| Hello all. I would like to introduce myself and my farm. Well my little start of a farm at least. :) We are calling it Shining Moon Farm to flow with the name of our jewelry and glasswork business, Shining Moon Creations. We are located outside of Boyd, TX which is about 35 miles northwest of the Dallas/Fort Worth area. We are starting with a small one acre piece of my parents 62 acre farm which I will one day inherit, hopefully far in the future. It looks like I will be taking over more of the work of the main farm in the next few years because it is getting harder for my father to do the work. This farm started in 1907 when my great grandfather purchased 170 acres and ran a standard mixed use farm. It has produced beef, cream, watermelons, corn, peanuts, and assorted grain crops at different times. My parents purchased 60 acres in the 1970's from my great aunts and we moved there in 1983 when my father retired from the Air Force. Another two acres were inherited from my grandmother about five years ago. As I was growing up, the farm was never run as a full time venture. We ran a few cattle for beef and 4-H and FFA projects. I did bottle calves and calves on Jersey nurse cows for a few years. Two years of raising Broilers for the county youth fair convinced me that I HATE chickens :D . I had a one acre market garden through high school which was a very good success except for the last year when we got a freak monster hail storm that destroyed everything in my expanded 1.5 acre garden. These activities paid for college through direct money and scholarships from the Houston Livestock Show. I never did much showing of large stock past the county fair level because of the high cost for show quality cattle. In my Sophomore year in high school though I got a couple rabbits. This started an interest in showing them in our family and at one point in a few years we were running close to 300 rabbits from five breeds in four barns. We took our show all over the country and competed at the state and national conventions. After I got out of college and started working in computers though I couldn't help with the rabbits much. I work for a company that has me traveling most of the time. My parents slowly got out of the show rabbit business and switched to just cattle when my mother and father retired for good. For the last thirteen years I have lived the miserable life of a city person. In June my wife, daughter, and I started moving to our new place in the country. It will be interesting to see how things go because they are both city girls. My wife thinks Denison where she grew with a population of 15,000 was small. Boyd has somewhere just over 1,000 people in the city limits. Luckily we are less than an hour from Fort Worth so she will be able to get her Big City fix if she needs to. :D One snag to things is that when we were just starting to move furniture and stuff out from our place in town, I got three days notice that I had to get on a plane to England for a one month assignment. Neither wife or daughter were thrilled with that and are making big lists of things I have to do when I get back at the in a few days. As I said earlier, my parents currently just run a small herd of mostly Angus beef cattle. Currently they have a bull, eight cows, and seven calves. Sunday after I get home I get to play cowboy and catch and take two of the cows and all the calves to the auction. They hay crop from their two small fields has not been good the last two years and they are trying to cut down on the number they need to carry over the winter. I hope to slowly move things to a more diversified and profit making setup over the next several years. I need to do this because while my parents have a good retirement setup and mostly just use the farm revenue for extra fun money, I would like to eventually stop the crazy corporate life and have it help support the family. My dad has no problems with this as long as I do the work. :) I am looking at going back to my market garden days and setting up vegetable and small fruit crops. Our house is in front of the area where I had my market garden so will be easy to get to. I need to investigate new outlets since the primary local farmers market in Fort Worth that I used to sell at is now fancy landscaping for Tandy's new office park. I am looking at putting in blackberries and raspberries along with starting a more formal orchard with pear, peach, plum, and fig trees. I also think that marketing the beef directly to consumers might be a good way to go. We raise grass fed beef with no antibiotics or growth hormones so it should be worth more than the 90 cents to a dollar a pound prices that they get at auction. The problem is that this takes marketing work that my father isn't real keen on doing. Over all it is exciting to start back on the agriculture path that I left many years ago. I have dug out all my old books from High School and College Ag classes and am racking my brain trying to remember things as I study what is new. Organics were just starting to be accepted in the 1980's and while I dabbled in them then, things have really changed in the last 20+ years. I will be leaning that way, but the requirements seem to be crazy. Well the government has had its hand in since I last looked so that is probably the reason. :) Anyway, this was way more than I intended to write and I am sorry if this bored you out of your skull. Cheers, Paul
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