I have some bittersweet news to share. After two years of attempting to find stable employment in Northwestern Washington, and finding no good home for my skills and experience, I've accepted a job offer teaching Sustainable Agriculture at Sterling College in Craftsbury Common, Vermont. Jen and I will be selling the farm, packing up the dogs, and moving across the country in a few months. 

The last 6.5 years have taken me on an incredible journey with incredible peaks of joy and debilitating moments of despair. My original goal for the farm was to create a business that could provide the equivalent of full-time employment for myself without growing to a size where I would need to compromise my values. If you've followed this blog, you've watched me struggle with many different business ideas, but you've also watched me come to terms with the reality that I can't realistically support myself financially from the farm alone. Faced with that reality, but still passionate about agriculture and alternatives to the industrial food system, I started to cast my net wider and wider. The opportunity to teach and mentor students at a small college devoted to the values that align so closely with my own was an opportunity that I could not turn down. I can now use the experience that I've gained on this farm to challenge and inspire students to work toward solving the food and farm related problems that I couldn't solve by myself.

Our farm is now for sale. It will be very difficult to leave our incredible community, and it will be equally difficult to leave all our loyal customers and friends who've supported us through our ups and downs. You all have my sincerest thanks, and I promise to work hard in Vermont to promote sustainable farming.

2017 was an odd year for the farm. It was the year I came to grips with the realization that I needed a full-time source of off-farm income, yet it was also our most profitable year by a large margin. It included what seemed like insurmountable losses from mowed wheat and unsold beef, yet everything worked out in the end. Doom, gloom, and optimism all share place at the table on this small-scale farm.

The big reason we had such a profitable year was that we got out of the pig breeding business. The breeders that we sold off and the few that we butchered provided a nice cash infusion, and with so many less piggy mouths to feed, our feed expense was only $2000 this year. This resulted in a $2500 operating income for the pig business. We also butchered more beeves than ever before, four, and they came in heavier than I expected, averaging more than 430 lbs. I had over-purchased hay in previous years, so I didn't need to buy any cattle feed at all, resulting in about $1500 of operating income from each steer. I held back one steer that was ready to be butchered due to lack of sales, which could have theoretically boosted our income even more. The beef business has been the most successful source of income for us after 6 years of experimentation, but it is still very contingent on being able to sell what we produce at the price we need to pay ourselves a fair wage. It is also somewhat limited by the difficulty in dealing with custom-exempt butchering. I could see growing the beef business to 10-15 head per year which could net us between $10,000 to $25,000, but finding 30-50 customers would be a major difficulty for us. Even with that income, I'd still need to work part or full-time off the farm.

Even though our wheat was mowed and did not re-grow with much vigor, the offending party paid us $1200 for the loss which mostly covered our expenses and allowed the wheat experiment to be a financial wash. Our EQIP fencing/manure pad grant was a wash as well, although it should start to pay out for us in 2018. We had the usual small expenses as well, but we managed to keep most of our expenses to a minimum and ended up with a net profit of $7,789. I probably averaged about 15 hours/week on the farm over the course of the year, which works out to a little less than $10/hour. Not bad, but also still nowhere near my goal of $20/hour. 

It will be interesting to see where the next few years take us and the farm. I'm keeping an open mind, and looking for opportunities that allow me to build on the skills that I've developed over the last 6 years. My hunch is that it will involve more collaboration and less solo-farming as I've definitely learned I can't do it all on my own!

