regenerative farming

The Merc is Officially OPEN!

This one has all the shoutouts.

Penning down my thoughts after the whirlwind week and weekend. I’m still blown away by the support and encouragement we got from both locals and from afar. Thank you for birthing this idea into reality with me!

Last week was absolutely bonkers, last month someone from UMLF (our lender) stopped by and the space was basically empty, I was still waiting on my fridge and freezer and inventory hadn’t been ordered yet. I had my doubts that we could pull all of this off in such a short amount of time. Once we got our tables and shelves from our new friend Ben Larsen in Cedar City, things started flowing into motion. I started placing my wholesale orders, boxes and boxes were coming in almost daily.

Before and during photos to mark our progress

Then the fridge and freezer got picked up by Zach and our neighbor Joey on 10/30. Longest drive day ever for Zach as he did this “errand” on his way home from work, meaning after a full work day and early morning commute, driving to north SLC, then schlepping it all home and getting back well after 9pm. The following day, Halloween, we were making plans to get things unloaded after the trick or treaters were done, but my friend Bob recruited his dairy men to come right over after their shift and they manhandled the units into their rightful places in the store while the sun was still out. What a relief!

We got the units plugged in and the fridge started cooling right away, the freezer was not cooling, so a call into the repair folks was made. I have PTSD from my window replacement scenario earlier this year so any call to service people sends me into a spiral that the request will take forever to fulfill. Luckily I was proven wrong, made the call on a Thursday, and the came by Monday to complete the job. Way to be efficient Peterson Refrigeration and Appliance!

A morning’s work to get the freezer running
Half a beef loaded in
Inching closer

Once the freezer was up and running I got our beef delivery arranged and Megan from SunnySide Up Pastures came on Wednesday. All this week I’m also working in my drive up north to visit my dad and get last minute supplies, baking or making one or two something’s everyday, having labels printed and adding them to my products as they file in, making pricing tags, putting inventory into our POS system and thinking new things as I go. This for me is being in the entrepreneurial zone. Working for hours and hours without noticing how the time is warping by. I thrive here even though it sounds kind of manic. Don’t recommend for the long term, but if you have a deadline and know about how to work backward from it effectively it can be a powerful tool. Every night I went to bed utterly exhausted from the physical and mental demand, and I loved it.

Friday I did the last few pick ups, went to the bank, then we had a little chat back at home base with a pork guy who is just getting started and looking for a market like us. We’re not quite ready for pork yet but he’s our kind of farmer and has similar visions for the county and people’s overall health. Quick insider info, Sanpete county is the second poorest county in Utah, so access to all things including healthy food is pretty scant. Robert did leave us with a large cache of pork to sample and we are eating like royalty.

Saturday was our big grand opening day! I had only just found the previous week that out our county has a chamber of commerce, so some of the ladies came out and did a ribbon cutting ceremony. We got to network a little and I’m joining the chamber as it’s just getting started. Our neighbors and biggest fans were some of our first customers. We’re glad they shared in the special moment with us! The day flew by with a pretty steady stream flowing in, sharing stories and memories of this place, and enjoying some camaraderie with one another. It blew us away as far as any expectations. Everyone participated, Camden and Natalie did most of the register work, Zach entertained his coworkers who came down for the occasion, my VA a caregiver counselor came all the way from SLC just to see this vision come to fruition (he and I have been meeting for the past year + talking about all of this alongside all I do in my role as my dad’s caregiver). I am still very touched by his kindness.

Sunday and Monday were mostly rest days and now we’re gearing up for another weekend of food and neighbor time. Our business hours going forward are Fridays and Saturdays from 11am – 5pm (or by chance, someone has come in “by chance” everyday since except Sunday and we love and welcome that!). I got my food handler’s permit today and Zach and Natalie will be getting theirs so we can serve more prepared foods legally, the menu will be changing weekly and we hope to add some grab and go meals to the mix. We’re just getting started and are so excited about all the possibilities that lie ahead. THANK YOU to everyone who has helped and to those who came and will continue coming, for making this a success and believing in our vision. We know deep in our bones that we were placed in this place at this time to do something with The Merc. We hope you feel that energy when you step through our doors.

Ribbon cutting, sure do love these small town gestures
Before
During
After

Embracing Becoming a Generalist

It’s been a few weeks since sitting down to capture some thoughts. This podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mind-body-and-soil/id1615122217?i=1000604087792 … always gets my writing juices flowing so here I am again after a good listen. As for the title of this post, a more self deprecating phrase we’ve said as generalists over the years is “Jack of all trades, master of none”.

I’m very much in a similar rut of what I posted last month. I’ve come to embrace it as my mud season. More metaphor, but hang with me. A fellow writer I’ve recently started following http://jamesapearson.com…describes it as the gap between winter and spring where there is no clear path and every step feels heavy and uncertain. We are here both physically and theoretically as we trudge through the literal shit (manure) we’re trying to spread through the backyard to build soil, and emotionally as I do the deeper work of inner healing and connecting with my younger selves. Do not do this work alone, you’ll lose your muck boots in the depths of the sludge. I’m grateful for a support network helping me to navigate my own traumas and explore my forgotten childhood as well.

Manure that will help us build soil
Waiting for it to dry out is a test in patience

Back to the generalist idea though. We’re in a pre-spring kind of whack-a-mole place with our homesteading and store plans. I announced the thing but am currently stuck in the mire of all the details. I can see where I want to be months or even years from now, but there is not a clear path and my inner compass is skewed because I haven’t been to this place before.

