I have a favor to ask: in order to help spread the word about our Kickstarting the Butcher Shop project could you please embed the following code in a blog post? This won’t cost you anything and will help reach out to more people. It’s a cool little Kickstarter widget that shows our status and lets people click through to visit the project page.
What this does is put a copy of the widget below onto your blog post. If you would like to have the text of your blog flow around it then you can instead use this version:
If you do this, please leave a comment with your blog address which gives a link back to you. Let’s see if we can get a hundred widgets out there! That would be awesome.
Thanks for the help with this and a huge thanks to everyone who has already pledge to back our project on Kickstarter!
-Walter
Outdoors: 45°F/36°F Overcast, Light Drizzle
Tiny Cottage: 68°F/67°F
Daily Spark: Your fences need to be horse-high, pig-tight and bull-strong. -Old Saying
Walter Jeffries Tinker, Tailor… A bit eclectic & a tad eccentric, polymath, quantum mechanic & Farmer. Also lucky at cards.
Hi, Got the Kickstarter email and had another red pen moment:
my wives Hollies
How many wives have you? I believe you meant “my wife Holly’s” ..
Slow down, Walter. Savor!
Did I mean Wife? Hmm… She’s identical twins so similar that even I can’t tell her apart. With all that she gets done though there must be two. And, the proof is in the photo!
your code shows my website in a javascript window. something funky is going on
Thanks for catching that, Karl. WordPress was changing straight-double-quotes to curly-double-quotes. I have fixed it. Try again and sorry for the trouble.
Link here (with widget): http://shadysidefarm.blogspot.com/2012/04/nothing-much-going-on.html
I have added a link in my most recent blog post. good luck.
Hi Walter, hope all is well.
One question about your processing facility – will it be available to other farmers? Who will be able to use the facility? Would love to support this facility if in fact it is something available to the wider community, so please let us know.
Thanks!
At least at the start we’ll just be doing our own pigs. There are a lot of regulatory and insurance complexities to make the jump from doing our own pigs to doing other people’s animals. Thus we are doing things in small steps to make the process easier.
Our facility will help other farmers and the wider community because:
1) We are freeing up 500 to 1,000 slaughter, butcher and smoking slots a year at existing facilities. These slots are then available to other farmers. Right now we use a lot of the very limited local processing capacity. When we’re doing it ourselves for our animals those processing slots at other regional facilities will be available for other farms. That is a big benefit to the community.
2) We are openly sharing how we built our facility so that other farmers can do similar projects. This information will help other farmers and butchers work their way through the maze of regulations, permitting, design and construction of nano-scale meat processing facilities like our own that can serve the local communities. This is probably the most important way that other farmers will benefit not just in our local area but nationwide and even worldwide. Small farmers need more very small-scale meat processing facilities. By having many small facilities consumers gain more options and our nation gains greater food security since there is more redundancy and less risk of contamination or disaster when a facility burns down as has happened twice here during the time we have been raising livestock.
So while we’ll not be processing for other farms right away, other farms will immediately benefit from the construction of our facility.
I tried it, but it won’t work. It says it’s not a valid url when I click on it. Any suggestions?
I just rechecked it and it works for me. Several people have set it up on their blogs and it works. If you can set it up on yours and give me the URL, the link, to your blog I’ll visit and check it. I can look at the placed underlying code to make sure that it is setup right. One person had a problem in the beginning where the straight quotes " got turned into curly quotes and that was messing it up so that is worth checking.