How We Started the Farm

hi i'm pete and welcome to just a few acres farm brownie had her piglets yesterday look at these little guys here's proud mom good job brownie good job it's very nice to have another healthy litter of piglets on the farm but here's the deal it's gonna be really hot today in fact it's already hot and it was hot yesterday i spent the whole day outside moving chicks out cleaning out barns taking care of this and that so today i thought i would be a shade tree mechanic and while i'm doing that because there's a lot of new viewers on the channel i thought i would talk about how hillary and i started our farm we'll mix it up a little bit oh deary me the mice have been in here again this is a farm all 756 diesel tractor same age as me made in 1968 quite collectible and quite useful on our farm the job today on this tractor is to install this gauge and the temperature side of it didn't work the fuel gauge works fine so i took the old gauge out and i sent it to todd roberts at the farmall shop and he redid the temperature side these lines always get broken and then the alcohol that's used to show the gauge or measure the temperature goes out and it has to be redone he did a good job i'm going to put it back in it's not as easy as just plugging the new gauge in the sensor of it dips into the coolant jacket in the head to measure temperature so i have to drain some coolant off first [Music] that's enough right there we don't need to drain the whole thing and this on the other side of the engine is where the sender goes that's the bulb where the wire broke off we got to take that out hillary and i started our farm in 2013. i was an architect i went to college and spent 20 years at a firm worked my way up and was a partner for the last 10 years or so and i got tired of it there's the old bulb right there so on february 6 2013 i left my old job and i didn't know what i was going to do hillary and i had always saved and paid off debts so i was fortunate not to have a lot of monthly bills but it's not like we could survive very long on what we had saved so i needed to find something else to make a living from i had always had an interest in farming i grew up farming with my grandfather and my dad my dad farmed beef cattle for a while kind of part time and they gave it up because he had a day job and i liked being at home so i thought well i'll try farming i didn't really know at the time we had 12 layer hens and it was just a hobby and i brought extra eggs to work about two weeks or a month after i left my architecture job i started building pasture boxes dual salad and style the ones we have now i built two of them ordered some broilers and put them on the field it was a low risk deal i didn't have but maybe 300 invested in the pens and then i had to buy the broilers and i figured well i'll take them to market and see how they sell look at this mess in here luckily when i took out the old gauge i labeled where each of the wires went so i can hook up the new one i had quite a bit of business experience from running our old firm so when i grew those first batches i kept track of all the expenses carefully and it turned out i made a decent profit off it i thought well this is something i could expand so i started growing more batches of broiler chickens they sold really well this line has to thread around to the front of the engine through the dash panel i think we'll go right alongside the fuel tank here you guys can tell me when it pokes out right it's gonna poke right out here maybe scratch that plant it's easier to run fish wire in and then fish it through [Music] we'll just wrap this around here don't be difficult [Music] there we go always always we kept our personal money separate from our farm money so i could tell that i wasn't dumping a ton of savings into far into the farm and after the first money from the first batches of chickens came back then the farm could exist on its own with a separate bank account so in this way as we started growing more and more we were able to bootstrap the growth of our farm one thing i definitely did not want to do is go out and spend a whole heap load of money building and buying all kinds of stuff for the farm before money was coming in i've seen that happen before and that's a recipe for disaster and i knew from my business world where we'd grown a firm from eight people to 75 people that you use cash to fund growth you don't borrow to fund growth at least never in my world it's a lot safer to make the money and then use that to expand i'm going to thread in a new fitting for the temperature gauge sender that's what i call senders are usually electric this one happens to use the expansion of alcohol to show temperature as it heats up then this bulb which the alcohol lives in until it heats up and evaporates and puts pressure in this line goes into that fitting and there's no tape required there because this seat right here matches with a seat it's a compression fitting that makes the seal there we go so the only time i drew from our own money is to start those first batches of broilers from then on any expansion was funded by farm income and in that first year it was slow growth we grew i don't know 300 broilers maybe and we started three pigs we didn't have any cattle i own tractors already because as you know one of my hobbies is collecting old tractors and restoring them so there weren't really very many equipment expenses i have to get these light bulbs sorted out here they're the low oil pressure and low voltage tail lights and i know the bulbs are bad let's turn on the key and see this is the oil light these go in the back of the cage that one's on and then this is the generator