What's new at Black Angus-Farms.com

Times is just flying by! Hard to believe it is the middle of February.  We sell our smoked meats/jerky/pepperoni at the Gun Shows in and about the greater Portland area.  Had our best show ever with high sells at the Portland EXPO show, and the Canby, Oregon show was very good as well!  And sales for the Feed mill and Store are up as well.  This is good for us, and it seems our adds in the local ragged called “The Argus” has being paying off, as we continue to get new customers.  This just what we need is new customers while retaining our old customers.   If read through our posts, this last winter has been really hard for us to maintain a stable cash flow that keeps all small and large business’s running.  Unless you got strong reserves to keep you afloat during these hard-times.  So far we are still not out of the woods yet with cash flow and steady income, but it does seem to be improving slowly.  Know if can just keep it up.  We also found a young man who is attends Banks High School to help us out.  So far this is working and able to meet payroll demands, even though he is part-time, we still need to be very careful that we have the cash to feed his hours.  We also want to thank everyone who has been following our blog/saga/just life’s events as they unfold.

Two women got lost in the Columbia Gorge because they ran out of daylight!  They were rescued the next morning, cold and will be o.k.

Often folks continue to walk in the dark and fall off a ledge or take wrong turns and get lost even more.

We have a little solution at our online store, it is called the Little Giant Hat Light!
You can see it at http://shop.blackangus-farms.com/Little-Giant-Cap-Light-46580.htm

This light can be carried in your pocket or pack as it it is very small, but only in size.  It weighs .35 oz, has a battery life of 70 hours, Lumens = 18, MCD: 105,000

With this small giant they would have light, and had a better chance of getting out of there!  For only $14.99/unit

Well, we are still here and moving forward as much as we can.  Here are a few things we doing differently and in fact we have noticed an increase in our customer base.

• We added a bigger sign on the main highway, and plan to add a 2nd sign on another road, which is another way to our mill/feed store.
• We purchased a used refrigerator with glass doors to start selling soda’s, candies, jerky, maybe some eggs from a local farmer.  This should be operational in February…….fingers crossed.
• We changed newspapers for advertising.  The one we have used for years is an AG paper that covers the whole state, and took a bold step and stopped our ads there and have moved them to a local paper, and WOW we got more connected to local folks.
• We also are including a lot of fishing/hunting gear for our local location.
• We will be caring fire wood and some camping supplies in hopes of attracting folks form a new State Park just about 10 miles away.  We are the closest location for emergency supplies.  But we can’t advertise in the park so we plan to have our new sign with key items listed……..being hope full here.

So with these changes we are hoping for the best out come for our business.

Hope to have another post in February, and thanks for all of the encouragement given to us in comments!

We thought a great way to get the word out would be using the our blog!

We are offering a great gift box this year with our smoked meats.  It contains the following items:

• 1/2 lb of Smoked beef steak – wonderful taste of hand cut top sirloin steak chunks
• 1/2 lb of Hot Gourmet Jerky – nice cut squares of shaved round steak soaked in a chili pepper/lime mixture.
• 1/2+ lb of Pepperoni Hot Stix – These are made from our own Black Angus cattle, grass fed, no gmo’s/antibiotics/hormones.
• 1/2+ lb of Pepperoni Teriyaki Stix – These are made from our own Black Angus cattle, grass fed, no gmo’s/antibiotics/hormones.

This is a $50.00 value if purchased as individual items from our online store front.

We are offering this package + packaging, + free shipping and only charge $45.00 per box.  the ship to address does not need to match the bill to address.

So send us an email from our web site to request this offer, and we will send you a valid PayPal invoice for the product to be shipped.  We ship Monday thru Friday, and the sipping time would be between 2 to 3 days via USPS Priority mail.

This month has been real hard on the farm.  Our sales are down over 60%, and really struggling to make ends met.  The feed mill is really off a lot, and we were hoping that folks would start buying more feed for their animals from us rather than the big stores in town.  But we are still waiting and hoping that our community will support our efforts in having a local feed store that can deliver their feed needs.  Not sure that this is being worded correctly, but we are hurting for customers as a small business!  We make our own feed that contains no GMO material, and it is pretty much hand made for our customers.  One of our biggest sellers in past years has been our grass seed pellet.  We take the material that is left over from cleaning grass seed from the farmers to make the this type of feed we call ‘coast’.  The screenings we use are the trash of the process, so we are saving it from landfills or being dumped somewhere else, so I guess we are ‘very green’ because we recycle unwanted material and make it in to something worth while.  But the grass seed carries a fungus that is harmful to livestock, if feed 100% of the time to them.  But if they are feed no more than 35% of the total ration for their needs then this feed works out to be a nice supplement to the rest of their feed.  But this year our sales are down a lot because of tight money I guess, and so it becomes tight with us as well.

We make another pellet that using the screenings, but has lees of them in it.  We add Non-GMO corn that is truck in from the mid-west, Alfalfa from Madras Oregon, Oats from the Forest Grove area, a few non-GMO Roasted Soy Beans.  And puff you got our 12% Econo Feed.

We have tried to advertise in the local paper called the ‘Capitol Press’ and other things, but sales continue to be very down.

We also make a non-gmo layer and broil feed with Fertrells Nutribalancer, and is made with whole grains, either pelleted or as a cracked ration.  But nobody seems to want this either as folks would rather buy from the big boys….so it is tough for us to make ends meet and we wonder how much longer we can hang on.

But we are trying our hardest in trying new things and will continue to fight and scrap very thing we have to try to hang on.  We started selling ODFW hunting & fishing licenses,  small selection of hunting gear including archery.  We also have an online store that sells jerky/pepperoni/smoked salmon/smoked tuna/fresh cuts of blackangus beef, and anything else we can think of to make a dollar.

So we are at some serious cross roads in our life and have no idea what is in store for us as we take this path we are on.  We are also born again Christians, and truly believe that God will provide our needs as we go through these hard-times.

Thanks for ready and would love to read your comments!

In order for our web site to move forward we really need to hear from our customer base and those of you that frequent our site.

We need some feed back on the site and where we can make a difference and improvements to your shopping and/or reading experience.

Thanks for reading and leaving a comment!

Jim & Spencer Sorenson

We have a very nice low cost Clumping Cat Litter for sale at Buxton Feed Company.

The sale price is  $3.75/bag

Sale ends on 9/15/2010