Long Story Farms, LLC
@longstoryfarms
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Aspiring sustainable farmstead, central SC, 8a. Motto: “with prudence and thanksgiving” Classic agrarian human, Southerner, localist, delusional but persistent.
South Carolina, USA
Joined July 2019
Don't wanna be here?
Send us removal request.
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When I started this journey to becoming a farmer, I was only doing what 5 year old me always knew I would do.
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The fact that this type of vehicle is not available in the US means we don’t live in a free country.
Toyota’s $10,000 future pickup truck is basic transportation perfection.
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No pesticides, no fertilizer, didn’t even prune this one last year. It is loaded. Fruit is smallish compared to commercial but this is exactly what we were aiming for: low maintenance, chemical free food forest.
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Been seeing this on Facebook homesteading forums since 2022. People expecting to bootstrap their homestead selling crappy homemade crafts, eggs, sourdough, and goat milk soap are in for a rude awakening. Those are the lowest “barrier to entry” homestead products. Every other
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The state of farmers markets in 2023 is really poor. Most have become glorified craft fairs/bake sales with food trucks and handicrafts dominating the cadre of vendors. People aren’t going to farmers markets to buy food to take home and prepare. They go to be fed.
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Sitting at the edge of this clearing I have been mowing every other week or so for a couple of years.
The other day my wife said she had “discovered” this pretty little clearing near the house that she wanted to show me.
Yeah, I know about that clearing.
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@primalpoly
Homeschooling our kids. I didn’t expect to homeschool kids and I had no idea that with her limited educational attainment she would become so expert in all aspects from curriculum to learning styles. Incredible woman!
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A 5 gallon bucket full of peaches was the yield.
No pesticides, no fertilizer, didn’t even prune this one last year. It is loaded. Fruit is smallish compared to commercial but this is exactly what we were aiming for: low maintenance, chemical free food forest.
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We aren't against solar power. We are against covering arable land with solar panels without at least making the installation amenable to grazing animals or some other use of the land.
Serious question for my fellow rural Americans:
Why are we against solar power?
I see people running for local office on the premise of stopping solar power in their specific district or county.
And I'm truly curious what's so bad about alternative energy?
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One of the hardest things for me to learn in starting to market our farm products was how to price it. At first I was in the mode of “aww shucks if you would buy our pork for a nominal fee, I would really appreciate it”
The one product that most pushed an evolution in my
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I am going to do a thread of "If I had a dollar for every time someone said..." stuff I hear about homesteading. I will add to it as we go. Drop yours in the comments.
#1
: I want my chickens to free range, I don't believe in confining them. *coyotes howls in the background*
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Why should you care more about your local government than who is elected president?
I just found out our county council is considering an ordinance to restrict the number of chickens you can have to 6 for any property zone residential regardless of size. Pay attention! The
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Bees made it. Who knows if the insulation helped but they made it.
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Another thing that makes no sense is how we deworm every domesticated mammal but we don’t deworm ourselves. Crazy, right?
When worms or parasites establish themselves in the body, they do four things
1. A worm can cause physical trauma to the body by perforating the intestines, the circulatory system, the lungs, and the liver.
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If you are thinking of getting into homesteading and you think you will bootstrap your homestead selling soaps and crafts know that every other homesteader is thinking the same thing. Find a business idea that has a market.
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Here's my advice to single American men who feel hopeless about ever finding a good woman to marry:
Become a tradesman and get a job in a mid-sized community, buy a cheap house and fix it up.
Hang out primarily at church and community events, walk old ladies across the street
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Wilson’s II in Little Mountain, SC you can still get nails by the pound, you can get organic grains and feed and pretty much anything a hardware store would carry that a big box store would not. If you are around, stop by!
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What a tool! And I am not talking about the shovel.
Invoking the Lord while demonstrating your ignorance is doubly disturbing. Relocate those guys. Even when they eat our chicken and duck eggs I don’t kill them, I relocate them where they can continue doing God’s work of sending
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It is going to happen! The storefront is papered over, we are ready to start working on getting the store built out. Stop by Saturday during Octoberfest.
