Neither Sandra nor I come from what you would call a “farming” background. Yes, both of us had grandfathers that farmed on a small scale, but nothing more than what one would call a gentleman’s farm. I lived on a small farm until I was 7 years old, and my parents had pigs, a horse here and there, a cow occasionally and a smattering of chickens. Both of us have a love for farming, but neither of us had a farm and the equipment passed on to us or available for us to use as we started farming. Getting started in farming for those who don’t come from a traditional farming family is not as easy as it may have been a generation ago.
First off, land is not easy to come by. Around us any available plots that are large enough to be of use are either sold as housing development plots, or are absorbed in to one of the much larger farms that surround us. The city of Rochester is expanding outwards, and the suburbs are slowly but surely heading our direction. Our town has always been a small, family oriented community, but we anticipate that over the next several years it will go the way of many small towns and grow in size, while losing much of its small town charm. That development comes at a price for small time farmers like us. We are locked in on all sides, and despite wanting to grow and expand some of our offerings, we are limited on our ability to do so without picking up and finding a new location.
Prices for farm equipment have risen astronomically right along with everything else. Our tractor is pushed to the limit of its capabilities and still doesn’t do everything that we would like it to. There is no way we could go out and buy something new. It just isn’t financially feasible. The same goes for most of the rest of farming equipment: mowers, brush hogs, rototillers, backhoes, etc. The best way to acquire these is to be at the right place at the right time and find someone who is willing to part with a good used model. The danger in this is that like a used car, you are often buying the problems that someone else is over dealing with. Unfortunately, sometimes that is the only way to expand your equipment and enable yourself to do more for yourself.
The livestock market fluctuates as wildly as Wall Street. Picking the wrong week, even one week early or one week late, in which to sell our livestock can mean the difference between making a profit and taking a huge loss on our investment. Profit margins run very slim in the livestock business as it is, so the gamble of when to sell really is that, a huge gamble. Take the rooster “market” for instance. Three weeks ago we took a couple of our roosters to the market and they sold for between $15-17 each. Last week, we took more, very similar to the last ones, and they sold for $4-7 each. When you consider that a chick costs around $1 each, and the food to grow it to market size is probably around $12-13 per bird, we realize a profit of only $2-4 per bird one week and a loss of $6-10 per bird the next. We leverage the market by trying to pick up free or cheap birds at other auctions or from other people who are trying to get rid of their birds, and selling those along with ours when we can find them. If we can get them cheap enough, we limit the amount we have in to each bird and can usually guarantee that we will at least make something on them no matter what the market does that week. This helps us to play the average game and hopefully, over the course of the year, if we play our cards right, we come out on the positive side of the board. Overall though, it is hard to make much in farming, so it is tough to come up with liquid capital to grow our business.
What this means it that both of us work off the farm full time. This puts a huge limit on our most important and most constrained resource, time. Despite years of trying, neither of us has come up with a way to add more than 24 hours to each day! And, as much as we are hesitant to admit it, neither of us is getting any younger, and we both recover slower from little sleep and the beating our bodies take in the day to day effort of running a farm. The chores and jobs involved in farming are never ending. Because we are not growing in to an already established farm, the infrastructure of farming is not already in place, and we build and grow at the same time. We find ourselves, day after day, coming to the end of the hours in each day long before we could possibly come to the end of the work that needs to be done. This results in projects being put off, and expansion being halted for days or weeks and sometimes months or years.
Thankfully, neither of us is averse to hard work, and we both actually enjoy most of what goes in to farming. Most days we are up with the sun, and climb back in to bed well after the sun goes down at night. There is no other way to do it though. If you want to farm, you are going to work…HARD. You are going to miss things that other people enjoy doing. You are most likely not going to be rich. And you are never going to be bored. The only way to get started doing it though, is to start doing it. Dive in, get to work, get your hands dirty, and build your dreams.