Hayes Valley Farms

Today I'm talking with Christina at Hayes Valley Farms.

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00:00
You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis.  A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free-to-use farm-to-table platform emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system.  You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. Today I'm talking with Christina at Hayes Family Farm.

00:28
Good morning, Christina. How are you? Good morning. I'm good. Just watching the rain. Yeah. Where are you? We are in Marion, Virginia. That's right. I knew it was the South because you have that lovely Southern accent going on. Whatever it says. And I'm like, I don't hear it, but... You don't hear it if you don't... Okay. I am like a crazy fanatic about accents. You don't hear it if you live in it. Yeah, true. True. So...

00:58
It is gray here in Minnesota. It was supposed to be sunny and the sun has not decided to break through the clouds yet. Do you guys still have snow on the ground? Oh no, no, no, no. I think we had sleet three and a half weeks ago. I think. Might have been five and a half weeks ago, but it's been a while since we've seen any frozen precipitation. Thank goodness.

01:21
June 1st is Sunday and we have farmers market starting June 7th. So it better not snow.  Has it snowed in June there before? Not when I have lived here. I've lived here. I've lived in Minnesota for over 30 years and I have not seen snow in June.  I have seen like three inches of snow in May though.  Yeah, it was really pretty though. Oh my goodness.

01:50
because stuff had started to leaf out just a little bit. So the snow got caught on all the little tiny leaves. It was really  That's pretty. Yeah. Yeah. And I had a rose bush that had bloomed and there was snow on the rose. And I was like, oh my God, I got to a picture of this. And I did. So  you don't want to see it snow in May and June, but on those rare occasions that it does, make sure you have a camera handy.  Yeah, definitely.

02:18
Okay, so tell me about yourself and what you do at your farm.  So  we  are,  I'm  a,  I guess a third generation farmer, skipped a generation.  So my parents, well, my father grew up in Nebraska  and came from a farming family  and then joined the Air Force.

02:44
And then my mom was born in Cuba.  my grandparents  on my mother's side are Cuban. She came to America when she was two years old. And in Cuba, they had a farm, but  the great grandparents did not the grandparents. They were more city folk.  She went to the Air Force. That's where I was born.  so I guess, you know,

03:11
I don't know, third, fourth generation farmers skipped a generation.  I grew up on a farm. grew up in Miami, Florida  and met my husband in Tennessee  and we, he had, grew up farming.  Um, so he's, you know, country boy  grew up in the mountains, the Appalachia mountains.  And, uh, you know, he liked that I was the city girl. I liked that he was the country boy. He didn't want to farm.

03:40
He wanted to live in the city and I'm like, yeah, you don't want to live in the city.  So we're farming.  I won that argument. Nice.  Yeah. We started our farm in Tennessee  and  long story short, the county we were in was expanding. A lot of the farms got pushed out. And so between property taxes and then, you know, we,  I had been in Tennessee since about 2005, 2006.

04:09
And, you know, since then, you know, prices have exploded in East Tennessee because everybody's flocking, has been flocking to that area. So we couldn't afford to buy a bigger piece of land. You know, for what we sold our farm for, we were able to buy three times that here in Virginia. So that's how we ended up in Virginia. So his family, my family, they're all in Tennessee. So we're about two hours from family.

04:39
So  I have a background actually, had a mortgage company. You know, my background is finance, business.  So I traded high heels for muck boots.  That's excellent trade. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, we raised Angus in Tennessee. And then when we moved the farm to Virginia, because we wanted more land, we decided to  start a micro dairy.  So now we have jerseys. We traded.

05:08
one cow for another  and  we're a full working farm. We raise hogs on pasture. We have chickens, we have a small hatchery, we have a rabbitry, we have sheep, have goats, we have Jersey cows  and a couple of mini donkeys and then standard donkeys.  And then geese and ducks.  I think that's pretty much everybody.  But we offer, you know,  grass fed beef.

05:38
pasture raised  chicken eggs, poultry, rabbits, live as pets. have different breeds. So we have pet breeds, the cute little ones, and then we have like meat breeds. Our goats are a dairy breed  and we have Nigerian dwarfs and newbies. We do milk the goats.

06:03
but I don't sell their goat milk anymore or offer it to our private herd share members, because it's illegal to sell raw milk in Virginia. So we have to do everything through a herd share  or a private membership.  We have our own little store on the farm. Our farm members come and pick up their beef, their pork, lamb, goat. We have goose, we have freezers, and then the raw milk,  goats milk soaps that we make.

