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BOTL Farm - Pasture Pork -Grass fed Goat and Lambs - Cage free Rabbit - Soy-free, Corn-Free, Non-GMO Eggs

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Reducing Waste Streams: A Tale of a Heavy-Duty Paper Shredder

12/11/2020

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Feed bag cut in half and folded ready for shredding
​Here at BOTL Farm, we’re not short on ideas. It’s like my mentor used to tell me: it’s important to have ideas, whether they’re good ideas or not, because eventually even a blind squirrel finds a nut. 

Let’s talk about one of our latest ideas.

We feed our pigs and laying hens this amazing-smelling, super-hippy-nutritious feed from New Country Organics. The pig feed comes in a giant, one-ton plastic tote bag, but we generally get the chicken feed in 50 lb bags because we use the feed for our own flocks but also function as feed resellers. The feed bags have three layers of brown paper (that the delivery company pallet jockeys love to puncture) and instructions printed on the outside that we should compost the bags after they’re emptied.
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Punctured feed bags from pallet jockeys, but at least you can see the tasty feed!
However, as a rotation-based pasture farm that raises only livestock and no crops, we don’t produce compost on any significant scale. We have a bit of household compost that we put in a pile, but it’s a weird mix of coffee grounds, pork bones, and eggshells. One time we put 100 lbs of boiled pig heads in it, but we vowed to never do that again. Don’t ask why [Editor says: It was the flies and the smell]. Not really the thing for hot composting.

Some farms have centralized compost piles filled with animal manure, but BOTL Farm employs a large number of manure spreaders.  We call them the animals.  The animals spread their manure evenly around the farm as they rotate through paddocks and move fast enough that it’s deposited in nurturing instead of deleterious (<- is that a real word? [Editor says: yes proofreader, it is a word, Google it]) amounts.

This whole time we’ve been living with only our tiny household compost pile, reading the instructions on the feed bags that clearly say to “compost after they’re emptied”, and we’ve been stacking them to be recycled at our local facility instead of composting, hanging our heads a little the whole time.
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Shredded feed bags ready to use
Now BOTL Farm is no stranger to doing weird things to compost paper products. One time we had this idea to store all of our paper products in a bucket of water, and then strain the water, and then compress the paper into “logs” that we could burn in our fireplace. This really works about as well as you think it won’t, but we tried dutifully anyway.  This and other experiments lead to much contemplation about how to fulfill the destiny of our feed bags and their manifest composting afterlife.

Because the NCO feed bags are all paper (an unusual find anymore in these days of abundant polymers), we needed a way to compost large quantities of paper. Given the constraints of not having a large compost pile and the difficulties experienced by previous large-scale paper composting attempts, we began to think of other ways to break down the paper, in a composting-like fashion, but maybe without the requisite chemical processes.  Shredded paper seems a lot like chicken bedding.  What if we could shred the paper and make chicken bedding?  Shredding paper sounds like a lot of work.  What if they made a machine that could do that for us?  What if we could hire a Ninja Turtle villain [Editor says: supposedly there’s a villain named “Shredder.” There’s also one named Krang but that’s not relevant here] and employ him in the manufacture of sustainable chicken bedding??

Luckily, we know basically nothing about paper shredders but that was no real obstacle since the internet exists and so does that “Amazon recommends” section. It quickly pointed us to the standard farm household industrial paper shredder, with a 4hp motor and a 110V hookup, we ordered it, and our very obliging (and dog-loving!) UPS delivery person delivered our latest piece of farm equipment a few days later (and a dog treat for Pup).

It’s a thing of glory: matte black, electric, with a supposed run time of 50 minutes of continuous shredding without overheating. How had we ever survived without a farm paper shredder?
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Amazon Basic 24-Sheet Shredder
A few nights later, we were the proud owners of 35 less feed bags and two big sacs of crinkly coop bedding. We’ve started using the shredded feed bags in the chicken coops, along with wood chips, planer shavings (from our saw mill), and commercial hemp bedding that we’d been using previously. 
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Pup hiding in a pile of hard wood shavings
Initial results seem promising with the shredded feed bags, but we hope to gather more data and provide an update on how it goes in the next few months. If this continues to work, we’ll submit a new definition of “composting” on Urban Dictionary. Onto our next adventure!
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Spread in coop ready for testing
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Pup The Future Award Winner of Best Farm Dog Ever Of All Time Of This Year

