Welcome back to the blog!
Confession time; I am a compulsive researcher. I read on topics that will likely never impact me at all, and extensively on topics that do or may impact me. I fall down the rabbit holes of the internet, fact-checking and note taking for hours. For me, this is fun.
One of the topics I’ve spent a lot of time on lately is how to make a small farm profitable. Turns out, step one is defining what you consider “profit”. Mr. L. and I had a long chat about our goals and dreams for our homestead, and we have different ideas of what constitutes profitability in our venture. This is good news, because I tend to overreach myself and then feel like a failure, whereas Mr. L. has a much more pragmatic and attainable view of success, and a totally different definition of failure.
I had in my mind that for our small farm to be “profitable”, we needed to make income that exceeded our initial investment and cost of upkeep, such that our income minus our expenses would yield an income that would allow us to expand without further external financial assistance.
Mr. L. simply wants our little farm to generate income equal to maintenance expenses, while reducing our grocery bill. He figures that if we reduce our expense and break even everywhere else, then we’ve come out ahead. Seeing the way his nieces and nephews eat, and knowing that we plan on eventually expanding our family, I can see where he’s coming from.
Step 2 of making a small farm profitable is tracking those investments and expenses, so that we know how much we need to make to break even or reach that tipping point into traditional “profitability”. This has been a touch depressing. My chickens are on strike. I was selling their eggs for $3 a dozen to my classmates (they’ll be $4 a dozen going forward, because I won’t be selling to my classmates anymore, as we are out on clinical affiliations for our final semester. I’ll see them again at graduation). This was the only income our little farm was generating, and with the girls on strike we don’t even have that currently.
I’m working on spinning up more angora yarn, with the goal of listing that for sale online in January. The bunnies have some work ahead of them to break even on their housing and vet bills - they were $200 each to get neutered! The hope is that this will lead to lower cost of keeping house - it should fix the peeing issues, which over the life of the bunny will be significant.
Looking ahead at spring, much of the expense of the garden has been taken care of. The goal this year is to keep the groundhog from wrecking my harvest, and keep up with the watering and weeding. We may pare back the planting. We already have garlic in the ground and horseradish overwintering in the fridge to go in the ground as soon as it can be worked. I have two black walnut seeds planted in pots outside. We will plant dill, cilantro, and kale for the bunnies. Tomatoes. I hope to get carrots, ginger, and beets to grow. We have several varieties of hot pepper languishing under grow lights in the house - I’m not sure what’s wrong with them, except that perhaps the room they’re in is too cold.
I don’t think we’ll plan on doing farmer’s markets this year - I think that would be asking too much, considering we harvested only a single yellow bean last year and everything else died. My goal for this year will be to have a useable harvest, and to have enough left over to experiment with canning. I’d love to do dilly beans, pickled garlic, and cucumbers as well as learning to make kvass and borcsht (hence the beets).
Wish me luck! See you next time!