Deep dive

Here at BOTL Farm, we’re planners. We’re planners extraordinaire. Each of us brings our special brand of special to the mix, such as childhood memories of being told one couldn’t tie their own shoes without a viable backup plan, or the absolutely bonkers feeling one of us gets when other farmers say things like “how do you know how much to charge for your products?” Like, duh, you should be tracking your expenses, inputs, and time in order to logically arrive at the true cost of your products.

person on computer in a bar

Anyways, the two of us put together is an extra brand of special. Now that we own and run a farm, we spend lots of time recording numbers, analyzing data, making plans, drawing maps, and generally planning.

In addition, we have the simultaneous advantage and disadvantage of being first-generation farmers. We managed to not get any formal education in farming, despite being fairly highly-educated. Oops. We’ve heavily relied on the knowledge and experience of others to help us get to where we are now. However, we have learned a lot as we’ve grown our farm and our first-generation-farmer-ness often allows us to bring new and different approaches to farming. We are happy to pass this hard-won knowledge on to others.

In this section, we share more details that might be boring or wildly interesting, whether you’re a fellow farmer or an interested eater. Depends on what you’re looking for. We talk about educational things we’ve done over the years (such as how-to videos on building fences), glossary terms, the nitty-gritty details of our animal management, and software/hardware systems we’ve custom-built to make our farming lives more manageable.