Here at BOTL Farm, we imagine our days as farmers will be filled with caring for happy animals; fixing fences; and watching goats attempting ridiculous things, like teaching their kids to climb at three days old, while the sheep watch in disgust. As our farm has gotten better established and more efficient, we noticed that farming involves, of all things, running a small business. Who knew…. okay, we did. 

Anyways, running a small business involves boring things like making invoices, optimizing our point-of-sale software, having an inventory management system, and worrying about how these things interact with each other. (Please don’t ask us at markets about our inventory management strategies, we get very passionate about this topic and we’ll embarrass ourselves by talking too much.) 

Up to this point we’ve used out-of-the-box (often paid) software solutions to meet our needs, but this month we got a proverbial bee in our proverbial bonnet and decided to switch to open source options where available. When they aren’t available, we’ll build our own. No problem.

This all means that this month, we’ve spent an unprecedented amount of time staring at computer screens. It’s like we have a normal job or something? Yuck. If you see us struggling a little more with our tablet at markets this month, this is why — we’re developing a new and (hopefully) improved system!

Despite the goal we set for ourselves when we were in our 20s of living a plastic-free lifestyle, we have a soft spot for Crocs. They make our feet sweat, have terrible traction, and aren’t particularly fashionable, but hey. It takes all types.

When we first bought our land years ago, being able to farm while wearing Crocs was a pipe dream. One of the first years our brother/brother-in-law was visiting and got his knee-high boot stuck in so much mud that he ended up with a very muddy sock. Our farm was a deeply wild, muddy place for many years. 

Fast forward to now: the farm is much less muddy due to our land management and grazing practices. Yay! But, our existing farm road which runs through the heart of our farm is one of the remaining, persistently muddy parts (probably because we try to drive the tractor over it all the time). Luckily, we’re on the cusp of having a real farm road built so we can better utilize ‘the back 40!’ 

Primary Farmer has dusted off his construction contractor skills and is organizing the project. If you happen to be a site contractor or road builder looking for work, golly, go ahead and let us know. 

Once our fancy new road is finished, we’ll be farming in Crocs! A pipe dream come true.

We have new products so often that this section of our email seems to be dedicated to covering them. 

To all our new NEWsletter subscribers who may not be familiar with it, we’re members of CLiCK Willimantic, which is a cooperative commercial kitchen space in Willimantic, CT. We started out using CLiCK to support our nose-to-tail aspirations, like turning bones -> bone broth, frozen eggs -> quiches, and pork fat -> rendered lard. 

Lately we’ve started making the things we want to see in the world (and eat more of). We’ve batched out meatballs a few times but this month, for the first time ever, we made sausages!

Okay, actually, we’ve been making sausages (for ourselves) for years. But that’s quite different than making them at production scale for sale. We’re totes grownups who run a business, so we do things like this. We’re happy to introduce ya’ll to our new sausage offering: farmer-made brats! We announced this on social media a few weeks ago, and we’re already mostly sold out. But you know, we can make more.

We’re proud to be resellers of New Country Organics super-premium chicken feeds, but sometimes our position as resellers leads people to believe we’re chicken wizards, avian experts, or a combination thereof. 

Sadly, we can’t always answer questions with the level of detail people are looking for, but NCO provides some resources for chicken lovers that might help! They have a blog, a “learn” page, and answer questions from customers on each feed in their online store!

As always, we’re happy to chat about our experiences with chickens over the years! Come talk to us during our on-farm store hours.

We have a few one-time events this month that we’ll be at: a New Haven pre-order pop-up and the Stafford Farm Day.

New Haven pre-order pop-up: Friday September 8 from 11:30 – 11:45am at location TBD in New Haven, CT. This is pre-order only. For more details and ordering info, Pre-order

Stafford Farm Day: Sunday September 10 from 9:30am – 4:30pm at Heritage Park in Stafford Springs, CT. 

On farm store: Tuesdays noon – 2pm, Saturdays 1 – 3pm. Pre-order

Tolland Farmers Market: Saturdays from 10am – noon at the Country Butcher on 74. Days we’ll be there in September: September 9, September 23. Pre-order

Assawaga Farmers Market: Saturdays from 9am – noon at Assawaga Farm in Putnam, CT. Days we’ll be there in September: September 2, September 16, September 30. Pre-order

Sturbridge Farmers Market: Sundays from 9am – 1pm on the Sturbridge Town Commons. Dates we’ll be there in September: September 3, September 17. Pre-order

Andy’s Neighborhood Canteen Farmers Market: Wednesdays from 4 – 8pm in Webster, MA. Dates we’ll be there in September: September 6. Pre-order

Third Thursday Street Fest: Third Thursday of the month in Willimantic, CT. Dates we’ll be there in September: September 21. Pre-order

It’s too many numbers! Save me!

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Page Last Updated on 2024-02-28