​Greetings my fellow classic Christmas song enthusiasts!  Today we’re going to explore another oft-overlooked aspect of farming – winter living in an 1820’s farmhouse.  We’ll also touch on the roles of feminism in firewood splitting, technology to prevent pipes from freezing, the infrared light spectrum, shivery puppies, and providing farm animals with water when the pasture looks like Antarctica. Right then, off we go.
 
I must speculate, a farmer from 200 years ago was cut from a tough cloth.  Consider a house with no insulation, no modern HVAC system, Thomas Edison hasn’t fought Nikola Tesla yet to invent electric blankets, and you’re basically relying on a few fireplaces throughout the house and whatever wood you split from the back 40 to survive the winter.
 
During a recent New Year’s Eve celebration at BOTL Farm, our resident hydrologist brought some of her fancy electronics to do thermal spectrum imaging.  We pointed them at the house to see if we could find any insulation.  We didn’t find any insulation, but we did find some amazing numbers.  Here’s a picture from January 1st 2018 of the backdoor into the farmhouse:

​You might notice two things astute reader.  The first is the wheeled firewood cart that we use to bring in fuel for the woodstove. The second is the temperature scale on the right.  We can see the boiler driven hot water heater chooching out an impressive 103 degrees.  We can also see the baseboards around the door are sitting comfortably at 1 deg Fahrenheit.  Please note that this picture is INSIDE the house.
 
Let’s have a look at one more picture:

​This is the kitchen counter in the farmhouse.  You can see a cellphone cranking out yub dub, a toaster oven, and our set of measuring spoons.  You can also see the electrical outlet in the center of the picture is 33 degrees F (no insulation in the wall), and that the highest temperature visible in the kitchen is the toaster oven and an actively charging cellphone at about 64 deg F.
 
The heating system in the farm house is a fuel-oil driven hot water boiler, that circulates water through three different baseboard loops.  During our first winter in the farm house, we discovered it costs a lot in fuel oil to keep the farm house at 54 deg F.  This temperature was selected because it is the lowest temperature we can go to keep the plumbing in the walls and basement from freezing.  Most of the time.  The plumbing has frozen at least 4 times.
 
For this the second winter, we saved by switching to a woodstove.  This was a considerable investment, because a chimney liner was needed to use the 200-year-old chimney in our living room with a modern woodstove.  This does seem to have reduced our fuel oil costs though, and we’re using mostly wood split from the back yard.
 
Splitting wood with hand tools is a vigorous physical activity, but fortunately our farmers come from a long family line of wood stove users and wood splitting enthusiasts.  There is a certain zen about standing in a 10 deg backyard, swinging a chunk of cold metal, hitting a frozen log, and trying to split it gracefully without inducing personal injury.  The exertion makes one feel at peace with the world, and we might venture it brings more satisfaction than giving the thermostat a turn and watching it slowly light your bank account on fire.
 
So we continue on, combining as much modern technology as we can to try and keep the farm house affordably thawed through this unseasonably cold CT winter, and trying to keep the chickens and rabbits thawed until that time where we see fit to intentionally place them in the chest freezers.  Everybody stay warm, spring comes soon!

Welcome dear reader, for another adventure in BOTL Farming.  Let's jump quickly into today's agenda:

   1) Contractors
   2) Jobs
   3) Why we are still buying pork but not selling it yet

Before we get to that agenda, let's begin with an agenda.  Today is January, the day after inauguration.  Let us not take a political stance, and instead let us seek that energy which binds all of us together, makes us successful, and breeds strength and positive energy regardless of whether we view ourselves through the lens of nationalism or globalism.  That's right.  Let's sell rabbits together.

We begin with contractors, but before that, let's talk about rabbits.  BOTL Farm, at it's core, is about farming, and farming, at it's core, is about raising organisms, which are either plant or animal and less often fungus.  Since we don't sell mushrooms in any significant volume, let's focus on rabbits.  Traditional rabbit dogma says that rabbits should be confined to cages, however we here at BOTL Farm think this is inconsiderate to rabbits.  Have you ever tried to imagine you were a rabbit?  Have you ever spent hours and hours sitting next to rabbits, watching the way they hop, the way they choose which strand of grass to eat next, which squirrel to fight next, and how to negotiate the world?  If you have, you would find that putting rabbits in cages is impolite.  The rabbits want to be free.  They want to eat greenery, they want to eat peas, and they want to stare at the other gender which has been almost entirely separated from them by a high voltage electric fence.  Rabbits are sold by the pound, and therefore an enterprising farmer would strive to raise the largest rabbit possible.  Imagine a rabbit the size of a kangaroo.  This is an ideal rabbit for a farmer.  As farmers, we are however limited to the rabbits our breeders will produce for us.  Breeders are not like a designer rabbit catalog, they do not accept orders, they do not commit to delivery dates, they will not allow customization, and in fact sometimes they won't even use the breeder boxes we provide for them.  Sometimes they dig holes we didn't want them to dig.

