The Sell Farm, LLC
Milner, Georgia
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The Sell Farm, LLC Milner, Georgia
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Table of Contents for this page Protecting your beef investment Temperature Alarm - Where to buy Have a Disaster Plan if your freezer quits Cooking Beef and Safe Handling of Beef Link to Local Farms - Honey, bakery, bees, organic produce, pastured poultry, CSA and pecan brittle
Links to Pike County Non-profits Websites we have developed and maintained
Education Protecting your Beef Investment Dear Beef Customers:Several beef customers lost all of their meat during the past years due to a malfunction of the freezer. One of our personal, relatively new, freezers died in November, 2007 and due to the external alarm we were able to save our beef. In an effort to try to help our customers keep their meat safe, we are offering the following suggestions.Read the material below about safety in freezing and refreezing various items. If you are considering purchasing a new freezer, buy one that has a temperature alarm built in. This feature causes an audible sound should the freezer temperature reach an unsafe level (usually 32 degrees F). Note some built in factory installed alarms may not work during a power failure!Alternatively, one can purchase an external refrigerator/freezer alarm that will alert you when the freezer’s temperature rises to your preset level. They cost about $50, but it may be a good investment considering the cost of your beef. Bill spent several hours researching this on the Internet. There are several companies that manufacture, or sell, alarm type thermometers for monitoring refrigerator and freezer temperatures. We found one from what appears to be a solid manufacturer of scientific equipment. We have purchased one for our freezer. The Sell Farm, LLC does not warrant any of these devices, we are only offering a suggestion for your consideration. We do not own stock, know the principals or people working for this firm, or receive a fee from the vendor.The reason we liked the one be bought is that the temperature probe is incased in a non-toxic glycol filled bottle that is supposed to prevent rapid fluctuations of the probes sensing and is more likely to represent the true temperature of your meat. Theoretically, reducing swings in the sensor probe by the use of this bottle should reduce false alarms at times of opening the freezer which I have read about happening in reviews of those without the bottle.The material below will also help you reduce the amount of loss while you wait for a repair, or find a new freezer. The information is also helpful for power failures. May you never have to deal with a freezer malfunction!Regards,Bill and Elsa
Quality for Keeps: Freezer Problem SolverThis article covers emergency care of your freezer and contents and facts about refreezing and a lot more - click the link below.
From the University of Missouri Extensionhttp://muextension.missouri.edu/xplor/hesguide/foodnut/gh1506.htm
Have a Disaster Plan, just in case! The following information is a short, but incomplete, summary of the material in the above Univ. of Missouri site.
Buy an external temperature alarm Please consider investing in an external freezer alarm. We recommend buying an external alarm. There are many on the market from $15 up. Many of these do not produce an alarm until the temperature goes above freezing which doesn’t give you much time to act in order to save the beef. We prefer an alarm that you can set the limits of. We do not sell alarms, and we do not get a fee for directing customers to any vendor. After much research we purchased a Traceable® alarm. It works well, we think the siren is not loud enough, but it was loud enough for us to realize that our fairly new chest freezer died during November, 2007. We saved the beef! The alarm below is what we purchased – about $50.
A Freezer Alarm from Fisher Scientific:
Once in the site, place this in search products box the following: Traceable® Refrigerator/Freezer Thermometer. You will be taken to a page with a couple choices: Choose - Fisher Scientific Traceable* Refrigerator/Freezer Alarm Thermometers Once to the page: You want to click the Dual Range thermometer so that you can program in Fahrenheit!
The Thermometer is actually manufactured by Control Company. From their website: “Control Company designs, manufacturers, and sells equipment and scientific instruments for plants and laboratories in the industrial, biomedical, hospital, educational, and governmental market”. It comes with a calibration certificate for each unit. Many of the thermometers I have read about and their reviews have only a bare temperature probe which is extremely sensitive to changes of temperature - like when you open the freezer's door. The Traceable® probe is in a bottle of a solution which prevents the rapid changes, and thus false alarms. Note this alarm is not a loud siren, and is not as loud as we would like, but it is certainly audible. This is the only drawback we have found with it. So, you will need to be alert to it and the freezer should be in a location that you pass by each day. Do a test of the alarm before you place it into operation so that you will recognize the sound should it go off. Recently (November, 2007) our personal main freezer went out and the alarm saved the day!!! I had set the alarm to go off if the temperature went above +10 degrees F. The alarm on the freezer will not go off until the temperature reaches 32 degrees F. The Traceable® alarm gave us more time to get the meat into our backup freezer before it started to thaw - a great advantage over alarms that come with freezers - plus many of the factory installed alarms will not function in a power failure.