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I don't know why I take it hard when people complain about our prices. I hate them too. I really want to make the meat we are raising affordable. But we are small scale and we are pursuing practices that also cost more. When I compare to other growers, we are actually reasonable
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Today is 27 years of marriage (to the same woman!). 4 kids, lived in 3 countries, traveled to many more, building the farm, starting businesses. Lots of shared life experiences, many of them fighting back against the things that tear couples apart to create our meant to be.
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Everyone who starts a homestead, especially those who are coming from zero contact with farming, will have a steep learning curve.
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Well, our turkey sales have wrapped up for Thanksgiving. We had a good year. We processed 45 birds, kept three for us, 2 unsold in the freezer. We sold 40 turkeys this year! More than double last year.
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Honestly, this account is too big for our farm. We haven’t done much. You shouldn’t listen to me. I know a little bit about a lot of things; but I can’t offer deep expertise in anything but my day job. This is why “aspiring” is in the bio. I mean that. I want to be the next Joel
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I started the year off working on an 8’x5’ island for my wife. Here is the island I built two years ago for the food prep and cooking side. The new one will be for canning, dehydrating, freeze drying. More of a built in look for this one. Pictures when it is done.
@embryosophy
Building my wife a(nother) kitchen island for the food preservation area of the kitchen.
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Goat kids 1 week old today and already have seen more snow in SC than most humans do in 3-4 years.
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My daughter reminded me today that the saying "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" actually has been cut short in common parlance. The full quote is "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness".
Be careful out there.
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Yes, you are succeeding as a parent if your kids can play bluegrass standards like this.
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We stopped by a professional office today and sold $700 worth of meat to the staff. I need 10 of these with monthly stops.
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Some people have accused me of being a prepper. They are mistaken. The stockpile of stuff is just a bunch of unfinished projects.
That said, if the world as we know it does end, maybe I will finally have time to get around to all those projects.
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A bunch of people who don't buy from me now keep telling me that they are so glad they know me "just in case".
Mitch, you better be buying from me now. If you show up "just in case" go to the back of the line because I am taking care of my current customers first.
Farmer here, reminding you that if SHTF I will not be trading foodstuffs for gold and silver.
Buy some land, tools, skills, and other real assets.
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RIP Caleb.
One of our LGDs passed on to the pasture in the sky today. He was acting a little off on Wednesday but I assumed it was the heat. Probably missed some signs of something worse. Not sure what the cause was but he was an affectionate companion and a fierce protector.
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I am sure that plum trees blooming 5 weeks before our average last frost date will be perfectly fine.
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While I am generally of the mindset that yeah, you should live below your means, I also think a lot of people made decisions before food and energy prices skyrocketed, before their interest rate sensitive debt went up, before property tax assessments went up. They are not
@Lead_Flinger
People just need to learn how to live below their means. They don't leave any "margin of safety" when they make decisions about what house to buy or rent, the car to buy, etc.
If you are living month to month, then you are spending too much.
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We are in a crisis of epistemology. Facts go unnoticed, undiscerned, or unacknowledged by what appears to be an overwhelming majority of society. No one is capable of saying, "I don't know." or, "I don't know with certainty."
Everyone is certain they know what they cannot know.
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Farmers markets are fragile. They need promotion, vendor participation, and, of course, customers.
We started going to a new market at a small town that just lost its grocery store. The local Jaycees were sponsoring it as a way to provide access to food in the town.
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Preppers and prepping are much maligned as though preps only come in handy if the world ends.
But, for a household, what does it mean for the world to end? There are very common ways that the world can end for a household. Things like illness, an accident, job loss can be world
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Not our cow…yet…
How long does a cow have to be on my land before I can just keep it?
Will call the neighbor tomorrow.
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So many people coming here from out of state, mostly people fleeing blue states and looking for a place where they can grow food, own guns, homeschool, etc. They bring their money and their Republican leaning (generally speaking) NATIONAL politics with them. A lot of locals
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Butchered 28 chickens over the weekend. Did not injure myself!