06:32
We make butter and we have a little separate cream. Sometimes if I'm not exhausted, I'll make some cheese and stick it in there. I use it hours in the day. I was going to say, how often are you not exhausted? Cause that is a lot to take care of. It is, it is. We have 110 acres. It's basically my husband, myself, and our 11 year old that run the entire farm. Wow. Wow. That's a lot.

07:01
So when you say you offer beef and  chicken and  rabbit meat,  do you sell any of the beef to outside of your community? Like does it go to a  slaughterhouse and get sold to grocery stores?  No, it's only packaged and put in our store for our members. Okay. All right, cool. Awesome. So  you're feeding your community. That's great. That's exactly right.

07:30
We used to do, and we still do it sometimes by the whole or the half, like on the pull work. But then we have some members that want to do it by the cut. you know, it's a 50-50 % of how much is goes, you know, a whole hog will go to one family or a half a hog to a whole family, or there's cuts also to choose from.

07:54
Yeah, I think it depends on if the person wants to do the work of dealing with a half or a whole because it is a lot of work to butcher an animal.  Well, they don't they so the way it works is they pay us for the hanging weights and then  our butcher butchers and it's all custom cut and they get everything packaged up. So we handle everything for the person. Very nice.  We have here butchered

08:24
a half  pig before.  And my husband hunts, so he's used to butchering deer. we do too. So we've, you know, what they call field dressing,  you know, your deer,  your bear,  stuff like that. the  clients, you know, a lot of our clients don't have a farm. They couldn't tell you where this cut comes from. Right.

08:50
And a lot of them have never ordered a whole animal custom cut, you know, to fill their freezer. So as a mom, as a woman, you know, the main cook of the family, if you will, you know, I was so done with them. you know, I'm like, well, what, what do you guys eat? You know, if we're talking about, you know, a hog and they're like, well, we like it like this. And we, you know, we have pork chops or butterfly chops or bone in bone out. And then I basically fill it out for them and hand it into the butcher.

09:20
Yeah, I went through that when we got our first half beef. I didn't know what all different cuts were. And I had to call the actual butcher to tell them what we wanted. And the lady that answered the phone was like, so how do you want this done? And I said,  you're going to hate me. And she said, why? And I said, because I don't know. I don't know what all the cuts are called.  And she said, oh no, Mary. She said, I go through this all the time. She said,

09:48
You  will remember for next time though, I guarantee you. was like, okay. And she walked me through the whole cut sheet  and she said, did you want the soup bones? And I was like, why yes, yes I do. And she said, okay, we'll those into.  And to this day now, if we get a half, I know what to ask for. So I love that you sit down with them and ask them what they want. I do, I do. Because a lot of our clients had never ordered anything remotely like that other than going to the grocery store.

10:18
store and say, we're going to do pork chops tonight or we're going to do, um, you know, pork like kebabs. Yeah. So yeah, I go over all that with them and the chicken we do process here, the rabbit we do process here. That's the only, we only do the small animals here on the farm. have a processing station and, we'll just start, you know, processing whether it's birds or rabbits.

10:48
And, uh...

10:50
that's, know, again, we also have breeding stocks. So everything that we raise on the farm can be turned into food or can be converted, you know, can be registered.  And we've had several people that are starting, you know, their first homestead  and they want a breeding pair of katod and sheep. And so they'll get a ram off of us or a euling.

11:18
Normally one or the other, because we keep one side. So  if one mom has  a boy and another mom has a girl, they're still related because they have the same dad. Right.  But we keep a Jersey bull. We milk 10 cows.  The babies, the calves stay with their dams with their moms until they're weaned.  We milk once a day.

11:45
and the calf is our second milking. Very rarely we have to milk sometimes twice a day.  We have two that are really big producers and even with a calf on them, they need to be milked twice a day.  You have two overachieving cows. Yes, yes. They are overachievers.  And then once they hit peak lactation, which is about 90 days, then we can start tapering them down to once a day.

12:14
So everybody right now is now once a day. We do have one Heifer calf still on the farm and she is nursing off of one of the cows and I alternate the cows with  her All our jerseys love babies, so you put if I put 20 calves out in the field they will all take them up like mama  Nice.  Yeah. Yeah

12:42
A whole different ball game compared to eight kids. They're just their personality. They know their name. They're just like big old puppy dogs. I love jerseys. I love how they look. I love their personalities. I've never had cows in my life, but I've known people who have them. And I've met some really not very friendly Holstein cows. But every one of them, they're just, you have to picture.

