Lau Family Farm Meats available Aug 13 & 20
Lori Anne Lau
Lau Family Farm, LLC
Grass-Fed and Finished * No Antibiotics * No Hormone Implants
Our schedule for the next few weeks:
August 13th Cache Valley Gardeners Market 9-1 @ Courthouse along Main St.
Idaho Falls Farmers Market 9-1
Pocatello @ 3:30 pm (420 N Main-Old Town Pocatello’s parking lot)
August 20th Idaho Falls Farmers Market 9-1
Downtown SLC Farmers Market 8-1 @ Pioneer park
Ogden
August 27th Downtown SLC Farmers Market 8-1 @ Pioneer Park
Cache Valley Gardeners Market 9-1 @ Courthouse along Main St.
· Back to School Special: Save $10 on orders of $100 or larger. Put together your favorite combination of items and save $10 off your total when the total is over $100 (before sales tax). We know exactly how expensive “back to school season” can be. We also how frustrating complicated sale terms can be so we made this as simple as we could, while still making it something we can afford to offer.
· Whether you like lower fat or higher fat burger we should now have something that will please you. We now have a limited amount of high fat ground beef, as well as some extra lean ground beef. We have a good supply of our standard, 10% fat, ground beef and we once again have quarter pound patties.
· We also have some extra thick (approx. 1.5” thick) New York and Rib Eye steaks, bone-in chuck roasts (7-bone style), and whole beef ribs. We even have beef marrow and leg bones right now.
· Lovers of bone-in lamb rejoice- we have whole ribs, bone in leg roasts and bone in shoulder roasts as well as neck meat slices and neck meat roasts. We also have 3 formats of loin and rib chops and bone-in shoulder chops.
· We just picked up a new batch of lamb sausages and expect to get some beef sausages back very soon. We have plenty of lamb and apple, garlic and rosemary lamb, Italian lamb with sun dried tomato and lamb merguez. We are having additional andouille, sweet Italian and polish kielbasa made. We are down to the last few frankfurter packages.
· Grass-Fed and Finished quarter Beef available NOW! A quarter beef is about 95 lbs of natural and grass-finished beef. Delivered to central location in Idaho Falls, Pocatello, Logan, Ogden or SLC free of charge. Cuts include tenderloin, New York, rib eye, skirt, flank, top sirloin, petite sirloin, chuck roast, brisket, sirloin tip roast, eye of round, stew, sliced shank (meaty soup bones), steak strips, short ribs and plenty of delicious ground beef. We may not offer more until December.
· We are beginning to take deposits for whole and half lambs to be delivered this winter (starting in December). We are also able to take deposits for quarter, half and whole beeves to be delivered this winter (December-March).
Both kids have begun daily sports practices, Becca will soon have two practices a day, so we are adjusting to summer break being all but over. We’ve made a good dent in their back to school shopping needs, and made major dents in our budget as well. A few years ago we started handing the kids a certain amount of cash with which to purchase their clothes and supplies so they’d stop looking to us to pay for everything they wanted. One of the kids is extremely thrifty when it’s not Mom and Dad’s money (anymore)…searching and searching for bargains. This is a great trait but very time consuming for the chauffer. The other child thought that if they didn’t use all the money for clothes and supplies it would roll over to pocket money. As soon as we asked for the dollars back, more items were remembered that were absolutely necessary. The best part of this plan is not having to decide for the kid if two $15 shirts are better than one $30 shirt. They get to make the choice, and live with the consequences.
Tom and I dabbled in online shopping for football cleats since there is nowhere to purchase these in our small town. It was an utter failure and terribly frustrating experience. He first ordered the same size cleats as his work boots. They didn’t fit. Then he ordered another size and they didn’t fit either. Tracing his foot on paper, and measuring the drawing suggested that he was somewhere between a double wide and a quad wide. In all of Soda Springs there is not one of those official foot measuring gadgets so we were unable to get a more accurate reading. We finally took his super wide foot into Dicks Sporting Goods in Pocatello to be measured and they actually had an affordable cleat in 13 wide that he finds fairly comfortable. Meanwhile, he’s learned how to read the fine print about returns, print out the pre-paid return slips and package up the ones he ordered online. We’ve also learned where in town you can get rid of Fed-Ex boxes. I hope we get a full credit on the returned cleats.
We took an afternoon and got up in the hills and collected quite a few huckleberries. We found a great patch just off the road. John thought it was one of the best patches he’d ever found. Huckleberries are one of the tastiest perks of living at 6000 feet!
John is working on rebuilding some fence lines while he still has the teenagers around. He’s also decided that he wants to mow the weeds growing in our newly planted hay field to prevent seed development. The plan is to get a swather machine of a friend going so he can run it above the alfalfa but cutting the weed seed heads off. Preventing a few million pig weed and lambs quarter seeds from being formed sounds like a great plan, but like most things it seems to take longer than we’d hoped to execute.
On Saturday (7th) I drove past a fire that was just starting north of Grace when I was coming home from the market. It turned into a quick moving fire requiring 6 tanker loads of retardant and burning up a bunch of ripe grain. Sunday, a knoll just north of Soda Springs had a small fire (15 acres). It started burning our neighbors grain field and John was very nervous that it would come north into our farm. Thankfully they got it put out fairly easily.
Around 3 pm yesterday (the 9th) winds caused the fire to flare up and the rest of the knoll burned over the next 7 hours. The same neighbor plowed under some unripe barley to prevent the fire spreading into the crop fields along the south, west and north.. Another farmer was able to harvest some of their ripe wheat and then till the soil to create a fire break on the east side of the hill. We spent most of the afternoon monitoring the fire in case the winds caused it to jump the fire break. The photo below shows the fire at its closest about ½ mile away. Everyone was very concerned that it would move extremely quickly thru the ripe grain, and quick enough to be worrisome thru the unripe grain if it got off the hill side. Between fire breaks and some back burns the fire fighter managed to keep it away from the grain and the structures on the east side.
I learned two things in this process…grain farmers don’t have the same anxiety as livestock people about fire. Knowing there are so many lives counting on you to keep them safe is very stressful. Also I was a bit disappointed in the affected farmers willingness to accept help. John and I repeatedly offered to bring our largest tractor and disc to help. I’m not sure why nearby combines weren’t put to work cutting the ripe grain that was close to the field edge. If those machines had run all of the grain could have been cut and an even bigger fire line created, and no (less) ripe grain plowed under. The ripe grain was also closest to the buildings, so cutting it all would have reduced the risk the structures even more. Despite my faith in the fire fighters I advocated for moving tractors and discs/harrows into position to fight the fire if it jumped the line. I certainly understand not plowing under more grain than necessary but I would have burned some diesel and moved some equipment closer to create fire breaks if the first line didn’t hold. Thankfully the fire was held to the 60 acres of native sage and grass of the knoll and none of the houses, and only a little bit of grain was lost. Hopefully we’ll get some rain, and less lightening, and the fire danger will drop soon. Every acre of grain that gets cut is that much less fuel for the fires, but there is still all the fuel in the mountains and around the houses.
Many thanks for your business,
John, Lori Anne, Tom and Becca Lau
Lau Family Farm, LLC
Grass Fed Beef, Lamb & Wool...A Natural Choice
PO Box 337
Soda Springs, ID 83276
208-709-4981 (cell)
Figure 1 Meat steers enjoying their pasture in late July