A commenter in a previous post asked me to provide more detail into how I would envision a 15 sow breeding operation, which I threw out as the smallest operation I'd be willing to start with if I ever got back into breeding. I took some time and ran the numbers using my existing business planning models, and came up with some interesting results. First, here are the big assumptions: I can get feed delivered at $400/ton, I average 8 pigs per litter that survive to butchering age and they hang at 145 pounds at 7 months, I get 2 litters per year per sow, and my cost of labor is $19.15/hour. The other big variable is the price I can get on a butcher pig. This year I sold them at $4.10/lb based on hanging weight, but I would need to sell 240 pigs a year with 15 sows and I know that I could never sell that many at that price using the custom butcher low-investment marketing approach that I have used for the last six years. Actually selling the pigs is the biggest real world issue, but in this scenario I'm going to assume that I can sell all 240 pigs at $3.39/lb which gives me a 10% profit margin per pig. I'm also assuming that after a few years I get to to a steady sow/boar replacement schedule and that I can sell a sow for $625 and that replacement breeders cost me $150. 

In this scenario, I would make a profit of $29,217/year and the cost of labor would be $36,922. I'm estimating labor at 1928 hours per year, which is about a full time job, so I could theoretically do all the labor myself and make $66,140/year. That's pretty good at first glance, but there are some big issues with this scenario. First, I would need about $32,000 to cover feed costs before I sold a single pig, and I'd need about $4500 to acquire high quality weaned breeding stock. There is also no way I could keep 120 butcher pigs in my current barn during the winter when they can't be on pasture, so I'd need to invest in a winter housing area which I'm assuming would cost about $40,000 for a simple hoop structure. So I'd be looking at about $80,000 in investment needed to get this off the ground, and that $80,000 investment would be contingent on the breeding assumptions I laid out at the top and being able to sell every pig at $3.39/lb. Let's say that I found I couldn't find buyers at that price and I had to start lowering the price. at $3/lb I'd be down to $16,000 in profit, and at $2.50/lb I'd be losing money. The commenter who inspired this post advertises pork at $2.75/lb and at that price I'd make $7200 in profit. I might be able to scrape by doing all the labor myself, but if I wanted to grow the business the low profit margin would necessitate me growing it much bigger very fast (sounds like the typical commerical pig model).

I don't have enough money laying around to take these kinds of personal financial risks, and I lack the marketing and sales skills to feel confident that I could sell all 240 pigs each year. There are also lots of other costs that I'm probably not capturing in my simple model, but it's a reasonable starting point and shows how difficult it can be to create a pig breeding farm business from scratch!

This website has been MIA for the last few weeks--unbeknownst to me! I transferred my domain service provider about a month ago but I did not set up all the settings correctly. This caused the website to go down and I didn't catch it until a few days ago. If you sent me an e-mail recently it got lost in the ether. It's good to be back!

It's surreal to have so few animals around the farm right now. Our current census is two steers, a hen, and a rooster. We had more individual animals back in 2010 at our suburban home in Shoreline! While the lack of animals makes it feel less like a busting farm around here, it is better for our bottom line. We're on a track to have our most profitable year by a wide margin. If you've followed this blog, you know that the biggest financial problem we faced over the years was the lack of consistency in litter size for our breeding sows. With some time to reflect, I have a better understanding of what went wrong. 

I started off my pig breeding adventure the way I imagine a lot of folks start out: with a breeding pair. My thought was that it was a relatively low risk investment and that I could use the offspring to grow the herd. This, I now realize, was a recipe for disaster. 

The problem that I think I failed to grasp was the need for genetic diversity. I started off with a single breed, The Large Black Hog, and initially planned on only raising that breed. I was swayed by some of the material I was reading at the time espousing the benefits of heritage breeds and also trying to replicate the examples of other farmers I followed online. I initially had good farrowing success with the original pair and kept the best gilts to raise as breeders. I ran into an economy of scale issue right away though: I couldn't afford to bring in a second boar to minimize inbreeding and thus bred the gilts back to their father. A lot of online materials I read said that this was an acceptable practice, and some even called it "line breeding." In hindsight, I realize that I turned a blind eye to the materials that discouraged inbreeding because I couldn't economically justify the husbandry practices that would minimize it. This is a common theme for me (and I think many beginning farmers): I wanted something to be true to fit the narrative that was in my head, and thus I gravitated toward the information that supported that narrative and discounted other information. 