13:11
We milk one at a time.  One cow comes in our parlor, because we do raw milk. I need to ensure, not just for us, for our family, but for our members, that she is clean, clean, clean, and I'm sticking my head under and checking each teat.  And so they come in one at a time. And when you're sitting on your stool next to that cow,  you sit on a normal stool,

13:41
Her utter is about island, whereas on a whole scene, it's above your head.  They're just massive. They're just, they'll scare me.  Yeah. The jerseys are just sweet. They're sweet, adorable cows. And yes, I know that they're big. They're a big animal, but  they, they have always come across to me as gentle giant cows. Yeah, they definitely are.  I love them. I really do.

14:10
You were saying back when you were talking about moving from Tennessee to Virginia, I think that Tennessee was getting built up the area you lived in.  Yeah. So we lived in Morristown and it was in Hamblin County. And Hamblin County has  to give you an idea.  If you look at East Tennessee, you have  basically Bristol and then you have Knoxville and Morristown is right smack in the middle of these two big towns.

14:39
Okay. And so Moore's Town, you know, it grew, it grew. And from when I had moved there, you know, people were like, grew even more in those last 10 years. Like it really exploded. A lot of farm land became either subdivisions or shopping plazas, like shopping centers, Walmart, stuff like that, which is good. You know, it brings jobs, but

15:10
What ended up happening  is they rezoned,  they stretched out the city limits. And so they pushed city limits into the county and the county didn't have the funds to fight with the city. And so city won, city got, you know, expanded. And so a lot of farms now were in city limits.  And that's what happened to our farm.  Yeah. Yep.

15:37
But the reason I asked about this is because I had the  supreme pleasure of driving up to the town we lived in four and a half years ago.  I got to go up there yesterday because my son needed to go to the bank.  And  we were driving through town and everything has changed just in four and a half years. hadn't been up there in six months.  And there's literally a new development on...

16:07
on what used to be a cornfield.  I  was like, what the actual hell happened here?  And  my son said, oh, you haven't been up here in a while. I said, no, no, I have not.  He said, they've been working on that for the last year and a half.  I was like, I'm so glad we moved when we did because this is breaking my heart. This used to be  a really cute, adorable.

16:34
just outside of a suburb feel town.  Small town  and so much is being built up around it. mean, the highway that goes through there is just ripped to shreds because they're putting in a cloverleaf thing on the main highway.  I just, I'm looking around going, oh my God, this doesn't even look like where I lived for 20 years of my life. Yeah. It's just like, you know, Miami's always been  overdeveloped.

17:04
But there were parts of Miami that were, you know,  when I say farmland, it was more like nurseries and stuff like that. And they have built almost all the way into the Everglades.  Oh my. I have family still in Miami and you know, they're like, you wouldn't recognize, you know, I haven't seen Miami since 2015. I haven't been in Miami. I want to say 2016.

17:34
either 16 or 17,  but  it's been a minute.  I'm like, yeah, you couldn't pay me to live back in a major city like that.  Yeah, me either. And I mean, I lived in Portland, Maine for a couple of years.  I lived in  a pretty big suburb of Minneapolis for a couple of years. And now we live  on a three acre piece of land.

18:03
in the middle of cornfields and I would not trade where we live now for anything. I love it so much. Yeah, so ours is like that. We're on a dead end road. It's 110 acres  and we're surrounded by national forest.  I bet it's beautiful.  It's gorgeous. It's quiet out here.

18:26
All you hear is sometimes our peacock going crazy.  Well, you must hear native birds, right? You hear a bird song in the morning. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We have wild birds everywhere. We have all kinds of critters around. We hear coyotes at night. Me too. Yeah. We catch them on our game cams too, but they don't, you know, we have German shepherds.

18:52
that protect the farm so they don't come close to the farm.  doggo's doing their job. Yes, it's important. It's important to have some kind of dog on the property because other  canine species do not like people dogs. They don't like animal. They don't like  dogs that are around humans. Let's put it that way. Yeah. Our biggest nuisance is actually  muskrats because we have ponds and we have creeks.

19:20
And they just wreak havoc on our ponds and our creeks  with their little tunnel systems.  And muskrats are not like  specific to Virginia. They are everywhere. We have muskrats in Minnesota too. And they're just nasty. Like our dogs will hunt them. Yeah.  One of our dogs.  So there's like a new little nest area we have found in one of our ponds.  My husband's always yelling at

19:50
at one of our dogs  so she can stop digging because she's making the whole bakery and everything. She's going to drain the pond.  Yeah, I just want to get to the nest and it's like she's hunting.  And they'll eat them. Our dogs will eat them. They're doing their job and you feel bad telling them not to do their job, but you also can't have them destroying stuff either.  Our dog, when she was a puppy, she loved to dig.

