​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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 !

Hello everyone who is a reader of this post that is written,

Today is the fest of October.  Aka Oktober.  Aka the Oktoberfest.  Many people are not aware that Oktoberfest is actually celebrated in a middle European country named Germany in September.  The name Oktoberfest is derived from the month after September, which is when the fest is a festival.  This is confusing for many people, but since I have been to Germany once I feel empowered to impart this knowledge upon you, thine dearest reader.  So it is said.

Let's review the agenda for today's post:
   -> An update on the progress of farming the BOTL Farm.
   -> A discussion of hydrology.
   -> Some thoughts about putting honey into bottles.

We shall now call this blog post to order, so that we may begin to proceed through the agenda.  Let us begin upon with the first item:

An update on the progress of BOTL farm

In the early 1900's, nearly every individual in the United States was a farmer.  Sustenance farming was a way of life.  As time marched on, farming became more centralized and large corporate farms took over.  This is because feeding a world with 7 billion people is difficult to do with hand tools, and therefore tractor firmware needs to be closed source.  Despite difficulties in maintaining modern tractors on small farms, we find that these large farms are the primary variety of farms that occupy the current US bread basket.  Here at BOTL Farm, we are idealists that still believe the world can change.  We believe that chest freezers don't have to be disposable, that wagons can be used to move heavy boxes, and that despite the Earth recently passing 400 ppm co2 atmosphere concentration, all hope is not yet lost.

All of that being said, we should clarify that paying off a mortgage is really hard.  Some recent studies we've conducted by doing google searches indicate that only about 32% of the United States has paid off their mortgage, and most of those individuals are over age 65.  In our age bracket, only about 11% of the population has paid off their mortgage.

A mortgage is no small commitment.  In fact, it's a fairly large commitment, usually being omnipresent during one's life.  When BOTL Farm bought the farm, we had intended that one member of our farming couple team would become a full time farmer and raise well loved pigs and bunnies, while the other would continue working a "normal" and "fruitful" job to pay the mortgate.  Honestly, we also were pretty sure one of us were going to get fired, since we're hippy farmers and we don't fit super well into normal jobs.  Shockingly, both of our employers have indicated an interest in keeping us on for several months, and since mortgages are big and scary, we have decided to delay the jump into full time farming and maintain our day jobs for a bit longer.

This is also convenient because our primary goal of becoming livestock farmers requires that we set up a lot of fencing to contain those animals, and trying to fence in 13 acres with a rabbit proof fence will yield some jaw dropping estimates from local fence installers here in CT.  So the good people here at BOTL Farm have decided to keep our day jobs for just a stich longer (probably a year or so) while we purchase heavy machinery that can drive fence posts through solid rock, and research how to contain rabbits who want nothing more than to escape from a place where they are protected from predators and fed infinite amounts of parsley stems.  Rabbits really like parsley stems.

A discussion of hydrology

Hydrology is the study of water, water modelling, water management, and the implications of hydrogen couples hooking up with oxy singles.  Hydrology is also important to farming, because livestock and their food require water, and often a lot of it.  To this end, BOTL Farm recently recruited a professional hydrologist to visit the farm, walk the land, and provide insight on the water movement and usage for the farm.

The results are astounding.  Have you ever thought about water?  I mean really thought about water?  What is it you find most interesting about water?  Personally, I find the water's transformation into beer to be fascinating, but I'm also interested in how to give a pig enough water to produce bacon, and how to feed a chicken water in the middle of winter with a system that won't freeze while I travel across state lines for Christmas.

BOTL Farm's new land has a stream that runs approximately through the middle of the property.  The stream is about 10 - 20 feet across, and is generally about 1-2 feet deep.  Our hydrologist consultant informs us that streams are organized into "tiers" based on size and water flow, and that the smallest streams in the country are called "Headwater" streams.  Sometimes these are also called ditches. [Hydrologist/editor notes: this is not true].  Our stream is a little bit bigger than a ditch, but since it has no direct tributaries it is still considered a 'headwater'.  This category of streams makes up the majority of streams in the world, about 60% in fact, but they are also the least studied type of streams.  If you write a government grant to study the Mississippi River, you will get showered with money and high fives, but if you try to instrument a ditch with thermometers, you will get thrown from your tenure review faster than you can say "madden julian oscillation".  However, as science becomes more enlightened, funding entities are realizing the importance of these smaller streams, and funding is becoming available to study them.

Therefore BOTL Farm is hoping for a collaborative effort between hydrologic modelling, farming, and sticking thermometers in our dirt [Hydrologist/editor notes it is called soil].  Collecting data on stream temperatures allows us to determine many interesting things about nutrient transport, biomass preservation, the water cycle, and the punnett square.  We don't actually know what most of those things mean, but they're words we heard the hydrologist use. Stay tuned for BOTL Farm coming to a hydrologic journal near you.  Also, did you know pigs can swim?

Some thoughts about putting honey into bottles:

The 2016 honey harvest is here!  We would like to thank our bees for all of their hard work this year, all of their wing flapping, and their ability to carefully curate their honey to 17% water content before we steal it from them to sell to you.  Contact us via the contact page, cell phone, txt message, email, the website contact form, carrier pigeon, or the bat signal if you'd like to purchase some locally farmed honey!

Conclusions

BOTL Farm is settling into our farm house built brand new for us in 1820, and we look forward to providing your sustainable farming needs for years to come, just as soon as we get fired from our day jobs and receive grant money to fly a drone over our stream.

Thanks for reading !