​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.

​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 !

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 !

​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.
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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: