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!

Five years! This farm is having an anniversary, and it's a good time for some good, old fashioned reflection. This year has been a challenging one for me, not so much in terms of technical difficulty (although there has been that), but in terms of my emotional attitude. You may have noticed that my blogging frequency has dropped off precipitously, and that is not coincidental. Part of the joy of the farm and blogging for me has been the excitement, wonder and optimism of starting a new business and really trying to make it work. This is the year I've come to the conclusion that this farm will likely never be a "real" business in the sense that it can contribute significantly to our financial well being. It's not all doom and gloom though, so read on.

The writing on the wall appeared in late May when the first rust pustules started to form on the garlic. By late June, the garlic stand was a shriveled, brown and black mess of fungal spores. The fungi hit last year as well, but it hit harder this year, resulting in stressed plants and small bulbs unmarketable as seed. After spending more than a thousand hours of labor and $1000 in investment over the last 2 years, I was left with a hundred pounds or so of small garlic bulbs, an organic producer certificate, and a tired body and mind. I had tried to do something unique, I had tried to find a niche market, and I had failed. This was not the first time, but I decided it will be the last time.

The garlic was my last great effort to find a revenue stream that could prop up the farm business and allow me to stay small-scale. The livestock side of the operation can still be profitable, but it requires a fairly massive scale-up in order to provide the revenue I need to farm full-time. I have been able to find buyers for 10-15 pigs a year and 3 steers without too much effort, but I'd need to increase that by twenty-fold to approach a full-time salary. Our new barn is great for our current scale, and I can probably increase the amount of steers to 10 or so over winter and maybe 10-15 pigs overwinter, but anything more and I would want another barn. And then I'd want hay equipment, and a new tractor, and employees, and a manure lagoon, and on and on. If I could even raise the money, the amount of debt and risk I'd need to take on would be more than this conservative fellow is willing take.

Starting this farm has been a great experiment. It's been incredibly rewarding, but it has also only been through luck and circumstance that I've been able to treat it as a 20-30 hour week (on average) job for the last 5 years. Both my full time working wife and my extremely flexible part-time job at the University of Washington made it work. As I've written before, the farm has been a big money loser for the last 5 years--and that's without accounting for the thousands of hours of my free labor. In the end, the challenge of starting a profitable farm business from scratch is just too difficult for me to surmount.

So where does that leave me and the farm? Surprisingly, in a good place. The farm isn't going away, but I am going to dial it back a bit. We are going to continue to raise breeding pigs and bottle feed steers, but that is probably going to be all we do for the time being. I still get a lot of enjoyment of having the animals on the farm, and raising animals with a focus on humane treatment was what got me started in farming. I may not be able to make a big impact on the food system, but at least I can provide humane meat options for a few people a year. I may not make much money, but I will still try and I will keep you informed of of my efforts. I'm pretty good at raising animals after 5 years, so I will play to my strengths and let the detail oriented folks of the world handle the complexities of vegetable production. I'm also transitioning away from my forestry research position at the University of Washington and starting a new job at the Puget Sound Food Hub. The Food Hub job is similar to running a farm in a lot of ways--it's a low salary job with tough hours and immense financial challenges--but it is at least a guaranteed pay check and minimal risk for me. I get a lot of the same personal rewards that I get out of farming and have the potential to make an even bigger impact.

In the end, I'm in a good place, but just not the place I may have optimistically hoped for 5 years ago. That is neither surprising or disappointing.

Most posting frequency is starting to plummet, so I wanted to give a quick update. I've taken a second  job as the warehouse manager for the Puget Sound Food Hub, which is very exciting and also very time consuming. I'm basically busier than I've ever been, and it's becoming more difficult to want to do anything other than relax at the end of the day. I'm still doing all the normal farm activities as well, so don't worry that the farm is going away. I may need to do slight adjustments to priorities and foci over the next year, but the farm will definitely stick around. The Food Hub job has me working directly with many different farmers around the region, so in some ways it feels like an extension of farm work and farm life.

Lastly, a quick reminder that we have our annual pig roast coming up next Saturday. Check our Facebook page for more details!

