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Writer's pictureIsabelle Hansen

What to do with Excess Farm Products

Usually, the problem on a farm is getting things to produce enough, but sometimes you can have the opposite problem. The main thing we have had too much of has been milk and squash.

In this blog I will share some ways you can use, store, or sell, your extra farm products.




Freezing

If you have the freezer space this can be a great way to store many things including milk, winter squash, green beans, herbs, peppers, okra, berries, and even eggs.


Milk

We have been freezing milk in gallon freezer bags; however, I would not recommend that. First, the bags tear very easily when they have frozen milk inside creating a disaster when you try and thaw it.


Second, it is very easy to spill milk when you try to either get it in the bag or back out, especially if only one person is doing it. And third, if you are trying to sell it bags don't look the most professional.


If you do have to use bags and you are selling it, make sure you not only put easy to add amounts in each bag (like "1/2 a gallon" not "2.267 pounds"), but that you write the amount on a piece of masking tape and tape it to the bag.


Don't write directly on the bag, the writing will either come off or become unreadable. We made the mistake of putting unknown amounts of milk in each bag and of writing directly on the bag.



Then when a customer requested ten gallons, we had to figure out how many 7.23lb and 4.895lb bags we should give her. It would have been so much easier had we just measured before freezing and written on the bag "half gallon" or "1 gallon".


So, after that experience, we are switching to plastic jugs (the kind you would buy milk at the store in). The company we got them from is called Glacier Valley which sells made in the USA, BPA free plastic jugs.


At that company they were about $2.30 each when we ordered them (that includes shipping), so they are much cheaper than using mason jars. To use mason jars would cost around $8! You do have to order at least 48 at a time, however another site had a $200 order minimum, which would have been about 100 jugs, just something to keep in mind.


The jugs don't fit in the freezer as well as the bags, but we just can't be having milk leaking all over the place!




Winter Squash


Winter squash (which includes pumpkins, butternut squash, acorn squash and fully ripe cushaw) can be frozen either cooked or raw.


Two years ago, we grew over 200 pumpkins and cooked almost every single one of them. So, as you can imagen, we learned a few things in the process (the following tips apply to most winter squash).




The first thing you should know is wait to remove the seeds until the squash is cooked. I think all the directions we have ever seen tell you to "cut the squash in half and remove the seeds" before you bake.


That is fine if you are only doing a couple (although I would always wait until after), but when you are doing 200+ it will save hours of time if you wait until after.


Not only can the seeds be difficult to remove, but unripe winter squash (at least pumpkins, not sure about others) have a sort of sap like juice that makes your hands sticky and doesn't wash off.


The other thing we learned is that after you puree pumpkins you should drain it in a muslin (or regular white cotton fabric) lined colander before freezing. If you don't the resulting puree will be very watery and can cause problems if used in recipes that call for canned pumpkin.


You will also want to make sure that the squash is completely cooked, it should be very soft when poked with a fork. Under done squash is much harder to remove from the skin than fully cooked.




Pumpkins should also be fully ripe before you harvest them, they should be completely orange, with no green. Unripe pumpkins will never really get soft during baking.


We froze our pumpkin in gallon bags and had the same problems that we had with the milk. We haven't looked into other options, but I think draining the squash would really help.


The biggest problem was when we would thaw the pumpkin to use, since the bags almost always got holes, we would have pumpkin water draining all over the refrigerator or the counter.



It was such a mess... we aren't having fun thawing the milk we have frozen in those bags either... we had two bags that we accidently left out leak all over the shop floor, and the garage, hope the dogs did a good job cleaning that up!


If you want to freeze the squash before baking, you should remove the seeds and skin and cut it up into 1-2" chunks. Since raw winter squash has fairly little juice you shouldn't have a problem with it sticking together to much.


And it should be fine in bags, just try to squeeze out as much air as you can to prevent freezer burn.


Herbs

Most people dry herbs to save them, but at least with basil, they retain so much more flavor if you freeze them (if you have any more freezer space by now). You can either leave them whole or chop them up.




Eggs

Frozen eggs will be fine to use in recipes but not just for scrambled eggs. You can freeze them individually in large ice cube trays and then transfer them to a freezer bag.




Uses

Milk

Sometimes the problem is not that you necessarily have more of something than you can eat but that you need different ways to use it. That is where we are with our goat milk.


I think if we could make cheese and butter with it in addition to yogurt and having it with granola and in smoothies, we could use it up just fine, especially since we are selling some.


But right now, it's like, how much yogurt can you eat in a day, not two gallons, neither are we going to have two gallons of milk with granola.


Even if we could use it up if we had yogurt for breakfast, a smoothie with lunch, and granola and milk for dinner, we aren't going to do that every single day until the goats dry up.


We have made mozzarella in the past, but it was a ton of work, took forever, and was super dry. We successfully made ricotta, but we don't make recipes that call for it very often.


We don't make butter because goat milk is naturally homogenized, so the cream hardly separates, and cream separators are not cheap!


Winter Squash

Apart from breads, cookies, pies and muffins, soups are another way you can use winter squash.


Cucumbers

There aren't many things to do with cucumbers apart from eating them plain, in salads or making pickles. We made pickles recently with lemon cucumbers and homegrown dill and they turned out good.




Selling

Trying to figure out if you are allowed to sell a farm product, or what you have to do to sell it can be incredibly difficult.


For some reason it seems like nobody will just tell you "Yes you can sell raw milk in Texas " or "no you cannot sell rabbit meat in New York" or "If you want to sell eggs in Pennsylvania you will need to have your address on the carton".


It is usually more like "According the Oklahoma agricultural code session IF7789 an individual noncommercial dairy plant operating under ordinance 374393 can market 100 gallons of raw milk a month sold through incidental sales".


That is not what the law really says, but it's the kind of answer you get when you google "Can I sell raw milk in OK". What all that legal wording even means is up to each person to figure out, I guess.


So, what we decided was that we are allowed to sell up to 100 gallons of raw milk a month off our farm, and if we wanted to sell it at a farmers market or sell more than 100 gallons a month, we would need to get a license. Well, it turns out you can't get a license for raw milk, only pasteurized.


So, either we are misunderstanding their law, very likely, or they are asking the impossible. The form on the OK agricultural site was 13 years outdated, and listed the wrong Governor, so I don't know what is going on.


If you search around enough you may be able to find someone who has called their agricultural extension (I think that is who you call) to ask them what their laws mean or who can understand that type of wording and can give you an answer in non-legal terms.

Once you've decided what you can sell you will need to market it. Try to advertise locally for the greatest chance of repeat customers. Signs are a great way to advertise locally. Make sure your signs are clearly written (the more professional they look the better) so people can easily tell what the sign says.


For the goat milk sign we made we got a blank white corrugated plastic sign at Lowe's and used our Cricut to cut the design out of permanent vinyl. The sign came with a metal stake to put in the ground, which we did at first, but later we attached them to wooden posts about four feet or so of the ground. I think they are more visible that way.



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