This brings us to a special rabbit we call "Big Brown."  We call her that because she is by far, the biggest rabbit we have yet created.  She's also brown. Since rabbits are sold by the pound, as farmers we saw the promise, the intellect, and the sheer gravity that Big Brown could yield.  By stroke of luck, big brown was a female, so she was added to the list of breeders.  Ancient humans civilizations have attempted to produce superior sized soldiers by selecting the largest male and female soldiers they could find and forcing them to interbreed.  These attempts were repeatedly met with failure, because human height is dependent upon multiple aleels, the interactions of which are poorly understood in modern day and were not understood at all in ancient times.  Queens and kings punished their subordinates, and the resulting offspring were undesirable, however the attempts tallied forth in spite.  Here at BOTL Farm, we like to think that we're smarter than the ancient Romans, but honestly we're been trying really hard to breed Big Brown.  After 3 tries of breeding, we were pretty sure she was not fertile.  Because honestly, rabbits breed like... well... rabbits.  If you hook up rabbits, you've got basically a 100% chance that they will produce offspring rabbits.  So after 3 breeding sessions with big brown that did not yield rabbits, we were thinking of cutting our losses and selling the Biggest Rabbit Ever.  But then, we decided to give her one more chance.  And lo and behold, Big Brown began to dig the Biggest, Brownest Hole we've ever seen.  She lined it with metric yards of her fur, and produced six of the biggest, largest, most sizable rabbit babies that BOTL Farm has ever seen.  Stay tuned my friends.  Kangaroo-sized rabbits may yet be within our grasp.

Returning to the agenda, let's begin with contractors.  Home-owners will understand the importance and the dichotomy that contractors provide.  They are important, because who has any idea how to fix their own septic tank, but they are a dichotomy, because who feels like they should pay $248 to fix the upstairs shower drain leaking onto the downstairs couch?  At the end of the day, we're going to pay whatever those contractors demand because we just don't have any other option.  BOTL Farm is much like any other house in this regard, except we have lots of square footage of house, and a whole lot of acreage of not-house.  BOTL Farm has employed a series of contractors recently.  First there were the contractors dealing with stone.  They had the unexpected but highly desirable side-effect of tamping down enough of the brambles and poison ivy to allow us to walk nearly a third of our property.  Second there were the chimney liner contractors.  They introduced us to the phrase "exploratory demolition" and they held steadfast to their goal to protect us from carbon monoxide and to properly route our combustion gases far above the roof line.  We liked them a lot, so much that we bought them Italian cuisine (pizza).  Third came the tree cutters.  The previous curators of BOTL Farm had lacked extreme diligence in monitoring the proximity of trees to our farm house roof, to such a degree that we had very large trees shading the roof in a way that scares us during high winds.  To such an extent that even though we owned the finest chainsaws and had even purchased chainsaw chaps, we decided it wasn't safe to tackle this arborist imponderable upon ourselves.  Fortunately our third contractor was up to the task, to such a degree that they even replaced the window they drove their bucket truck through.  And so it was, that BOTL Farm's capital value was improved, with the help of some of the nicest contractors that northeastern CT has to offer.

Can you believe it's only the second blog topic for today?  Jobs.  Farming full time requires... farmers.  A farmer guides the sheep in the way that a shepherd guides the sheep.  Without a farmer, a farm is just a field of plants.  Or a field of animals.  We've done the math though, a field of animals should be way more profitable.  In either case, a farm purchase is a mortgage, those are expensive, and quitting your job is like .. super scary.  Since neither of us have been fired yet, we've continued working our jobs and using our job money to pay the farm mortgage.  It is difficult to predict how far into the future this will persist becuase our crystal ball is not nearly as reliable as our band-saw's aftermarket adjustable aluminum fence, but it looks reasonably likely that the husband member of our farming team could potentially be approaching the end of his career within a month or so [editor's note: this is not confirmed and highly uncertain].  Of course nothing is for sure, but one thing is for sure.  We won't buy a dog until we both live together, and we both really want a dog.  Fate can only keep us from our dog and thus in our day jobs for so long.  Sooner or later, the farm must be free to farm and be great with Puppy [editor's note: this is the name of the future dog].  Speaking of which, what is your favorite type of dog?  Ours changes daily but is currently the blue-tick-red-labra-pit-doodle-hound.  [Editor's note: in the first reading of this blog post the blog writer nearly peed himself while re-reading this sentence.] What a classic.

