Learning Beyond the Fence Line
“A farm isn’t built the day you buy the land. It’s built every time you learn something you’ll one day use on that land.”
Farm Snapshot
Journal Entry: 004
Date: August 10, 2026
Piglet Count: 49
Active Litters: 5
Sows Remaining: 1
This Week’s Focus: Bringing knowledge, resources, and new capabilities back to DaleWood Farms.
One sow is still holding out on us.
She still looks pregnant, her milk appears to have dropped, and for now we’re simply watching her. She’s separated out in the field with the boar while the other five litters continue doing what piglets do—eating, running, growing, and keeping us busy.
The piglets are moving through weeks two, three, and four now. There’s not some dramatic visual change from last week’s journal. They’re healthy. They’re growing. They’re doing what they’re supposed to do.
But the farm?
The farm changed quite a bit this week.
And something I’ve realized is that not every improvement to DaleWood Farms actually happens at DaleWood Farms.
Sometimes you’ve got to go beyond the fence line to bring something valuable back.
Farm Walk
Stop #1 — The Farm Doesn’t Care Where I’m Going
Some of the most important work I did for DaleWood Farms this week happened 62 miles away.
But before I could leave, there was still a farm sitting here waiting on me.
On poultry-processing days, that means getting up around 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning.
Shower.
Feed.
Water.
Rotate hogs.
Walk the five litters.
Check our remaining sow.
Make sure everybody is where they’re supposed to be and everything is secured.
Then get in the truck and make that 62-mile drive through the back roads so I can be there around 7:00 or 7:30.
The farm doesn’t pause because I have somewhere else to be.
That’s part of this story too.
If I want to build a farm that eventually handles more of its own processing, I need experience.
As a first-generation farmer, I didn’t inherit generations of processing knowledge.
So I’m going to go get it.
Stop #2 — 287 Chickens and Nine Customers
Tuesday’s poultry day involved 287 chickens belonging to nine different customers.
That’s an important distinction.
It wasn’t just 287 chickens.
It was nine people’s livestock.
Nine orders.
Nine sets of instructions.
Nine expectations.
And potentially months of somebody else’s work sitting in front of us.
I spent roughly the first four hours working through evisceration and chilling.
Remove the organs.
Inspect the bird.
Wash it.
Separate the heart, liver, and gizzard if the customer wants them.
Keep the neck for one customer.
Remove it for another.
Then get that bird chilled while making absolutely sure it stays with the correct order.
That last part impressed me more than anything.
Books can explain the process.
Experience teaches the pace.
Some orders were huge.
One customer might have close to a hundred birds and require multiple large containers packed with ice. Another customer might have only a handful.
Either way, their birds have to come back to them.
That sounds obvious until you’ve got 287 chickens moving through a processing room.
Then organization becomes just as important as knowing how to use a knife.
After everything was properly chilled and the evisceration side was cleaned up, I moved over to knife work for roughly another five hours.
Most of the birds were broken down into eight-piece cuts:
Two legs.
Two thighs.
Two boneless, skinless breasts.
Two wings.
Other customers wanted whole birds.
Some wanted halves.
Some wanted party wings.
Thursday I went back and got more repetitions, including working with ducks and some different birds.
And here’s something I noticed…
Experienced processors don’t necessarily look like they’re rushing.
They just don’t waste movement.
Every cut has a purpose.
Every station depends on another.
There isn’t much room for autopilot.
One missed instruction can mess up somebody’s order.
One bird in the wrong place can create a problem.
And one slip of a knife can remind you very quickly that this is skilled work.
By the end of Tuesday, I had sore hands and little punctures underneath my fingernails from chicken ribs.
It isn’t easy work.
It isn’t glamorous work.
But damn, there’s a lot to learn.
Stop #3 — Seeing Our Own Pork From the Other Side
This might have been the biggest lesson I brought home.
When DaleWood Farms sends our hogs out for commercial processing, we expect to get back what we sent.
Every dime of it.
We expect the cuts to be right.
We expect the packages to be right.
We expect our instructions to be followed.
And ultimately, our customer expects the same thing from us.
Standing on the other side of that equation changed my perspective.
I don’t know what those 287 chickens represented after they left.
Maybe they’re filling somebody’s family freezer.
Maybe they’re being sold to customers.
Maybe they’re going into a restaurant.
Maybe they’re simply feeding somebody’s family for the next several months.
It really doesn’t matter.
The responsibility is the same.
