Compare Income to Cost, and you'll see that we lost about $4000 this year. Our goal was to break even, but we came up a bit short. The big reasons:
1. We expected more honey production this year. Losing four of of the five hives we started in the spring put a big damper in our honey plans. We had hoped to bring in $500-$1000 from honey.
2. Feed costs started skyrocketing in the summer, significantly cutting into our profits.
3. We had hoped to sell 50 baskets, but could only sell 25 and had to sell the rest of the turkeys individually. If we had sold all 50, that would have been about $2000 more income.
4. I was expecting the pigs to average 200 lbs hanging weight at 6 months and the turkeys to average 12.5 pounds at slaughter. Instead, our pigs averaged 164lbs and the turkeys 10lbs.
5. Lots of little costs crept in that we hadn't planned for. For instance, I didn't budget for new boots, gloves, and work clothes, but I desperately needed those as my old stuff wore out. Embarrasingly, I didn't budget for fuel (tractors, tillers, and trucks don't run for free).
So, we learned a valuable lesson: be more pessimistic in business planning than you think is necessary.
Overall, we spent about 1185 hours working the farm this year (a bit more in reality as I didn't account for hours spent blogging). That works out to an average of 22 hours per week. This was manageable with my 20 hour/week University of Washington job, and I could have probably cut the time down a bit cutting out a few projects that didn't make me any money (like the barley project for instance). 60 hours per week is the absolute max I ever want to work the farm, and I'd prefer to stay in the 50 hours/week range. It's important to have time off, and working 12 hour days seven days a week will burn me out in a hurry.
We're going to make some changes next year based on these economics and the big picture things we've learned this year, but I'll leave that discussion to another post.