Which brings us to the final issue of why BOTL Farm is still buying pork and not yet raising it.  As you can see, we don't have any animals, but we just bouught our first half cow from some delightful cow farmers down the road.  If you've never had happy cow, locally raised, hippy-dipppy, grass fed cow meat, we would super strongly recommend it.  Unless you're vegetarian, in which case you just need to realize that cows are just condensed vegetables (they eat grass).  Since we can't raise our own pigs, and we don't plan to raise cows, we just bought our first half cow today.  Delicious!  Buy local meat, support local farmers, use single stream recycling and credit unions, save the world.

For one final insight into daily life in BOTL Farm, let's review the word of our savior Russel Monroe [1].  This insight, which says we begin to speak the languages of our animals, proves truer than ever.  Rabbits don't have well developed vocal cords, but still have a rich language using their paws.  Dog owners may begin to communicate with each other using only the language of the dog.  Cat owners may begin to communicate with each other using only looks of disapproval and occasional bats of their paws, but rabbit owners begin to communicate with each other using only ear-grooming motions.  It begins with a dedicated swipe of both paws towards the base of the ear and extending firmly towards the end of the ear, with a defining flick of the wrists to rid the paws of collected debris.  It is with this language that we, as farmers, speak to each other in a way that words never could.  #RabbitStuff

Also two more hives [editor's note: we still maintain three live hives] died this winter.  Again.  Have you ever felt personally responsible for killing tens of thousands of innocent creatures that relied upon you for guidance?  We've done that like 4 times now.  Oops. [Editor's note: some members of BOTL farm would like to note responsibility as a separation between husband and wife, but team "Elk Whistle" [note: not a euphemism] asserts teams are teams, and we succeed and fail together.] In totally unrelated news, we might have more honey for sale soon, because it turns out the bees probably don't need it this winter anymore.  Oopsies.

Cheers, mates.  Keep strong, roll on, eat local, support farms, make bees and rabbits, and never lose hope.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1535/

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 !

Greetings dear reader, from sunny Connecticut. Today is September, which marks nearly the end of summer. That reminds me, I should buy a snow shovel. In our last edition of the BOTL Farm blog periodical, we mentioned that BOTL Farm had purchased a farm. This was not entirely super accurate, as we were actually deeply in the process of purchasing the farm. Inspectors, negotiations, loan officers, and box packing ensued. Some of us couldn’t imagine the deal ever actually going through, but in spite all odds, the 40 acre plot of poison ivy was legally transferred to us.

Completion of house closing meant it was time to move in. For those who weren’t aware, as the husband and wife team of BOTL Farm, we have been living separated. Not because we’re not getting along, but because we’ve just never gotten around to moving in together. Also because having time apart keeps the peace. If you don’t believe that, just think about how relaxed you were the last time your spouse left town for a week. Remember that bender of The Walking Dead and Doritios? Where you had a competition with your cat to see who could sleep more? That’s right, imagine that every third week. Anyway, we decided that had to come together to pool our resources, combine our bank accounts, and bring pasture raised rabbits to the masses.

The house is a tasteful size by modern American standards. At merely 3,500 square feet plus a basement, an out building, and a two car garage, the farmers are able to play baseball during a game of hide-and-go-seek without ever being on the same floor as each other. The house was originally built around 1820, with a significant expansion added around 1860. The kitchen is held up by a carefully stacked pile of rocks, the floors are all correctly sloped in a way that makes office chairs drift pleasantly towards the nearest exterior wall, and the house has between two and eight bedrooms depending on your legal definition of the word “closet.”

The Dear Wife (DW) moved in first, since she had the most flexible living situation. She had been living with thirteen hippies in a commune in downtown New Haven. Upon leaving the commune, she was shocked to find houses that didn’t have bars on the windows, and towns that didn’t have bars on each corner. She was able to move all of her possessions using just a backpack, a bicycle, and an SUV. The SUV was borrowed.

