Pasture Raised and Grass Fed on Stony Brook Farm

I have made mention in past posts about the importance of the constant attention to detail on a farm. Yesterday was a case in point of this.

Substantial rain was forecast for yesterday. It did rain, but not nearly as much as was predicted. Nevertheless, the weather prediction, which I was well-aware of was for heavy rain and temperatures in the mid- to upper-forties. The worst and most dangerous weather for livestock is from the mid-thirties to upper-forties and heavily raining. Once made wet in those temperatures, an animal is liable to become chilled, even a sheep, in spite of the fact that wool retains about 60% of its insulating value when wet. At risk especially in those weather conditions are young animals. I was therefore somewhat concerned about the three little lambs.

Before feeding lunch, I checked the weather radar and saw that the rain was impending. I rushed around feeding and brought the horses in. The rain, driven by a strong wind, started to come down, although not as heavily as predicted, and as I was bringing the last of the horses in, I realized that I had allowed a substantial lapse in my attention to detail when I fed the sheep. Without realizing what I was doing, and in spite of the fact that the impending rain was on my mind, I had laid out their lunch hay about 100 feet from the shelters, in a spot chosen because it was relatively free from existing waste hay. In consideration of the cold rain and the lambs what I should have done was laid the hay out within fifteen or maybe twenty-five at the most feet of the shelters. At that distance, once the rain started, the lambs would have been willing to leave their mothers’ sides to seek shelter. The lambs would not feel comfortable leaving their mothers’ sides to seek shelter 100 feet away. Rather, they would stay near their mothers, getting wet.

In a worst case scenario, say thirty-five degrees and the heavy rain as predicted, rather than forty-eight degrees and a light rain, this lapse of attention to detail, this difference of perhaps as little as seventy-five feet, might have seriously threatened the health, and perhaps even life, of one or more of the lambs.

(Note: The Direct Marketing Minority is a post related to this one.)

As regular readers of this blog know, my goal is to be a full-time farmer, and my target date for becoming so is 2013, the year of my fortieth birthday. Because my wife Jen works full time and is not particularly interested in becoming a full-time farmer herself, I can cheat a bit in terms of what sort of income it is necessary to derive from the farm. I will not have to purchase health insurance with the income from the farm, for example. Nevertheless, since Jen is an accountant and CFO, numbers really matter to her. I can’t quit my day job to farm full time if the farm is only providing $5,000 in net income. Jen and I have never actually sat down and hammered out a minimum income that the farm needs to generate before I can quit my off farm job. My own feeling, and I expect Jen would be satisfied by this number as well, is that the farm needs to generate $40,000 in net income. That is a tall order, but doable.

The question that has driven my farm planning over the past six months or so is, “How do I get there?” The answer serves as the impetus for this post.

Regular readers of the blog should also know that when I got into farming I was ideologically driven by the idea that local-regional farm and food systems marketing should be made up entirely of direct, face-to-face sales, and that local-regional production should be super small scale so that farming could be a chosen profession of millions of people rather than a million or two. However, I was then and continue to be equally ideologically driven to see a local-regional farm and food system that produces, processes, and distributes food that is equitably priced; I wanted no part in a farm and food system that was socio-economically exclusive. It turns out that these two ideological drives are in opposition.

I am a numbers runner. I set up spreadsheets and start plugging in numbers to see how various scenarios play out. What I found is that a small-scale, direct only market that supports a full-time income requires prices so high that only high income people can afford to participate in it, and that even in the high price high profit margin small scale direct market sales volume tops out well below that necessary to provide a $40,000 net income. I also found that any effort to keep meat, especially, prices low either forces even a pasture-based farmer to more or less industrialize, especially in terms of pushing the carrying capacity of the land to its limit, or fall far short of achieving the $40,000 net income cut off.

I was in a quandary. I could satisfy one or the other ideological drive, but not both. Not wanting to choose between my ideologies, I have decided to moderate my commitment to ideology, generally speaking, abandoning a black and white perspective for a more nuanced grey one.

I started running numbers again. I also started thinking more seriously about the narrative of farm marketing history. According to the numbers and the narrative, there is an interesting opportunity here for farmers to make a full-time income while providing affordable food — one thing that must be unflinchingly admitted is that local-regionalism cannot match industrial food prices, especially meat; people, especially people of modest means, are going to have to spend a higher percentage of their income on food than they have in the past few decades.

What I found is that a combination of high profit margin direct marketing and lower profit non-commodity wholesale can get the farmer to the $40,000 net income cut-off while providing relatively inexpensive food. (Note that a related concern is our low-wage, high-cost consumer culture. By paying people higher wages and mitigating our consumer culture, people would be better able to afford non-industrial food). In order to take advantage of this hybrid market, however, there is one thing that proponents of local-regional farm and food systems must acknowledge: the need to scale up. The vision of local-regionalism baesd on small farms with a couple dozen pigs, a few hundred chickens, a flock of twenty ewes, and a half a dozen beef cows is a pipe dream, unless the idea is that local-regional farmers will all subsidize their farm income with off-farm jobs.

