Ben and Hope have created a new cartoon info-graphic to show the progress on our Kickstarter the Butcher Shop project.
Outdoors: 39°F/25°F 1/2″ Snow
Tiny Cottage: 68°F/64°F
Daily Spark: It isn’t the time to market that matters so much as the cost to sustainable quality.
Outdoors: 50°F/29°F Partially Sunny, Rain
Tiny Cottage: 69°F/66°F
Daily Spark: Don’t borrow trouble. -Anon
Sugar Mountain Farm is on Vermont Public Radio on Vermont Edition with Nina Keck right now at 12 noon. It will be repeated at 7 pm. Tune in, listen, call in, enjoy! Spread the word about our Kickstarting the Butcher Shop at Sugar Mountain Farm.
Right now they’re doing the national news. Then the first part of the show is about about “Thinking Globally, Acting Locally“. I believe we come on after that, perhaps at the half hour mark.
We are at our mid-point on the Kickstarter project and have surpassed $19,000 $20,000!
We very much appreciate everything people have done to date including backing the project and getting the word out. Several people have asked what more they can do to help. The biggest thing is spreading the word and getting visibility so more people know about the project and the great meat shipped to their home which they can get by backing our project.
Kickstarter has a calculation they use for “Popularity” and they also have a “Staff Picks” page, newsletter and “In the News” that get projects onto a front pages and gives visibility. So, I do have a favor to ask:
1. Please go to our kickstarter page.
2. If you have not yet pressed the Like button on the left under the top photo of Big Pig then please press that to help spread the word.
3. Also under the Big Pig picture at the top is a tweet button. Please use that if you tweet and send out a message to your followers about our project.
4. If you have not yet pledged, please back our project and pledge a dollar (or more if you like). Pledges, even small ones, help with the popularity ranking on Kickstarter. Every little bit helps to move us towards our goal and make us more visible.
5. Tell your friends in the real world, via Facebook, Tweeting and on your blog about our project. Here is a short URL that is easy to give out:
Note that capitalization does not matter. The smf.me is the important part since most web browsers know to put the http:// in front. This tiny web link redirects to the much longer Kickstarter URL making it an easy way to spread the word.
The goal is to boost our popularity on Kickstarter which will boost our visibility which will boost pledges. Activity creates more visibility on the front pages of Kickstarter which means more people will see our project and hopefully back it too. Wednesday we’ll be interviewed on Vermont Public Radio’s program Vermont Edition and this extra visibility will help people who come from that show find to our Kickstarter page.
The cost is a dollar and a few minutes of your time. I hope that you can do this to help us jump to the next level of visibility for Kickstarting the Butcher Shop.
Thank you!
-Walter
PS. After you have done this check out Update #16 and Update #21 for some games where you can win a free T-shirt or coffee mug with Sugar Mountain Farm artwork.
Outdoors: 52°F/27°F Partially Sunny, Snow, Rain, Hail, Wind, You Name It.
Tiny Cottage: 68°F/65°F
Daily Spark: Change is life.
A bunch of people on Kickstarting the Butcher Shop, here on my blog and in person have asked about having bacon in the rewards. Everyone loves bacon. Salt, sugar, fat, protein and smoke! What’s not to love!
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On the recent Fencing article Jeff asked:
Your note of the cross-breediness of your pigs bring up a question I’ve been pondering for a while. We have started with large blacks as our foundational stock, but we plan on doing once a year farrowing and will need to bring in new boars/AI regularly. My tendency is toward experimentation, and I’m keen on bringing in other breeds and selecting the best gilts from the crosses–but I’m also getting some push back from folks that think I should try to maintain a single threatened breed. I have some vague ideas of what I want to select for (vigor, ability to reach sexual maturity in 8 months, good mothering, docility) but don’t feel super comfortable with my skills as a breeder. My main goal is to make things as simple as possible going forward, but I’m well aware of our human tendencies to constantly complicate a seemingly simple task. Any words of wisdom?
I appreciate and respect those folks who are determined to maintain specific pure bred lines. That is a resource of genetics. However, for our needs we cross to produce a breed that does what we need. With each cross we select the best of the best and eat the rest. Over the course of many generations of pigs this has resulted in a gradual, dramatic improvement of our herd genetics, giving us the best traits that fit with our local environment, management style and pasture based farming.
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I always wanted to be a farm mom! -Holly
