Skip to main content

Easter is upon us

A cold Thursday, the weather here and in Strasbourg are nearly identical.  Our meat chickens have started arriving, they are coming in batches of 200 every few weeks (we actually pick them up from the hatchery).  More important the house is being readied for all the important guests...our children.  The whole lot, begin arriving this afternoon.  Our youngest daughter arrived this morning on the 11 am train, just in time for lunch.  She came "without her boyfriend"  as any father knows you don't ask questions about absent boyfriends...you rely on your wife for that task.  Our eldest daughter is arriving tonight with our precious granddaughter and her fiancee, that they were both able to be off this weekend is a treat. 

Their new lodgings here at the house are about ready, the permanent heating system and electricity have yet to be finalized, and an inspection or two are still required, to obtain the residency permit (I know it makes no sense, but it's an insurance thing).  The floors were installed and they are spectacular, it's a new British system, the parquet floor comes in 2"x2" slabs, is very easy to install, and looks amazing.  

The wine cellar is ready, for all the guests.  

In other news the farm is ticking along with few problems, at this time of the year before planting there is only limited activity.  We were able to start clearing out the first forest that the pigs rooted out.  The archeologist didn't find anything interesting, and the mini digger (Chinese) and the power-tracked barrows allowed us to demolish the stone structures and recover all the material.  The same architect that bought the old wooden barnes from the new farm is buying up all these stones for wall projects in the area.  Once we are done clearing out that first forest, it will be integrated in our cattle fields, it provides excellent shade during the hot and sunny days.  Cattle love hanging out in forests.  

Aside from that, the farm is on track.  As we near the end of the month we start to look at revenues and income, and we are on track with February, not that I am looking very hard, volume is similar and prices too, we are about 17% over the 2023 results, that gap will fall within the next two months, because we really started to use CO2 consistently in June 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

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

So we sold surplus electricity one time last summer...(Update)

I guess that we will be buying an additional tank for our methane after all.   Over the past few months, we've had several electricity utilities/distributors which operate in our region come to the farm to "inspect our power plant facilities, to ensure they conform to their requirements".  This is entirely my fault.  Last summer we were accumulating too much methane for our tankage capacity, and so instead of selling the excess gas, that would have cost us some money, we (and I mean me) decided to produce excess electricity and sell it to the grid.  Because of all the rules and regulations, we had to specify our overall capacity and timing for the sale of electricity (our capacity is almost 200 Kw) which is a lot but more importantly, it's available 24/7, because it's gas powered.  It should be noted that the two generators are large because we burn methane and smaller generators are difficult to adapt to burn unconventional gas, plus they are advanced and can &qu
Post a Comment
Read more