• Home
  • About
  • Products
  • Contact
  • Blog
BOTL Farm - Pasture Pork -Grass fed Goat and Lambs - Cage free Rabbit - Soy-free, Corn-Free, Non-GMO Eggs

Blog

Sign Building

1/26/2018

0 Comments

 
Picture
Greetings fellow small farm enthusiast.  Bootstrapping a small rural farm presents many challenges, such as building a sign and a farm stand.  We can learn from the authors of the Unix grep command that the fastest way to do work is to eliminate the work that needs to be done.  Therefore we combined the farm sign and farm stand into a single glorious entity.

Our initial goal was to build a farm sign that could be seen be from space but our local municipality has more specific ideas on allowable square footage and foot print.  After considering our logo, branding, marketing, three tab shingles, the golden ratio, and the sizes of standard construction lumber, we submitted a design that was unanimously approved by the town.

Construction began in earnest.  The initial step was to set posts 4 feet into the ground.  Attempts with post hold diggers and shovels were met with large rocks, and the farmers resorted to tractor-based excavation.  Complications involving a PTO driven auger arose, persisted, and were overcome.  40 bags of cement were poured.  Finally the two vertical support posts for the sign were in place.

The wood working for the sign was commissioned to the lowest bidder/sucker that was found just two states away.  An aspiring, upcoming, novice woodworker who's strong suit was underestimating agreed to build the whole sign in 3 months, and in that time he delivered on more than half of the work.  The wood worker reports that he learned a lot about how to cut out letters using a bandsaw blade, how to change a broken bandsaw blade, how to use a jig saw in place of a bandsaw, what the minimum length of roofing nail is, and how to sort shingles by color.

One particularly challenging aspect of sign construction was how to mount a series of sign boards that indicate the products the farm currently has for sale such as eggs, honey, rabbit, and poison ivy.  A series of mounting solutions were explored, approximately 247 solutions in total including eye screws, vertical cables, clamp systems, tiny carabiners, turnbuckles, and a pneumatic stapler.  After the hired wood worker had carefully considered each solution for many hours and built multiple failed prototypes, he invited his only friend over, who studied the situation for 60 seconds and then arrived upon the correct solution.  So it was that the signs were mounted with a horizontal cable system using a remarkably simple tensioning system and some incredibly forgiving hooks and eye screws.
​
And so it was, the sign parts that were built 2 states away, shipped in a Honda fit, and left in a snow bank for a few days, came together to represent the farm for many years hence:
0 Comments

Top 10 things about eggs that your farmer doesn't want you to know.

1/2/2018

2 Comments

 
​1) No lemurs were used in the production of your eggs.  It is commonly known, that lemurs are excellent wood workers, but they don't lay eggs. It is important to recognize what each of your employees excels at, and set them up for success.

2) Most chicken feed has corn and soy.  Any rich hipster, introspective foodie, or individual who periodically mitigates personal concern for global food supply degradation by getting up early enough on Saturday to visit a farmers market -- knows that the federal government heavily subsidizes corn stalks and soy plants.  Chicken feed is no exception.  We believe chickens prefer to eat really, ridiculously expensive feed.  We buy it by the pallet.

3) Chickens don't like being in cages.  A minimum thickness of impermeable and ideally electrified steel is necessary to keep chickens from being converted to fox treats, but chickens like to stretch their legs and wings in wide open fields.  We believe that keeping our chickens in a protected but open and rotating pasture field, combined with superior quality feed will produce the Highest Quality Eggs that northeastern Connecticut has seen recently.

4) The cost of chicken eggs is a function of feed quality, available pasture, and supply chain overhead.  Since we're maximizing the first two to bring you The Best Tasting Eggs Ever, we will try to minimize supply chain overhead by building the shortest supply chain possible.  This means selling eggs in our front yard.

5) Your farmer wants to sell you eggs in their front yard.  Look at their front yard. Then look at our front yard.  Then at theirs.  Now back to ours.  What do you see?  You see eggs with a cost representative of the quality of the chicken feed and pasture that we employ to provide The Best Tasting Eggs ever.
​
This brings us back to lemurs.  If you ever need wood working such as a farm sign, a farm stand, custom bandsaw work, or amateur roofing, we recommend hiring a lemur.  Introducing BOTL Farm's combination farm sign and farm stand:

Picture
2 Comments

    Archives

    December 2020
    August 2020
    October 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    December 2018
    October 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    August 2017
    July 2017
    January 2017
    October 2016
    September 2016
    July 2016
    January 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015

    Categories

    All
    Barn
    Bees
    Chickens
    Dog
    Farmhouse
    Fence
    Goats
    Honey
    Pigs
    Rabbits
    Sawmil
    Sheep
    Sign
    Tractor

    RSS Feed

Site powered by Weebly. Managed by Lunarpages
  • Home
  • About
  • Products
  • Contact
  • Blog