Happy New Year!

How is everyone surviving the winter weather this week? It has been very mild here in NEO, and my fields have been so muddy it's been hard to get the tractor and spreader in and out but 🤷‍♀️.

I am currently looking at roses to plant along my fence by the road and enjoying a glass of wine. Cheers 🥂

Hi Patricia, I planted roses outside fence lines on my farm, and the cows inside the fence keep them pruned for me - thorns and all. Not what I had in mind.

It's been warm and wet here too this week. I am waiting for dryer days to treat the huisache popping up in the pastures - again. Good weather for digging post holes though.

Thanks for starting this New Year thread.

Not a serious farmer here as some of you are but I'm waiting on drier weather also. There are things that just need doing but it is too wet to put the tractor in those areas.

So I am curious if there are any serious chicken/egg producers here. We grew up with a large house of layer hens. My Mother would sell eggs to a local hatchery. We would have to wipe and pack the eggs in crates. I don't recall the size of the crates but they were two flats wide and quite a few deep.

It was mandatory to pack the eggs pointed end down so as not to rearrange the yolk. These days I get eggs from the store and there is no order to the packing of the eggs. I buy 5 dozen at a time and there are two flats with eggs packed helter skelter. What has changed or is my OCD just coming out???

I don't think it really matters on Supermarket eggs as they are just going to breakfast or baking and being soon eaten up.

Probably true! I suspect my folks were strict on that so the yolk was centered when the eggs were candled.

It likely had no bearing on the edible product.

I have not bought eggs in decades, but when I did, they were packed pointy end down. I store our home grown ones that way too.

Guess I am OCD because I repack them when I buy them. I used to raise chickens (for eggs and meat) but lost interest when they became a magnet for snakes.

When I sold eggs I always packed them pointed end down because the rounded end was the visible one and looked larger if it filled out the pocket in the carton.

MaryE said:When I sold eggs I always packed them pointed end down because the rounded end was the visible one and looked larger if it filled out the pocket in the carton.

Great, I never thought about that.

I have some farmland to sell. I don't currently live in the same state as my farmland. I'd appreciate any advice you might have. The issue is that before I'd want to sign up with a land broker to list my property I'd like to figure out the value of my farmland independently of a broker.

I'd also like suggestions as to how to find a good broker. It feels odd to just pick someone out randomly without knowing if they are any good, have actually got a lot of land sales experience and all that before giving the a 10% commission to sell my farm.

My farm is in North Carolina. It appears to be harder to find closed land sales and the sold prices. In the Mid-West that info seems to be more readily available.

If you were to sell some farmland how would you go about finding a good broker and figuring out how much your farm is worth?

My farm is in Sampson County N.C. and it's 133 acres with 70 of those timberland and 63 cultivated land (cotton, soybeans, tobacco, etc).