SWMBO sent me the following article on egg rationing due to the Avian flu in the US. Since we don’t buy eggs, this was news to me. I don’t know if this is doom and gloom or just the latest weird happening in the world.
A dozen perfect farm fresh chicken eggs
Either way the good news is, we still have plenty of farm fresh eggs ready to sell so if you need some eggs to go along with your fourth of July celebration, then make sure to grab some while you are getting your burger and sausage for the grill. Just shoot me an email if you want to stop by and stock up. dan@ninjacowfarm.com
Despite what you might think from the pictures we post and products we list for sale, our main crop isn’t cows, or pigs, or chickens. Our main product is grass. Cows, pigs, chickens, and produce are the tools we use to seed, grow, harvest, and manage our grass. Being that we are in reality grass farmers, it may surprise you to know that we don’t own a grain drill. We don’t plant seeds, or roll out turf. We don’t have Chemlawn out to treat our pastures so they are bright green and glowing like subdivision grass. We don’t own a lawnmower or a bat wing mower. We don’t own a hay baler or bale any hay. In fact, to be grass farmers, we don’t do any of the things you’d expect of someone who raises grass. What we do is utilize what we have to work with nature to improve our soil. By concentrating on the soil, we get the grass we want. It’s that easy, and that hard.
A few years ago, we did a big project with Wake County Soil and Water to repair a huge eroded area in the middle of our main pasture. It took some heavy equipment and about 55 dump truck loads of dirt to backfill the missing soil and to get things back like they should be. We seeded the ground and let things grow as best they could. This winter, we found that not all of the areas had recovered and we had to change our process to help the new soil do better. Now this summer, the areas we were able to treat over the winter are the greenest and lushest in the pasture. However not every area was able to be treated so what to do?
Here you see an area that shows all the various stages of what I’m talking about. The area in the background where its bright green (and in front of the big orange arrow) is an area we treated this winter. As you can see it’s recovering nicely and is lush and green. All that was done to transform that area was to feed hay directly on the ground and allow the cows to do their magic. Now the soil in that area is moist, brown, and growing good grass without any application of seed or commercial fertilizer.
The areas in the picture with the beans spread on it looked like the bare patch in the foreground. Pretty much barren clay, devoid of organic matter. By next spring, or even late fall, this area will be green and rich with life. We will continue to practice this spot application of surplus produce on areas that are not growing grass till we have no more areas without grass. Then we will transition to areas that are growing the wrong kind of plants such as thistle and weeds. Once those areas are gone, we’ll transition to areas where the grass us underperforming or the wrong kind of grass. Every time we add organic matter combined with animal traffic, the end result is something better grows. This is all without disturbing the soil, and without chemicals.
Make the best stock in the world, or the fattest dog you’ve seen.
We have beef coming both this week and next. As usual when we have beef coming, we need to clear some space out of the freezers. To do so, I’m going to have a sale on all of our products for making your dog happy or for making the worlds best stock in the kitchen.
For those of you who have used our product to make beef, chicken, or pork stock, you know how good that stuff is and how well it keeps. Help a farmer out and stock up at the same time. I need to make room for steaks and hamburger and need to move this stuff out.
For those of you with dogs, I have lots of beef bones which are perfect for dog treats. Just thaw them out and pass them out and watch your dogs spends hours happily gnawing away.
For you soap makers or wholesome cooks, I also have some fatback that I’ll include in this sale.
All of these products, plus some more similar bits stuffed in the freezer will be marked down 11% until we get the freezer full of beef again, likely next week. Just shoot me an email if you want to stock up and I’ll get your order pulled for you and have it waiting.
I was receiving a shipment from another farmer today and the owner mentioned that she had an extra case of pasture raised chicken eggs on the truck and didn’t know why. Must be some mixup when they were loading she assumed.
Me, “Um, so they are extra.”
Her, “Yep.”
Me, “Wanna sell them?”
Her, “Sure, why not.”