8/21/2020

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Congratulations, you have just been e-introduced to the finest farm dog east of the Mississippi.  Her name, quite creatively, is pup.  Pup is a rescue dog, who began her life somewhere in Texas.  She doesn't talk a lot about her past, but from what we can infer it involved something that makes buckets extremely scary.  Pup took to farm life from a young age.  She enjoys her new house with a private 19 acre dog park and companions of a variety of species.  She has quickly developed skills that include hunting squirrels, helping encourage stray chickens back towards their coop, and pointing out whenever a lamb is not in the correct paddock.
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BOTL Farm believes in full circle sustainability and this includes using every part of every animal.  Since some parts of animals are not ideal for human consumption, this means making them available as dog food to an extremely willing pup.  Here you can see she mustache you a question, but she's shaving it for later.
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Pup's diary: day 34.  I've been eating grass for a month straight and the sheep now believe I am one of them.  I have learned to speak their language, and find their customs endearing.  They suspect nothing.
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​The farm can be a muddy place in spring, and humans often find themselves sinking up to their knees!  Although the power-to-weight ratio of an athletic farm dog is more ideal, you can never be too safe.  Here we see pup putting on her muck boots to head out for her morning animal chores.
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​One of pup's favorite activities is trying to lick the inside of the mouth of animals on the farm.  It's her way of bonding, and letting the animals know they are her friends and they are both loved and delicious.  Here pup bonds with one of BOTL Farm's pigs, as they catch up on their weekly todo lists.
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​Anyone at the top of their field, such as Pup the farm dog, is constantly pushing the limits of what's possible.  One time Pup ran so fast she strained her front shoulder, and was limping for several weeks.  Her personal assistants took it upon themselves to aide her plight, and here you can see Pup undergoing her cold laser therapy.  This procedure is painless, and had the primary side effect of making pup want to take a nap on her bed, like is normal for an evening following a hard day of farm work.  Also note the UV protective safety glasses being worn both by Pup and her designated farmer assistant.  Safety is one of Pup's top seven priorities.
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​Pup doing her part during the covid pandemic to stop the spread of disease.  Pup says this reduces her ability to smell anything, but she knows that sacrifices must be made.  Pup appreciates the mask being color matched to herself, and the adjustable ear loops for getting that proper fit.
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​Normal people buy their dogs Beggin Strips and flavored treats from the grocery store, but farmers have a tendency to give their dogs treats that are uh, how to say, a little closer to what's normally written on the package label.  Here we see pup extremely excited to head outside to get to work on her latest treat, a partial deer head.  While this may look horrifying to some, if you could see the giant dog smile that's hidden behind those deer molars, you'd understand why Pup loves her farm dog life.
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​Ninety Nine BOTLs of Farm on the Wall

10/10/2019

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Mangalitsa/Berkshire/Large Black piglet, aka a tiny elephant.
Mangalitsa/Berkshire/Large Black piglet, aka a tiny elephant.
Dearest BOTLiebers,

The cool mornings, the pup under a blanket, and the dinner time sunsets all tell us the same thing: another summer is drawing to a close here at BOTL Farm.  As we put the following touches on our third year here in The House, it occurs to us that we have many words to share with you.  Many words.  Gather round the pixels we will sequentially illuminate, and let us illustrate and elaborate on another general farm update:
Pup the farm dog warming up underneath last year's lamb pelts.
Pup the farm dog warming up underneath last year's lamb pelts.

The Sawmill


Our primary sawyer loves this machine as much as our head wood worker, and our sign-maker and lumber curator get behind it nearly as much as our main green cant hook operator.  The whole crowd agrees, sawmills are great if you're a wood worker.  This season we discovered a cherry log on the property, and fortunately for the sawmill, that log was in the way of the barn.  Cherry slabs have fantastic grain color.  We've cut about 8,000 bd-ft of lumber in the last 1.5 years and built many things from it including an animal shelter and a cutting board.  We also recently acquired a commercial-grade 16" planer built in 1985 when one of us hadn't yet been born and polymers were not considered structural.  Soon our boards will all be smooth like a newborn piglet.
Cherry slabs and other rough-sawn lumber from our sawmill.
Cherry slabs and other rough-sawn lumber from our sawmill.

Piglets!

As we mentioned in our previous article, maintaining boy pigs is expensive and aspiring farmers are up to date on the latest AI research.  Our attempts at manually operating the pig duplication machinery have proven effective, and we are proud to say that our two breeder pigs have produced a total of 20 piglets!  This all happened in October. Both pigs gave birth in their pasture paddock overnight.  The pig mothers demonstrated varying proficiencies in choosing whether to build a nest, and in how many inches from the electric fence they thought appropriate to allow their newborns to experiment with walking.  Aside from one small shoulder injury, the piglets all appear to be healthy, curious, and helping themselves to as much milk as possible.  We take this time to reflect on the miracle of life, how glad we are that this worked, and the prospect of having 400 lbs of bacon next spring.
A sleepy pile of piglets with their mom. Or their aunt. No one knows.
A sleepy pile of piglets with their mom. Or their aunt. No one knows.