I never experienced adequate litter sizes from any of the offspring of that first pair, and I was very slow to make changes to my husbandry plan. I wanted to bring in outside genetic material, but couldn't find reputable local breeders of Large Black Hogs (One of the lessons here is that if one is going to stick to a single breed, there needs to be an adequate supply of breeding material locally. Rare/threatened breeds are thus a poor choice based on that metric). I eventually decided that cross-breeding heritage breeds was "okay" and brought in a Berkshire sow, but by that time, the damage to my herd was already done. With 6 sows and 2 boars, I was too big to justify continued failure and money losses, but I was still too small to be able to really address the problem. 

In the end, I think I made a couple big mistakes: 1. I got too caught up in the idea of specific heritage breeds and was too reluctant to consider other options, 2. I embraced inbreeding when I knew in my gut that it was a bad practice, and 3. I didn't try to achieve a large enough scale quickly enough. This last point is a big lesson for me, as it goes against my conservative economic nature. I was afraid to make a big investment in breeding stock because I was afraid I couldn't sell hundreds of pork shares/weaner pigs a year. I may have been correct to fear my inability to sell the pork, but in the end my lack of scale and genetic diversity became a self fulfilling path to failure as well. 

If I was going to do it all over again, I would wait to make sure I had adequate cash, housing, and customers before I got into pig breeding. And if I got into breeding, I would start with at least 15 sows and 2 unrelated boars. Financial risk and farming go hand in hand (or should I say hoof and hoof?!)

I finished my last meat delivery of the year yesterday, and it always feels good to have all the invoices sent out and all the risk removed. One thing I noticed in this year's beef was the large difference between the three dairy breed steers and the meat breed steer. The beef breed is on the left (angus I think) and the dairy breed (Holstein) is on the right. I bottle fed the dairy steer after receiving him as a day old bull last spring and I purchased the beef steer from a farmer who had bottle fed him after his cow died after birth. They were both the same age (20 months) and they both received the same diet, but the beef steer hung at 516 lbs and the dairy steer at 408 lbs. The other two dairy steers were within 10 lbs of the one in the photo. I was expecting a difference, but I was surprised that it was so large. The dairy steers were in good condition at slaughter, with lots of fat, but the amount of fat on the beef steer was considerably more. We have some meat from both animals in our freeze and we'll be doing taste tests to see how the two breeds compare!

I'll be honest. It has been a bit of a depressing 2017 for me. After resigning my position at the Puget Sound Food Hub in January, I spent the next nine months looking for a new job. With the farm idled down to a 10 hour/week job, this left a lot of time to get increasingly frustrated and depressed. On top of that, in early June, the farmer my neighbor uses to mow part of their land for hay accidentally mowed the 2 acres of Edison wheat I'd planted in May. This did not help my mood. It looked like a total loss, but the early signs of good news appeared about a month later when the wheat managed to regrow and actually send up some seed heads.

The news got better slowly as I started to get some job interviews, but those were followed by an equal number of rejections. I started to wonder if the PhD I finished in 2011 had doomed me to being overqualified. My daily farm chores helped to keep my sane, but it was hard to feel positive and thus I couldn't muster the motivation to blog. My brain is at its best when it's constantly trying to tackle new challenges, and all the challenges felt out of my control.

I was able to get some relief when my neighbor allowed me to test out the combine for the first time on a cover crop of rye/vetch that he had let go to seed in August. After immediately running over a wooden post and spending a couple hours to figure out why the machine wasn't working, I found the offending post and proceeded to pull about 700 pounds of seed off a 1/2 acre. Success!

The wheat was ready to harvest in the 2nd week of September, and although there was more clover (planted with the wheat to provide a field ready cover crop for winter) than wheat, the combine made quick work of the 2 acres and yielded about 900 pounds of grain.

