Its surprising how fast a month can fly!
Seems as though it was just yesterday that we were franticly copying pages for a monstrous business plan – that was April 30 and here it is all ready one month later.
The business plan was submitted for a big project here on the Farm. The organization we were submitting to was a state grant program "Farms for the Future." The plans here always included submitting to other places as well; in fact, it is necessary because Farms for the Future only has a limited amount of money which is really small considering the scope of the project.
I'm not trying to keep you in suspense about this; the project is still confidential because we don't want to lose the thousands of hours of research and a significant amount of money we've all ready spent to get the plan completed. If we lose out, we'll lose a great opportunity to make our Farm a business that will support the family here on the Farm.
So today? Here's the status: the grant monies requested were only partially approved giving us some ability to move forward with part of the project. This week we have a meeting to try and begin more forward movement.
Meanwhile, farming goes on. We have over 200 meat chickens on the pasture and more are coming in less than 2 weeks. We also have over 50 turkeys, 21 pigs, 50 Americana pullets, our 60 laying hens plus the usual flocks of breeding poultry and, lest we forget, three steers and our donkey Ozzie. Seems as though that should be enough, right? Well not quite. We have 200 Rhode Island Red pullets coming this week, plus 60 more turkeys (we hope) and we'll take some beef to West Gardiner this week for processing into quality meat for sale.
Say: is anybody out there interested in helping out around here? We could use any volunteers and would gladly trade good food, pleasant surroundings and some fun for your labor. If, and when we can, we'll pay some wages for some things but we're not even sure what we can afford right now. It all depends on customers, weather, and luck.
posting from Emma's Family Farm,
Windsor Maine;
Steve Hoad
See what we're doing on the Farm at
http://twitter.com/TheHoads
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