A dozen perfect farm fresh chicken eggs
There are now 9 dozen eggs in the fridge for whoever wants to stop by and buy them. Since I get a request about every other day for eggs, I doubt they will last long so its first come, first serve. I’ll be here till about 4pm today and around all weekend so just let me know if you want to stop by and get some eggs, or chicken, or pork, or beef. We have it all right now!
We go to three different wholesalers and two different farmers markets every day to pick up produce that would otherwise be headed to the landfill. Some days an individual farmer has more, sometimes they have less but it all averages out to a certain amount per load, per day.
A pallet of produce is heavy. I know our tractor cannot pick up 2300 pounds because that’s what one of our bales of cardboard recycling weighs and the back end lifts right off of the ground when we try. With a pallet of produce, the back tires are barely touching the ground and often as not we walk the pallet standing on the front tires only. I’m going to guess that means an average pallet weighs about 1200 pounds which is relatively conservative. That takes into account the half pallets we receive in the mix. 1200 per pallet is a good average.
We go the market 365 days per year. Often in the summer we make 3 or more trips per day. In the winter, we can usually make it in one trip. Our normal trailer hauls 9 pallets when fully loaded, but we often have to pull out the big trailer which hauls 18 pallets. All in, it looks like we’ll average throughout the calendar year 20 pallets per day, every day.
20 pallets x 1200 pounds per pallet = 24,000 pounds per day or 12 tons per day.
24,000 pounds per day x 365 days per year = 8,760,000 pounds per year, or 4380 tons per year. That means that we are diverting nearly NINE MILLION POUNDS of produce from the landfill and into either our animals or our soil. No wonder we are tired all the time.
One of our great customers (Hi Drew and Kat!) bought a full slab of bacon a while back. I don’t recall exactly when but I seem to recall it was cold at the time so it’s been a while. While delivering meat recently to their house, I noted the slab was still squirreled away in the freezer. “Tsk, tsk”, says I. “Bacon pining away in the bottom of the freezer is no bueno.” Of course, I had some bacon in my freezer at the time that had been there since winter, but I’m not going to tell them that! For those of you that need a special cut, we can get pretty much anything you need. We even had some full length beef shank and beef tendon on the way for April as a special request.
This past weekend, Drew finally brought that beautiful slab O’ meat out and went to work on it.
The beginning of cutting up the bacon
First they cut up part of the slab into these huge chunks of meaty goodness. The rest will be used for actual bacon I assume. Of course there is no telling what Drew may whip up.
Not sure how this made it to the next step. I’d have eaten it here and now.
Here you see the bacon chunks cooked at 500 degrees for 18 minutes. They were similar to pork chops at this point. But we are just getting started.
A whole chicken, also from our freezer.
After getting the bacon ready, he rubbed the whole bird and pork in chili powder, cayenne, paprika, salt, pepper, and then made a marinade for the bird with lime, cilantro, a little olive oil, and minced garlic. I’m really not sure if there is a recipe for this that is being followed, or if it’s just a mad scientist at work (insert maniacal laughter here). I’m guessing the latter is more likely but having tried their cooking, I’m totally ok with it.
I know from experience that this is a staple in this house.
While the bird was cooking, they made this awesome salsa verde. Then just add corn tortillas with more cilantro and diced onion to garnish and Viola!
As good as it gets
I really should only work on these posts after breakfast. Now I’m hungry.
I received all the above this past weekend and this note at the bottom. “thx for the awesome food to celebrate Father’s Day and I wish you guys the best!”
I used to work in an office. I had over 100 people who worked for me and most of the things that got done were done by somebody else. We did about 100 million in business in our heyday. I had an assistant, great pay, great benefits, and most anything I needed was simply a phone call away. I gave all that up to be covered in hydraulic fluid yesterday while crawling up, over, and inside a trash compactor that smelled exactly like what you think it would, on a day when the temperature was in the triple digits. I came home greasy, oily, and disgusting having worked from about 5am to about 7pm. After a shower and a quick dinner, I came back to do office work till about 9:45. I couldn’t be happier and a large reason is from comments like the above from Drew. Nobody thanked me for doing my job before. Now I get it routinely from my customers. Having someone hand you money and thank you for selling them product at the same time changes your outlook on running a business. I’m bringing people happiness by doing my job, and in the process I’m having it for myself. It doesn’t get any better than that.
