It’s freezing in here!

Over the last several months, we’ve been working on a major project around the farm. We drove down to Fort Myers and picked up a 24′ trailer from an ice truck.

We removed the existing freezer unit from it since we didn’t know how old it was and I wasn’t comfortable trusting it with thousands of dollars of meat.

I split the area into two sections: a freezer section and a cooler section. I then installed a 24,000BTU window unit and a Cool Bot in the front section that will act as a cooler. Using the Cool Bot, the A/C unit is able to achieve around 34 degree temperatures.

Once the freezer equipment was installed by Ian at HVAC Comfort Solutions, LLC, we got to work filling up the freezer right away.

The cooler is fantastic to hang and age the meat and to keep it nice and firm while butchering it into smaller pieces. We’re super excited for this new addition to the farm!

We built a smokehouse

We’ve wanted to smoke our own meats for quite some time, so after numerous hours watching YouTube videos and looking at other peoples’ designs, we decided to take the plunge and build a cold smoker smokehouse. It’s based off the design from Deep South Homestead’s videos and has worked great so far. We can’t wait to smoke more bacon and sausage.

We used tongue and groove cedar for the smoker box and constructed an offset firebox so that the internal temperature wouldn’t get too hot for cold smoking. It’s topped off with a metal roof (leftovers from another project around the farm).