Rabbits

Have you ever heard that old adage about how "they converse like rabbits"?  You can always rely on rabbits for duplicating themselves, except when you can't.  We're not sure if it was a gamma ray burst, a rare ailment, a magnetic pole reversal, or some other extreme event, but this year we somehow ended up with rabbits that couldn't reproduce.  The rabbits nervously told us this doesn't usually happen, and we told them it was OK, not to worry, and that we had a special place to keep them warm in the freezer.  And thusly we decided to slightly reduce the herd population size to zero and try again in the spring with new rabbits.  Hopefully the kind that know how to converse better.  In the mean time, who wants some rabbit meat ??
Some of our pasture-raised rabbits sitting on top of a shelter in the rain. Wet, wet rabbits.
Some of our pasture-raised rabbits sitting on top of a shelter in the rain. Wet, wet rabbits.

MVP Barn

We built an open air barn with a roof!  In fast moving startups, like farms, they often talk about the "minimum viable product" or MVP and say you should build the smallest thing you can to fill the need, and then start using it and iterate as you go.  Once the roof was on the barn, we realized that was actually all we needed to keep the animal feed dry and we moved on to other projects.  We should really think about putting walls on the barn before winter.  But we now have a 60' x 30' barn with a 16' high roof peak, steel trusses, wooden stud walls, and a metal roof.  It also has a lockable person door installed next to a 30' gap where the next wall will be built.  Honestly the door doesn't close properly anyway.
BOTL Farm's minimally-viable barn: who needs walls anyways?
BOTL Farm's minimally-viable barn: who needs walls anyways?

Sheep and Goats

The herds live on!  We've got the boys and the girls separated still, but we're getting ready to combine them again for winter to produce next year's baby sheep and baby goats.  We did our best at shearing our own sheep this spring, which is a bit like mutton busting while trying to use hair trimmers on a shag carpet soaked in crisco.  We're looking forward to another attempt at that this fall.  Except for on our boy breeder sheep.  He's huge.  Shearing him is going to be like giving a haircut while riding a bull.  Several members of the sheep herd have been selected for a free trip to sheep camp this fall.  They're looking forward to the trip, and we're looking forward to the neatly packed boxes they'll return in!
Freshly shorn ram with marking harness, ready for the ladies.
Freshly shorn ram with marking harness, ready for the ladies.

Interior Fencing

Hard physical labor is not fashionable these days, and if there's one thing the BOTL Farmers are, it's fashionable.  This has not stopped us from clearing miles of fence lines through the forest in the last 14 months and dividing 20 acres of land into 24 main paddocks, each paddock bordered by an electric fence.  The fences uses 4 strands of electric on 3 separate circuits, and the paddocks are inter-connected by a system of 37 electrified gates.  The primary construction is all complete, and we're currently working on the finishing touches, testing, and bring-up of each section of electric fence.  Once finalized, we'll be able to move animals from one paddock to another for rotational grazing all around the farm.
A section of interior fence and gate, using new types of insulators called LockJawz.
A section of interior fence and gate, using new types of insulators called LockJawz.
And that's an update on the farm!  Despite all those words we still didn't cover the latest on the honey bees, the tractor, farm road construction, that one time we got 100 dump trucks of fill delivered and leveled for free, the incident(s) with the bald faced hornets, our experiences with the word "silvopasture", meeting the Yale forestry students and their government counterparts, our annual pigroast, the 20 types of grass we're growing in the front yard, the chickens and the eggs, the farm house, and so much more!  We wish we could share it all, and we'll try real hard to write more soon.  In the mean time, support your local farms, love the world, and stop by BOTL Farm if you're interested in buying any eggs, pork, lamb, rabbit, lumber or soap!  Cheers !
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Grandma, the male Kiko goat and the father of our herd.
Grandma, the male Kiko goat and the father of our herd.
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A Primer on Pasture-Raised Pork (Re)production

5/22/2019

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Lady Breeder on bottom and one of our purebred Berkshire on top. Both gilts sleeping in a pile.
Lady Breeder on bottom and one of our purebred Berkshire on top. Both gilts sleeping in a pile.
To all who stand at the back of the line, hear us now as we relay a story from BOTL. For no reason at all, we will start this blog post with a poem:

There once was a farmer from New Jersey 
who moved outside Hartford in the burbsies
he got lots of sheep who eeped-meeped and peeped
and read 18th-century literature featuring Percy

