Farm Update April 2026

Farm Life Farmstand

Spring has sprung at Farm Life Farm. Our Farmstand is open!

Sarah built our stand and has outfitted it with eggs and soaps to start. So exciting to see it.

Dogs and Sheep are shaved. Again, all Sarah.

The yard has been swept and raked and the tons of winter manure in all pens has been hauled to the muck pile. The muck pile fencing has been moved so we have more room for the compost. We will be attaching the backhoe soon. Harper and Phoebe can get up there and mix the pile to help it all break down faster. It is already some incredible garden additive and will keep getting better.

Field gates have been repaired. Actually we rebuilt the gates last summer. It was the posts that failed. Of course we use logs, not pressure treated wood. We don't expect our posts to last more than a few years. We knew they were both bad but did not get to them before the ground froze. As soon as we had soft ground, we replaced both with new logs and actually scraped all the bark off below ground to help them last a bit longer.

Vehicle maintenance has been arduous. I spent 4 days under the Sequoia. We now have new upper and lower ball joints, shocks, sway bar links, cv shafts, and hub assemblies. Rear suspension will be next.

Gator Maintenance: Mid winter the gator turned off and would not start again. The brakes also froze so it would not move. This was in January during that bitter cold snap. I released the parking brake and put the burn barrel behind it a couple feet. At the beginning of March, Sarah exclaimed that the gator rolled away and only for the grace of god did the burn barrel stop it. She was very confused when I showed great joy at this. Once it was rolling I was able to move it closer to the house to start repair. After some diagnoses it appears that one side of the ignition coil burned out. I did get a replacement and attempted install last night after work. The plug did not fit on the spark plug so I attempted to drill it wider and it went terribly wrong. Now I am waiting for the repair boots.

A litter 9 rabbits has been slaughtered with five of them sold to two customers. We have also slaughtered and butchered two lambs for the family with a third being picked up by a customer this weekend. We will be Doing two pigs next with at least one sold.

on a bad note, we lost two pregnant ewes this winter. They were both at the end of the gestation and they just stopped thriving. Neither us or our vet could find the cause. Very disheartening, yet we must understand that we cannot have complete success with every animal. Our only educated guess is that we had too much sugars in the feed we were using. We have gone back to the grain we used last year.

Knife sales continue slowly. We have decided not to wheal and deal with buyers on the case knives. If someone wants a deal to buy the less desirable knives, we will entertain, however the case can stay until someone really wants them. For example, I took a call from a man down south. His father had given him a case pocket knife many years ago. While fishing, three days before finding our sight, that cherished knife fell in the river. After hours of searching, he gave up and begin searching for a replacement. It had to be that knife...the yellow handle and how it feels in his hand brings back the good memories of his dad. After three days of internet searching he found Farm Life Farm. So he called just to make sure we were real people with real knives. I had his knife in the mail by the end of the day.

Medical training continues: Over the winter we trained Scouts, FFA members, Firefighters and other first responders all with added training on farm-specific incidents.

Sarah and Phoebe became CERT (community emergency response team) certified as well as having joined a large animal rescue team.