CT Farms Mobile Processing

Today I'm talking with Ty at CT Farms Mobile Processing. You can follow on Facebook as well.

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00:00
Did you know that muck boots all started with a universal problem? Muck? And did you know that it's their 25th anniversary this year?  Neither did I. But I do know that when you buy boots that don't last, it's really frustrating to have to replace them every couple of months.  So check out muck boots. The link is in the show notes. The very first thing that got hung in my beautiful kitchen when we moved in here four and a half years ago was a calendars.com  Lang calendar.

00:26
because I need something familiar in my new house. My mom loves them. We love them. Go check them out. The link is in the show notes. 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.

00:56
You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Ty at CT Farms Mobile Processing in Le Sueur, Minnesota. Good morning, Ty. How are you? Good. Hang on one second. My computer is doing something weird. Okay. Nevermind. We're good. Okay. So, um, Ty is not far from me. Where are you in LaSore, Ty?

01:26
Uh, right outside we live over by the Cambria plant. Oh, okay. Yep. And we live over by Michael Foods on Highway 8.  you're maybe  five miles away from me, I think. Yeah, not terribly far. Yeah. So it's a hyper local episode today, guys. I'm very excited about this.  What does CT stand for?  Uh, stands for Chad and Ty. So  I'm Ty, the son of the operation and then Chad is my dad.

01:57
Okay, awesome. That makes sense.  I would normally I would ask how the weather is where you are, but we have been having the most  glorious streak of beautiful weather here in Lesor. Oh, God, yes.  Today is just beautiful.  My husband and my son have been outside all morning watering plants and getting our plant sale set up and  all kinds of things. And I've been taking

02:22
I've been taking care of stuff in the house and doing dishes and the stuff that the girls do so So tell me about yourself and what you guys do, please um So kind of just all started, you know I was Wasn't having fun really doing concrete breaking my back for a whole lot of money, you know processing pretty easy money We've been doing it

02:49
I've been doing it for a very long time now. My dad used to do it when he was younger. So it was kinda like in our family. You know, we knew what we had to do. We knew that it would provide everything for us. You know, it cost us less money if we just butchered the animals ourselves. Saved us money and it provided food for our family. So you know, it was kind of a big plus to it. There's one guy getting out of

03:18
mobile processing for chickens  and we just kinda started questioning if we could do it.  We were gonna go buy that trailer  but it sold so we were like alright well we can kinda base our trailer off of that. So we did, we tried our best and it turned out pretty good.  As a business getting into something  obviously there's some stuff that needs to adjust.

03:47
which we are slowly  working towards.  Our business is definitely getting better and better every year.  Our customers love our birds that we do for them. They love us. And we love having them come to us.  So yeah, I mean, it's pretty fun.  Awesome. So  is it only chickens that you guys butcher or do you do other things as well?

04:16
Uh, we mainly stick to chickens.  Um, we do butcher our own animals at home. have a little hobby farm per se. So.  Yeah. Cause,  a friend of ours was looking at getting into mobile butchering and discovered that, um, the state of Minnesota does not really smile upon much else except chickens for mobile butchering. Yeah. They don't really like you doing everything else really because

04:45
You know, there's just a lot of stuff going on in the government. Uh huh. Yeah. All the rules and regs that you have to follow and,  something about that, that the USDA inspector person has to come out and  be there  for butchering of anything other than a chicken or a rabbit, think. Yep. Yeah. And that's, that's difficult to schedule and they don't really like to do it from what I've heard. So.

05:14
Yeah, that's a big thing.  If you're  approved, they kind of just got to come out there,  just have a little office, you know, cornered off or something. Just always checking in, making sure everything's going as planned and whatnot.  Kind of just making sure everything's legal. You know, nothing's getting infected with anything such. because cleanliness is next to godliness when

05:44
when you're butchering animals for sure. Like  you want to make positive that everything is clean, everything is followed to the letter because otherwise  people do  have issues with it and we don't want that to happen for you or anybody else. Yes.  Yes.  So what,  the reason I wanted to talk to you about the mobile processing stuff is because how, how does it work? Like somebody calls you and says, I have chickens, I need

06:15
Dispatched butchered whatever and then what happens on your end? All right, so they'll text us through we mainly go through Facebook Me and my dad have a joint account So we both get the messages we can both respond to them, you know If I don't know the question to it, you know, I'll text him. Hey, can you answer this? I don't really know You know the process of it. So he's like, yeah, that's fine. I'll text them

06:44
So once they do that, we get a date set out with a range of price,  kinda. We'll get their address, we'll put it in our calendar to make sure we have it down for good. Then we'll be like, hey, we got a job coming up, let's prep the trailer, get it all cleaned up, shiny,  and we'll prep everything the day before.  And then kinda we go from there as we go to their house, butcher for them.