A processor isn’t just trusted with meat. They’re trusted with months of somebody else’s work.
Now I understand a little better what we’re asking someone else to do every time we hand over one of our animals.
That’s knowledge I can bring home.
The wages from a day like that will eventually get spent.
The experience won’t.
Stop #4 — One Field, Several Opportunities
The poultry shop wasn’t the only place I learned something this week.
I also went back out to my buddy Bob’s farm.
Now, if you’ve followed DaleWood Farms for a while, you’ve heard me talk about Bob before.
This relationship didn’t start this week.
Last year, Bob shared corn with us. We brought stalks home for the hogs, and I got some time on his tractor learning how to work and clean up the ground after harvest.
This spring, he took it another step.
He had me come out during planting season and actually taught me how to plant some of the sweet corn myself.
So when I walked into that field this week, I wasn’t just picking somebody else’s corn.
I was harvesting rows I’d helped plant months earlier.
There’s something pretty damn satisfying about that.
And even Bob, after all his years doing this, is still looking at his crop and asking what he can do better.
He’s looking at spacing.
Ear development.
What worked.
What he’d change next season.
That’s another lesson right there.
Experience doesn’t mean you stop evaluating your work.
Bob went through the field selecting the ears that had developed to the quality he wanted to sell.
What didn’t make that cut stayed behind.
For his market, those ears had reached the end of the line.
For DaleWood Farms, they hadn’t.
We cut the remaining stalks down, loaded the trailer and brought them home for the hogs. At the same time, clearing those rows helps prepare that section of ground for whatever comes next.
Bob has taken the relationship another step too.
He planted feed corn after his sweet corn was established, spacing the planting times so the varieties wouldn’t interfere with each other.
That corn has a destination too.
Our hogs.
That’s one of the things I love about agriculture when it’s working the way I think it should.
It doesn’t always have to be cash changing hands.
Sometimes two farmers simply have something the other one needs.
Bob likes our pork.
We can use his corn.
So we barter.
Everybody gets value.
But we also brought four dozen marketable ears of sweet corn back to DaleWood Farms and decided to experiment with something else.
A driveway farm stand.
Nothing elaborate.
No major campaign.
Just fresh-picked sweet corn available right here at the farm.
Now, I’m not going to tell you people were lined up along the road buying corn.
That’s not what happened.
What actually happened might be more important.
We started making phone calls.
“Hey, we’ve got some fresh-picked sweet corn at the farm if you want some.”
And people who already follow us, support us, and trust DaleWood Farms showed up.
Before we really had time to establish much of a roadside stand, three of those four dozen were sold.
That’s worth paying attention to.
Word of mouth worked.
Relationships worked.
People were willing to try another product simply because DaleWood Farms told them we had something fresh available.
Hopefully some of that corn ended up beside somebody’s Saturday or Sunday dinner.
And to everybody who came out and gave it a try—thank you.
Then there was one dozen left.
A couple years ago, we probably would’ve left that corn in the husk, wrapped it up, thrown it in the freezer and gone for glory.
We know how that story ends.
Months later you pull it out, cook it for dinner, take a bite, and everybody looks at each other like…
“Yeah…this ain’t the same.”
It’ll feed you.
But the quality isn’t there anymore.
This time was different.
Journal 003 got me thinking harder about preservation.
And having a separate kitchen space beginning to take shape has changed how practical some of these projects feel.
Instead of taking over the family kitchen, I could go out there and work.
Blanch the corn.
Ice bath.
Vacuum seal.
Label.
Freeze.
Done.
A preservation technique that once felt inconvenient suddenly became practical because we’re slowly building a system around it.
And when I stood back and looked at everything that came from that field, it hit me:
The same field produced food for Bob’s customers, food for our customers, food for our hogs, food for our freezer—and clearing those rows made room for whatever comes next.
That’s a hell of a return from a few rows of corn.
Stop #5 — Bringing the Learning Back Home
Later in the week, Jamani came over and we turned our attention back toward the barn.
Trees and limbs had started closing in around the area. They were narrowing access, cluttering the property, and taking up space I wanted back.
Now, I’m not a professional tree cutter.
I’m damn sure not a chainsaw-ologist.
But I’ve done enough of it around here to have learned a few things.
Jamani had never used a chainsaw before.
So this time, I got to be the teacher.
I showed him what I’d learned about removing a limb without just hacking through it—an undercut first, then the top cut to remove the weight, followed by a finishing cut to clean up what’s left.
Then we started cutting.