Recently some of our customers have inquired about intern or volunteer positions on our farm for their kids this summer. Each time I’ve politely declined as we figured we were done with interns, at least for this year. We have both Miguel and Vicente here, and me occasionally when I do some actual work. That should be plenty of labor for all the things we have to do.
Then the summer rush of produce hit us like a tidal wave. We have averaged about 20 pallets of food a day for the last couple of weeks and there is no sign it’s going to slow down.
8 partial pallets of food. We are getting 20 per day, 7 days per week currently.
Each pallet weighs on average 1500 pounds so that’s 30,000 pounds of produce each day. Most of it we handle by the pallet and use tractors to move it and feed it, but a large amount still has to be hand sorted. We are also having to deal with all the boxes that everything comes in and simply baling the cardboard takes too much time with this kind of volume. We are baling about 2500 pounds of cardboard per week currently.
I say all this to say, for those parents who were looking for a position for their kids on a farm part-time, we have some opportunities. The work isn’t especially hard or difficult as all these weights I listed are handled one bundle of grapes/strawberries/peaches at a time, If it’s heavy we use tractors. But for someone who is watching their kid sit on the couch and play Xbox, it’s a perfect job. I promise they will come home safe, tired, and ready for bed.
We should need this person for basically the summer and can work around most schedules. I’d prefer that when they come, they plan on staying most of the day rather than coming for a couple of hours here and there as that is too much to manage from our end.
I cannot recall exactly who asked me about interning, so I’m making this blanket announcement to everyone in hopes that whoever it was will contact me at dan@ninjacowfarm.com
So I take the Gator and Miguel and go down to get the boat. This time I’ll lift it with Miguel’s help and carry it on the Gator. We bring it back to the upper pond and I hop in and paddle over to the cow. Paddling is kind of fun, but it’s a leg workout which doesn’t add any coolness to the temperature. As I get to the cow, I’m recalling that hippos are the deadliest creatures in Africa, killing people all the time. I see the cow looking at me thinking, “That thing doesn’t have much freeboard. I probably can’t sink it, but I can knock his butt out of it and turn it over. And he just upgraded to the iPhone 6 (I’d told him earlier when I was taking his picture) which is probably in his pocket still. That would totally be worth it.”
In the end he decided to run instead. Right by Miguel and jump back into the lower pond. Sigh.
I pull the boat out of the upper pond and drag it to the lower pond. Miguel is by the cow, laughing of course. This whole thing is funny. Hot, sweaty, irritating, but funny. I launch the SS Minnow into the lower pond and paddle all the way across it to the cow who this time really doesn’t want to get out. I’m about to play bumper car with him when he finally relents and heads out of the water and thankfully back into the pasture. We collect Gators and again play bumper car with the cow to get him back to the paddock which has been reconfigured with vehicles to receive him from another direction and get him into the head gate, which we finally accomplish. I retrieve my doctor bag from the barn and prep our patient for surgery. After some quick work, I install a trocar and the bloat quickly blows off.
LF 37 in the head gate with a Trocar inserted
He’s not happy about it, but he is feeling better at this point. Rather than leave the trocar in, we go ahead and remove it and leave the wound open. By the time it starts to heal, the danger of bloat has pretty much passed, we hope. This saves us from having to do this all over again to get him back in the head gate to remove the trocar. This entire series of events took from 4:15 to 6:15, when SWMBO was calling me to go to dinner, something I was more than ready to do. But only after a shower and some time cleaning various wounds I’d picked up during the day. Hopefully today everyone behaves and we can get back to our to do list. For you careful readers, you may have noted that I didn’t mention the escaped cow. We left him in the woods where it was cool to overnight by himself. We’ll hopefully get him today and put him back with his friends.