The news got better when I was finally offered a job a few days after finishing the wheat, and I'm happy to announce that I'm now working for Skagit County helping to coordinate agricultural programs. I should be well positioned to help support the local ag community and have time to continue expanding my seed and grain business in the upcoming years. We'll also be celebrating the wheat harvest by cleaning and milling the grain using (extremely) antique equipment that has been stored in my neighbor's barn for 30 years. Please join us on October 21st from noon to seven p.m. at the farm (you can find more details on our Facebook page). 

I still plan to share more of the lessons I've learned over the last 6 years, especially now that my mood is improving as I get back into a routine. Thank you all for sticking with me over the course of this wild farm ride. In the end, it's the community of supportive folks that has made it all worth it!

My big farm project for this year is progressing nicely. We are using 2 acres of our neighbors land at Blanchard Mountain Farm to grow Edison hard white spring wheat that we sourced from Finn River Farm. The Edison variety has a pretty cool backstory, as it was developed by an English professor in his Bellingham backyard over the course of 20+ years. It was not easy to find a small-scale source of organic wheat that didn't cost an arm and a leg (I was looking into shipping seed from Maine for over $1.50/lb with shipping before I hooked up with Finn River). It's been a bit of a neighborhood effort to get it planted, as I've relied on my neighbor and his tractor for tillage work and I borrowed a seeder from another farm down the road. We got it planted last Saturday, which is fairly late in the spring to plant wheat, but the folks at Finn River assured me they had success planting late in the last few years and that this variety ripens fast. Time will tell!

The field we are using this year is exceptionally well drained for our area, but it did have a cover crop of rye and vetch that was a bit of a challenge to till. We chose not to plow the crop in, and instead disked followed by a light tilling. This left a lot of plant material near the surface which hopefully won't be too much of a detriment to our seeding success. I'm already seeing buttercup coming back in the field, so it will be a race to see if the wheat can grow fast enough to smother most of the weeds. We are going to certify this crop this year so we definitely will be following only organic procedures.

I'm been running the combine every month or so to keep the engine maintained, and gave it a full oil change (the filter hadn't been changed since 1996) about a month ago. I've gone over everything that I can see on it and it looks to all be in good working order. I had to take the header off to fit it in the barn so it will be interesting to get it all back together in August. A bearing on the alternator is also screaming, so I will be changing that out as well. I'm not willing to pour huge amounts of money in to this machine, so I'm mostly keeping my fingers crossed that it will work out. I have several parts machines in the area that I can draw from, which will help if and when a breakdown occurs.

I'm going to overseed the field with red clover this week, then follow up with an application of organic fertilizer to give the plants the nitrogen they need to get good protein content. It's going to cost me about $1500 before we even harvest to get everything ready, so it will be very interesting to see our final yield. I'm setting my hopes very low, and would be happy with just 1000 lbs/acre. All in all, it's been a lot of fun to do this experiment this year and I'll be keeping you posted on our success as the year rolls along.

A 10 day vacation to Maui can cure a lot of the winter ills! I'm back, and I'm ready to start planning for 2017. The evolution of the farm continues, and my time away helped my thoughts to coalesce. Here are a few directions I'm interested in going forward, in no particular order.

1. Small grain and seed growing. I bought this 1969 John Deere 95 combine in December after it appeared on Craigslist. I can't really justify the purchase other than it was offered at a good price, it is in excellent condition, and I have always wanted a combine after trying to grow my own barley 5 years ago (my naivete in that post is truly comical!). I bought the combine with my personal cash (not the farm's) and I have no illusion of ever making money from it. It is purely something I want to do as a hobby. There is a lot of local hub-bub around small grains and it will be fun to get involved with it at some level.

