Ongoing Projects
We are in the midst of several projects here on the farm right now. The driving purpose behind any project that we undertake is to somehow better serve our customers. As a full-time farm family, we know that if we fail to serve our customers to the best of our ability, then we likely will fail in every other aspect of our farm business. In our eyes, our customers are our most valuable partner!
Farm Store
As we alluded to last week, we are excited to soon be offering the opportunity to shop through our inventory here at the farm. It will be small, but our new farm store will be complete with glass-front freezers and coolers where we can hopefully display and sell all of our available products for you to browse through. We also intend to extend our hours in order to offer more convenience for you. We hope to have it fully operational by the time of the Ag + Art Tour on June 26th! Stay tuned.
New Freezer
The weather is the number one variable that we deal with in all of our livestock operations. It can allow a herd or flock to excel or severely impede its performance. While many times it can be generally predictable from season to season, it can also give wildly unforeseen circumstances, conundrums, and headaches.
But what does the weather have to do with the need for more cold storage? Seasonality. The most obvious example is in our pastured broiler enterprise where we don’t even try to raise them during the winter. This causes us to have to store up a large amount of chicken in the fall in hopes of it lasting until the first processing round of the spring.
Another example is with our grass-fed beef, where spring is usually the easiest time to finish cattle on grass only. Therefore if we schedule more cattle to be mature in the spring of a given year, then we are working with nature to fatten the cattle instead of pushing to have such an unnaturally steady supply of grass-finished beef throughout the year. This also helps us reduce our carbon footprint by letting a larger spring herd harvest excess grass instead of using tractors and expensive equipment to harvest hay. We’ve found that we can usually purchase the small amount of hay that our winter herd needs for less than it truly would cost to make it ourself. The only problem is that this glut of grass and beef in the spring requires someplace to store it all. And that brings us to one of our big projects: the new ~200 sq. ft. freezer.
More freezer space allows us to “bank” more spring beef and meter it out over leaner times of the year.
The thing to take home from this discussion is that truly pasture raised meats are very subject to the ups and downs of weather and many hurdles have to be cleared in order to provide you with quality product throughout the year. We’re doing our best, but if we run out of certain things from time to time, please hang in there with us. It will hopefully be back in stock soon!
Take a look at some other scenes from around here this week!
Ag + Art Tour
After being cancelled last year, the Ag+Art Tour is back on and we are participating! The date that we are involved is June 26 from 10am – 4pm. We will be offering free tours throughout the day. Vendors and food trucks will be on site as well.
As we get closer to the date we will let you know more details. Stay tuned!
Product Spotlight
If you haven’t checked out our Merchandise Category then be sure to head over and do that! We have t-shirts and now hats! We have lots of different colors of each item available and each item is printed or embroidered on-demand by a company called Printful, which has a facility in Charlotte in addition to others elsewhere. The products ship straight from them to you, which helps us not have to be so busy with apparel orders.
Referral Program
If you enjoy our products please consider passing the word along to your neighbors, friends and family! We don’t spend a lot of money of advertising but rather depend on customers like yourself to advertise for us if they are amazed by our products and customer service.
All you have to do is refer someone to us and when they place an order for the first time they will get a link to a form where they can say who referred them. You and the new customer will receive a $15 credit! So make sure they tell us your name. Hit the button for more info!
Check out this ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review:
“I love ordering from a local farm‼️ I don’t have to worry about the junk that these large manufacturers put in their meat and I’m supporting local families. We placed our first order a couple weeks ago and haven’t had a chance to try everything but the chicken breasts are amazing. Very tender and highly recommend. Thanks Watson farms for your hard work????????“
We would greatly appreciate it if you would be kind enough to leave us a review!
Thanks again for being partners in this endeavor of local, pasture-raised proteins that has truly transformed our farm. We look forward to continuing this transition while serving you long into the future.
Sincerely,
The Watsons