A SNAP Decision
February 2024 vol. 1
Reaching Our Goal
John Pantalone September 18, 2019 I see it’s been a year since I’ve blogged so I thought I’d start by celebrating. Yesterday we reached one of our sales goals – $1,000 at a market. This is huge and we couldn’t have done it without our loyal customers. Over half of that came from pre-orders from
Chicken Business
Last week we started a batch of 100 Cornish Cross broiler (meat) chickens with the intent to raise on pasture and sell at the farmer’s market. We are prototyping the system with 100 birds, but hope to get up to batches of 300, as chicken is a high volume – low margin game. A chicken
Second Chance on Cutting Hay
My previous post was about a disappointing hay harvest. Well, the second cutting exceeded my expectations. I got 39 bales of hay off of ~15 acres. This same area only produced 13 bales the first cutting. What made the difference? Well, I think the fertilizer had finally kicked in. We had a good 2″ of
Disappointing Hay Harvest
I had a few acres cut for hay this year as the cows weren’t keeping up and it was going to seed. On 25 acres I only got 15 bales. I knew one 10 acre patch would be sparse, but I was expecting 2 bales per acre on the remaining 15 yet I got less
Living la Vino Loco
I’m not a big wine drinker, but when Molly and I visited Fredericksburg this spring I couldn’t help but pick up a few grape vines. I picked up 2 of each of the three varieties available – Black Spanish, Blanc du Bois, and Champanel. These are the predominant wine grapes in Central Texas as they
Isn’t it Swale
Added more earthworks to the ranch. This time I put a swale in as the first phase of my orchard. A swale is basically a ditch on contour. The idea being that runoff acclimates in the ditch and slowly infiltrates the soil instead of running off. The added depth of topsoil and moisture retention is