If you're in the Austin or San Antonio areas and are looking for somewhere to buy bulk livestock feed, try Freewing Farms in Gonzales. I picked up 400 lbs of NON-GMO, soy-free #chicken feed from them last week for 53¢ per pound, and the chickens love it. You have to bring your own containers, but I store the feed in barrels anyway, so it's no problem to just take the barrels down and fill them up. Their website doesn't appear to be functional, but their Facebook page has all the contact info:

Free Wing Farms - Organic Feed Mill | Gonzales TX

‏‎Free Wing Farms - Organic Feed Mill‎‏, ‏غونزاليس‏. &#x2...

I have no affiliation, just a satisfied customer wanting to help promote a local business run by good people. #grownostr #livestock #Texas

This little idiot is the least helpful helper I've ever had. #grownostr #cats

Here are some photos of the guts of my remote outdoor temperature sensor for my #HomeAssistant setup. I will eventually probably expand into a full weather station to measure wind, rain, humidity, etc, but what I really needed this winter was a thermometer to warn me when temps were getting close to freezing so I could check the greenhouses, cover sensitive outdoor plants, etc. The location of our farm is in a natural depression, so on cold, clear nights it can be almost 10 degrees colder than what the local forecasts predict in nearby Austin (and they're wrong about that about half the time, anyway) so I needed to start collecting my own data. This is an off the shelf cheapo solar light from Amazon. The light function still works, but I usually leave it off and not in "motion detect" mode to preserve battery life. Inside I added a clone of the Wemos D1 mini microcontroller board, wired to the battery through an MCP1700 LDO voltage regulator and a couple of capacitors, with a DS18B20 temperature sensor dangling outside the case through a hole I drilled on the bottom side of the light housing. I sized the hole to be a tight fit for the cable, which sort of causes it to self-seal. No issues with water infiltration yet. I used the ESPHome plugin for HomeAssistant to program it, set up on a cycle to sleep for 10 minutes and wake for 40 seconds. That gives it just enough time to wake up, connect to wifi (tip: using a static IP address instead of DHCP lets you reduce the wake cycle by a few seconds), and transmit the temperature reading. I tried five minutes between readings, and would run out of battery power overnight, so on this battery, ten minutes is about the minimum. Not shown in the photo is a strip of thin plastic I cut to fit over the original circuit board that runs the light to keep the D1 board from possibly touching it and causing electrons to go somewhere they're not supposed to go. Total cost of this setup when I built it six months ago was around $12. Half of that was the solar light, so if you already have some lights, you can add this kind of functionality for about six bucks. #grownostr #homestead #automation

I think someone should check on the guy who named this body of water and make sure he's OK. I'm worried he might not be in the healthiest relationship. He's clearly got something on his mind...

If you find yourself needing to remove saplings and small trees, you need a Pullerbear. This thing is a beast. Look at the ridiculous taproot on that hackberry stump. Yoinked it right out of the ground like pulling a weed in the garden. My only complaint is the feet are too small for soft ground, and it tends to sink in when you lever it over. But a medium sized steel plate placed under it solves that problem. I've had it for a couple years and it's sturdy enough that I expect to have it for the rest of my life. They'll even weld your name on the handle to make it tough for your neighbor to steal after they see you yanking trees out with it... #grownostr #tools (I have no connection to this product other than as a satisfied customer who wishes he had discovered it a decade earlier.)

You probably didn't even realize it when you woke up this morning, but you needed to see a teeny-tiny little lizard drinking a drop of rain today. #grownostr

In my prior post on my #homestead #automation efforts, I mentioned moving to Home Assistant from my somewhat primitive home brew system. There are a couple of big advantages to using HA. I expanded the wifi coverage at the farm to include the greenhouses, so I could use cheap Esp8266 boards that have wifi built in, instead of the more expensive LoRa modules in my first setup. It's easier to configure and program than programming Arduino from scratch, once you learn the syntax and structure of its configuration language. Pictured below is one of the temperature sensors for this setup. A knockoff clone "Wemos D1 mini" and a DS18B20 temp sensor. There's a resistor soldered into the cable (it's the the shrink-wrapped lumpy part of the cable), and that's all. Three cheap components plus the power supply (these run off standard micro USB power, so cheap adapters are plentiful) is all there is. I use these to monitor the greenhouses, freezers, fridge, etc. I think they probably cost about six bucks each to make, and they're tiny enough to fit anywhere. I have one built into a solar light like in my previous post, with a couple capacitors to buffer the battery power. Wifi takes much more energy than LoRa, so that one sleeps most of the time and only updates the temperature reading once every ten minutes. A couple of screenshots from the HomeAssistant app on my phone to round out this post, and I'll post more details on the whole system later.

I thought I'd post a few notes about the automation experiments and data collection I've been working on around the farm for the past year or so. This was my first attempt at a greenhouse temperature monitoring system. I used some cheap Arduino-compatible devices with built in LoRa radios. LoRa is a low-power, low-bandwidth radio system for sending small data packets over longer distances. Rather than piece together a power solution and enclosure, I installed the boards into solar night lights and used the light's battery and solar panel to run the circuit. By using low-power sleep mode between updates, they'll run about four days on a full battery if there's no sun to charge them. With even just a couple sunny days a week, they run indefinitely. I attached a DS18B20 temperature sensor to the board, and they send the temperature every 15 seconds to the base station, which is another LoRa-equipped device (inside a 3D-printed case), that also has a tiny LED screen and wifi. The screen displays the temperature and it connects to wifi and makes the temperature readings available to my server, which can alert me if the temperature in the greenhouses gets too high or low. It all works great, but I've recently been moving to integrating everything into HomeAssistant to avoid having to program everything from scratch, and giving me more options for alerts and controlling things like fans and valves (and even cool features like voice control). I'll post more on that system later. I'm still using this original system as a backup while I work on my HomeAssistant setup, and it works much better than I ever thought it would. I built it two years ago, and it's been problem-free once I got the initial bugs worked out of my code. #grownostr #automation #homesteading

The best part about being made of velcro is the ease with which one can instantly camouflage oneself into near-total invisibility. #grownostr #dogstr

You can give Duke a bath, but you'd better be prepared for the massive guilt trip that he's gonna lay on you for it... #grownostr #dogstr

I hope you're having a great day, but if it's not so great, here's a couple of fat old #donkeys making out to cheer you up. And if it's already an awesome day for you, here's a couple of fat old donkeys making out anyway. #grownostr

You know how cutting off posts square and even is almost impossible? How you get a raggedy-ass cut if you try to use a circular saw because you can't ever line up the multiple cuts needed to get through a 4x4 or 6x6 post? Get some scraps of angle iron and bolt them together like this to make a jig to guide a Sawzall blade. Clamp it on to the post using the long bolts, slide the saw blade into the guide (use washers on the short bolts between the two pieces of angle iron to act as a spacer for the blade), and it's a perfect, square, smooth cut every time. If you're careful squaring it up, and getting it securely clamped, it even works on round posts. #grownostr