is to buy from a reputable butcher who can provide all the information you want on how the cattle was raised and recommend a cut that’s right for you. (See “Here’s the Beef,” below.) After talking to experts and cooking many pounds of meat, I learned that the tastiest grass-fed beef comes from cattle allowed to graze for 28 months or longer. The beef should have a good marbling of fat, a rich color and a slight smell of the grass on which it’s grazed.

Here is one place where I break away from this article. But in their context, it is correct. This author is talking about being in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. It’s not like you’ll be in Brooklynn and hit your local grass fed farm down the street. But for those of us blessed to be in NC or anywhere that rural farms still exist, it’s better to know your farmer than it is to know your butcher. Go to the source, see how the animals are treated, and buy your products there (yes I am biased.) I also know that butchers will eschew a farmer because they are too small, too far away, or won’t discount enough. Or maybe the butcher is conventional too and doesn’t really care about grass fed. Going to the butcher is no guarantee of what you are getting.

I’d like to come back to the 28 months thing in the previous quote. When I went to grazers school (yes there is such a thing) a lot of the conversation revolved around how to finish cows in as little time as possible. If your farm can only carry 100 cows, and it takes 24 months to finish a cow, then you can produce 50 cows per year. However if you can finish your cows at 18 months,  you’ve increased your production dramatically. What about 16 months? What about 15 months. Folks, this is what beef farmers talk about. How quickly can I go from calf to cash. It lessens the time spent managing, lessens chance of predation, chance for disease or injury, everything. We are ALL about production and efficiency in this country and we are good at it.

So what does all this production cost us? That’s the next post.