​Anyways, BOTL Farm believes in the earth, the world, the planet, the future. Much like the sugar cane fermenters in Jamaica, we look around us to find those things that can be distilled into happiness, and since we don't have any sugarcane, we think it probably going to be pork. Our first swine minions came to be upon our lands in the cold part of winter 2018. One of the many good things one can find for sale on Craigslist is heritage-breed piglets. As we have previously pontificated, we reared our first thirteen pigs as though they were our own [Editor notes that since we bought them on Craigslist, they were our own]. We built them shelters, we gave them hard-boiled eggs, we showed them where the mud is, and ultimately we sent a subset of them to pig camp. When they returned from camp in neatly packed boxes, we knew that what we needed was ... more pigs.
Lady Breeder's turn on top.
Lady Breeder's turn on top.
Those of you who passed the 8th grade and/or received a discussion of birds and bees from your guardians will know that one solution to producing more piglets is to collocate a boy pig [Ed: boar] and some girl pigs [Ed: gilts] inside an electrified fence for at least 21 days. However, a boy pig is not only an expensive proposition, but there are few heritage breeders within CT and importing pigs from outside CT is a complicated legal maneuver. We will eventually buy or grow an intact boar for our herd, but it's just not in the cards for the next few months.
Berkshire on Cow-Pig (Mangalitsa-Berkshire cross)
Berkshire on Cow-Pig (Mangalitsa-Berkshire cross)
Another solution is AI. This is where a computer smartly calculates the date to deliver a temperature-controlled box to your door, and as a discerning farmer, you responsibly navigate a wand from the temperature-controlled box into the pig duplication receptacle. Then you chase the pig around the forest with the magic wand. There's another nuance to this story that involves the phrase "dry powdered lube" but we'll cover that later and/or when you're older.
The pigs enjoying a treat from a nearby vegetable farm. The pigs only get soy-free, corn-free, non-GMO feed and these bolted radishes qualify!
The pigs enjoying a treat from a nearby vegetable farm. The pigs only get soy-free, corn-free, non-GMO feed and these bolted radishes qualify!
So we're not sure if it worked [Editor's note: it didn't work]. Pig heat [Ed: estrus] is difficult to identify and qualitatively interpret, since it requires not a thermometer but instead thoughtful stimulation while observing the position of the ears, often at a light jog. Since early indications are that our first AI attempt was not successful, so we simply look forward to trying again.

If you find yourself hankering for pork by the pound, we have great news. We now have pork by the pound. And once we sell out, you can be confident that we're taking the future of the farm into our own hands. Our own hands up to our elbows. A fist full of the future. Cheers to the next generation!
Smoked ham center slice, also known in some areas as ham steak! Yum!
Smoked ham center slice, also known in some areas as ham steak! Yum!
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Our First Sheeplets!

4/14/2019

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Editor's note... this was published a few weeks after it was written... Sorry about the timing, oops.

Greetings!  It's been a long winter since our last update, but spring is beginning to sprung and with spring comes BABIES.

Tess, one of our seasoned ewes, gave birth yesterday evening to twins.  As Experienced Farmers who have owned sheep for several months, we totally knew it was going to happen.  She had mostly stopped eating yesterday morning, was hanging out by herself for most of the day, and when she finally went into the shelter she growled at anyone who tried to join her.  Tess and Goaty McGoatFace (GMGF) seemed to compromise in the afternoon that GMGF could sit half-in, half-out of the shelter as long as GMGF was quiet.  That's quite a compromise for Goaty.

By late afternoon, Tess had started to occasionally twitch, gasp open her mouth, and then grind her teeth -- I don't know much about giving birth, but i told myself that her contractions had started.  However, our farming mentor had assured us that most of her sheep give birth overnight.  Whew, that was going to be lots of hours of contractions.

So we did what responsible farmers would do and went to the bar to hang out with our Friends and eat chicken wings, thinking that we'd be back in time for the birth later at night.

When we returned to the farm and exited the car, it was immediately apparent that there were new tiny animals and one of them was giving pathetic little cries.  One of the twins had gotten separated from Tess and was still wet and sticky (yuck) and was trying vainly to nurse from Sesvanna (who named these ridiculous sheep), who hasn't given birth yet and was having none of it.  We were able to scoop up the sticky twin and put it back down by Tess, who started licking and nursing it.  A great success.
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Tess' twins at 7pm last night still seemed new enough that individual adults were coming over one at a time to have a sniff and say hi.