07:13
Obviously if they're not there, that's fine. We can we grab everything ourselves  And then if they need it put in the freezer, we'll do that too. So I Love that your chicken wranglers because I freaking hate chasing my chickens. I hate it It's not my  thing to do  I used to be pretty scared of chickens, but it just kind of They're not gonna do anything to me when I'm You know ten times bigger than them or something. I

07:43
Yeah, they're just they're just crazy. You think you're right on top of them. You go to grab them and they take off out from under you. I'm like, um, I was right here. I had you and you're gone again. Exactly.  They're sneaky. I don't like them.  Um, okay. So how,  how do you guys base price on,  on when you take a job, how do you do it? Do you do it by number of chickens? How do you, how do you do that? So from the years prior, we have

08:12
Like based ourselves  off of everyone else. So we have a couple competitors.  We talked to one of our main competitors.  They have a really big company  and we kind of went off of them. They're at a higher price. So we went a little bit lower, you know, since  they're USDA approved and whatnot.  But we kind of just went a little lower, make sure.

08:40
You know, we can maybe get a little bit more customers, hopefully. You know, show them what we can do. But other than that, we have like a spreadsheet for all of our prices and everything. They'll tell us  like the range of chickens because you never know when one's gonna die or not. So they'll just give us a range.  So that's kind of how we base it off.  We have the spreadsheet, like I said.

09:09
So at the end of the day, we'll write up everything on a receipt, price all out, and then we'll give them a receipt and they'll pay it from there. Okay, so say this is just a ballpark idea and don't anybody quote Ty or me on the numbers,  but say I had 40 chickens that I needed butchered.  How much ballpark would that cost? All right.

09:37
I do believe it'd be like 200 bucks.  And then if you wanted like hearts, livered, gizzards and such that would add onto your price.  If you wanted the feet, necks  and everything like that. I mean, that also add onto your price too. Okay. And then  we do charge for like mileage. You know, we don't drive the most gas efficient vehicles. So.

10:07
You know, a little something for that too. Okay. So it's not exorbitantly expensive. mean,  we've butchered our own chickens and it's not the most fun job, especially when you're just learning how to do it. So I would be happy to have somebody else do it for that kind of money. That would make me ecstatically happy.  So do you guys have your own chickens? Do you butcher your own chickens and sell them or is it just that you

10:36
We do have a bunch of chickens growing so every time we butcher chickens we do expect chickens in the next week.  So right now I believe we have roughly 40, 46 turkeys roughly and then  about 20 or 30 chickens.  So  we have some moving in, we have some moving out. That's kind of just how we do it.

11:06
always have some stuff moving in and out which is what we like. Okay so if somebody wanted to buy a turkey or a chicken butchered from you do they just contact you or do you sell them anywhere else?  So do you know about the farmers market in Leesore? Oh yes we do my husband has sold there for the last two years his name is Kyle.  Oh well  I believe last year

11:34
or two years ago is when we started selling at the farmers market.  This year we're going to get back and we're going really try and boost our business because we're going to have my sister and my dad doing that. I'll be running the business.  So that'd be awesome. That's kind of how we do our business. Other than that, we do  Facebook too. We're really big into that. That's how we get all of our customers.  So yeah.

12:04
Awesome. I'm sorry my dog is barking in the background. That's our mascot, Maggie. Oh no, that's all right. I posted on Facebook and Nextdoor and stuff this morning because we have a plant sale going on here today at our place.  And  she's a watchdog. So anyone who pulls in the driveway, she's going to do this. So I'm really sorry, guys, if you can hear her. OK, so  she's distracting me so my brain is frying.

12:33
You said you guys have a hobby farm. So what else do you do on the hobby farm? Right now we have probably about 20 cows, just mini cows.  They're a lot easier to probably handle around here. You know, they can't really wreck a bunch of stuff.  We have about 20 of them. Some of them are mini size and some of them are close to full grown size.  So those get pretty...

13:02
Decently big we have a couple over a thousand which is pretty well kind of what we want For minis because that's pretty darn good  We have rabbits  We used to show rabbits actually that's kind of what we have for county fair  We do show county fair so we show turkeys  chickens rabbits my sister likes to show cows so that's kind of what we kind of focus on is

13:32
All of them. What breed are the mini cows?  Uh, Herefords.  Really?  Yes. What do they look like? I don't know what a Hereford looks like.  Uh, they'd be,  uh, red and white with like either like a red little spot around the eyes. It was kind of what is like a good show cow kind of for Herefords. You know, I mean.

13:59
So do they look kind of like Holsteins only they're red not black and white?  Yes. Okay, cool.  I don't know if I've ever seen one. I mean in real life. I might have seen pictures, but I don't think I've ever been introduced to one. Yeah. Okay, cool.  And do you guys grow any produce or is it just animals?  We don't really,  we just grow the animals and then eventually butcher them after so long, but we don't really grow the produce.

14:29
Okay, well we're doing that for you. We got you covered.  We're going to have so much stuff this year if the weather holds that we're going to be swimming in produce. So if you need anything, let me know, Ty. We'll have it. All right. Yes, because local shopping, local bartering, local supporting each other is really important right now. It always has been, but it's really important right now. Yes, it is  very important. Yes, we purposely grew more.

