Retail License Hanging in Butcher Shop Office
One of the many licenses we need is our retail meat handling license and scale license. That arrived yesterday and I hung it in the butcher shop office. It is the first one up on the wall.
Today I worked on the laundry dryer ventilation and the source water distribution system. Parts arrived. Ben and Hope painted around the exterior… Progress.
Outdoors: 69°F/47°F Sunny
Tiny Cottage: 66°F/62°F
Daily Spark: Caution Sign on Road in Barre, VT: “Slow Pot Holes” I must say I’m glad because it makes them easier to dodge than if they were fast.
Walter Jeffries Tinker, Tailor… A bit eclectic & a tad eccentric, polymath, quantum mechanic & Farmer. Also lucky at cards.
One more step on the path. You’re on the home stretch now!
Walter, I’m curious about something. Since you’re soon to be killing and butchering your own animals and you have some fairly serious freezing capacity, have you considered harvesting sperm from the boars that almost made the cut to become breeders?
There are probably quite a few people out there who would be willing to pay a bit for the possibility of using your pigs’ cold weather genetics. It’s a long way to Vermont to pick up a live boar or sow. You certainly wouldn’t get a premium for it, but if a couple syringes in a dry ice cooler package could net you the profit from a good cut of meat, you might have another income stream worth your time.
An interested and complicated idea but realize that only the top 0.5% of the boars qualify to become breeders and with each successive generation it stays at that percentage causing the grading curve to shift higher and higher. I don’t want a boar’s genetics anymore who didn’t make the grade or even one who used to make the grade but now his offspring have surpassed him.
As to other farms getting the genetics, they do, see the Breeders Page. Likewise they want to get the latest cutting edge innovation in the genetics and not yesterday’s man of the year, a has-been and runner up at this point.
Life is hard for guys on the farm, and in the wild.
One additional detail is that swine sperm is kept fresh rather than frozen and I’ve got enough other projects keeping me busy so I doubt I’ll ever supply AI. It has been asked many times before.
Aye, I figured it might be a no-go, but also figured that with the new butcher shop, you might be able to extract sperm from just-butchered boars that were close runners up to stay on the farm, and sell AI to people who couldn’t reasonably come pick up live animals. Say farmers in Colorado, or Washington, or other places with mountains and cold weather. That would be a time investment though, and time is a very valuable commodity :)
Hmm… I suspect it is far more efficient, and easier, to just keep a boar alive to do his job or if collecting for AI then to collect while he is alive. Collecting post mortem seems iffy when it can easily be done ante-mortem.
I certainly defer to you on the topic of what would be easier!
My thought here was imagining this as a way to turn waste into profit. If a good young boar is starting down the path to the dinner table, and you could get a little extra out of them without a lot of effort? But if it is a lot of effort, then of course not. Time is money.