Welcome to our Farmstead
A Little About Us
We’re the Fansler Family. We are first generation farmers with a dream to build a sustainable farm with a focus on quality for ourselves and expand to our community.
Our family farm is located in Janesville, Wisconsin where we are slowly expanding our infrastructure. We have 2 pastures fenced in with animals on both grazing. There is also a small garden that we build on a little more each year.
Little by little it is turning into exactly what we dreamed of.
Our laying hens are pasture raised in the largest pasture we have and in the summers we raise Cornish Cross chickens in tractors so they can receive fresh grass each day. We have a small herd of ADGA registered Nigerian Dwarf goats that we raise for the milk to make our soap. We also have Kune Kune pigs we raise for meat for our family and lard for our soap. The other animals we raise on our farm is Jersey cows for milk and Katahdin sheep for meat. We feel that this is a good mix but we are still fine tuning our systems. Things get better each season.
We’re on a quest for better nutrition by bringing our favorite recipes to peak nutritional possibilities. Our family goal is to grow our own food, preserve what we can’t use fresh. Live more organically and locally. If I can feed my animals better I will also be fed better. Those beliefs are the heart of this website. Follow our journey from seed to stomach and all the life that happens in between.
My hope is that this website will help to document all of the skills learned and steps we take to reach our dream. So our family, our friends, our customers can experience this journey with us.
We don’t know everything, but we can learn anything.
Livestock
We raise an assortment of livestock from laying hens to dairy and meat animals to help you start your farm.
Garden Vegetables
Our garden is expanding every year to grow more and more produce with a goal to be able to support our family and expand to our community.
Pastured Poultry
We raise pastured chicken and turkey annually in chicken tractors that are moved daily across the farm.
Know Your Farmer
Know Your Food
Featured products
Fresh from our farm
Latest News
Farmer Musings
I started this website/blog to share my families journey building our hundred year old farmhouse and land into a fully functioning farmstead. Maybe my words won’t matter, but I have to speak up. This is my platform and with it my voice. I am not blind to the world around me, I see the riots and the looting, I see the peaceful protesting, I see the scared, I see the enraged. With watching and observing, I see it all. My entire career revolves around observing and trying to notice micro changes before they become something more critical. To solve and correct problems before they become life or death situations. So watching, observing, and waiting is what I know best.
I have so many mixed emotions, and I’m sure that I am not alone in that statement. In a way I have been watching this unfold my whole life. Things I have seen when younger is starting to make more sense. I have seen definitions of things I feel finally put into words. Now that I have watched and waited enough I think I can articulate what I am going through.
All Lives Matter
I both love and hate this statement. Do all lives matter? Of course they do, you would have to be a barbarian to disagree. Not all lives are being discriminated against, the lives of the oppressed need more recognition than the lives of the privileged. #BLACKLIVESMATTER I stand with you. The fact that it is 2020 and there is still discrimination and racism is infuriating.
This isn’t really a subject or topic I know how to talk about. With the way I was raised it feels uncomfortable to even have a voice regarding this. I don’t want to raise my children the same way I was raised. Sweeping these feelings under the rug and just quietly keeping to myself is what feels natural. However I am an advocate and an ally and being such means I need to speak up.
What about Blue Lives?
I see the phrase blue lives matter and I both agree and disagree. Blue lives matter because all lives matter, but blue lives are not lives. Blue is a career, blue is a choice. Being a person of color is not a choice. I grew up hearing that respect is earned. If the police want respect it takes more than going through the police academy to earn it. I have never been arrested but I have had many interactions with police, a very small percentage have left me with a feeling of respect towards police. What I mostly feel is frustration, irritation, and fear. I feel neither protected nor served by the police. Between my own experiences and those I see in the news, I feel that mostly the police protect and serve themselves.
Police are perpetrators too. Why wasn’t that officer publicly arrested on the spot. George Floyd was murdered, in broad day light, in front of the police and nothing was done. Police only protect and serve themselves. I read that the arrest occurred over suspicion of forgery. That crime did not deserve that level of force. Why can a white mass murderer or school shooter be walked out by the police and an unarmed non violent black man can die in the streets? Why is that acceptable? It’s not!
Ethics Matter
In the news I’ve seen physicians killing themselves over the decisions they have had with choosing who lives and dies due to corona virus treatment. The ethical dilemmas that have been grappled with by these doctors to make those tough decisions. When a police officer can take a life so casually and carelessly is inexcusable and unforgivable. That other police, who are people of authority, can stand by with not even a single flinch of intervention in there body while they see this occurring before there eyes.