(and it's not even summer yet!)

Our two initial breeding Large Black Hogs were slaughtered on the farm today. There was a definitely a tinge of sadness to it all, as these two pigs have been with me from the very beginning of the farm. Some of the memories came flooding back: chasing around the pigs for two hours when I picked them up in Yelm with no clue of how to move or manage pigs, swimming out to the boar to try and give him a dry island in the big flood we experienced when we lived in Monroe, the first litter we had on the farm and my friends coming out to see and hole the first piglets, and of course, the time I got rammed head on by the boar when I tried to get into the pig house when another sow was in heat. As the farm slowly grows, I start to see the hogs less as individuals and more as a herd, which also means I "get to know" each pig a little less well. A good day for reflection.

It's been far too long since my last blog post, so let's get back into the habit. I have become massively busy over the last few weeks and I even managed to fit in a trip to Yellowstone to see real grazers in action.

But with a week of 60 degree weather, the spring is in full swing. In between weeding garlic, I've been trying to reflect on the farm as it matures into its 5th year. We tried so many things thus far that didn't stick: turkeys, Thanksgiving-centric crops, market garden, pumpkin patch, and pastured rabbits. We've stuck with breeding pigs since the beginning and after another farrowing season, I'm starting to seriously question if breeding pigs deserve to be a long term part of the business.

At the moment, we have 5 sows, 2 boars, and 15 piglets on the farm. In order to make the pig business viable and meet our projections, we need to average at least 6 pigs that survive to weaning per sow. The year got off to a great start with a first-time sow who farrowed 11 piglets (of which all survived). The second sow was the oldest, and she farrowed at least 6, but only one survived the first week. The third sow farrowed 8, but only 3 survived. Our two remaining sows have not farrowed, and are probably not pregnant. They both had litters last year.

Our new barn helped a lot this year in allowing us to create roomy pens where the sows could construct their nests without being bothered by the other pigs, and as a result, we had very few crushing deaths of piglets. The piglets that did die were either runts, stillborn, or just seemed to die for no reason after a few days. I'm at a bit of a loss as to why we're having such breeding problems. One theory is that inbreeding is a big problem: we started with two purebred Large Black Hogs. They were supposed to be genetically dissimilar, but I've come to be very skeptical of how dissimilar two purebred animals can really be when the population of the bred in the United States is so low. We've saved four gilts from the original pairing: one died at about 10 months old for unknown reasons, one we sold because she wouldn't become pregnant, one is the sow he had only 3 pigs survive this spring, and the other sow is one of the ones not pregnant. The Berkshire gilt that we brought in 3 years ago has performed better, and the first gilt we saved from the cross of her and our original Boar is the gilt he farrowed 11 piglets. Unfortunately, the original Berkshire sow is now one of the 2 who appears to be infertile.

My general plan going forward was to continue to bring in new gilts from off the farm to increase genetic diversity, encourage hybrid vigor, and form a basis to aid selection, but at the moment, I'm faced with the need to cull the 2 infertile sows, the old sow, and potentially the other sow who had only 3 piglets. Aggressive culling is key to rapid genetic improvement, but it is another set back on the slow ramp to a financially successful herd size. The need to purchase several gilts from off farm and the potential unprofitable sales of the culled sows means another year of the pig business losing (significant) money.

Thus, I face a dilemma. Do I take this opportunity to sell off the rest of the herd and get out of the pig business, leaving the garlic and calf raising business, or do I persevere with pigs and take the losses? I'm not sure what to choose, but I know I need to choose soon. Every day I put about $15 of feed into the breeding pigs with no financial benefit.

With spring just around the corner, it's about time for my annual reflection on the state of the farm. This year's reflection also coincides with the year anniversary of the fire, and it's wonderful to be stable with a positive outlook going into this year's growing season.