Other highlights include
-- Lilac's reaction. Lilac is Tess' daughter from last year, who is now old enough and big enough to be pregnant.. but looked so forlorn and confused that her mom had made more tiny things. at one point, Lilac even laid down by Tess to snuggle/warm one of the twins.  She's going to be a wonderful aunt, right up until she births out her own lamb in two weeks and she becomes a mother.
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- Monster-face's reaction (the male breeder sheep).  As Monster approached to have a sniff, Tess growled and tried to edge him away.  However, she only protected one of the twins with her body and Monster sniffed the other one twice, looked at it sideways, and rammed it.  It was somewhat horrifying to see a 125 lb male with 14" horns ram a 6 lb newborn, but you know, such is the way of the animal kingdom?  The lamb sat down hard as it was rammed and stayed there for a few minutes.  After monster walked away, Tess nudged it and it stayed down, so we picked it up and put it back on its ridiculously wobbly legs.

Great news, both lambs were still alive this morning. 
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One more farm story: so we're hard-boiling extra/cracked/small eggs for the pigs, right?  Pigs LOVE eggs. 

Two days ago, we took out a bucket of eggs for the pigs, but it appeared they had slept out in the forest somewhere because they weren't around the feeding area and weren't in their shelter.  We said fine, whatever, they'll come up for food and water at some point and eat the eggs then.

New farm lesson: crows LOVE eggs.  A group of nasty, too-intelligent-for-their-own-good crows proceeded to spend the morning trying to figure out how to efficiently hold whole, hard boiled eggs and fly at the same time.  They ended up scattering at least 5 of the eggs over the two fields and nearby forest, which pup was happy to run around and find and eat.  It was like pup-easter.  It's tuff to tell how many the crows successfully stole and ate.

So yesterday in the morning, we go out, no pigs.  So we put a lid on the egg bucket and set it outside the pig area, thinking we'll put them out when we sees the pigs return at some point that day so they'll eat them right away.  The pigs never returned, so last night while we were paparazzi-ing Tess we put the eggs out for the pigs, thinking the crows wouldn't eat them in the dark.

This morning we go out with another bucket of eggs and last night's eggs are still there. Those lazy goddamn pigs had already gone to sleep in the woods and hadn't woken up or returned to their feeders yet.

So we went to find them.  They were all in their pig-pile about 200 feet from the feeding area, but didn't seem inclined to get up just because a farmer was approaching.  So we let pup in.  She got free pig-butt-licks and snout licks because they still wouldn't get up.  Sheesh.  Pigs are not morning animals.  We kept trying to get them to wake up and go eat eggs for about 10 minutes before it worked.  At one point, I had a foot under one of them and was urging it up while pup was licking its butt.  It just laid there, placidly snorting and steaming. 
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Finally we got three of the 13 pigs to get up and follow us back to the feeding area. # can three pigs eat 160 eggs # probably # damn crows
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A Pig’s Tale

12/19/2018

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BOTL Farm now has expanded meat options!  If you find yourself braising a rabbit for dinner on Monday, broasting a chicken for lunch on Tuesday, frying a dozen eggs for breakfast on Wednesday, sous viding [Editor notes that ‘viding’, being a conflagration of the French word for ‘vacuum’ and the English ‘-ing’ for a present-tense verb, is not a word] a leg of lamb on Thursday afternoon, and spending all of Friday hankering for a pork chop, boy have we got just the things for you!

Here at BOTL Farm, we have always believed the foundation of a balanced diet is bacon.  While we wait for an updated food pyramid to get published, we have begun a project to raise a pig that is 100% bacon.  Current yields are a normal amount of bacon in each pig, but we're going to keep trying using an experimental technique of piglet belly rubs and playing high-fat music in the pasture over night.  Our neighbors love the music.
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The deets:

  • Whole pigs will be approximately $1,300.  This includes a price per pound hanging weight of $6.50 with target hanging weights of 160 lbs and target live weights of 250 lbs.  This makes the total meat cost about $1,040 and butcher costs around $260, for a total of approximately $1,300 depending on the final weight of your little bundle of bacon joy.
  • We are NOT currently doing half pigs. Phone a friend and buy a whole.
  • First deposit is $250, and we’ll be asking for a second deposit of $250 in February. Balance will be payable at pick-up.  Click here to email us a suitcase full of money.
  • Our pigs are heritage breeds Mangalitsa and Berkshire, and are being raised on pasture and in forest.  This means they eat lots of sticks. Pigs love sticks.
  • Supplemental feed is, as with all our other animals, corn-free, soy-free and non-GMO.
  • Pork will be ready in late April or early May 2019.
  • We will deliver to USDA-certified butcher and can help you with your cut list if you’ve never done one or are looking for the latest in pork cutting technology.  
  • Everything will be vacuum-sealed, packaged, and frozen, picked up from our farm.  At no extra charge, you’ll get to meet a couple of the best-dressed farmers you’ve ever seen east of Hartford!  Also a really cute dog. She loves you already … in fact she knows you’re her new best friend.​​
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Pigs come in pods, and our first pod is a farmer’s dozen! [Editor notes that although the proper name for a group of pigs depends on the age of said pigs, ‘pod’ is never the correct answer. A group of young pigs is either a drift, drove, or litter; whereas older pigs are called a sounder of swine, a team of hogs, a passel of hogs, or a singular of boars.]  We’ll be reserving a few for breeding stock, and converting the remainder into frozen bacon. Contact us here if you can’t wait to add carnitas and ham steak to your weekly meal plans!
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Update!