20:19
And we had to teach her that that was a not good idea. That was not good behavior because she would dig holes.  We wouldn't know they were there and we would step in them.  Oh, no, that's not good.  So she doesn't dig anymore.  she really doesn't dig to dig. She's like digging in their little burrow system.  She's like, I'm going to get  you. Absolutely.

20:43
Maggie tried to dig out a tree and she actually damaged the roots of a maple tree because she dug underneath of them.  So that tree was already not great and it now no longer exists in our yard because we had to have it taken down. Oh wow. And it was probably a hundred years old. So we were very sorry to see that tree go. But  dogs do what dogs do and  you have to teach them what is acceptable and what is not.

21:13
Yeah, yeah. Oh my God, we have so many trees. So when Helene came through, I mean, oh my gosh, I can't even tell you. As I said, a number, I don't know, 20, 40 trees came down all around the property. So our farm, like I said, it's surrounded by the national forest and probably about 15 acres of our farm, which is like the buffer is woods, which it's woods that we own.

21:42
And you know, these were 150 feet tall oak trees that just toppled over, root balling off.

21:53
I guess it's the shale that's in this mountain region. And so the root system doesn't go down on an oak tree. spreads out.  one little wind comes. And so now not only do we have these massive trees down, which is great. We have a sawmill, but  you know, it's another tour.  We've got these massive like craters now in certain areas of the farm. Yes.  There's one in the cow field actually, which

22:22
We,  I like having collars on our girls  and  we train the cows  to be collar trained. like you would grab a dog and walk with it. Yeah.  But because there's still like two big trees down that we haven't gotten to in that field.  Um, they're everywhere.  Like  you can't even comprehend how many trees are down. It's just a mess.  And,  um,

22:50
I took their collars off because I'm like, that's all I need. Because jerseys are just real silly creatures and if there's something new, they got to check it out.  Yeah. all their collars off just in case so they don't go rubbing on the tree and hang themselves. Yeah. Get hung up on it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like,  you look naked.  wonder if they miss their collars when they're not on.

23:21
I don't think it matters to them because it's not like it's tight,  know. Yeah. They just can't come up over their head.  Right. Exactly.  So I feel like I'm doing these left-hand turns in this conversation, but I wanted to ask you a question.  You do a lot of animal husbandry. Do you do any produce? We do, actually.  We have a garden and then we have a commercial greenhouse.

23:51
that we have vegetables or we start vegetables from seed from our organic seed stock.  And it's 80 feet long, 32 foot wide, I want to say. So yeah, we have a commercial greenhouse that we also do produce.  Awesome. So you're like a grocery store at your farm store. We are like a grocery store. And then we have some extra little, you know, stuff in there like decor.

24:20
farm decor, if you will. How big is the building for your shop? The store is a 12 by 32. Oh, it's Yeah, it's one of those like sheds with the porch on it. And then, you know, we dolled it up inside. We actually have videos on our website of our little store. And it's got a shelf, it's got a freezer, got the commercial fridge in there.

24:49
Cute, cute,  It makes our farm stand look like an ugly shed. Yeah, it's cute.  I like it. And we painted it red. We actually got a great deal on it because it was like a repossession.  We got somebody's repo and then we  cleaned it up and painted it and it looks, we flooring and so you walk in and it has that little country vibe inside with the wood floors and.

25:18
It's all white inside.  Nice. I'm going to have to look at the videos.

25:27
Yeah. So, and it's right at the entrance of the farm. So we have a little parking area and then customers come, they park, go in the store. The lights are automatic. We have some nurses that have real late shifts. And when they get out of work, you know, I would see them. If I was up late, I would see them in the store with like, with their, their camera flashlight, you know, trying to look around. told my husband, I'm like,

25:53
We got to put automatic lights in there. So now when you just open the door, boom, the lights come on.  Wow.  I am.  really impressed. I'm not telling my husband anything about this discussion about your farm store because it's going to be like,  we should get that for ours too. And I'll be like,  no, it's an eight by 10 shed. No, we're not getting automatic lights. We  close at six.  But the general public were open Monday through Saturday one to six.

26:22
We have other stuff that we sell that we can sell to non farm members. You know, we could sell the stuff, we could sell eggs.  We can sell, we have hatchery.  So we probably hatch maybe 1800 chicks a month. This may be the last month we hatch.  And so I'll have people all the time coming, buying bunnies,  know, buying a goat, buying a lamb, buying.

