5 steps to start your small livestock farm

hi I'm Pete and welcome to just a few acres farm I didn't just wake up one day and decide I was going to follow this course of being a small farmer it took me years to come to this realization I was an architect and for a long time I was unhappy with my job so I decided to take some time off and think about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life I knew I liked working with my hands I knew I liked being outside in nature and I guess most importantly I'd saved up enough money to be able to take some time and start a new venture in life I remember reading a lot of books at that time about homesteading and small farming and I read a lot of books by Joel salad and and something sticks in my mind that Joel said over and over again and he said if you want to start a farm just do something so I decided to just do something I built some pasture boxes for broiler chickens and started growing broiler chickens and after a while it just seemed natural to me and I decided not to go back to my old job and my wife joined me as a full partner in the farm and here we are seven years later making our living off of a small livestock farm now when I was starting out I knew that I didn't have the option of farming the way that the farmers around us do business we only have 45 acres and were surrounded by large dairies and large crop farms and I can't make a living in that business we decided that we would grow premium meats and eggs for sale directly to consumers that was the only way that we could survive on our small acreage and even doing that we had to be very creative with the way we used our land in this video I'd like to show you how we started out and the strategies and the steps that we used to get our farm up and running in an formed way rather than just kind of shooting in the dark if you like this sort of video please subscribe to our Channel we have a lot of farm business videos a lot of sort of how-to videos about how to start a farm how to keep the farm going and how to live as a family on a small livestock farm the subscribe button is right down there and I'd appreciate it if you did and thank you very much step 1 is to ask yourself and to be honest with yourself about the big questions and the first big question is of course why do I want to do this it's a heck of a lot of hard work for not a lot of money and if you're a small farmer you're facing an uphill battle because you're growing products that you have to charge more money for than the big farmers do and you have to be able to justify that to yourself that you're doing what's right and that what you're growing is worth the money and you have to convince your clientele of the same thing it's not easy sometimes and you can feel very alone so you got to be convinced of what you're doing assess your labor pool Ezra here used to be our official rat catcher but he seems to have retired but if you have a wife and kids or a husband that want to help you out that makes a great difference and I believe especially the kids are an excellent source of free labor on the farm and it builds good character for them especially in this age of video games if you're going to do this together as a married couple as we do you need to have good marriage it needs to be resilient right is there any times when our marriage is tested by farming moving cattle is always a religious experience and there's usually a lot of yelling that goes on between the two of us but I get over it and he gets over it I can be a real jerk when it comes to dressing cattle no it's important to have a good marriage hard physical labor is so much less a part of our society than it used to be and one of the things you need to ask yourself is do I enjoy doing that labor I always say that 90% of farming is hard physical labor picking rocks throwing hay bales forking manure do you like doing that quart sort of stuff can you do that stuff day in and day out are you able to physically it's necessary and how do you feel about working in this stuff that's a question a good part of the year we're working in the mud in the ice in the manure in the snow in the rain we're out here every day rain or shine and you need to be comfortable with being out in the elements and being able to weather extremes in weather and how do you feel about never having a vacation I have no vacations in my future no cruises no weekend trips I'm just fine with that but some people wouldn't be the animals need to be fed twice a day and me and my wife need to be here to do it so I guess our vacation is having a cookout in the afternoon on a nice summer day that's about all we get do you have the cash to invest it can take quite a bit of money to get infrastructure livestock and equipment set up on your farm what animals would you like to grow we knew right from the get-go that we wanted to raise chickens pigs and cattle I myself couldn't imagine having a farm without cattle so that was a prerequisite but we didn't start out with cattle we started out with laying hens in this little house here I think it's an 8 by 12 house we had a dozen chickens I sold extra eggs at work while I was still working my old job chickens are a good gateway animal they're like a gateway drug because eggs are easy to sell and there aren't a lot of government regulations around their sale step 2 do your research for me a lot of the research was about reading books and I have shelves full homesteading in farming books I just loved reading about people's lifestyles that way when I was in my old job for a couple years before we ever started farming I was reading and reading and reading books are great because they give you a lot more detailed information and they show the downsides of things as well as the upsides I think one of the problems with social media is you tend to see the upside of everything and books cover it so completely I would highly recommend them one of the side effects of doing a lot of reading is inevitably you're gonna wind up running into a farm whose model fits what you would like to do and for me it was Joel Saladin's Polyface farm and I read a ton of his books instead of having to figure out everything for ourselves when we were starting we had a model to follow and it took a lot of the trial and error out of things for us as we learned more about farming we adapted his methods to our particular circumstances but knowing how Polyface work let us hit