#BLACKLIVESMATTER
Thanksgiving and Christmas have long since passed and now the new year is a quarter over but it definitely doesn’t feel like that much time has passed. It’s easy to feel that way when I start every day the same, by asking myself “what can I get done in the time I have today” so downtime is almost non existent. I finally took down the Christmas tree during the last week of February, I didn’t think it would take me that long but it just kept moving lower and lower on the priority list.
The top of my priority list has been reserved for updating the electrical. Once we started the electrical the top of the priority list became “remodel the whole house”. Remodeling the house has been keeping me VERY busy. I really want to clean and organize and sort and give everything a home but I can’t until the remodeled rooms are more finished. That is a very powerful motivation for me to keep going even when I don’t want to.
What are we doing!?
I feel like we’re on the 12th revision of our farmstead plan since moving in last July. The phrase anything worth having is worth working for is something I really believe in. With all the work the farmstead needs it’s a phrase I say often. If we stick with it now it will pay off for years to come. The other phrase that’s keeping things going is “do it once, do it right” because ripping out things you spent a lot of time on is miserable.
Kevon and I are pushing hard to continue with the mantra that “2020 will be our year”. We had so much transition and change that we couldn’t really set goals in years past. This year we have certainly been making up for that though!! So far since January first we have completely relocated 4 rooms in the house. Totally unexpected but it has worked out well so far. Opening walls made updating the electrical much easier and with everything open we were also able to get some of the out dated plumbing up to current standards too.
January
The first week of January my amazing father in law came to stay with us to help with some of the projects on the to-do list to help get our farmstead going. The initial to-do list item we were trying to get done was: update the electrical. I was shaking in my boots at the idea of updating the electrical but my father in law was cool as a cucumber about it. I’d say 4 or so days after starting the electric I had a BRILLIANT idea (well, brilliant to me). “What if we moved all the rooms for better flow”. He still stayed cool as a cucumber. However I think he developed a permanent eye twitch, which got worse the more ideas I had.
One of the first things that changed was moving the location of the kitchen from the back of the house, to the heart of the home in the middle. The old kitchen I spent so much time trying to make pretty was such a waste of time looking back now. On the flip side I now have the makings of the kitchen of my dreams rather than the kitchen I could settle for. I enjoy cooking so much more now that I’m not sequestered to the back of the house in the closed off kitchen. It’s nice to feel like a part of the family again. The new kitchen is so close to being a finished space I can almost taste it. I’ve put some teaser pictures on Instagram highlighting some of the changes that I’m swooning over.
The house is much more open now and has a better farmhouse vibe and flow than before. Seeing how corroded the old water lines were made me feel a lot better about my decisions. Not to mention the new kitchen added a water line for the freezer and for the dishwasher because the old kitchen had neither.
February
After the kitchen reach the livable/functional stage we moved on to the living room dining room conversion. The old kitchen wall that closed the space off to the rest of the house was taken down and opened up to give the open concept house that we now have. We also worked on the upstairs master bedroom during this time and learned that we had zero insulation in the house. Well, we did find one abandoned bee nest but other than THAT we had no insulation. Adding insulation everywhere we can put it became the new priority. I can now say with honesty that my bedroom has become cozy. We also added a door (didn’t have one before), removed the Jack and Jill bathroom door for more privacy now, and closed off the giant 10 foot opening that was the entrance to our master suite.
We also cut down one of the dead trees on the property. This tree was chosen to be cut first because it was leaning towards the house. That made me really nervous when it got super windy. As an added bonus we have a ton of fire wood thanks to that tree for next winter.
March
The goal for March was to get as much wrapped up as we could because it would be a while before my father in law would be back. We wanted the house to feel a little less like a construction zone and more like a home. We also took down another dead tree (yay more firewood) and got the lawn mower put back together after a failed attempt at doing some mechanic stuff ourselves.
Inside, the laundry got moved upstairs where I wanted it. Now it’s on the same floor where most of the living takes place. The upstairs bathroom had a weird side room for something and now it has purpose. Having it there makes so much more sense and feels like it belongs better than it did where it was located downstairs. Plus I don’t have to lug laundry up and down the stairs anymore which is the real reason I am so excited about the move.