14:57
plants than we needed this year because we wanted to make sure that people could buy bedding plants to start their own little backyard or raised bed gardens because  I have this sinking feeling that the tariffs are not going to help us out a lot this year and people are going to need local food. Yes,  very much so. And I don't talk politics on the podcast, so that's as close as I'm going to get to that. But I keep encouraging people that if they have any room at all to grow something.

15:27
that's edible, do it and support your local meat producers because not only are you helping them but you're helping yourself to not have to pay the exorbitant prices at the store. Yes. For a lesser quality meat, you know? Yup. So this dog, I didn't think she was going to do this. Okay, so we're 15 minutes in.

15:55
You said that you guys have been doing this as a family for a very long time. When did it start? So we kind of got into rabbits when my mom got diagnosed with cancer. Rabbits is supposed to be like the number one food cancer patients can eat. Oh, okay. So we tried that. It worked out really well. We started growing probably

16:23
100 rabbits to about 150.  then as my mom passed away, we still kept going, you know, into it. We were still really big into it. And then we kind of slow it. Once we got all like the bigger animals  and stuff, we kind of slowed down on rabbits  because we always wanted cows and stuff, you know, really big breed takes up a lot of room. So we got to focus on them a lot. we started cutting down on our rabbits.

16:53
Then we started focusing on chickens and cows. So that's kind of what got us all started.  But, but when, how long ago did it get started? At a rough estimate, probably around.

17:10
Six years when we started buying them. Oh, so it hasn't been that long. No, it hasn't been. And you're doing pretty well from what I can tell, so that's awesome. Yes.

17:25
It's so exciting to me when people start a new endeavor, whatever it is. I don't care if it's ag or I don't know, knitting sweaters and they're starting it as a small business and six years later they're like, look what we've done. I know that that is definitely the cool part of, you know, watching the business grow and you know, putting more money into making your business better. That is definitely like the fun part of it.  Yeah.

17:54
I don't know. Like for us, this is the summer we've been waiting for. We moved here four and a half years ago and it was a blank slate. It's three acres and there was a house, a pole barn  and a one car garage and a useless two car garage here. That was it.  And now we have a greenhouse. We have a farm stand. We have a high tunnel that comes down in the fall. You know, we don't leave it up. And this is the summer that we have been building.

18:24
Ford for four and a half years. And I woke up the other day, grabbed my coffee, looked outside. It was gorgeous outside and looked at everything we've done since we moved in and almost cried because I was just so full of happy at what we've done. And so I get it. It's, it's amazing when things finally start to click and come together. Yes. So other than my dog barking in the background.

18:55
She's usually much more well behaved than this. Okay, so what's the future look like for you guys? Are you going to expand or you just going to try to maintain for a little while? Oh, we're definitely looking forward to trying to expand our business. I would love to become a full time in the summertime. know, I really don't like working, working terribly hard in the heat, getting

19:22
killing my body, processing, I'm running it myself. I don't have to really listen to anyone. I can kind of do myself as I please. I mean, I think it's gonna work out good as long as we can keep our business growing. Yeah, so this is gonna be a weird question. I don't know how to phrase it correctly. The people that you have done the mobile processing for.

19:48
What did they say? Are they like, wow, that didn't take long or wow, that was easier than I thought it was going to be,  you know, because people have a real, I don't know, trepidation fear about having people come in and do something like that. You know, there's been a couple of people where they've been really,  really skeptical about us coming there and butchering their chickens. So they, you know, my dad would be there talking with them. I'd start butchering.

20:17
You  know, it really eased them into it. And they really were like perfectly fine with us doing it afterwards.  You know, I mean, we're not there to try and ruin nothing. We will do our job and try and help the customer out.  But they really been happy with it afterwards.  And then I know a bunch of people we have  returning customers. They are really happy to help us.  And we've had a couple.

20:46
Couple customers help us in the last year,  kind of help us get it moving faster.  I mean, yeah, they've been really happy with it. So we try and make them happy. Okay. And what do you need from the customer? saw something about that you need to have an electric hookup somehow  and a garden hose, right? Is there anything else? No, that'd be all. mean, other than a

21:15
probably a spot where maybe your grass or your gravel will get little wet and whatnot. I mean, we have water going in and out of the trailer. Other than that, that's about all we need. Awesome. And is it just a regular electricity hookup or do you need a certain voltage? No, regular 110 hookup would be fine. We have a generator or 20. Okay.

21:43
mean, anything bigger than 110 we have covered.  Okay, awesome. Fantastic. I would love to make this episode 30 minutes, but she's not going to stop barking and I keep getting distracted. So Ty, I'm going to cut it short a little bit today. Thank you so much for coming and sharing the information with me and your time. And  I will let my husband know that you're going to be at the farmer's market again this year and maybe we can get you some more business. All right. Thank you.

22:13
Okay, because I really love what you're doing. It's really important. Thank you. All right. Have a great day. You too.  Bye.