BOTL Farm Buys the Farm

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.