So Miguel and I charge into the pasture with our two Gators. We don’t have horses although sometimes I wish we did on days like this. We quickly get to our patient and start herding him with the Gators back towards the barn. He is wise to what we are doing and has no intention of going. He also has four wheel drive and can turn on a dime. After a few laps of the pasture, I finally had to do to him what I’ve learned is required with these purchased steers, I had to physically turn him with the Gator. As we are running along (he’s trying to outrun the Gator) I have to match his speed, then place my front fender against his shoulder and physically push him the way I want him to go. Thank God I bought the fender guards on this Gator. They are round so they don’t cut the cow, and they are steel so he doesn’t break my fenders. There is lots of starting, stopping, running, and backing up. It’s actually kind of neat to work together like that with Miguel, working as a team with very little verbal communication.
So we get this cow into the central paddock where he runs into the wall of trucks we’ve erected. We jump off and chase him down the lane and he goes exactly where we want him to, till he gets to the last truck which is Miguel’s truck and trailer. Specifically the goose neck trailer. There is a unique feature of a goose neck trailer. It’s that there is a gap between the truck and trailer as the hitch is actually in the bed of the truck. You can see what I mean here.
See that gap between the truck and trailer?
Our cow, seeing that forward was the way back to the head gate instead ran right through that gap and then promptly escaped back into the main pasture because of course we’d left the gate open on that side of the paddock. Sigh.
So now we had to go get him again. We took the Gators back into battle and again played bumper cars with the cow to get him back to the barn yard. As we were working him back, he decided that he’d rather go back to the pond and ran through the fence and jumped back in the upper pond. Now I need to go get the paddle boat, drag it back to the upper pond, and do this all over. And it’s hot and we aren’t doing anything that’s actually on our to do list. It’s time to get the boat, but that’s the next post.
Not that skinny dipping in the pond is entirely out of the question. It’s just that,
This pond is right by the road and pretty much in full view. Not a great spot.
The pond has lots of green gooey stuff growing in it. Looks neat and is probably great for wild life. Not great for swimming in.
The last cow I had to chase tried to kill me. Being found dead in the barn is one thing. Being found naked and dead in a pond, now that’s quite another
We have an old paddle boat I haven’t used in years. My mother bought it when I was a teenager but it’s still here and still usable. I drug it, literally, from the other pond down to this pond and paddled up to the cow. He was not entirely pleased to see me and after some consideration decided he’d exit the pond and head back to dry land. I disembarked and followed on foot, getting him up to the head of the other pond and near the pasture where our other bloated cow and his friend were hanging out. Cattle like to be together so my plan was to walk him to the gate and he’d dart in to escape me and be with them.
Instead the other cow darted out to be with this guy. Sigh. I called Vicente to come down and help me, which is what I should have done in the first place. I had him walk the cows back to the gate while I guarded it to keep the cow who charged me still in the pasture. Very quickly Vicente had the cows moving. Unfortunately the cow who wasn’t bloated decided that jumping the fence was better than walking back so he escaped into the main pasture leaving the bloated cow behind. Sigh.
So Vicente walked the bloated cow back and we got him through the gate and into the pasture. By this time, Miguel has come back from the market. It’s about 100 degrees and everyone is dripping wet with sweat. We decide that the bloated cow is not going to go back into the paddock so we take pretty much every vehicle on the farm and make a hard barrier from the pasture to the head gate paddock. Usually we just use a temporary wire but we’re taking no chances this time. Trucks, trailers, tractors, are all lined up nose to tail making a 100 foot long, 100,000 pound fence. It’s quick and relatively easy. Miguel then takes the Gator to go get the cow while I watch from the fence. My Gator has four seats and I’m worried the cow might see the opening of the bench seats and try to jump through so I’m guarding that opening. After a few laps of the pasture, it’s clear that Miguel isn’t going to get the cow by himself. We quickly reconfigure the vehicle fence and I bring my Gator into the fray which is more fun than standing around watching Miguel do it. But that’s for the next post.
