Dearest BOTLiebers,

The cool mornings, the pup under a blanket, and the dinner time sunsets all tell us the same thing: another summer is drawing to a close here at BOTL Farm.  As we put the following touches on our third year here in The House, it occurs to us that we have many words to share with you.  Many words.  Gather round the pixels we will sequentially illuminate, and let us illustrate and elaborate on another general farm update:

The herds live on!  We've got the boys and the girls separated still, but we're getting ready to combine them again for winter to produce next year's baby sheep and baby goats.  We did our best at shearing our own sheep this spring, which is a bit like mutton busting while trying to use hair trimmers on a shag carpet soaked in crisco.  We're looking forward to another attempt at that this fall.  Except for on our boy breeder sheep.  He's huge.  Shearing him is going to be like giving a haircut while riding a bull.  Several members of the sheep herd have been selected for a free trip to sheep camp this fall.  They're looking forward to the trip, and we're looking forward to the neatly packed boxes they'll return in!

​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 !

Greetings, fellow livestock enthusiast.  You may recall that just a few short months ago, our heroes of BOTL Farm ran a long and difficult campaign trail to seek election to the highest office in an 1820’s farmhouse.  The office is on the first floor.  However, one of the campaign promises made by our farmers-elect was to build a big, beautiful wall to keep all those unauthorized raccoons out and to prevent them from picking our fruit.  In the orchard.  Not only did they promise us a wall, they vowed that the state of Connecticut was going to pay for it.

Behold citizen, our farmers-in-chiefs have delivered upon all these campaign promises and more.  We’re not talking about a partial prototype in the southern California desert or multiple decades of eminent domain disputes with the owners of Cards Against Humanity [1].  No indeed fair reader, for what we have here is the Biggest, most Beautiful wall the world has ever seen:

In our early days of herding meat rabbits on the shores of the Jersey coast, we learned what security researchers have long known: multiple concentric layers of defense are the foundation of any reliable system.  This became clear to us the day the rabbits dug a hole under the electric fence, and we ran all over town with a butterfly net trying to catch them.  This lesson was re-enforced the day we lost electricity and the rabbits got out, the day the rabbits found an old woodchuck tunnel system and got out, and all the other times we accidently altered the local rabbit gene pool.  A perimeter fence around animal paddocks is critical to the success of a livestock farm.  Fences are like onions.

Our goal was to fence off 19 of our 40 acres with an electrified perimeter fence, so that in the inevitable event animals escape their individual paddocks, they are contained within the 19 acres.  We budgeted $15,000 to build the perimeter fence and all animal paddocks.  We received quotes from several contractors, and after reviewing our original budget the phrase “hotdog down a hallway” came to mind.  The cheapest quote was $47,000 to build only the perimeter fence and did not include land clearing or electrification.  We began seeking alternative plans.  As we often say here on the farm, “you’ve gotta swing to miss!”

The revised plan was to do all the land clearing ourselves, do all the design work ourselves, do all the post and panel sourcing/distribution/installation ourselves, and do the electrification ourselves.  We believe that we’ve built ourselves a one-of-a-kind farm fence, and we’re writing a whole separate blog post to talk about all the parts that went into it.

Since we never back down on a campaign promise, we still vowed to get the citizens of Connecticut to pay for our big pig wall.  Now we understand this could be a controversial goal if, for example, you live in CT and pay taxes.  Don’t worry, you can tour the outside of the fence at any time.  Please don’t touch it, that hurts like really quite a lot.

We found the Farmer’s Land Grant Association of North Eastern CT and wrote up a proposal to the state on why they should help build our wall.  The proposal quoted the scholarly body of Subaru Outback bumper stickers including “no farms, no food” and “galvanized T-posts are expensive”.  After being compared to an uncountable number of other proposals, our proposal was selected!  Our fence was inspected, high fives were issued, a commemorative selfie was taken, and we look forward to receiving a $20,000 reimbursement for 50% of the fence cost installation any day now.  In fact, I should go check the mail box right now.

Good neighbors, help you make your fences good.  Shout-out to all of our neighbors.  Sorry about those post pounder noises, we should be mostly done with those now.  Cheers everyone!

[1] https://cardsagainsthumanitystopsthewall.com/
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