If you’re reading this and it’s Monday night (or not long after), December 28th, you’ve may see a few posts on the blog missing. The Wordpress upgrade to version 2.9 failed horribly, and apparently I only backed up one table when I thought I had backed up the whole database. So right now I’m going through Google’s cache trying to restore as many of our posts as possible as quickly as possible. Sorry for the inconvenience!

As I mentioned in my last post, the only major items left to purchase for Pony Tail Acres were a tractor and a farm. Well, we decided that we wanted to meet our goal of buying all of the vehicles and equipment we needed in 2009, so that we could leave just finding a farm for our major 2010 purchase. We’ve traded our personal vehicles for farm trucks. We bought the horse trailer and various tools. And the biggest tool yet we gave ourselves for Christmas while Kubota was still offering 0 percent financing – a Kubota Grand L 3240 tractor (that we’ll be running on biodiesel). We also picked up a bush hog and tiller attachment so as to make our gardening efforts and cleanup for whatever farm we purchase much more do-able.

Speaking of finding a farm, we think we’ve finally found one! We’re very close to making an offer on a 38 acre tract that we found that we believe should go for somewhere under $10,000 an acre. Since some of you have asked for ways to help, we’ve also created a donations page where you can help push the organic and sustainable farming movement to more peoples’ dinner tables.

http://www.ponytailacres.org/donate.php

Ashley (left) and Brandy (right) on the Kubota

For those of you who follow us on Facebook, you know that Ashley and I have finally reached the part of the business where we are farm shopping! These past 8 months have been quite an adventure – cleaning up Ashley’s parents’ house and barn, mending fences, learning the ins and outs of organic gardening, determining our own best practices and buying most of the equipment that we need. We should now have everything we need but the tractor and the bigger farm!

Recently we’ve looked at a few different facilities, each with their own unique charm. We’re currently planning to go see a 25 acre farm in Cumming tomorrow and a 16 acre farm up by Big Canoe on Friday. Out of all of the ones we’ve looked at – online and off – so far, the Cumming one seems the most promising. It’s close to my (David’s) day job, the price seems workable, it has multiple houses on it that we can rent out or let caretakers, trainers, etc. live in and it’s reasonably close to the Wills Park show facility and GA 400 to go to other shows.

So while we’re still searching for the perfect new home for Pony Tail Acres, if you happen to come across a farm that you think we might be interested in, feel free to shoot us a link to it. We’d love to check it out! Anyhow, back to the spreadsheet… trying to make the numbers work out for one of these places so we might be able to get into one at the beginning of 2010. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue our search for the perfect place!