Overall, the new infrastructure is wonderful. We have a spacious structure that comfortably houses all the pigs and steers and makes it easy to set up farrowing pens. If there was one area to be improved, it would be winter water management. As you can see in the picture, it gets wet here in the winter. We're only 5 feet above sea level, and the water table in the winter ranges between 0 and 6 inches below the surface. Even if I could keep rain from blowing in from the open sides of the barn, surface water would seep in during the wettest times of the year. This has caused about 1/3 shed part of the barn (the part that you are looking at in the photo above) to be underwater or very muddy and wet most of the winter. I'm not sure how to best rectify the situation. I spread 50 yards of wood chips in the fall, and while it has helped, it wasn't enough material to keep the barn above water. Luckily, the other parts of the barn are dry and I continually add new hay as additional bedding and to sop up manure. One option would be to put in a concrete slab, but that is expensive and won't affect rain that blows in. I will keep thinking about it, as I want to be able to use every last square inch of space in the barn.

Farrowing has been the easiest it's ever been this year. I made simple pens out of recycled panels and penned in the sows about a week before they farrowed. I give them plenty of hay and let them build a nest. The picture above is about a week after farrowing, and it's amazing the amount of mess that make in a week, but the system works well. Next year I want to put a nipple waterer in each pen so I don't have to lug 5 gallon buckets of water twice a day. I also want to put an actual gate on each pen. At the moment, I've just tied the ends of two panels together, which is cheap, but it makes getting in and out of the pen difficult. Sows can aggressively protect their piglets, and I want to be able to escape. It will also be nice to put in a more permanent feeder in the pens that the sows can't easily knock over. As you can see, this sow made a mess after a week. Castration was the most straightforward it's ever been, as I just lured the sow out of the pen, then closed it back up, climbed in, and castrated the pigs. As each one was castrated, we put it on the outside of the pen so it could reunite with mom. A more sturdy, permanent pen, though will be safer, as I don't doubt that certain sows would destroy these cheapo pens as currently constructed.

The second sow to farrow this year did fine, but she only delivered 3 piglets alive (2 were stillborn and there appeared to be some undeveloped or aborted small tissue as well). She was our first sow, and she is about 6 years old now. Her first few litters were large, but the last three have been 3 or less. I probably would have culled her last year if I hadn't been so distracted by the reconstruction, but this year will unfortunately be her last on the farm. Another sow is currently penned and ready to farrow at any second. The remaining 2 sows are problematic. One keeps going back into heat, so I'm assuming that she is infertile. She farrowed last summer with a normal sized litter, but I guess this might be the end of the road. She is the Berkshire that we added a few years ago. The remaining sow is a 2 year old Large Black that has been lame for the last 2 weeks. She might be pregnant, but she's not close to farrowing yet, and she is not walking well at all.  I might be forced to cull 3 sows this year, which is a big loss, but I can't afford to keep sows around that can't consistently wean 8 piglets a litter twice a year. We will likely keep a gilt from the first litter of the year and perhaps a boar as well, as we will be culling our older boar as well this year (see this post for more info on him). I want to add at least 1 gilt from another farm, as well, but I want to be very picky. I've learned a lot about evaluating pigs over the last 5 years, and I'm a bit smarter about what to look for. My only caveat is that I want the new pig to be a heritage breed. Cross-breeding has worked very well for us thus far and it is the only way to go as far as I'm concerned.

The steers have been rock solid this year. I feed them and water them twice a day. I do about 2 minutes of manure cleanup a few times a week, and that's all the work required. I built a simple slat feeder for them, but they still waste some hay and that waste hay acts as litter to keep their manure in check. They will probably be standing a foot higher in the spring then they started in the fall, but they are dry and relatively clean. I'll probably turn them out to pasture in another month depending on weather.

The driest areas of the pasture have already experienced significant growth, but there isn't enough consistent growth to let them out. Manure runoff and soil damage is also a major concern.

I still have plenty of hay, so there is no rush to get them out of the barn. I figure I'll have about 100 bales left at the end of the year after starting with about 350.

At this point, all the garlic is up and out of the ground. As you can see, the raised beds are absolutely necessary to deal with the surface water from the winter rains.