10/28/2018

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​Hello there good person.  Let's have a general update on the goings-on here at the Back Of The Line Farm.  Come with me, dive right in:

1) The chickens.  The chickens may be our greatest success.  Birds are gross.  Have you ever met a creature that has such disregard for where it poops, and that has an attention span that facilitates transition from dedicated guardian parent to clueless lost dinosaur in just a few seconds?  All you have to do is reach under their butts and grab their eggs.  It's kind of amazing this species could ever survive in the wild.  Anyhooo, it turns out we're having grand success at producing eggs, and we're currently collecting between 60 and 80 per day.
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We realized early on that as altruistic farmers we would have to choose between our ethical grand utopian views for the world, and a concept called "making enough money to live."  For better or worse, at each fork in the proverbial road we have thus far selected the former grand vision.  This includes our chickens, where we continue to feed them corn-free, soy-free, non-GMO feed and we continue to keep them out to pasture each day, so they can scratch and cluck like happy chickens in the field.  Feed this expensive necessitates that we price our eggs at fifty cents each which is basically a break even cost on the feed, and ignores the time our farmers spend lovingly stroking the birds each day and reading them limericks.
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2) Dat puppers.  Poor doggo pulled something in her shoulder, was on forced rest for a month, only sort of got better, was still limping, them somehow tore her leg open in the forest and had to get emergency stitches and is back on rest now.  Pray to the puppers deity for the dearest doogan pup.
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3) Sheep and goats!  They are doing quite well.  We separated out three male lambs that will be sent to sheep camp in December and transferred to buyer's chest freezers, and kept one male breeder and five female breeders to prepare next year's stock.  This means we could have up to 10 lambs for sale next year, if all the stars align.  We're also working on breeding our two goats, in the hope that they will keep eating poison ivy.
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4) Bees.. Bees are hard.  We had 11 active hives at the end of 2017 when a multi-day battle with ground wasps killed all of them.  We started over with three colonies this year, and unfortunately two of them didn't make it through the season.  It's not clear why they failed, it appears disease or parasites.  So we have only a single remaining hive, and unfortunately it is not strong enough to harvest honey from this fall.
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5) Sawmill.  This is going well too.  We installed the sawmill in July and have since cut over 4,000 bd-ft in a mixture of pine, oak, maple, birch, ash, and cedar.  We've sold about 1,000 bd-ft so far and used a bunch more for animal shelter projects around the farm.  There's something intensely satisfying about taking trees down on your land and turning them into useful lumber.  It's like building something amazing and destroying something beautiful, all at the same time.
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In addition to the state-funded fencing grant we wrote about before, the good people of Connecticut have decided to invest further in the BOTL Farm infrastructure and we have been awarded a second grant for animal paddocking and road construction.  The internal roads will be used to support cement trucks to pour concrete footings for our barn.  We are very much looking forward to our future barn, as it will reduce the amount of feed and equipment storage that we currently have in our garage, and in the contractor's trailer we purchased and parked in the lower field.  Have you ever tried to dig through a contractors trailer to find the right bag of minerals to feed to your sheep?  It's not a good life for a farmer, nor for a trailer.  The trailer wants to be on a job site, cooking Hot Pockets in the generator-powered microwave and hosting skyscraper blueprints.  The farmers want a barn.  These things too, we wish shall come to pass.  Other dark specters loom over the fate of BOTL Farm, but alas, let us not dwell on why the barn construction is financially delayed, and let that battle rage on silently in the background much as Godzilla fought Mothra and Optimus Prime in Pacific Rim 3.  Instead, let us look with optimistic fervor on that which we can positively influence in the world.  Like delicious eggs, and thinking to yourself "how can I eat eggs for every meal today?"

