Skip to main content

90 days to refurbish the quarters

That is all it took, we did not need any planning permission, since the plans had long ago been submitted and there was no exterior work on the building.    The plumber and electrician informed me this morning, just before lunchtime that the apartment had passed its final inspection by the county.  This means the heating and the electricity can be officially turned on.   Until now it was not fully connected.   The new tenants (aka my daughter, granddaughter and her future husband) are moving after school ends this summer.  Our future son-in-law will use a room in our new London apartment for the summer to finish his term at the hospital.  He will be in London five days a week and come up during weekends, this will only last a few months.   

The daycare centre is moving along quickly, there is a lot of work, and the standards are exacting, which we expected.  We are still on track to open by the end of summer, assuming no disaster, but we don't anticipate anything, the building was in good shape but required new draining to address the dampness, something the Brits are allergic to. The remedial work to improve draining reduced humidity by nearly 50% in less than two months.    

Note:  For those who ask, the chicks are still not in the forest, first nights are still to cool, and the chicks cannot go out until their feathers are fully grown in, it takes between 4 and 6 weeks depending on the breed.   


Comments

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

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

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