Local-regional farmers that want to farm full time are going to have to get serious about farming. On a diversified farm, the couple dozen pigs will have to become a few hundred. The twenty ewes will have to become 100 or 200. The half a dozen beef cows will have to become two dozen. The few hundred chickens will have to become 1,000 or 2,000. To get the highest net income possible from such stock numbers, a percentage of the stock will be marketed directly at farmers markets, on the farm, and/or through CSAs, and a percentage will be marketed via non-commodity wholesale to purveyors or to premium wholesalers who are selling into the Buy Local market. In the model I am currently working out the lower margin non-commodity wholesale pays the bills while direct marketing provides the profit. (Farmers who don’t want to do any direct marketing will have a tougher time of it, but they can make the income cut- off by raising more animals, which they can do without overtaxing themselves or their land, with a careful mix of livestock species, or with carefully chosen non-commodity wholesale buyers)

Scaling up to these sorts of numbers and using this marketing model provides a high enough gross income for farmers at a reasonable enough profit margin to place full-time farming well within the reach of local-regional farmers and it makes food widely available at more or less affordable prices. The target profit margin is 30%, which, for a farm, is historically high, but by including a significant percentage of high margin direct marketing, it is possible to attain.

I received an e-mail from another farmer yesterday about my pig prices. He thought $2.40 per pound hanging weight for a whole pig was very low. He rightly pointed out that the going rate is about $3.50 and runs all the way up to $4.50 or even $5.00 per pound. In response I pointed out that at $3.50 I would be making about $250 in profit per pig and would be being paid more than $80 per hour to raise them, which is totally unreasonable, relative to the income of other (even well-paid) manual laborers, and totally unethical in terms of making food available at affordable prices — at $3.50 per pound handing weight, a whole pig would cost about $700 total, including processing, or about $7.00 per pound of meat in the freezer. At $2.40 per pound, the whole pig would cost about $540 or about $5.40 per pound in the freezer (note that this is still a lot for a person of modest means to pay), and even at that price, I would still be making close to $100 per pig and $35.00 per hour to raise it.

So, you can see that even at $2.40 per pound there is quite the return. The issue in terms of full-time farming is sales volume. You can’t sell enough pigs at that price to have pigs make a large enough contribution to a diversified farm’s income to make it full time. If you include direct sales of indivdual cuts, direct sales of pigs by the whole and half, and non-commodity wholesale sales, the average price per pound hanging weight drops down to about $2.00 per pound,  but the inclusion of the non-commodity wholesale sales makes it possible to market enough pigs to get the gross income up high enough, and still at a high enough profit margin to make a full-time income while selling at a price that is more broadly affordable ($2.00 for me at my current cost of production is a 25% profit margin, so I need to get my costs down a bit to get up to my 30% target profit margin) .

(Note also that because there is so much labor in marketing pigs directly by the individual cut [farmers markets, mostly], the hourly wage in this model, based on a 40-hour work week, drops down to about $18.00 per hour from $35.00. A more accurate hourly wage calculation is as follows: 8 hours per day, 7 days per week, 52 weeks per year, and at a net income of $40,000 = $13.75 per hour. The hourly wage calculation is useful, but really the question is not how much do I make per hour, but is $40,000 for all of this work worth it? To me the answer is definitely yes.)

With three lambs less than 72 hours old on the ground and at least three or four ewes bagged up, I have been watching the weather and the weather forecast with a bit of anxiety. We are in the midst of a bit of high wind and low temperatures that will last through tomorrow morning. The wind chill right now at 3:00am is -3 F, but the air temperature is a less dangerous, though still cold, 15F.

I woke up about a half an hour ago and decided to go out to see how things were going. I was hoping that I would find no new lambs and that Mama Dorset would have her lambs inside the shelter and not out on the snow. Wicked and her ewe are still locked up in the other shelter. Yesterday morning, I was able to lure Mama Dorset into the shelter where Wicked is by picking up her lambs and carrying them in there, but Wicked’s ewe started to try to kill Mama Dorset’s lambs, who are named Snowball and Dawn. It would have been nice to be able to have all of the lambs locked up with their ewes, but that wasn’t going to happen. I scooted Mama Dorset and her lambs out of the shelter as quick as I could before Wicked’s ewe seriously hurt one or both of them. I learned that you cannot introduce lambs into a space that a ewe with a lamb or lambs at her side considers hers. The reason I wanted to get them into that shelter is that the other sheep had knocked down my hay bale barrier which I had been using to keep Mama Dorset and her lambs corralled in the other shelter. With the hay bale barrier down, they were free to come and go from the shelter. Once they were back outside, I resigned myself to trusting Mama Dorset to keep her lambs out of the wind. As Snowball and Dawn made a beeline back to and inside the other shelter, I realized that as long as Mama Dorset didn’t wander away from the shelter, they would stay in it on their own.

When I got out to the pasture, I was very relieved to find no new lambs. I was also relieved to find Mama Dorset and her two lambs deep inside the shelter. One of the lambs was nursing, which was also a good thing to see. Mama’s milk is about 100F, so a couple of ounces every few hours will do a lot to keep a little lamb warm. The other lamb was nestled against one of the hay bales that lay flat on the ground on either side of the shelter to provide some additional wind break. Mama Dorset is extremely skittish and I definitely did not want to spook her out of the shelter, but I did want to make sure that the hay bale lamb was alert, so I stepped into the shelter a bit hoping to see some movement from that lamb. When I was in far enough to see the lamb, I made the “click-click” horse sound and the lamb’s head immediately popped up and she looked around. Satisfied, I slowly backed out of the shelter.

The rest of the ewes were all milling about. A few had been inside the shelter when I walked down, but the majority of them had been just laying around outside. There is a natural wind break where I set the shelters and the shelters themselves provide some more. It has seemed that even when it is windy as long as it is above 10F or so, the sheep sleep outside. Below that and with a wind, they prefer to go inside. I took a good look at them to see if there were any signs of impending labor. There weren’t, so I walked back up to the house.

As I crossed the line of the natural wind break, what had been a gentle breeze one step earlier blasted me in the face as a twenty mile an hour chilling wind.