And animal paddocking, our next great adventure!  Currently animal moves still involve manually setting up and tearing down electro-net for each fence line.  Let me paint a picture for you.  Imagine it's 5°C (42 deg F), raining lightly, and in your hands you have a hundred pounds of electric and nylon fencing and you're trying to drag it through a pasture of pricker bushes and poison ivy to set it up again in a straight line, while being berated by the bleating of animals that don't understand why they can't eat the new grass already.  Also this has to be done every day.  We're looking forward to proper animal paddocking to help stream-line this effort.

Until next time, keep fighting the good fight, believers in the BOTL !
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Baaaah to the Bone

10/15/2018

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Hello there BOTL Farm fan club.  Today we explore a tale of success and failure, a story of victory and defeat.  A tale of lovely stock and tail.  Let's talk about sheep.

When the farm was first established in the summer of 1965, we wrote a business plan using a primitive text editor, similar to vim and not at all like a typewriter, but actually maintained by Microsoft.  The business plan said BOTL Farm would primarily focus on the development and sales of swine products.  We self identify as pork enthusiasts and our hobbies include home-made sausage and bacon, and hosting an annual pig roast.  An aspiring pig farmer never imagines they will own sheep.  Sheep are not pigs, and pigs do not need to be sheared, and nobody has ever eaten sheep bacon.

We were going upon our merry ways, doing BOTL Farm things, cutting down trees, collecting giant buckets of eggs, trying to figure out how to make a bee hive live to celebrate a birthday, doing cold laser therapy on our dog's shoulder and our farm laborer's back, and that's when it hit us.  Like a phone call from our farm mentor.  Our mentor, guide, hero, inspiration, and general moral compass had decided to quit farming and move to a distant island in the Pacific and buy a sailboat.  After decades of building a successful farm, teaching us everything we knew about stock piling yogurt cups and how to mend electro-net, she was throwing in the towel.  Also she wanted to give us sheep.  We didn't want sheep, but we also do whatever she says.
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Originally we said no sheep, then we agreed to three sheep, and finally we took delivery of nine sheep.  Three lady breeder sheeps, each with two baby lamb sheeps.  We raised one of the baby lambs into a breeder boy sheep.  Don't think too much about that, it's totally normal farm animal stuff.  Now I hear you, dear reader, asking why the sheep are not pigs.  For pigs have pork chops, and pork chops are delicious, much like racks of lambs.  The answer for why we do not have pigs is a tale for another time.. a story of road building, barn building, bridge burning, and inland New Jersey.  We'll discuss that later.  For now, you must know that we have sheep we never wanted, but now love.

So our mentor moved to to the beach and gave us her herd of nine sheep.  Now we move them daily to new grass pastures.  We built them a sheep shelter, and we feed them minerals.  Owning a sheep occasionally involves doing very Rude Things.  Sheep need a mix of selenium and garlic oil, but they don't know they need this.  They know it so little, we must squirt it down their throats while they are trapped in a pallet maze.  It's quite rude, and incredibly necessary.
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The sheep are helping us clear the forest of BOTL Farm's 40 acres, at a rate we previously didn't think was possible.  Our human farmer can use a dinosaur powered chainsaw and sintered metal lopers to clear a quarter acres in three weeks, but our sheep herd can use their molars and hooves to clear a full acre in half that time.  They eat weeds and picker bushes, and if we take down small saplings they eat all the leaves and follow us excitedly looking to see if we are carrying buckets.  Buckets are the best, only good things come from buckets.  Except for when Rude Things come from buckets, but mostly good things come from buckets.
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Here in the midst of fall, we're staring down the barrel of another winter and the challenge of keeping alive animals that eat grass.  We don't yet have a barn built, and we are faced with difficult decisions like how to heat a sheep standing on an ice sheet in the middle of Connecticut.  The solution, is to transfer the sheep to a warmer location.  Like the freezer.  So we'll do that for a few of the sheep, except for the breeders.  Those we're going to feed hay and skip their fall shearing, and pray to some livestock deities and hope for the best.

And so we have added another unexpected product to our current line up of candles, coasters, no honey, lumber, eggs by the hundred, whole chickens, and free poison ivy samples -- whole lambs!  As it so happens, we have already sold all three of our lambs for this season, however our male breeder sheep happily reports that more lambs should be in stock for next year !

Sheep are an unexpected addition to our farm, but have turned out to be an enjoyable one and we look forward to our role of shepherding them into the future.
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Goats!

8/13/2018

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Dearest believer in the BOTL, 
 
Have you ever awoken at the break of dawn, stepped out of bed, stretched your legs, and thought to yourself "I really wish I could hear some screaming right now"?  Oh man, you should get goats.

