Final Day
The pork and beef are at the butcher. Winter is coming. The fields are put to bed. It's time to start the reflection process for 2013.
This post is first impressions because I'm still wrapping my head around what to make of this year. It started off with a farm purchase and a move, included a hastily thrown together vegetable plots, saw the arrival of beef for the first time, included several unforseen animal deaths, and ended with lowered prices but sold out pork.
This post is first impressions because I'm still wrapping my head around what to make of this year. It started off with a farm purchase and a move, included a hastily thrown together vegetable plots, saw the arrival of beef for the first time, included several unforseen animal deaths, and ended with lowered prices but sold out pork.
Last head scratch
Here are some bullet points that I'll be exploring further in the next few months:
1. Pork was much leaner than last year (a good thing!) but also much smaller than last year (we averaged 120 lbs. hanging weight this year (at 6 months) and 170 lbs last year (6.5 months). My initial figures seem to suggest a very poor feed conversion efficiency.
2. Beef did not put on as much weight as I hoped. Hanging weight on the beef was 340 lbs, and I purchased it at an (estimated) 450 lbs. That's only about 65 lbs. of gain in 6 months.
3. The farmers market was not worth the time. We averaged sales of about $75 per market and were able to connect with one pork customer through the market.
4. Our farmstand did not attract that many customers. Although we live on a busy street, we didn't get that many visitors to our farmstand. We averaged 1-2 people per week, for about $15 in sales or so per week.
5. Related to above: turning the farmstand into a Halloween theme focused on pumpkin and squash sales did not result in many sales.
6. Although I cut our costs to absurdly low levels this year, we're still going to lose money.
7. Word of mouth advertising is by far the best advertising. We sold out on pork by lowering our prices and making a concerted appeal to our supporters, who helped spread the word to their friends.
8. I'm learning more about my strengths and weaknesses. (Strengths: frugality, , growing plants and managing pasture, (Weaknesses: marketing, impatience, frugality).
9. We'll be making changes for 2014, but we're still figuring that out. At every juncture I try to learn from what works and what doesn't, and try to not make the same mistakes twice. Sometimes I need to remind myself that this is only our second year in the farm business, and that there's still room for improvement and growth (otherwise, I would be totally despondent!).
1. Pork was much leaner than last year (a good thing!) but also much smaller than last year (we averaged 120 lbs. hanging weight this year (at 6 months) and 170 lbs last year (6.5 months). My initial figures seem to suggest a very poor feed conversion efficiency.
2. Beef did not put on as much weight as I hoped. Hanging weight on the beef was 340 lbs, and I purchased it at an (estimated) 450 lbs. That's only about 65 lbs. of gain in 6 months.
3. The farmers market was not worth the time. We averaged sales of about $75 per market and were able to connect with one pork customer through the market.
4. Our farmstand did not attract that many customers. Although we live on a busy street, we didn't get that many visitors to our farmstand. We averaged 1-2 people per week, for about $15 in sales or so per week.
5. Related to above: turning the farmstand into a Halloween theme focused on pumpkin and squash sales did not result in many sales.
6. Although I cut our costs to absurdly low levels this year, we're still going to lose money.
7. Word of mouth advertising is by far the best advertising. We sold out on pork by lowering our prices and making a concerted appeal to our supporters, who helped spread the word to their friends.
8. I'm learning more about my strengths and weaknesses. (Strengths: frugality, , growing plants and managing pasture, (Weaknesses: marketing, impatience, frugality).
9. We'll be making changes for 2014, but we're still figuring that out. At every juncture I try to learn from what works and what doesn't, and try to not make the same mistakes twice. Sometimes I need to remind myself that this is only our second year in the farm business, and that there's still room for improvement and growth (otherwise, I would be totally despondent!).
The clover is coming in quite well. It's looking more and more likely that I'll have a nice stand of pig forage for next year!
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