My wife and I were talking a little while ago about how to describe our farm and what we do when we are talking to other people. For a long time she has been describing us as a “hobby farm” and us as “hobby farmers”. I told her that we probably can’t describe ourselves that way anymore seeing as how we spend more hours every week working on the farm than we do working our “real” jobs. So we aren’t a hobby farm, but what are we?
We aren’t a full operational commercial farm. They typically operate in many ways the same as a factory assembly line, with one primary end goal product in mind. Yes, some commercial farms may have diverse products, but typically these all center around one main primary product. (ie. The commercial dairy operation that sells their excess hay, silage, grain or animal waste by-products…but these products are not their primary focus, rather excess or off cast from what they use to produce their primary goal product.) Their animals are producers, often forced beyond nature to grow and produce faster and more than they would otherwise. Their fields are pushed and forced to produce beyond their natural limits, with hundreds and thousands of pounds of fertilizer applied to maximize output. The simplicity of caring for the land and animals has been replaced by corporate strategies and maximizing profits. Animal names are replaced by ID numbers and spreadsheet tracking. This isn’t to say that what they do is wrong, or there isn’t a place in farming for what they do…it’s just not what we do or who we want to be.
We finally settled on calling what we do a “homestead”. We are a small scale, family run farm that focuses on the quality of our product. This includes not only the quality of the end product, but the quality of life of our animals, the quality of the feed that we give them, the quality of the housing we offer them, the quality of their water sources, the quality of the produce we grow and the quality of the produce we buy from other sources. We will not offer for sale to anyone else a product that we (I really – I’m really, REALLY picky about the quality of my food) won’t put on our own family table. Anything that doesn’t meet my exacting standards gets fed to our animals. Throughout the spring, summer and fall, the majority of their food is produce that doesn’t make the cut for us. They never complain!
We are diverse in the animals that we raise, often focusing on what we want to put on our own table, and then raising enough so that we have some to offer for sale to our customers. We are small enough that we can change pretty quickly what we have to offer based on market needs. For example, earlier this year the majority of our farm income was coming from rabbit sales. Without warning, over the course of one week, the rabbit market tanked. Rabbits that had been selling for $25-30 each were now bringing $7-10. Over the next couple of months we reduced our rabbit numbers from near 150 to just our primary breeding animals. The market is beginning to stabilize again and we have located another buyer, so we are now cautiously working to have more rabbits to bring to market again. At the same time as we lost our rabbit market, we located a pretty regular buyer for roosters and pigeons. We had never before considered raising pigeons, but found a coop online and after some searching found a source to buy pigeons from. We also began picking up roosters when we can and now have more roosters than I could have ever believed we would have at one time. Our customer is happy, and we have another source of income for the farm.
Daily feeding of the animals on our farm takes right around one and a half to two hours each day, depending on what we have going on. Of course some days take more and some take less, but that is the norm for most days. Beyond that, we have cages to be cleaned, stalls to be mucked, eggs to be collected and washed, produce to be picked, gardens to be tended, fences to be installed and maintained… the list goes on and on. Still, how can that amount to more hours of work a week than our “real” jobs?
Well, this time of year we have a produce stand that requires stocking several times a day, and all of that produce to pick, buy, sort and prepare for the stand. We each work 3-4 days off the farm each week, but on our days off there are several local Amish and Mennonite produce auctions that we attend to buy produce to stock our stand with what we don’t grow ourselves. There is no way we could grow the amount and variety of produce that we sell. We focus on growing what we can, and then invest 6 or so hours a day 3-4 days a week at auctions searching for the highest quality of produce and hedging our bids to obtain it for prices that enable us to offer it to our customers for prices that are affordable for just about every family. At these auctions we stand in a mix of buyers from private individuals, to owners of stands just like ours, to chefs at some of the highest end restaurants in the Finger Lakes, to high volume purchasers for some of the largest grocery chains in our region. We have learned a lot about produce and how to ensure that we are offering only the highest quality to our customers.
In addition, there are two local livestock auctions that we attend regularly. Depending on the auction we may be selling, buying or both. Buying requires us to make fast, accurate evaluations of the health and marketability of the animal being offered. We have to value the animal based on sight alone and determine if it would be a good addition to our farm. As sellers, we need to watch the market prices and determine what we would be willing to let our animals sell for. If we are not happy with the prices being bid that day, we need to be prepared to bid and buy our own animals back. While some good deals can be found at auction for buyers, as sellers it can be a catch 22, in that of the selling price, 20-25% goes to the auction house as a selling commission. Sometimes though it is the only outlet for moving animals that we have decided we no longer want on the farm and that are not selling through our other avenues.
We find that each of us are spending between 40-50 hours each week working solely on the farm and farm endeavors. This certainly pushes us out of the hobby category, at least in my opinion. People ask us all the time why we invest so much time and money in this. The short answer is that we love it. We do generate a small amount of income from our farm work, but certainly not enough to leave our “real” jobs yet. Eventually we would like to, but for now we have settled in as homesteaders…somewhere between hobbyists and full time real farmers. And for now we love it.