Skip to main content

It's new years eve but we are already partied out!

Evidently, last night turned into an engagement party for our eldest daughter.  Thank God Roger bought so much Champagne.  Everything hurts this morning;  Bouldering with my future son-in-law was fun but there is a price to pay.  This morning, getting out of bed to do the milking was harder than usual.  

Jennifer, our farm manager was there with me, and two farm hands to do the milking.  Knowing that she was childless tonight, we invited her (several times) to our New Year's Eve celebrations.  At first, she refused, but my wife did her usual magic trick yesterday and got a yes.  

Aside from chairs, rugs, lamps, a computer, sofa and decor, my new office is ready to go.  I had forgotten that we had a massive desk in that attic.  Because it was so large, it was in parts.  It is more than six feet wide and nearly four across.  It's insanely large but somehow fits the space rather well.  My wife pointed out that we had the labour available (sons and future sons-in-law...) to bring it down and install it!  We will need to buy several rugs because the space has an echo.  

This morning was mass, as usual.  We saw the Clarks (our neighbours) coming back from Liverpool where their daughter lives.  We bought the Clark's farm.  Mr. Clark was very pleased with the safety barriers around the barns, he said he inspected the site of the new warehouses and was impressed with the layout.  I told him that was entirely our architect's doing.  Space has to be large enough to allow a lorry to comfortably turnaround.

As usual, it was only my wife and me, we don't expect our children to join us, and for us, the Church serves mostly as a social requirement.  It was very interesting, as we were leaving I was accosted by a farmer I had never met, who told me that he heard we were maybe looking for additional corn-ready land for next year.  He is keen to rent part of his land out for a year and wanted to know if we are interested. 

This could be a great temporary solution for us.  Will discuss this with Jennifer on Tuesday.  

May 2024 be better than 2023


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ok so I lied...a little (revised)

When we began looking at farming in 2013/14 as something we both wanted to do as a "second career" we invested time and money to understand what sector of farming was profitable.  A few things emerged, First, high-quality, source-proven, organic farm products consistently have much higher profit margins.  Secondly, transformation accounted for nearly 80% of total profits, and production and distribution accounted for 20% of profits: Farmers and retailers have low profit margins and the middle bits make all the money. A profitable farm operation needs to be involved in the transformation of its produce.  The low-hanging fruits: cheese and butter.  Milk, generates a profit margin of 5% to 8%, depending on milk quality.  Transformed into cheese and butter, and the profit margin rises to 40% (Taking into account all costs).  Second:  20% of a steer carcass is ground beef quality.  The price is low, because (a) a high percentage of the carcass, and (b) ground beef requires process
Post a Comment
Read more

Spray painting Taylor Swift G650 aircraft (updated)

 First, a bit of paint will not harm anyone.  These climate activities are going to learn two things in the next few days:  (1) Trespassing at an airport is a felony almost anywhere in the world.  That means criminal prosecution.   (2) removing paint from an aircraft is expensive.   So these climate activists are about to find out the reach of the British criminal system and it will not be pleasant, the UK has very strict laws about that, I would be surprised if cleaning the aircraft of all the paint will cost less than $100,000.     I am sure that when they planned (premeditation) this little show they had a very valid logic to doing this.  Tonight, they are probably realizing the depth of their troubles.   I understand that in the UK it's a minimum one-year jail sentence.    Also, good luck travelling with a criminal trespass charge against you.  I am relatively certain that the airline industry will slap them with no-fly status. Update;  It seems that what they threw on the airc
Post a Comment
Read more

21st century milk parlour

When we first looked at building our farm in 2018, we made a few money-saving decisions, the most important is that we purchased our milk herd from a retiring farmer and we also purchased his milking parlour equipment.  It was the right decision at the time.  The equipment dates from around 2004/05 and was perfectly serviceable, our installers replaced some tubing but otherwise, the milking parlour was in good shape.  It is a mature technology. Now, we are building a brand new milk parlour because our milking cows are moving from the old farm to the new farm.  So we are looking at brand new equipment this time because, after 20 years of daily service, the old cattle parlour's systems need to be replaced.  Fear not it will not be destroyed instead good chunks will end up on Facebook's marketplace and be sold to other farmers for spare parts or expansion of their current systems. All our cattle are chipped, nothing unusual there, we have sensors throughout the farm, and our milki
Post a Comment
Read more