The small section of this row in the picture above seems to be the only area where it was too wet. A garlic autopsy showed that the cloves simply didn't sprout--likely suffocating from lack of oxygen.

I don't have a good picture, but I can now comment on the results of my experiment of overseeding the planted garlic with organic oat seed. I seeded in to pulses: one in the first week of October and one in the third seek of October. I put about 15 pounds of seed over about eight 4 ft x 100 ft rows all together to give you an idea of my seeding rate. I broadcast the seed then lightly raked it in. From my observations, more than half of the sprouted oats were eaten by rabbits (some of the seed was probably eaten by birds and rabbits as well). The sprouts that survived in the early October planting actually grew quite well, and although I did not get a very dense canopy, they were sufficiently large to act as a mulch had they been dense enough. The late October planting sprouted but basically didn't grow. About 90% of the plants that sprouted and survived the rabbits winterkilled, while about 10% is still alive and green today. My interpretation is that I could see oats working as a green mulch if I could get all my garlic in early October and I seeded at 4 to 5 times the rate that I applied seed this year. The 25 lb bag of oats cost me $39 with shipping. It's hard for me to see that oats could be consistently effective enough to warrant the cost, but perhaps I'll try again with a higher seeding rate.

We've also been working on a very soft rollout of the garlic business. We chose the name Chuckanut Organic Garlic, and the website has been up for a little over a month. I'm building the website myself, and I've slowly been adding to it as I have time. I wanted to get it up early so that I could start to have it show up in google searches. We also had an article published in the local Grow Northwest magazine in January and I wanted to take advantage of the publicity to at least mention the website.

There are still a lot of unknowns with the garlic business, but everything looks positive thus far. The plants look good, the barn is set up for processing, and our organic certification will be finished soon.

The farm is definitely on a positive trajectory at the moment. We continue to have our struggles here and there, be it a sick pig or a puddle of mud, but something are just out of our control. Here's to a grand 2016 growing season for all!

With the first gilt about to farrow, I think it's about time to finalize our farm financial plan for 2016 and set the pork and beef prices. Every year I get a little better at planning, and this year is no exception. In the first few years I was overly optimistic about everything, but I've learned my lessons the hard way over the years. I'm also attempting to accurately track all my labor costs and adjust my prices accordingly. I've got a fairly good handle on the labor involved in raising pigs and steers, but the garlic business is still a bit of a black box. I tracked all my time last fall during processing, but I still need to estimate times for cultivation, harvesting, and drying. I also don't really know what to expect in terms of the labor and other costs involved in getting the processed, cleaned bulbs into the mail and delivered to customers.

As far as the important numbers, I'm assessing a labor cost in 2016 of $19.15/hour, which is a $0.15 raise/hour from 2015. I just called Conway Feed and I was told to expect pig feed costs to drop substantially this year. They quoted me a current delivered cost to me of $350/ton, which is about $70 less than I have been paying. Since I have already fed the breeding pigs with the more expensive feed, (and their costs over the last 4 months are already incorporated),  I'm assuming an average cost of $400/ton for pig feed in my projections. This also gives some wiggle room if prices go up again in the next 9 months. Bull and steer prices were very high last year, and it cost me $700 to buy a 6 month old steer and $300 to buy three day old bulls. Thus, this year, beef is going to be a little more expensive than pork. Pork is going to cost less than last year, at $3.71/pound, while beef will cost $4.05/pound. Below you'll see the spreadsheet I used to factor in all the costs for 2016. The excel version is linked below.

There are some issues with this financial plan which will likely result in us making less than the projected $13,340 this year. First, I project that I need to sell weaner pigs at $170 each in order to make my target. $150 is the most I've ever sold them in the past, and I'm looking at needing to sell 30 this year. There probably won't be the demand to sell that number at $170. My cost (break even point) is $78 per weaner, so I have some room to lower the price, but I don't want to get in the habit of lowering my prices by cutting the amount of money I pay myself for labor. If I ever need to hire on help, I can't tell an employee to take $5/hour. I will see how this year goes and re-evaluate the weaner side of the business after 2016.

