Soppressata!!!

Soppressata

Here at BOTL Farm, we love meat. We've tinkered with at-home fermented sausages since before we were farmers. Years later, we're pumped to offer a professional version: made with our Animal Welfare Approved pork and processed into dry salami at New England Charcuterie, we now have Soppressata for sale!

Because this is a shelf-stable product, we are shipping in packs of 3. Contact us if you're interested in ordering for shipping. Of course, we'll also have it on hand everywhere we normally sell for local customers.

Biscuits

We are members at the cooperative CLiCK Willimantic commercial kitchen and there we make most of our value added products (lard, bone broth, pasta, frozen biscuits, etc.), but we applied for and were approved for a cottage food license through the CT Dept of Consumer Protection! With our cottage food license we can do some stuff in our home kitchen. To start with, we will be able to bring fresh-baked biscuits to our CT farmers markets and our farm stand.

The Furrow magazine

John Deere, the ol’ green-tractor company, has a quarterly magazine called The Furrow. They thought we were doing such a unique thing on our farm (a combination of silvopasture and multispecies grazing), that they visited to see the place, interviewed Nick at length, took pictures, and wrote an article about us. It’s available in their spring magazine. If you don’t get the print version (we typically don’t, as our tractor is orange), you can read the article here.

Pork stock is low, but not low on stock

We are running low on most of our meat including pork, lamb, and goat, but we’ll be harvesting lots of animals starting in May and continuing through June. This means lots of trips back and forth to the butcher and our off-site freezer storage, but by the end of the month we should be fully back in stock of pork and goat.

We still have plenty of bone broth/stock, lard, and eggs, along with a select variety of mutton and a few pork items to hold you over a few more weeks.

Farmers markets start in just a few days

That means everyone officially made it through another winter! Congrats and welcome to the warm months. :)

This farmers market season we’ll be doing the same markets we did last year.

• Tolland, CT starts Saturday May 7th and we’ll be there for the first day and then every other week until the market ends on November 19. This is a short and sweet market at 2 hours long, from 10am to noon.

• Assawaga Farm in Putnam, CT has a small market, featuring their organic vegetables and our meat + eggs. This market start is on Sundays from 9am to 12pm, starting May 15th. We’ll be there every Sunday until May 29th. Then we’ll start every other week on June 19.

• Sturbridge Farmers Market in Mass starts on Sunday June 5th. This market is four hours long, from 9am to 1pm. We’ll be doing every other Sunday starting June 12.

• Twice a week on-farm at our very own farm in Ashford: starting last fall and running year-round, we have on-farm store hours here. Each Sunday we’re open from 2-4pm and each Tuesday from noon-2pm. Come on by!

The every-other week schedule at markets can be confusing, so we have each date we’ll be at each market listed on the Contact Us page of our website. A good reference so you can be sure to catch us before you head out for market shopping!

Starter and grower chicken feed

Now is the time to think about ordering your chicken starter or chicken grower feed. We only stock layer feed, but can order anything on the New Country Organics website. Just give us a few weeks’ notice and we will get it for you.

As we’ve talked about, animal feed prices are up, but in addition shipping prices have become quite volatile. We are doing our best to keep costs as low as possible, but this means the price may change every time we order feed because shipping costs are no longer predictable. As soon as things stabilize, so will our prices, in the meantime we will keep our website updated with current pricing.