By the time we finished, we’d opened the area around the barn, widened the driveway and access, removed a substantial amount of overgrowth, and made another section of DaleWood Farms look considerably better than it had that morning.
Jamani learned something too.
He even took some pine chunks home that he wants to experiment with and turn into coasters.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, I realized something that deserves to stand by itself:
Tuesday, I’m standing somewhere else learning from somebody with more experience than me.
Friday, I’m standing on my own property showing somebody else something I’ve learned.
Nobody knows everything. Everybody can teach something.
That’s how knowledge works.
It moves.
Someone teaches you.
You practice.
Eventually you become experienced enough to help the next person.
Sunday, I came back through and finished cleaning up what we’d cut. I broke the remaining pine branches down and stacked everything at the fire pit.
Right now it looks like somebody dropped about a thousand Christmas trees in one pile.
It can sit.
I’ll wait for the right conditions and a wet enough day before lighting it.
No rush.
The important part is that the work got done, access improved, somebody learned something new, and another little section of this farm changed.
Observation
When we started constructing this journal Tuesday, I thought this week’s story was going to be about poultry processing.
I don’t think that’s the story anymore.
The story is what came back across the fence.
Knowledge came back.
Experience came back.
Poultry by-products came back and became another resource for our working dogs.
Corn came back and fed our customers, our hogs, and our freezer.
A preservation skill we learned last week became something we actually used this week.
Knowledge I’d gained doing tree work became something I could pass along to someone else.
And the physical farm itself became a little cleaner and a little more accessible.
That’s what changed this week.
Looking Ahead
The separate farm kitchen we’re building toward feels a little more real every time we use that space.
That’s important.
Because we’re beginning to see what happens when farm work has a place of its own.
Preservation becomes easier.
Processing becomes more practical.
Experiments become less disruptive to everyday family life.
And ideas that once sounded like “maybe one day” start looking a lot more like:
“Why not try it right now?”
The same thing is happening with processing.
I’m going to keep making those drives.
I’m going to keep putting in the repetitions.
I’m going to keep asking questions.
Because our long-term goal isn’t simply to raise livestock and hand the rest of the process to somebody else forever.
We’re trying to understand the entire system.
Breeding.
Raising.
Feeding.
Processing.
Preserving.
Packaging.
Selling.
And ultimately, serving the people who trust DaleWood Farms to put food on their tables.
We’re nowhere near finished.
But we’re closer than we were last week.
Until Next Week…
A farm isn’t confined by its property lines.
I’m starting to understand that more and more.
Sometimes the best thing I can do for DaleWood Farms is leave DaleWood Farms.
Go learn.
Go work.
Ask questions.
Watch somebody who’s better than me.
Bring home something useful.
Then put it to work.
That’s especially important when you’re building a first-generation farm.
We didn’t inherit all the answers.
So we’ll keep going out and finding them.
One lesson.
One relationship.
One skill.
One mile at a time.
And then we’ll bring them home.
Become Part of the Journey
If you’re new to DaleWood Farms, welcome.
These journals are our record of building a first-generation farm from the ground up. Some weeks you’ll walk the pig pasture with us. Other weeks we’ll preserve food, improve infrastructure, learn a new skill, or travel beyond the fence line to bring another piece of the future home.
But don’t let your visit end here.
Read the previous DaleWood Farms Journals and see how much has changed since the beginning.
Learn about our Black Beauties breeding program and, if raising your own pork is part of your plans, learn how to join our feeder-pig waiting list or reserve an available feeder pig.
Explore DaleWood Talks for the stories, observations, and lessons that don’t always fit inside the weekly Farm Journal.
Or visit the DaleWood Farms Marketplace under our Shop tab and see the farm products and pork cuts currently available for purchase.
There’s a lot more happening at DaleWood Farms than what can fit into one journal.
And before you go, I’d like to hear from you:
What’s something you learned somewhere else that eventually became valuable at home, at work, on your farm, or in your own business?
Leave your story in the comments.
Comments build community.
Shares introduce new people to DaleWood Farms.
Subscriptions let you continue walking alongside us.
Purchases directly support the farm while putting DaleWood Farms products on your table.
And donations help us continue building the infrastructure, equipment, storage, fencing, water systems, and other pieces required to turn this vision into something that lasts.
Every bit of support matters.
And every person who comes back next week becomes another witness to how this farm was built.
Until next week,
Brian & Maci Webb
DaleWood Farms
Pasture-raised. Purpose-driven.
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