Goat back in stock
If you’ve been waiting for goat meat — good news, the wait is over. Goat meat from our spring harvest is in stock and we kept the cut options simple this time: bone-in stew, ground, rib chops, along with one package of bones. All organs have sold out already, sorry.
Just the bone
In case we haven’t told you recently, we are firm believers in nose-to-tail uses for each animal. In addition to having goat meat, we now have several goat skulls cleaned up and ready for your new rustic decor.
The most striking one is from a full-grown Kiko goat buck and which has a remarkable twist to the horn shape and measures 28” across. There are some smaller Kiko goat skulls, along with two Icelandic sheep ram skulls. All of them are Animal Welfare Approved and Certified Grass Fed. Try finding that somewhere else!
As you may remember from last year, we will bring a skull with us to farmers markets to frighten children and act as a conversation starter. :)
Slow growth, but more pigs
BOTL Farm is a “farrow to finish” operation, which means we raise breeding sows (farmer jargon for ‘big mom pig’) who farrow (farmer jargon for ‘gives birth’) piglets. We raise the piglets on our farm for their whole lives, finish them, and take them to butcher. In contrast, it’s much more common (and arguably easier) for farmers to buy piglets which were farrowed on other farms (for NE farmers, typically in Pennsylvania) and simply finish the piglets on their own farm. It’s not uncommon for farmers to even go as far as buying nearly ready-to-harvest pigs and ‘finish’ them on their own farm, marketing them as their own.
With our method of farrow to finish raising, there is a long lead time to get more pork in your freezers. First, we realize we need more pigs than our current production allows for so we decide we need another sow. In our operation, it takes about 12 months from when a piglet is born until she is old enough to safely and humanely breed. Once she is bred, the gestation period is about 4 months. The piglets need 8-9 months before they’re ready to harvest, so in total the process from start to more meat is about two years (assuming nothing goes wrong) [haha, it’s farming, things often go wrong].
For the past few years, we have always run out of meat towards the end of summer market season and have had little to keep you satisfied over the winter. But… all this time, we’ve been slowly accumulating new sows and preparing to expand. In the next few days we are expecting two new litters of piglets on the ground and we just finished breeding three more sows so we will have more piglets farrowed in the fall. If all goes well by this winter, we will have more pork on hand than we’ve ever had before!
Hidden costs of credit cards
Credit cards have become the normal nowadays, but we like it the old-fashioned way, cash and check. In order to safely process our customers’ credit cards, we pay a fee on every transaction that uses a card. These fees deduct from 2.6% to 12.6% from the total, depending on the size of the transaction but our typical transaction fee is ~4% of the sale. As of now, it looks like credit card usage is up this year compared to last, as we’ve already paid out about twice as many fees. Margins on farming are thin at the best of times, and these fees add up for us.
It is state law that we can’t pass these fees off to credit card users (ie. charge a higher price for a credit card transaction then a cash transaction) and it feels unfair to raise all our prices across the board, punishing our cash and check users.
So help out your old-fashioned farmers. Bring cash or check with you if you can. We greatly appreciate it!
Egg supply is getting low
Despite increasing the size of our laying flock, our egg sales have continued to increase and we’re, once again, tight on egg supply. We’ll do our best to supply our markets this season, but want to let you know of an alternative: when we had excess eggs last winter (demand for our eggs is seasonal, for reasons we’re still trying to figure out), we went to our local cooperative commercial kitchen and got crackin’. We packaged up whole, out-of-shell, mixed, not-cooked eggs and froze them in ~dozen quantities. So if we run out of shell eggs at the market, ask about our frozen eggs! They’re good for baking, scrambled eggs, quiches, casseroles, and similar dishes.
New Country Organics feed update
As New Country Organics feed resellers, we attended a call last week that NCO hosted for its resellers. The founder of NCO wanted to provide some perspective on how fuel price increases, ubiquitous supply chain interruptions, and grain market instability has affected their feed prices, and ultimately our feed prices.
It was a mix of good and bad news. NCO is dedicating time and effort to making their mill and warehouse facilities bigger, better, and more efficient. But, they are not sure that we’re out of the price-increase woods yet. Some of their costs have started to plateau in the last six weeks, so hopefully the biggest price increases are behind us.
We do believe that the quality of their feed is unmatched and are sticking with them for our own farm and hope you can do the same. Thanks for being awesome!
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