2. Farm Education and Research. I've gained a lot of experience in the last 5 years, and while the experience slowly sucked the optimism out of me regarding farming at small-scales, I don't want that experience to go to waste. My opinion is that we are spending a great deal of money both locally and nationally to support an unrealistic ideal of profitable small-farming. (see programs like Cultivating Success. My experience with the Puget Sound Food Hub in 2016 has really given me a good feel for what it takes to be a financially sustainable farm. I want to continue to use this blog to help share some of my thoughts, but I'd also like to branch out and try to educate and influence through other forms, such as research grants (I will probably apply for a KCD grant again this year), and perhaps even a book (I feel like it's cliche to write a book after a few years of farming, but I think I have a unique enough perspective that it might be worth my time). Time will tell.

3. Beef only. In my previous posts I've written about ending our pig breeding operation, and I'm still on track to make that a reality. Calf raising is not going to make me rich, but it is a pretty sure fire way to keep the farm going while ensuring a small amount of extra income. We are raising 5 steers this year and I anticipate getting 5-10 additional calves in the next few months to bottle feed.

4. EQIP Fencing. I applied and was successfully awarded an NRCS EQIP grant for perimeter fencing for my land and my neighbor's land (which I rent). My neighbor and I are going to install the fencing this year ourselves, and that will take a good chunk of time. I'm really looking forward to the peace of mind that I will get when I don't have to worry about animals escaping onto the busy Chuckanut Drive.

I think that about sums it up. Thanks for your continued support of our farm as we evolve with the never ending waves of challenges!

It's been an eternity since I last posted. My heart just hasn't been in it as of late, and I needed to take some time off. I've been spending a lot of time this year thinking about and working with farms, and a great deal of internal processing needed to happen to help me figure out where my thinking was going to land. I think some of those thoughts are starting to solidify, and I do want to share them, but I'm still deciding on the best venue and the best time.

My 2016 has been dominated by my job at the Puget Sound Food Hub, which is coming to an end at the end of 2016 (not the hub, just my position within the hub). The job gave me an incredible opportunity to help build an institution to support the regional food system, and it helped me to meet nearly every small to medium farm in the area. In the end, the actual nuts and bolts of the job weren't that satisfying to me and I'm choosing to end the position.

In terms of how 2016 worked out for Thoughtful Food, it's been a mixed bag. We had the same, seemingly never ending dissapointments and challenges, but I also gained a great deal of wisdom this year. We even made a $200 profit!

The facts of the matter are that after 5 years and at least 5000 hours of work, I'm getting to the point where I'm no longer satisfied making little to no money. I've always treated this farm as a business and thus as a job, and I've come to learn just how difficult it is to start and maintain a profitable farm business starting from nothing. I now know of a few successful farms in the area, and they do not look anything like mine.

The problem is: I'm still terribly addicted to farming, so I'm not about to give it up. I'm just willing to accept that it will never be more than a part-time hobby business for me, and that while it can be profitable, in order to make a profit I need to make some hard decisions and get rid of some money losing operations. First and foremost, I'm saddened to say, is the pig breeding operation. It was the first thing we started with, and it has been the only thing that has been constant through the last 5 years, but in the end, it costs us several thousand dollars each year to keep the pigs. Our litters have been consistently variable, but on average they have been much smaller than what I've figured needs to be profitable. In addition, the summer born piglets that I was hoping to sell as weaners have been difficult to move, and it is not a business that I see much growth potential. The garlic has also been a bust, succumbing to disease the last two years. Mostly, I've learned that there is little room for creativity in the farm world. Economic forces have helped to show what grows well in an area, and if you aren't growing those things, you are probably going to fail. 

I have been quite pleased with our beef sales: Bottle raising calves involves a fair amount of labor, but it is fairly low risk and we have had no problem selling our beef shares. My plan is to grow the beef herd next year while finding a way to reduce or eliminate the pig herd. In the end, I need to look at the bottom line and continue my commitment to treating this farm as a sustainable business.

I'm looking forward to the promise of 2017 and I hope I can find a way to rekindle a bit of the spark that got me interested in farming. It hasn't fully extinguished, but it sure is dampered down at the moment. Happy New Year!