The Dear Husband (DH) moved in second, since he owned more possessions than the wife’s entire commune combined. While planning his move, DH was shocked to find that the largest U-Haul truck available was 26 feet in length. He briefly contemplated purchasing an 18 wheeler and getting a CDL, but decided to just have a go with that dinky U-Haul and a caravan of as many cars as he could lure in with kegs and pork. This move was significantly more involved. By the end of the packing day, the U-Haul contained 3 coffee tables, an oxyacetylene welding cart, 62 folding chairs, and a light weight climbing wall.

Through the grace and luck of family, strong backs, and consistent leg day observance, the U-Haul and backpack were both successfully unloaded, and the farm house has become a home. The decorative steer horns are hung over one of the eight fire places, and the kegerator is plugged in and running at a balmy 63 degrees F. The first pizzas have been served atop the stainless steel kitchen island, several of the plumbing traps have been updated to modern code, and the wall hangings are being rapidly assigned to walls throughout the house.

So begins BOTL Farms next adventure. As we seek fence quotes a few orders of magnitude less than the market provides, and prepare for our first arrival of piglets, we look forward to this opportunity of sustainable farming and making the Earth a better place.

Hello dear reader!  Today is the fourth of July, the day when our great nation celebrates its independence.  Not from aliens, not from the box elder, and certainly not from the scourge of designer pick-up trucks but instead from England.  Like all of the skilled investors of the world, here at BOTL Farm we've been watching the events of Brexit unfold with bated breath, not because we have enough money to own any stocks, but because we're buying a farm and want a good interest rate on the mortgage.

BOTL Farm has outgrown our acreage.  BOTL Farm currently sits on 0.49 acres, which for those of you who are math connoisseurs or those of you who work in City Planning, that's less than the half an acre required to legally split a city lot and rent out the busted trailer park home the previous owner left parked out back.  With dreams of wide open spaces, green fields, and the grass on the other side of the fence, we set out to find a farm.  We decided to search Connecticut, because we enjoy their tiny blue license plates, the delicious restaurants of the New Haven area, and the challenging but temperate climate.  Also if you've ever tried to raise 55 pasture rabbits and two bee hives in your backyard while living next door to the town's mayor, you might understand that sometimes operational development requires scaling both horizontally and vertically, and that scale-up and scale-out operations mean both bigger rabbits and bigger pastures.

Like all good farmers, we decided to write a business plan.  There are two primary reasons to write a business plan -- the first is to convince an investor or bank that the ideas you're pursuing are sound, and the second is to introspectively review one's own motivation in a financial endeavor.  As it turns out, the bank didn't care but we did find it useful to contemplate the average number of eggs specific chicken breeds might be expected to produce when living at a specific latitude and subjected to a specific gravity.

The business plan dictated we would need certain things.  We wanted a farm built around livestock, specifically pigs because pork is delicious and not terribly bad for the world.  If you've never had sous vide pork shoulder wrapped in pig skin and cooked to perfection with optional mac and cheese, we recommend reviewing the recipe in our previous blog post.  We think you too will be convinced that pig farming is the way of the future.  Our business plan was built around raising pigs, rabbits, chickens, goats, honey bees, partridges, and fruit bearing trees.  Just kidding about the partridges.  We wanted to find about 40 acres of land, ideally in a way that we could clear it for pasture and grow enough food to feed ourselves and our animals, which in turn we can sell to fund the farm.

If you've ever bought a house, you might have an idea of how stressful it is.  You're spending a significant percentage of all the money you will ever make, and you're trying real hard not to screw anything up.  What if the house has termites?  What if the house has a primary foundational support post resting awkwardly on a stack of rocks in the crawl space?  What if the house has three septic systems, none of which are serviceable and one of which is located real close to the well water?  What if a previous home inspector had condemned the garage as unfit for human or designer pickup truck habitation?

Well fortunately, here at BOTL Farm, we don't believe in designer pick-up trucks.  We drive a Jeep until the wheels fall off, then we yell at our brother in law for forgetting to tighten the lug nuts and we just keep right on driving.

So without further ado, BOTL Farm is buying the farm!  Not like in the dying sense, that would be bad and we're still very much alive, but we're buying 40 acres in Eastern CT and hoping to raise a bunch of animals.  We hope this will allow us to bring you more delicious products in the future.