The Manufacturer's Website To read the manufacturer's information on the thermometer alarm go to: http://www.control3.com/4127p.htm
Control Company does not sell directly to the public and refers one to Fisher Scientific.
OK you decided to get a thermometer - What Next?
When it arrives, you will get the main digital thermometer housing, the bottle probe with a 10 ft. lead, some Velcro and a piece of flexible magnet for mounting inside the freezer. You will also receive a manual and a certificate of calibration.
First question is where do you place the probe – the manual does not address this? You will have to experiment as I did – see below – in order to know where to best place it for the an adequate reading, and more importantly you will then have to set an upper and lower temperature limit for the alarm based on where you place the probe. Without some experimentation, you may have several false alarms.
This is what I did. We have a large chest freezer. Most literature I have found suggests that the freezer should be set at 0 degrees F or a lower. The compressor is in the lower left hand side of chest freezers - as you look at it. I placed the probe using Velcro on the inside wall in the upper right side just under the lid. The temperature varied between 4 and 9 degrees F. I then placed it in the middle upper basket and the temperature there /varied between -3 and +4 F. Then I placed it in the right bottom under some ground beef packs. The temperature there was -2 to +1 F. Finally, I placed it under a roast sitting on a ledge right over the compressor in the left lower section of the freezer. The temperature there was -1 to -8 F, this is the location that the literature suggests you will find the lowest temperature in a chest freezer.
Our freezer has been operational for several years with good results ( until November, 2007). Most of the meat is in the lower section were the temperature is -2 to +1 F. I think, for us, since it has worked well, we will continue to use the factory, current, settings. I understand in upright frost free freezers, the temperature is lowest in the top of the freezer, but you must check this out. We placed the Traceable in our frost free upright and noted that it has very wide temperature swings at the factory setting = 2 F to 14F, which I assume the high represents the time during which it is self defrosting? It does this every day!
Using the above data, I set the alarm in our chest to go off should the temperature go below -15 F (why, don’t know?) and over +10F. This should give us a fairly narrow window to set off an alarm. Our upright is set at -15F and +15F. You need to make your own decision.
Happy Freezing!
12/07
We all have had the experience of taking a beautiful piece of beef and ruining it by improper cooking methods. In order to get a tasty and tender steak , or roast, one has to following the correct cooking method (dry heat or moist heat) as well as to bring the internal temperature of the meat to the proper level. The Beef Board has produced many useful brochures. One such brochure, Basics about Beef, can be found on their website at URL: http://www.beefitswhatsfordinner.com/
Please also read about safe handling and cooking of beef at the following Georgia Beef Board Site - this also is important for all meats, eggs, etc.: http://www.beefboard.org/checfoodsafety18.aspx
The Beef Board has been active in promoting the virtues of beef. If interested, check out these websites. http://www.beefboard.org/whoweare.aspx
http://www.hsffarm.com/index.html
D and A Farm - Certified Organic Produce Zebulon, GA Check these folks out for their fresh organic vegetables, pastured chicken, eggs, raw milk for pets and they also have a CSA program (Community Supported Agriculture) with pickups in Atlanta, Zebulon and Griffin. Check them out at the following URL: http://www.dandafarm.com/index.html
Pike County Market on the Square
We are at the Main Street Newnan Market, the first Saturday of April through the first Saturday of December. We are on the Courthouse Square: Map below http://www.mainstreetnewnan.com/map.html
To view the list of vendors at the Main Street Market Click Below: http://www.mainstreetnewnan.com/2007MarketDayVendors.htm
Pike County Georgia Chamber of Commerce
News from Lamar County Georgia - The Dispatch New Site
This is a very new and interesting online news source that has just starting publishing online. It is worth a read in order to keep up to date about what is happening in this neck of the woods. Please take a look and add them as a bookmark! http://barnesvilledispatch.com/
Websites that the Sell Farm, LLC has produced. We have developed and maintain this site which you are viewing www.sellfarm.com .
As a service to the Beef Industry we have developed the following discussion board:
Grass-Fed Beef Farming with over 400 members: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/grassfedbeef/
We have also designed and maintained art and literary sites. Taos Fine Art
The Frank Waters Foundation
Dog Health Site:
The Bearded Collie Foundation for Health - Elsa is founder, president and web designer, etc. http://www.beaconforhealth.org/
Other Useful Links and Information The Georgia Cattlemen's Association and Georgia Beef Board.
The National Cattlemen's Beef Association.
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Send mail to wmfarr@bellsouth.net with questions or comments about this web site.Last modified: August 27, 2008 02:39:18 PM |
