One thing we haven’t found a lot of information about online is the operating costs of running a small, homestead farm. Instead, we’ve visited a bunch of farms, thought long and hard about what we spend money on and slowly put together our own operating expense budget. We thought it would be helpful to share some of our findings and maybe provide some clarity for other beginning farmers. This is a long post, but there's no other way around it, it's not a simple subject to tackle.
Read MoreThe Mind-Boggling Concept of Planning
Advice for planning with a spouse: bring the booze
I always thought of myself as a good planner and goal-setter. I’d set a goal, develop a plan for how to get there and every once in a while I’d actually achieve it. Sweetbreads and I have run two (very) small, but profitable, businesses in the past and that required a fair amount of forethought and also taught us a lot. However, I will tell you one thing for certain, no amount of experience in my prior life prepared me for the type of planning required to start a farm business.
What got me thinking about this was when we sat down recently to write down, review and discuss our timeline of goals and vision for the future. I’m a firm believer that sitting down, discussing ideas and putting them on paper will make accomplishing a dream a reality. This is not a one-time process, it is rolling. It needs to be done on a regular basis and it needs to be highly flexible on the edges, but firm in the center. For us the center is our Core Values. Our planning process involves everything from the next month, two months, six months, year, two years and well beyond. Oh yeah, it also involves a fair amount of beer and wine so that we don't kill each other.
Understanding Your Soil - From a Distance
Soil Comparison courtesy of permaculture.org
Now that's a pretty presumptive title given how little I know about soil! How about this: Understanding Your Soil - From a Distance - for Beginners. Yeah, that's more like it.
There are many fantastic resources for learning about soil and I won’t pretend to be any sort of expert, but I will offer up some insight as to how we’ve gone about evaluating different properties and their soils.
As I mentioned in an earlier post on determining a farm location, we aren’t lucky enough to have land in the family or smart enough to just go pick a place and get started. Both of those options would be much easier and sometimes I envy the people that have gone down those tracks. We also don't live near the areas where we're considering buying land, so we rely on the internet for most of our research. So how can we evaluate whether a particular property will support a grass-based dairy without getting on the ground and taking a soil test?