Colonel's Blog, Earthdate 4 Jan 2023...
Hey Ya'll!
Good morning and happy Wednesday. We posed for a quick photo before milking this morning to say "Hey Ya'll!" Tax prep began yesterday and, like training the puppies, is an ongoing project. We also worked on a couple of house-related projects. A frost-free spigot failed and we had to cut open one of our new walls and remove the spigot. I was able to take it completely apart and found that a seal on the anti-siphon device got stuck in an area it wasn't supposed to be. I got things into the right spots and was able to put everything back together and the wall back in place. The spigot works and now we have a handy access panel! This is not the first project in which I was thankful we installed a PEX manifold and I can control water flow to each individual line. The beef cows and sheep were extra excited to get their hay yesterday and both gave us a bit of a playful happy-dance.
Our farm projects today are to refresh the straw for the milk cows and layer chickens, continue tax prep, and the main project is to refresh the stock in our freezer at The Little Farm Store. We work with a local business, on a consignment basis, to deliver our products to the immediate community. We have been doing this for a couple of months and we really like the arrangement. We found that our best selling products are: bacon, loin chops, rib chops, and ham hocks. So, we are going to pull some of the stock that is not selling as well back to the farm and restock those items that are selling best.
An update on our shipping: I would grade us on the container that went to KS as slightly below average...it arrived cold and usable but not frozen. The container that went to FL is a solid well-below average. Our 2-3 day USPS Priority container took over a week to arrive...to Florida. Needless to say, the meat was ruined. In the Fighter Pilot Community, we looked at each event as a learning opportunity and harshly debriefed ourselves to ensure we learned as much as possible. In this case, we learned that we cannot rely on an open-ended USPS 2-3 day delivery. From now on, we will use a different shipping company. We attempted to keep costs as low as possible for the customer, but that came at the expense of the product ordered. We will do better in the future. We will also use different insulative material and more frozen gel packs. We shipped "The 14" to the Atlanta area yesterday using our new techniques and eagerly await the results. We will re-ship to FL today using the new techniques.
Local Farm Report:
Harvest:
21 Chicken eggs
9 Duck eggs
3 Gallons of milk
Sales:
N/A
Cheers! Rich & Shelley
Comments