tell light new bulb nope in that first year really the first five years times were tight because the farm was supporting itself and funding its own expansion but we were living off of savings and we didn't have that much we had to really scrimp and scrounge and make sure we weren't spending a lot of money all this stuff hooks into the back of the gauge we're going to do it one by one fuel gauge left and then here we've got fuel gauge right so that would be that one chickens and pigs were easy because they didn't require only about a few hundred dollars in infrastructure just growing them in the summer we had no cattle yet and i had no equipment for making hay or any of that stuff and we were selling it two small markets and i knew that you had to think of the whole business as one thing the growing the selling the profit making all that stuff so before you got in too deep you had to figure out could i sell what i was growing and where would i sell it and enough volume to make a living these markets we started at were just kind of warm up markets they were small and small towns and i knew there were certain things that there wasn't a market for or much of a market for for instance lamb go there's a market but it's really small so i wanted to focus on more mainstream commodity type things chicken eggs pork and beef are the biggest sellers getting all these wires in the right place is quite a trick under here well you're not going to go under there you got to go under this thing here and then you can fit on maybe i know you fit you came off there no fumble fingered fred today one of the nice things about going to farmers market is you meet other farmers who are kind of doing the same thing you are as far as trying to make a living out of it and a couple of farmers that i met that are live a couple towns over had dexter cattle and i always wanted to have cattle on my farm because i just love cattle and i met their dexters and immediately i said well this is this is the breed that i want so i arranged to buy three heads from them and we started our dexter herd oh i'm gonna need that in our second year of farming so this would be 2014. now along with cattle came a whole lot of infrastructure and a long payback so having cattle you know we had the one very old pole barn that's got the kettle pens in it now and i had some tractors but i didn't have a baler rake or anything any way to cut well we did have a sickle bar mower but it was not in very good shape so i had to redo that so we started running into having to invest in something that wouldn't pay back for a long time different than pork and eggs and chicken cattle i thought was going to take at least seven years to start getting our money back because of all of the we didn't have any fencing on the farm all of a sudden i was shelling money out of that farm account that we could have used as our own personal income because i was reinvesting it into the beef operation going to auction buying equipment putting up fencing that first summer we ran our three head of cattle on four acres and made i don't know 200 bales of hay to feed them maybe not even that it was small and it would grow gradually all right this is the moment of truth this other terminal here is the fuel gauge sender terminal so now we get to see if the fuel gauge will work it worked before i sent it out so it should work now let's try it yup it works now we can put in the warning lights or tail lights let's see let me put new bulbs in that's the oil tail light and that's the generator tail light there's something wrong with this circuit but i traced this one down to the oil pressure center so i know that one goes in this hole here and this one goes in this hole here there then we gotta fit this bracket on that holds the gauge in place wow you're a pain lock washers we don't need no stinking lock washers to fund our continuing investment into the cattle we had to grow a lot more chickens and pigs so we put on i don't know we expanded to like 150 layers we started growing five 600 broiler chickens we put on turkeys for the fall and i went and gathered dexter's from some other farms because i wanted a diversity of genetics so we got some from a couple of other homesteader size operations and then went to a big farm out near buffalo and bought some stock that's where prudence and kerry came from and patty of course the descendant of prudence so we gathered our stock from four different locations with a lot of diversity also in that second year the work got to be too much for me to do by myself and hillary said you know i'd like to do this with you she had been busy the first year taking care of her kids but the kids were getting old enough now as to where she could leave the house and come outside and do work and she really enjoyed it i was pleasantly surprised we were growing so much stock in that second year that we outgrew our markets and you know i always say that you got to grow your markets your infrastructure and your animal population equally or things get out of whack so a dream of mine had always been to sell at the ithaca farmers market that's the big time to me and so the second year we applied for and started getting a booth when one was available at the ithaca farmers market it took us until last year to get our own booth it was a slow drive to get seniority and be able to claim our own booth but it was well worth it sales went way up as we accumulated a regular customer base at the ithaca farmers market and selling at farmers market was really the only option for us we had to sell direct to consumer and we really as we figured out as we went along had to sell at retail buy the cut rather than halves and holes