the ground running in the beginning see what other farmers are doing in your area and when I did this I did it with a critical eye I looked at what was going on and said well how can I do that better than they do that and sell my products better than they do it's a competitive world and you have to find your marketing niche right from the get-go that's what differentiates you from all the other folks that are doing the same thing you do so investigate what's going on around you and get some farming experience get your hands dirty make sure you really like this endeavor that you're undertaking work with some local farmers if you grew up on a farm you may already know what you're getting into but it's good to try it out on somebody else's farm before you invest your own money while you're doing your research look at what local butchers there are in your area and look at whether they're USDA or custom exempt because this affects how you can sell your meat if you have a USDA butcher close by that means you can sell your meat by the cod at farmers market it's got a USDA stamp on it if you only have custom exempt butchers nearby then you're going to have to sell your animals as halves and holes where the customer takes possession of the meat at the butcher and finally do your research on where you can sell your product visit your local farmers market you're going to have to charge more for your product than it would be in the supermarket because you just can't grow it as cheaply as the big farms can you're gonna need an enlightened clientele who understands the dynamics of local food systems and understands that they're getting a premium product for premium money selling at the local sale barn is just not an option livestock going at auction brings so much less than selling by the cut or by the half whole have some faith here I believe that if you love what you're doing and you do a good job at it the customers will come step three is to think about the animals you'd like to grow and this is the way that a lot of people started farming including me I love cattle and I wanted to raise cattle my wife and my daughter loved chickens so we have those on our farm in addition to understanding what kind of animals you'd like to grow you need to take stock of your land and the climate that you're in our farm is a grassland farm we have lots of open fields and we live in a temperate climate where we get a lot of rainfall so it's perfect for grading but you may be dealing with land that's mostly wooded you may be in a dry climate hot climate and excessively cold climate all those things need to be taken into consideration when you decide what breed of animals to grow each type of animal has different land requirements and different investment periods cattle take a lot of land to grow especially if you're going to make your own hay and you don't get your money back for a long time boiler chickens layer chickens turkeys and ducks don't take that much land and you get a quick payback on your investment pigs don't take much land either but what they do take they'll destroy unless you raise the slow-growing pastured breeds when it comes to sheep and goats I have no experience with them and can't give any advice on their requirements but it does remind me of one important thing and that is we chose to raise the livestock that we were familiar with that can be a factor in your decision as well realize that your startup expenses will be affected by the type of animal that you choose to grow large animals like cattle and sheep and goats they take a lot of housing and fencing which are expensive we had this big barn build a few years ago just to hold hay for our cattle that is a big expense to undertake for a small farm step 4 start with just a few animals and get the feel for how much labor is involved as well as whether you truly enjoy it and if you're doing it part-time see if you can incorporate it into your life without it becoming too stressful I always advise folks that you can't go whole hog all at once you need to start your firm small and grow it rather than starting with it all growing out and the reason behind that is because there are three aspects to your farm that you need to grow at the same pace or expand at the same pace those are the number of animals you have how much farm infrastructure you have and your customer base if either of those three gets out of whack you're in trouble either financially or from a product perspective for example if you're growing lots of animals and you don't have a big enough customer base you wind up with full overflowing freezers if you build out all of your infrastructure and you don't have a lot of animals yet you wind up with debt so these three things interact in various ways in keeping them fairly uniform is a key to successfully expanding your farm step 5 keep careful track of your expenses and your income so you know how profitable each of your livestock enterprise is you can't fly blind especially when you're in expansion mode you need to know exactly how profitable each thing is on your farm and for more information on that I have a whole video about that called knowing the numbers a simple system for tracking small farm profitability there you have the five steps that I followed when we started our farm my last advice is that I think it's important to not fully commit to having your farm till the second year I didn't know if this was the thing for me until we were two years in and if you want more information I actually wrote a book on this subject about five years ago it's about me leaving my job starting the farm going through all of that indecision about what to do with the rest of my life it's called a year and a day on just a few acres and I'm not biased but I've heard it's an amazing read if you'd like to find it it's available on Amazon just search a year in a day on just a few acres and you can order it there thanks for joining me I hope you have a good day and I'll see you next time

Channel: Just a Few Acres Farm

Views: 147,518

Rating: 4.969687 out of 5

Keywords: how to make a living from a small farm, small farming for profit, how to start a farm, profitable small farm, profitable small scale farm, how to make money on a small farm, family farming, small farm life, small livestock farm, just a few acres farm, frugal farmer

Id: A9x1dPJpn50

Length: 14min 30sec (870 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 31 2019