With the laundry out of the way downstairs, the space was divided into two rooms. Before the dividing wall was built we had to move the pellet stove, which was HEAVY! Or at least that’s what I am told because I 100% let the boys handle that job without me. Now one side of the space is a powder room and the other is the master bath for the downstairs master bedroom. The powder room is functional, the master bath is not. Once we got the powder room working (reused the previous toilet and vanity) we could demo the downstairs bathroom. Removing the bathroom made the living room bigger and gave the pellet stove its new home. Before the pellet stove didn’t really heat the house because of the layout. Now it heats the house great and even sends some heat upstairs which didn’t used to get heat before.
April
Everything still has a long ways to go. I’ve taken some video tours of the house during various stages of change and it has definitely changed a lot. I’m excited to have time to edit the video to show the updates. However that’s a project for another very distant day. I am still trying to get to a good place with the house, but that requires a lot more cleaning and organizing.
With my father in law gone I have spent so much time trying to clean up the construction debris. Mostly it is piled outside until we can get a dumpster but at least the house is coming together. Even with all of the chaos going on we have managed to make some time for outdoor projects too. Outside we managed to install about 25% of the T-posts we need for fencing in the future pasture. Our estimated post count for the pasture is about 200 so we still have plenty more posts to set.
We also added to our chicken flock to increase our egg laying chickens. Now we have 30 ladies giving us two dozen eggs per day or more! Our first batch of meat chickens consists of 8 Black Australorp chickens and 8 Brown Leghorn chickens. They wont be ready for the freezer until the end of summer because they take so long to grow but it is what was available at the time. We won’t do meat chickens again that take this long to raise, we will stick with a different breed in the future.
Our local agriculture store was advertising the spring livestock options for purchase. We bit the bullet and ordered some new egg layer chicks that will be getting here the last week of April. The store was also advertising bees so we ordered a package and they are already here and getting adjusted in their new hive. We think the queen arrived dead so we will be watching closely to see how the hive fairs while we wait for a replacement queen to ship.
What’s Next
I’m anxious to see where the progress is at for the 1 year milestone (2 months to go) but I feel proud of what we’ve accomplished so far. We know we’re being ambitious but it’s nice to have goals to keep working towards. My hope and prediction for the 1 year milestone:
- Pasture enclosed (finish t post installation, string fencing)
- Getting a pig for the pasture that we can raise for meat (my mothers day gift request)
- Planting a vegetable/fruit/herb/flower garden
- Fill the root cellar with as much home grown crops as possible
- Get the main floor of the house painted (walls still need some prepping)
- Demo the last 2 horsehair plaster walls on the main floor
That’s all in no particular order just based on whatever we’re able to do with the time and money available. Plus there is always side projects that pop up requiring immediate attention. We will keep documenting the progress and changes we make to get our farmstead functioning. Hope to see you along for this journey with us.
Did anyone else hear “when it rains, it pours” growing up? It is a phrase I’ve heard as long as I can remember and it always feels so fitting when something happens. I had such high expectations for myself to complete our kitchen project and cat room/office project with such ease, ease is not the word I would use looking back on everything.
Project delays happen in the biggest and smallest projects, and my projects were not spared. I’m not sure where everyone lives, and I feel like we’ve lived everywhere but it has been a LONG time since I’ve lived where there is snow. Like real snow. We have seen snow plenty of times in our various homes but it never sticks. Well…it sure does stick here in Wisconsin!!
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The locals say this weather is unseasonable and that snow this early isn’t the normal for the area. We of course have no idea what normal is, we just have to roll with it and learn as we go.
That is something we have to do every time we move. Japan had a learning curve, California had a learning curve, and Washington had a learning curve too. It’s a bummer that Wisconsin’s learning curve is frozen. *Brrr*
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What Could Go Wrong
Do you know when the worst time for the heat to go out is? I am not sure all of them, but I can tell you with complete certainty that having it go out when the temps outside are in the teens is DEFINITELY one of them.
Luckily our cats have always been our personal space heaters so that helped get us through until the oil boiler could be repaired the next day. If that sounds like a project delay, you would be right!
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That wasn’t actually the first time we have lost heat since we’ve started getting snow. The first time we lost heat was because we ran our oil tanks dry. Whoops.
We are having the oil gauges replaced so we can measure how full the tanks are but that doesn’t do me any good when they are already empty. If you didn’t know that oil tanks sound the same full or empty, I am telling you now!
It worked out though because we had a LARGE oak tree branch break over labor day weekend (we posted about that on instagram if you don’t follow us there, you should) and we chopped that and had it for fire wood.
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We have an outdoor wood burning boiler as a backup heat source. That is an amazing backup heat option to have!!! At least it is if you know how to work it. Which we didn’t. We figured it out eventually but it would have been nice to have that knowledge beforehand.
