Hot hot goats
Here at BOTL Farm, it's HOT! Each species on our farm deals with heat in different ways, but the extreme heat this year has given ample opportunity to see how heat-tolerant our goats are. While the pigs, chickens, humans, and farm dogs are hanging out in the shade and panting, the goats are on top of their shelters, soaking up the sun, and smiling.
The breed of goats we raise, Kiko, is basically the super-heroes of goats. It’s rumored that the breed originated when an enterprising farmer in the hill country of New Zealand released a bunch of goats into the wild, came back five years later, rounded up the animals that were left, and started selective breeding from there. Kikos are known for hardiness, low susceptibility to worms and disease, ability to birth and successfully raise triplets (even on pasture), and the males have truly epic horns (up to four feet). We’ve never been to New Zealand so we don’t really know how hot it gets there, but we imagine our Kiko goats’ ancestors balancing on a rocky outcrop on the side of a hot, sunny mountain. Smiling.
Saving the world, one egg carton at a time
We normally don’t bore our newsletter readers with numbers, figures, percentages, and the minutiae of what we produce each year, but you’re in luck – today we changed our minds! Fabulous. Instead of having to seek all these fascinating statistics in our health and management plan, they’re right here in your face.
Why the exception to the rule? We’re so excited about how many of our customers routinely BYOC (bring your own carton) when they buy eggs. Since the beginning, we said if you bring something you’re comfortable putting eggs into, we’ll put eggs into it (pockets!), and give you a fifty-cent discount for every dozen eggs that you BYOC for.
Hang in there, here comes the numbers. Over the past year, we’ve produced 28,095 eggs, of which we sold 27,072 (some are cracked, or we drop them by accident, or we eat them). So, that means we sold 2,256 total dozen eggs in the past 365 days. Of those, 969 dozen were sold, as we affectionately call them, “loosies.” This means that a full 43% of the eggs we sold last year were to an obliging customer who had planned and remembered to bring a carton (or other egg-carrying vessel).
We buy cartons in huge boxes of 200, so our powers combined have saved five of these boxes of egg cartons from going into the world. Huzzah, let’s keep it up. We really appreciate your dedication. And if you haven’t heard us talking about this yet, consider this your official notification that you can be part of the BYOC effort.
Mistakes of a first-generation farmer
We collect eggs every day, all year round. Lots of people collect eggs by putting them in padded buckets or baskets, but when we were baby farmers we decided to buy stacks of durable plastic egg trays that hold 30 eggs each and stack nicely in milk crates. So every day, we take a stack of trays, a milk crate, and gather away. The eggs don’t touch each other, they’re organized in tidy rows (one of us LOVES having things in tidy rows), and counting the daily yield is easy. We bought a variety of colors of egg trays and developed a system where colors indicate which day eggs are laid, which should be used first, and if they are clean. It’s amazing: a bastion of order against the chaos of the universe and this system has worked for us for years.
That is, until one recent (fateful) day when we were looking at other cool farms’ social media posts (hi, Maple Wind Farm!) and we saw they have the same egg trays as us and use them to collect eggs every day – and they were using them upside down! What the heck?
We knew we were obviously right and they were obviously wrong, but for politeness, we went to the tray manufacturer’s site to confirm that we haven’t been using these trays upside down, every day, for the past, uh, eight years.
Turns out, we have been using them upside down.
Now that we know, we’ve tucked our tails between our legs, admitted the mistake, and are using them properly. In our defense, it’s not much different. But, we wouldn’t want other cool farms snickering at our social media posts (if you’re another cool farm, don’t look at our old egg tray pictures!).
Organic animal feed: you may need to load your own bags
Many of us have gotten used to bringing your own bags (BYOB) to farmers markets, stores, and the like, but this warning is a little different: if you come to some of our farm stores in August and September and buy bags of feed, you may have to load your own bags (LYOB) into your vehicle. Normally we’re happy to load the heavy feed bags into customers’ cars, but Danielle will be on a lifting restriction for a few weeks in August and September. If she’s running the store by herself for these few weeks, it’ll be up to you (or the nice family members you bring with you) to load the bags until Danielle is cleared for heavy lifting again. When we’re going to have an LYOB farm store, we’ll post about it on social media and our calendar so you can plan accordingly. Thanks for your understanding!
Find Us
On farm store: Tuesdays noon - 2pm, Saturdays 1 - 3pm. Pre-order
On farm self pickup: Everyday 8am - 8pm. Pre-order only
Wooster Square, New Haven CT: This market runs every Saturday from 9am - 1pm until the end of November. We will be there every other week. Dates we’ll be there in August: August 02, August 16, August 30. Pre-order
Assawaga Farm Market, Putnam CT: This market runs every Saturday 9am - noon until the Saturday before Thanksgiving. We will be there every other week. Dates we’ll be there in August: August 09, August 23. Pre-order
Sturbridge Farmers Market, Sturbridge MA: This market runs every Sunday 9am - 1pm until October. We will be there every week. Dates we’ll be there in August: August 03, August 10, August 17, August 24, August 31. Pre-order
It's too many dates! Save me!