Goats serve an uncountable number of uses on the farm.  Really just two.  They eat poison ivy, and they make a delicious osso buco [Editor: At BOTL Farm, we have no expectations that our goats will learn to cook].
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You may have seen the viral videos of screaming goats complementing Taylor Swift in her top 40 hit pop songs.  If you haven't, hit up the googles for a chuckle or two.  If you have, you'll understand why farmers begin their search for goats by looking for quiet breeds.  You might be surprised to learn that even the quiet breeds are.... really quite loud.

A good goat can eat a good fraction of its body weight in poisonous plants each day, is resistant to disease, and grows very large horns.  Like, at least 4 feet in length and curly.  We  wanted to get merino sheep [Editor: no, some of our wool-loving family members wanted us to], but since they are sheep and not goats, we decided on Kiko breed goats.  Kikos are known for being large, delicious, good eaters, independent, worm-resistant, and very pretty.  They are not quiet.
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We built a custom isolation system in the back of our farm truck, which is actually a Honda Fit.  The back is the part where the rear seats fold down.  We went to pick up two Kiko goats, and the goat breeder noted this was not the worst goat transport setup he had ever seen.  That made us feel better.

We kept the goats together for the first sixteen weeks, until the male goat began peeing on his face... which, as we all know, is an obvious sign of goat foreplay.  Then it was time to separate the goats and pair the male with two ram lambs (we have sheep but we'll tell you about that later) and the female goat with the rest of the sheep herd.

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In the future, we hope to sell goat meat, but for now we're raising our breeding stock and trying to encourage them to eat metric tons of plants that we don't like but they seem to enjoy.

If you drive by BOTL Farm, roll down your windows to hear the distant screaming of our new goats at all hours of the day !
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​Cluckin and pluckin

8/6/2018

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Hi there, poultry connoisseur.  We should have told you long ago, but BOTL Farm has chickens.  A lot of chickens.  We've had them for so long that they wander both the pasture and the freezer.  You may ask yourself, why have we been keeping this information from you?  We have no excuse.  All we can offer you is apologies, and the story that follows... a story of the birds and the bees.  Just kidding, the bees all died last fall.  Let's talk about the birds.
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Once upon a time, BOTL Farm received a delivery of young chicken-lets.  If you've ever been a steward to such a flock of tiny dinosaurs, you know they will occasionally plug up their poopers and die, and that you have to wipe off the pastie butt like five times a day.  We did that.  We kept their bottoms as clean as the morning is early.  When the chickens were old enough to leave the cast iron bathtub and head out into the brooder, we built a square brooder.  Chicken books tell you to avoid square corners, because the chicken-lets will pile up in the corners until they crush each other, but who could build round corners without a sawmill that can cut quarter inch bendy boards?  We did not have such a thing.  Yet.  We cared for each chicken, but nature must take it's toll like a pile of tiny chickens in the corner of a foam insulation box on top of one poor tiny chicken.

We tried to get the chickens to lay eggs in January.  They normally don't lay as many eggs in January since it's dark and cold.  Like Sweden.  We tried light therapy, giving them wooden eggs to sit on, reading them poetry, showing them anatomically accurate Youtube videos of chickens producing salable sized eggs with minimal shell defects, and gently massaging the chickens over top of the egg laying boxes.

We stand firmly behind economists that subsidies will encourage specific behavior, which may have unintended side effects.  So we decided to raise our chickens on a diet that is free of corn and soy.  Our chicken feed is 100% organic all natural corn free, soy free, GMO free, bits of delicious chicken dinner.  They love it.  And they look good eating it too.
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Further, chickens, like DJs, like to scratch.  Both records and piles of wood chips.  We faced the challenge of putting our chickens out to pasture in a way that allows them to dig around and be happy chickens, and also allows us farmers to periodically move them to new pasture land.  We needed something that was a large chicken coop on wheels... something like... a $200 RV from Craigslist.  That's right.  That looks like a chicken coop to us.
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After a year of herding birds and collecting eggs, we decided that what we needed was even more chickens.  So we collected our top 200 eggs and put them in an incubator.  The incubator was a plastic tote we had to rotate 6 times a day.  After just the right number of days, out of the eggs popped... tiny dino-errr.. chickens!  And such it was that we turned 200 eggs into 130 chickens!  Magic!
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As math and genetics would have it, that was a lot of roosters, so we went ahead and transferred about 61 rooster from the pasture to the freezer by way of the ole plucker.  Not too many feathers left on those roosters.  We hope.

So BOTL Farm now sells eggs and chicken!  Stop by today for an infinite supply of eggs, sold for $6 in a lovingly made carton of 10 or whole chicken for $5 a lb.  Corn free, soy free, GMO free, good for your conscious and good for the world!  Spread the world and eat the bird products !
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