Homesteading requires a highly sustainable level of DIY and I’m still a novice in a lot of the areas needing my attention. Earlier this week for example, I had an ongoing text and phone thread with a soil guy about cover crop and testing soil samples, got a new internet router installed but was not able to connect (fortunately Zach was the generalist here and got us online when he got home), I mopped the muddy floors almost everyday, sent a customer service email, was supposed to apply for a grant with a deadline of Wednesday but due to the no Wi-Fi issue went ahead and skipped that round, took the dog to training class, on the way picked up a gallon of milk from our raw milk lady, grocery shopped up north, went to the chiropractor, attended a coaching call and a webinar, and there’s a whole other running list in my head of things to do, research, cook, clean, prepare, that doesn’t even touch the business side of things.

I know we all do this everyday, every month, etc. but the question I had to stop and ask today is the same as last writing. Where is it in service to my goals? What is my next right step? When we were living on the road this was always at the forefront of my mind, next right step was usually pretty clear and we became very intuitive and knowing where to go and when to make a move. Living inside dulls that intuition to some extent. But I don’t want to have dull instincts so I have to get in the mud and feel around for my footing.

Here’s an example of where I think we are (maybe) getting it right. We want chickens, always have, and have been around enough urban farms or even friends backyards to know having them is a great farming segue and low entry barrier project. We even have a dilapidated barn behind our house that housed some foul at some point. When we moved in last summer the kids started clearing out that space. When we circled back around to the research end of having chickens there was a lot of debate about building a new coop or using the existing one and just making improvements to it. Next right step (and next right available thing) meant that improving the existing structure is more viable for now. We already had the lumber at the ready to do the work. The boys made great headway last weekend and we’ll be getting some chicks in early April after our spring break. Same goes for the garden, we have seeds, at least some workable ground, and a separate barn space for getting some seeds started indoors. We all have to start somewhere with what we have and this is what we have for now. And it is enough.

🐣 coming soon!
Other birds are not going to like these holes patched
Camden built a nesting box all on his own!

The mud season is messy but it can be full of fun challenges if we’re willing to look at it that way. I still grumble a lot on the cloudy and cold days but the temps are ever so slightly starting to climb and signs of spring are slowly making their selves known. I see it in the greening up of things and the return of more bird species to the area on my daily walks. Sometimes there’s even a clear blue sky to appreciate and if we’re really lucky no wind. Today is not such a day, but I can knock a few more things off my list from inside while I wait for another glimpse of the sun and for the mud to dry up.

On food security and sourcing local

The memes making the rounds on the price of eggs has me laughing it up. Probably my favorite is this one:

It’s funny because it’s embarrassingly true. Just ask my sister or myself about the one time a friend’s dad caught us in the act and came running out of his house with nunchucks as we scurried away terrified! 🫣💀

But when I started thinking about this “crisis”at a deeper level, and level setting it to my reality here’s where I landed.

I will pay anywhere between $4-8 for a dozen cage free or pasture raised eggs (depending on where I’m picking them up and availability). I’m currently able to get two dozen for about $6 at Costco and that feels like a steal! Is there really a crisis, or has the bottom fallen out on an unstable model from big egg producers?

The once cheaper variety of eggs we are seeing depleted from grocery store shelves (and also currently price gouged) are grown in an unsustainable manner.

My county has a lot of large poultry operations, growing for Tyson, or…I’d like to list another but I think they’re a monopoly. Same goes for eggs. There may be tens of thousands of producers around the country but those farmers are growing their chickens and eggs to a standard that is not sustainable for the bird, the farmer, or the environment. All for a huge corporation that is demanding more and more for a lower bottom line. That way they can get a dozen eggs in the grocery store cooler for $1.88/dozen.

What happens when a chicken gets sick? Or how about a pandemic like avian flu moving through those enormous cramped coops that kill off the majority of the flock? That is what we are currently experiencing at the large scale level.

Your neighbor who raises their own chickens? Likely not affected, although egg production naturally decreases during winter months so the timing of all this makes a lot of sense. Support them if you are able to, but also look into organic or cage free or best of all pasture raised eggs. This level setting is happening everywhere in the food supply chain and I hope it’s opening more folks’s eyes to the problems that relying solely or heavily on centralized food systems creates. We were never intended to depend on ten or less huge corporations feeding an entire country. And look at what happens when we do, we are watching that system collapse.

Quick caveat: I’m writing from my personal perspective, which is a place of privilege that I can afford eggs at pretty much any price. If you rely on food stamps or affording eggs means sacrificing something else, please know I have absolutely been there. Where choices were not so abundant and we went without a lot of things due to their price. Eggs are a high-quality, low cost protein and there is a lot of food insecurity that touches people on the margins even more so when something like this happens. We are doing our best with broken systems all around us, no judgement or shade for how you go about putting food on the table for your family. This is a criticism of the industrial food system and not of people who need food subsidized.

On that long and rambling note, I’m opening a store!

I’ve been eluding to this basically since before we moved here, two weeks ago I filed the initial paperwork with the Secretary of State for my business name, and now things are starting to roll along.

Depending on how things go with funding and grants, I hope to open The Fayette Merc sometime in the spring.

Look, I can’t fix a broken system. None of us can do that individually but I can and do notice ways where I can make a positive shift in the direction that better serves my family and my community. If we all choose to notice and do things in our own small way, over time, these systems will rectify.

What I am writing is not new or revolutionary. It is doing my part in sharing the collective wisdom I’ve witnessed and experienced over the years from people doing good in this arena.

Now send me some good juju as I become a grant writer!

Yes, there will be bread