I've also calculated my labor costs for pigs and steers based on what I consider to be a sustainable number of animals. Since so much of my summer labor costs revolve around rotating animals on pasture, labor costs are smaller on a per animal basis the more animals I have. For pigs, I calculated my costs based on 10 sows (we currently have 5) and for steers I assumed 10 (we currently have 3). To illustrate the difference, my estimated summer labor costs for a single steer with 3 head is $328 while it is only $99 with 10 head. I believe the current barn can support 10 steers and 12 breeding pigs over the winter and I also think that is a good sustainable number of animals for me to reach. I don't think it's fair to charge you my actual costs if I'm keeping less animals than would otherwise be efficient. It is only our desire to be cautious and grow slowly that is keeping us from getting to those higher number more quickly. Lastly, the profitability of the garlic is fairly uncertain. On paper, it seems like it will be very profitable, but I don't trust my on paper projections. I'm either missing some important costs, I'm overestimating the demand, or some combination. It will be exciting to see how 2016 plays out for the garlic, though. All the bulbs are peaking through the soil now, and the crop looks good thus far.

The numbers are crunched, the bills are paid, and a new year is upon is. It's time for the financial year in review.

Calculating revenue was a bit tricky this year, because we received so many donations that helped us rebuild the barn. We decided to put donations where the checks were made out directly to the farm into the farm account, hence the $945 figure. Other than those monies, the rest of our revenue was very simple to figure out: we sold 2 steers for $4,160 in revenue, 10 butcher pigs for $5,762 in revenue, five weaner pigs for $750 in revenue, and collected $225 for 9 deliveries of pork and beef. Given the stress of the barn rebuild, we're glad to have sold anything this year and are grateful to our customers and neighbors who supported us.

Expenses are more complicated, as they tend to be. The biggest piece of the pie is animal feed, of which the vast majority is pig feed (Hay is lumped in as well, which was about $1800 for about 300 square bales. The other big expenses were the three new steers at $1349, a load of wood chips for bedding at $877, our 5 acres of land rent (both part of 2014's rent and all of 2015's rent got counted in 2015), and small tools and equipment (a lot of which were replacement tools from the fire loss). Of note, we have not accounted for any of our labor, which is something that is going to change in the next year. A good deal of labor went into weeding, harvest, processing, and planting garlic, but almost no direct cash expenses.

All in all, we still lost money in 2015, albeit less than any other year at $1411. Add this to a loss of $2915 in 2014, $4425 in 2013, $4000 in 2012, and $4100 in 2011 and you can see that it's taken us a little less than $17,000 of personal investment to get the farm to its current state. I also bought and rebuilt a tractor using my personal money for about $3500, so let's just give the cost of starting the farm at an even $20,000. Clearly, farming is a terrible investment!

Even though the cost outlay has been significant, it's still less than the cost of one year of post-secondary education. Part of our journey has certainly been making and learning from mistakes, and we also dealt with that pesky fire last year as well. I think I would have thought twice if I knew it would cost me $20,000 to get a farm started 5 years ago, but I can't say that I regret any of it now. For those in a similar position to 2011 me, desperately wanting to start a farm, I hope our experience can be a bit of a guide to the realities of any farm business. We have made it work thus far because we went into farming with 1. money in the bank, 2. jobs and educations that gave us flexibility to farm but also enough income to survive without falling into poverty, 3. a combination of 1 and 2, as we were able to buy a farm property because of our sound financial footing, and 4. an obsessive desire to make the farm work. At this moment, I don't think I'd recommend owning and running a farm to anyone starting out who isn't in a similar financial situation to me from 5 years ago. Rather, if you want to farm, go work on a farm. You'll get the same experience but without the financial and responsibility related stress. You will make terrible money, but instead of making -$20,000, you'll actually at least make minimum wage. If you read all this and still want to try owning a farm from scratch, no one is going to stop you, so good luck!

My next blog post will be a financial preview of 2016 (spoiler: we will probably make money this year). I look forward to continue to share the nitty gritty financial details of our farm adventure. Thanks again to all who helped us through 2015.