Beautiful carcasses between 4 and 6 pounds. Sweet spot for our customers. 16 already sold. These were raised on non-soy, non-GMO feed.
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I got my kids fast food as a "treat" the other night and they said it didn't taste real. Since we are eating so much more food from the farm than from off farm, their palates have changed.
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My hottest take is that we are systematically destroying the human genome with pollution, both chemical and electromagnetic, and with inferior foods, impacting epigenetic expression and that is causing most of the problems in the world today.
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It is mushroom inoculation day at Honeybee Hollow homestead. Great day for community building.
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We sell whole birds for $6/pound. We need to get between $25-30 per bird
But the analysis below includes fixed costs which should be amortized over the number of batches you will raise. That is not a good analysis.
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The world seems akilter, doesn't it?
What are you going to do about it?
Me, I am going to plant some more trees, buy a bull to freshen my dairy cows, open a store to provide local farm products to my community, and install some solar equipment I have so I can be more off
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One of my great fears is that the US goes from high trust to low trust. I think it is happening already. If you haven't lived in low trust societies/cultures you probably see this a symptom of moral decline and you may see the transition as societal collapse or becoming third
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It is official. We have been approved for on farm processing of poultry under the federal exemption.
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If you are planning for a long emergency, the one thing most people don’t have enough of is salt. Salt has so many uses but is especially needed for refrigeration free food preservation. My wife is annoyed at how much salt I have. That is an indicator you have it about right.
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Old timers used to fatten hogs with corn and skim milk. Next time you go grocery shopping, take a look at your cart and ask yourself if you are the hog.
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I am hoping to retire from my corporate job so I can begin my true calling of being a farmer because I plan to work until I am dead. I hope to walk out to the garden or the woodlot and sit down on a stump and expire, thinking I was just taking a break.
One of the main complaints I hear from young men is that there are no openings or opportunity for them at companies because no one is retiring. You see this phenomenon very clearly amongst the political class. Just look at the average age of our presidents over time.
It is
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I once negotiated with a big 4 consulting firm’s Mexico City office. They assumed I didn’t speak Spanish. Funniest look on their faces when we finally got to a deal and I informed them that I did in fact speak Spanish.
They had been discussing negotiating strategy at the table
pov you're about to negotiate with someone who presents as not being good at negotiating
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I am eating a duck soup my daughter made.
Duck, mushrooms, ginger turmeric, sweet peppers all grown here.
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Just an FYI...My processing cost for pigs has gone up 20% year over year. My feed cost has gone up 20% year over year.
I am a small scale producer. I am not setting market prices but there is no way you will not see this or more at the grocery store. My prices will go up.
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I am building a friendship with a local intellectual. A poet, writer, and retired professor.
He has been recommending books by local writers and it got me thinking. Localism, taken to its logical conclusion should lead us to localization of thought, knowledge, etc.
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It isn’t just consumers though, farmers are not seeing a return and generally do better selling at their own farm stand. Unseating the grocery store as the source into a shrinking market for unprepared foods feels like a fools errand. What to do?
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It is funny how they say you need 1 nesting box for every 4-5 hens but then the hens get together and decide to use just one of them, no matter how many there are.
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Long delayed but we have finally started roughing in the mechanicals, getting this moving!!
It is going to happen! The storefront is papered over, we are ready to start working on getting the store built out. Stop by Saturday during Octoberfest.
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A customer asked if their turkey would be ready for tomorrow when she leaves to go out of town. I said, “well, I am killing them today so they should be mostly frozen.”
She texted my wife and asked that I use different language like “preparing your turkey for the freezer”.
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Here are a couple of pictures from the farm to table dinner we did tonigh featuring 5 local food producers!
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90% of what we are doing is relearning what the old timers and indigenous people did.
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@smoky_tax
I was investing in real estate back in 2007-8 and I read where a professional investor was getting out because too many people were doing it and someone was going to get hurt. We got out too, just in time. Rule of thumb is if there is a gumroad course on how to do it, you are
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Mowing with a scythe.
