One of the challenges of being a farmer is wearing all of the different hats necessary to run our operation profitably: carpenter, electrician, plumber, mechanic, engineer, draftsman.... all of these skills come into play at some time over the course of any given year.
It would certainly be easier (and faster!) to hire an expert when something comes up that needs to be dealt with, but farms run on a very limited budget, so we usually try to rely on our own level of skill and ingenuity before going that route.
We currently farm on rented land and are fortunate to have access to existing infrastructure which we have been slowly adapting to meet the needs of our operation. It's a difficult trade-off between having the facilities needed for an efficient operation and spending money on infrastructure that we can't take with us when we finally have a farm to call our own.
We are extremely lucky to have a landlord that is supportive of what we are doing and has been willing to cost-share some of those improvements with us.
Over the last year we have transformed the three-bay garage that we used for storage into a multi-function work/storage space.
It originally had a dirt floor, which made it impossible to use for any kind of vegetable operation.
So last spring we poured a concrete floor and felt like we hit the lottery! What a total game-changer that floor has been!
It enabled us to install a walk-in cooler - a critical piece of infrastructure for our veggie enterprise.
We were also able to set up an area to wash vegetables and package them for market, as well as install our new egg-washing machine.
But we still had a ton of STUFF piled up in there that was difficult to maneuver around. We prefer to operate under a "place for everything and everything in its place" model!
Last weekend we took a giant step toward that dream. We built two large sections of shelving, enabling us to maximize and organize our space a lot more!
Our dear friends (and soon-to-be partners) David and Chandra were an amazing help during this project.
Prophetically Huey Lewis began singing it's Hip to Be Square at the very moment we began to square up the first shelf supports
Last year David and Chandra helped us build a walk-in cooler and mobile range coop for our broiler chickens. When we throw up the bat signal they always ride to our rescue! Plus they are lots of fun to work with!
Building the mobile range coop involved drilling lots of holes into heavy duty steel all day....don't worry we revived David with gin & tonics
Next up for the garage: building a second walk-in cooler, more shelving, lots of sorting and organizing, and setup of an expanded wash/pack area necessary to process a big weekly harvest to fill our CSA boxes.
Can we build it by May? YES WE CAN!
Cheers,
Jennifer & Brian