60 Days Out
The countdown starts now.
Sixty days, give or take. That's what stands between me and the farm.
Right now, The Bonus Round Farm is 37 acres of Kansas grass that I don't wake up on yet. In about two months that changes. The boxes get loaded, the city gets small in the mirror, and the front door and the farm gate become the same address. Last post I told you why this farm exists. This one is about what happens next, and in what order.
What's actually out there
Thirty-seven acres near Mayfield, Kansas. Flat, open, tornado country. Wind that doesn't ask permission and a horizon you can't argue with.
What's out there right now is mostly open ground and a plan. No hens yet. No sheep yet. No fence lines with our name on them. If you drove past it today you'd see a piece of Kansas like a thousand others, and that's exactly the point. You're going to watch it become something, from the first post hole on. Most farm pages start the camera when the barn is full. We're starting it while the land is still empty, because the distance between those two pictures is the whole story.
The order it'll actually happen
Here's something I learned the hard way in the Marines: the order you do things is the difference between a plan and a wish.
So the first stretch isn't animals. The first stretch is foundation. Get moved. Walk every acre until I know it in my boots. Learn where the water goes when it rains and where the wind hits hardest. Get the unglamorous paperwork squared away, the kind nobody claps for. Put in the infrastructure that everything else stands on, because a fence built right once beats a fence built twice.
Then come the laying hens, and honest farm-fresh eggs sold straight to the people down the road. Then the sheep, Katahdin and Dorper, breeds built for this country. The leather goods, burned with the TBR iron, run through all of it.
What sixty days out really looks like
Nobody films this part, so I will.
Sixty days out is not tractors and sunrises. It's boxes. It's a kitchen table covered in paperwork and a notebook with more lists than a grocery store. It's measuring things twice from a distance because you can't drive out and check a third time. It's the strange in-between where you've already left one life in your head but the other one isn't ready for you yet.
Every veteran knows this stage. It's the staging area. It's gear laid out, checked, and checked again before anything moves. Boring to look at, and the whole mission depends on it.
That's the part I'll be showing you for the next two months, because real beats perfect every time, and the staging area is as real as it gets.
The Build Log starts here
This post is the first entry in what I'm calling The Build Log. One post a week, every week, from wherever the build actually is. The countdown to Day One, then the first fence, the first coop, the first setback I'd rather not tell you about but will.
Follow along and you get the whole arc, from empty grass to full cartons. Jump in late and you can binge back to this post and watch the distance close. Either way, when the truck rolls onto that land, I want people standing on the timeline with me.