Pretty poor at it yet. But it is very relaxing.
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I was out at my grandfather’s old farm today to buy hay from my cousin. My cousin farms it now, raising turkeys, intercropping corn and wheat on contour and has a small cowherd and some hay ground.
The farm was the typical integrated family farm of the post war years prior to
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I am raising my eggs prices to keep eggs out of the hands of my enemies.
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Mrs Long Story Farms and I have had the pure joy of being married for 28 years today. Happy anniversary, babe! I still pinch myself to make sure it is not a dream.
Hopefully we will look this good in a few more years (my great grandparents).
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This was a great feeling for us. Achieved in January, also with the harvest of a beef. We have been poultry and pork self sufficient for a couple of years. Beef takes longer.
Stocked the freezers with our homegrown, grass-finished beef this morning. Still have a mess of chickens, and almost a whole pig in the freezer, with more pigs coming ready for fall slaughter. We no longer require outside sources of protein, as of today.
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One of the things I love about the building where we are putting the store is the doors. They need a little work but will be restored to their former glory.
MAKE DOORS GREAT AGAIN
Homes with a public face, entrances with real character, built right up to the plot edge
🏰🏛⛩
#Sustainability
#GoodUrbanism
#SmartCity
#TeamTradition
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Cows confused at man reacting angrily when all they wanted was a little sweet feed and a pat on the head.
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If this passes it might be fun to withdraw and deposit money over and over each month just to mess with them.
IRS: where did all this money come from/go to?
Me: it’s the same money. See I thought I was going to buy a cow but it didn’t work out so I put it back *every month*
Yellen defends IRS rule requiring banks to report all transactions over $600
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We planted crimson clover in 2017 and now it comes back every year. Vetch and oilseed radish too. That is in the food forest—about 2-3 acres with over 100 trees and 40 or so species/varieties.
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My son wanted to plant some trees. Look at the clay.
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Yeah, that’s us! We are working on a retail space we bought where we plan to have a farm store featuring the best local farm products from our farm and others in the area. It will feature a refillery where you can get zero waste products. Shooting for late March.
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Was talking with a friend who received criticism because his garden is too big for his own needs. Meanwhile, the critic has more than one home and spends most of their time in the Hamptons.
If you grow gardens that make people who live in the Hamptons uncomfortable you are gmi.
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I got caught in the mess caused by the IT outage. I was on a plane when the outage occurred. When the plane landed, there was a problem getting the ground crew to the plane and a gate agent to the gate. The radios were down (!) due to the outage. We waited about 30 mins for this
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One of the most fortunate things to happen to me during my childhood was that my mom believed that margarine turned into plastic in your stomach so we never had it in our house. Pure butter since I was a kid.
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My paternal grandfather taught me how to plant tomatoes when I was 13–never had blossom end rot if I follow his instructions.
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The best time to plant a black walnut tree was 50 years ago. The next best time is now.
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Anyone want to come over and do this later?
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Every time people say “Sustainable ag can’t feed the world” we need to make them defend their position.
Will conventional ag yields continue? Current trends say no.
How many precision fermentation vats will it take to feed the world?
Small farms HAVE to feed the world.
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Feed cost is just nuts, freight and feed. I don't know how we will make money at this rate. Really thinking about this hard. Will have to scale so I can mix my own or we just won't get there is what I think now.
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Last night we had two set of twins born. These are offspring of two bucklings that went missing a few weeks ago, suspected victims of predation by coyotes. Their legacy will continue.
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I just made some scrambled eggs in bacon grease and it awoke some childhood memories of the smells from my grandmother's kitchen.
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It has been a lot of fun so far this year with our food forest coming into its own. The first year we got mulberries it felt like we were fighting the birds but now we just can’t reach them all.
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What does it sound like when pigs eat black walnuts? Turn on sound to find out.
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Tomorrow we are sending our third steer to the butcher. He is 27 months old and a fine specimen given his jersey-angus cross genetics and our poor pasture. This was planned just after Christmas.
This week, a friend asked if my butcher could take another. As it turned out he had
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