That wood burner helped get us through until the gas company could refill our tanks. Something I have learned since losing heat twice is that working outside is much easier when you know you have a place to warm up after. It takes a long time to heat a frozen house.
We were naive to think that when we were ready to switch back to the oil it would be as simple as turning it on. It wasn’t that simple which is why we lost heat a second time during below freezing temps.
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Adulting Failures
Now we have our heat sorted, or as sorted as we can I guess. We are out of wood so we know we need to get that replaced for backup just in case. We have a pellet stove but no pellets. Honestly we aren’t even sure if it works, we only know we have it. The upstairs heater doesn’t work but the electrician gets here in a week and that should be repaired at that time. We have plenty of oil but only if the boiler keeps working. We have already talked to our boiler guy (it’s weird to say we have a boiler guy) about our options with that behemoth but most of it will wait until we are back in the warm season so we can be without the boiler to work on the boiler. Clearly that isn’t an option at the moment.
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It’s also been a reality check about tasks that should have been prioritized before it got so cold that now have to wait months and months to be completed or become way more difficult to do now. We were considering turning our “corn crib” into a winter chicken coop but winter is already here and it didn’t get done. In some ways it could be a blessing because now we could really plan it out but the bigger blessing would be using it.
I predicted in the previous post about having to wait to re-fence our pasture area after the snow melts and I can see my landscaping flags again and that couldn’t have been more true. Although I can still see them well enough at the moment, I am sure the ground is frozen enough to make manually pounding the t-posts a quickly regrettable chore.
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Farmstead Victories
The cat’s and the chickens have been eating good since the weather has gotten colder because the mice we catch goes back to the animals. The cat’s catch their own and any that we catch we feed to the chickens.
The chickens are little poultry velociraptors because they go crazy when we throw a mouse in for them. We have a particularly fat hen that must be the alpha because she claims dibs on the first treat every time. Doesn’t matter what the treat is either. She is always the first to grab what she wants and run with it. Although the other chickens will chase her down for some of that mouse.
Another victory is the amount of eggs we are getting per day! We are all getting a little egged out but I keep trying to find new recipes to make that uses plenty of eggs. As of today we are getting between 12 and 14 eggs per day. When I cook I typically use a dozen eggs in a day or 0 eggs. There is not much of an in-between with egg use.
Our favorite egg recipes currently are chocolate pots de creme, that uses 6 egg yolks per recipe. Every 2 batches leaves me with a dozen egg whites. Do you know what uses 12 egg whites? Angel food cake! I was pretty intimidated to make it the first time but I shouldn’t have been because I over cooked the first one and it was still delicious.
Pasta carbonara is a family favorite as well, its the most adult version I can find for “breakfast for dinner” because its basically bacon, eggs, and cheese pasta. Speaking of pasta, homemade egg noodles. I made lasagna the other day and took the time to make the pasta from scratch, the hubs proposed again. The saying a way to a mans heart is through his stomach is so true. At least in my house it is.
House Updates
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Calling anything an update is almost laughable because the farmstead is so old anything we do is an update. Just cleaning is an update! Anyways, with the help of my brother I was able to do a mini kitchen update.
Mostly it’s just a little more pleasant to be in there with the paint update. Although I feel like it’s a little boring now. I just need more art, I just haven’t quite found what I’m looking for yet. After the electric is finished the next update will begin.
I know I should have waited to do anything to the house until the electric was done but it makes me happy to spend time in the rooms I changed. Happiness isn’t always practical in practice.
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The other room I changed was our cat room/office. It makes being in there more relaxing and keeps the focus on the task at hand when trying to do anything. Even the hubs said it just feels better in here when he’s trying to get school work done.
I’m pretty sure the cats gave me a meow of approval as well. Although a disgruntled meow sounds about the same. I’ve never painted paneling before and I hope to never paint it again. I had a heck of a time getting good coverage. Maybe there is a trick like a certain type of paint or brush or something to make the job easier but I don’t know it if there is.
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Christmas decorating has begun in the house already as well. Just a few things are up currently, it’s a very slow process because I don’t know where I want to put everything so it’s going up a little at a time. The few things that are hung sure are making me feel festive. It’s making me want to start my Christmas baking early but I know that wouldn’t be very smart this early so I’m waiting, impatiently waiting, but still waiting.
I’m so happy about everything that got done even with all the setbacks during the process. I am also excited for the future projects to come over this winter on the inside of the house because when spring gets here it will be outdoor time again. I can’t wait to share the next phase of this journey. See you then!