Work-Life Balance? Isn’t That Why We’re Starting a Farm?

 
Over the past year we’ve spent a lot of time reading books and chatting with farmers of all shapes and sizes. Veteran farmers, young farmers, former farmers, aspiring farmers, urban farmers... if it ends with farmer we’ve found someone to tell us about it! Aspiring farmers, including ourselves, tend to have a romantic view of life on the farm. We may tell you that we understand it's hard work, but no matter how many farms we visit and how many farmers we speak with I still can’t get that image out of my head.
 
Part of it is because when we visit and work on farms we don’t really get to see the most difficult aspects of farm life. We’re agri-tourists. At the end of the trip we get to
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Farm Flows - Understanding Gross and Operating Profit

Image from cover of “Slow Money”, by Woody Tasch.

If you’ve read our first blog post, you probably know that I have a background in finance. Whether I like it or not, numbers are always on my mind. That means I think a lot about Little Seed and how we’ll manage to stay alive in an industry like farming, which is notorious for bedeviling even the most astute financial planners. Probably the most important aspect of our financial plan is understanding our costs and our cash flows. Not just thinking about them, but actually writing (typing) them all down and planning a few years ahead. I can't emphasize how important it is to actually sit down and write it out. Until you do, you won't know what you don't know.

Money management is a complicated (and often sensitive) topic, so I’ll try to keep this particular discussion high level and offer some ideas for
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Pinning the Tail on the Donkey, or Choosing a Farm Location

The beauty of not having land in the family and essentially starting with a blank slate is that we can pretty much choose any location to start our farm. However, it is a blessing and a curse. Figuring out where to farm has been, and continues to be, the most difficult decision to make. Sometimes I wish the choice was already made for us and we had no other option but to make it work. Since that’s not the case, we spend an inordinate amount of time debating the pros and cons of weather, land prices, water access, distance from family, proximity to end markets, and so on. We’ve done a fair amount of research on each topic, so I’ll throw out a few bits and pieces of our decision-making process... and if anyone has feedback we’d love to hear it!
 
The first step for us was to eliminate places we definitely would not want to farm. We actually thought about several foreign countries, but eventually ruled them out and chose to stick it out in the good ole US of A (despite the seemingly insane regulatory environment). For us, deciding to stay in the US was primarily based on
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