26:52
chicks.  So, you know, we're, we stay busy and we have the honor system in our store because I don't have someone sitting there. Right. To run the store. Yeah. I mean, we have cameras and, you know, it's like yesterday, every day, obviously we milk and every day we bottle.  And so yesterday I went in the store and there was like over a hundred dollars in our little basket. Oh my God.

27:19
That's the best part about a farm stand or a farm store is when you go out there expecting to find like five bucks and there's oh, 50, 100, 150 that you didn't expect to find. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's, this is our livelihoods. Yeah. We're new at the farm stand thing and we actually made like a hundred bucks in the first four days we had it open at the beginning of May. That's you guys do. We sell eggs.

27:47
And we sell homemade candles and soap and lip balms  and wax melts  and duck eggs from a friend who has ducks. She wanted to know if she could sell her duck eggs in our farm stand this summer. And I was like, of course you can.  And then we're going to have radishes  and peony blossoms and rhubarb and asparagus in there, I think, this weekend, I think. So basically whatever is in season is in the farm stand. That's awesome. Yep.

28:16
And people love it. Like I didn't think anybody would show up that first week because it was the first week of May. All we had was really eggs and candles and lip balms and candles. And my husband was like, well, let's open up and see if people want good eggs from real chicken for a real farm. And I was like, OK. And we can't keep eggs in stock. Yeah, we're going. And we only had 12 chickens at the time, so it was really easy to sell a dozen eggs a day. Right.

28:46
So with your hatchery, I don't know how to ask this. Like I see people on Facebook all the time doing the small incubators with like 12 eggs. I'm assuming that's not how you do it. No, no, we have three cabinet incubators and each cabinet holds 450 to 650 eggs depending on the size of the egg in the tray. So obviously a goose egg, you know, takes up the space.

29:16
kind of an egg and a half of a chicken. So if I'm putting goose eggs, then it's a lot less chicken eggs I can put in. But yeah, we have three cabinet incubators and we can pump the chicks out if people want them. And we hatch all kinds of breeds. I have people all the time, what breeds do you have? And I'm like, it's on our website.

29:43
I'm not trying to be mean, but it's like, I'm trying to farm. can't sit here and answer all your million questions. I try to make things like very automatic. And then I'll have people like, can I have a picture? And I'm like, oh my goodness, just come to the farm. I will show you the baby. And then we have a brooder that holds, let's see, 50 times six. So it'll hold about 300 chicks at once. Well, I bet that gets really loud.

30:13
Yeah, yeah, when I go in there in the mornings, they're all like, hey, we're dying. We're starving. We ate all the food you left us last night. Cause I top everything off early in the morning and then throughout the day and then again at night. So I mean, they're eating and eating and eating. And then we have like little poop trays and then I take that and clean it once a week. And people are like, what do you do for a living? I shovel poop.

30:41
All day. That's what I do for a feed animals  and I'm mucking some kind of poop. Somebody poop. My dad would say, I shovel shit all day. What do you do? Yeah, that's exactly right.  I feed animals and I move shit around, like literally. Yeah, exactly.  I have one more question for you. I know that...

31:07
I know there are chickens that lay colored eggs like green, blue, whatever.  I am guessing that those eggs don't taste any different because they're a different color. No, they don't. And it's funny, my grandmother, if I give her eggs, she's like, well, I don't want green or blue. And I'm like, why? You know, I'm Cuban, I speak Spanish, so I'll be like, abuela, which is grandma in Spanish,  and she's like, well, I don't want the green one.

31:35
They just, they look rotten. Oh, They don't taste any different. Um, but there are some people they want, you know, I have some clients, they're like, I only want brown eggs. And I'm like, okay. You know, but I like to, when I put the eggs in the store, um, our son, helps me, I wash all the eggs. And I mean, we probably put about six to eight dozen a week or a day in there. Yeah. And, uh,

32:04
I actually have like four dozen I need to wash from today. And I do a color, you know, so there's pinks in there. There's blue, there's green,  there's  brown, different shades of brown, different, you know, we have olive eggers, we have blue eggers,  our buffs lay out like a pinkish egg. yeah, blues, different hues of blue.

32:33
I like seeing the colors. I like the rainbow.  Yeah, I was gonna say it makes the cartons really interesting looking.  Christina, try to keep this to half an hour. We're there. Where can people find you? We are  on HayesValleyFarms.com is our website. All our social media handles is Hayes Valley Farms plural.  So that's...

33:02
That's how you can find us, Hayes, H-A-Y-E-S. Awesome. If any of the listeners are in Virginia, hit up Christina, because she's got all the good things happening at her place. as always, you guys can find me at atinyhomesteadpodcast.com. Christina, I hope you have a wonderful day. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye.