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].

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.

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.

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 !

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.

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.

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.

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!

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 !