Our social media looks so pretty with cute animals and fuzzy feel good stuff but we all know farming ain’t all ‘roses’. We know what you want; the nitty-gritty. Well we’re going to oblige! We’ll let you know what’s been happening on FCF. What went wrong, what went right and a general behind the scenes insight into the joyful madness we call farm-life.
At the moment you’re listening to Shannon ramble on, but I’m going to drag Kylie on here kicking and screaming to share what’s it like from a Woman’s perspective. She could share how she puts up with me, the ups and downs of farm life and what it’s like running a farm with a young family. Maybe a sneaky recipe or two!
So here goes!
Its the start of February and we have kicked the year off with a self-induced rocket up our bums. We are heading into a more systematized home delivery service NSW wide! We believe regenerative food needs to be accessible for all and home deliveries are such a convenient way for the busy families. This is huge for us. We have so much to learn and adapt to but the challenge is exciting!
We have been preparing for this for a while. We have expanded and refined our meat chicken operation with new mobile sheds, expanded layers, regular litters of piglets now coming through, and our new relationship with Furracabad Station for additional regenerative beef. The one missing piece of the puzzle we need to solve is our on-farm butcher shop so we can have better control of the product and do super cool stuff like chicken schnittys, offal mince, burger patties, jars of broth and more. So we have been hard at it. Oscar and I have finished a huge awning over the shop and freezer, hooked up water catchment from the roof into tanks and a filtered pump system to finally get water to the butchery. As of tomorrow, we will have completed the rails in the coolroom to hang the meat. Sewerage and septic hook up left to go, concreting a floor in the shop, new hot water system, more butcher equipment purchase ( $18K spent, around $10k left to go!) and the all-important food authority audit and tick of approval. We have found an absolute legend of a butcher who we know through friends who is excited to come on board. He will totally revolutionize what we do with the cuts, ultimately benefiting you the customer. He has snag recipes coming out of his ears which is enough to get anyone excited!
We will have 2 full time staff, 2 part time staff, plus Kylie and myself. I just can’t believe how quickly this has grown. Our aim for the rest of this year is to refine the home delivery model NSW wide, and to just calm the hec down a bit with expansion! haha! The rest of the year we’ll just find our feet, do long overdue paddock work and maybe a sneaky 5 day holiday in there somewhere!
Did I say no more expansion? Well that only took a paragraph for me to break that rule. I forgot to mention we are looking at running a batch of meat ducks out in the paddock soon. This will be an enterprise that Oscar will run himself. Oscar is on wages here, but we want to encourage him to shape his own sub-business within FCF. He will grow out these ducks, manage the finances and work, and we’ll pay him a per kilo rate. This is such a great space that we are heading into where we can have all sorts of cool arrangements with staff to grow more regenerative food to not only better supply you the customer, but also support our staff and their businesses as well. Farm is community, and I love it.
Thats it for now with all the real-life farm stuff…. but we can’t leave you without an obligatory piglet pic can we…. so here you go!