because we needed the largest profit margin if we were dealing with middlemen or selling wholesale it just did the numbers didn't add up and i've been over this lots of times in other videos direct to consumers the way to go if you want to farm on a small scale and make a family uh income out of it where does that go those first two years in the farm were probably scarier than any other time in our farm because i had figured out that we could sell what we grew at an appropriate profit margin but i didn't know for sure if we could grow enough to support our family a on the number of acres we had we only have 45 acres here 30 in pasture and b i didn't know if our markets would support selling that much volume so it's a grow and feel kind of thing you grow a little bit you feel how it's going you grow a little bit you see if you're killing yourself you see if you can continue it for the long term slow growth is good i think you know there's a little secret for funnels that glug like this that don't have an air outlet let me do that all i do is stick a screwdriver in alongside of it so there's a little air gap that's what you need just a little air gap one more glug now if i were in another business i'd probably call that phase the proof of concept phase you know we'd come up with the concept when we started the farm and through its growth it was proof concept phase the other thing that characterized the farm from year three through probably year six was we were finding more efficient ways to do things and that ma changing the methods from what we started out with with smaller populations of animals things like going from bag feed to gravity wagons for feed to save on bulk and save on carrying bags around we could just draw the wagon instead it met from the hang side upgrading our whole line of equipment i started out making hay with a small square baler connected to the farm all h went through the pharma 504 up to the farmhouse 656 changed to round bales all the infrastructure goes along with that building the upper barn for hay storage because the lower barn where the cattle are the old barn couldn't fit all the hay anymore and i wanted to stay store hay inside so it was all about that bootstrapping yourself up again always working from the money that the farm had made before now we could have chose to grow slower and pocket some of the money that the farm was bringing in but i had this kind of ultimate goal that i wanted to bring the farm to self-sustainability as far as providing for our family by year seven and that's what happened i don't see any leaks here i think we're good with a full cooling system so we'll climb over this mess of tools here and start her up and see if anything goes kerflowy oil light off pretty quickly that's good sign [Music] here's something to watch for you don't know conclusively but watch this oil light when i turn it off see how long it took to come on that can be an indicator that the engine is in pretty good shape as far as bearing clearances it can it's not conclusive though like i said it's just a good sign that light switch is on at five psi or less we continued to expand and refine and gather our customer base and finally in year five we started actually paying for our living off the farm which our living expenses had dropped so much because there's so much synergy that goes on with farming you don't drive to work you have fewer vehicle costs less fuel costs we had less food cost because we were growing all of our own meat and a good part of our produce or bartering for our own produce at the at the farmer's market anyway in year five happily we started drawing money off of the farm and that continued until year seven it continued in percentage until the farm was paying all of our living expenses and i was able to stop depleting my savings in retirement which i'll get to in a few minutes one thing a lot of folks ask about is health insurance where do you get your health insurance well you gotta figure it into the cost of you know your your business really we get ours affordably off of the uh new york exchange i that's what we've done since i left work and it's worked out for us yeah it's always going up but what can you do i learned that by year seven we were growing as much as we wanted to in other words hillary and i were working our butts off and i said well is there any way to make this easier on us to cut down the labor and make the same net profit at the end of the year so i thought about the things we spend our time on and poultry is hugely labor intensive not so much the layers but the meat birds when you're doing your own butchering we were butchering twice a week it was a big part of our week and the other thing that took a huge part of our weeks was going to market we were going to while we were going to three farmers markets every week which take two full days plus one half day market and then i was doing deliveries to cornell once a week which was kind of like another market it took me another half a day to do that and i thought if we can consolidate our markets and turn toward the less labor intensive enterprises that's what you call them on a farm that has multiple enterprises like the egg laying chickens are an enterprise the broilers are an enterprise the pigs are an enterprise on and on if we can go to the less labor-intensive enterprises that create the same amount of profit for less labor go to fewer markets our life will be a whole lot easier so we started to throttle down on our broiler production cut down on our egg layers a little bit cut down to pork production because pork was always our least profitable enterprise and at the same time grain prices were skyrocketing so it turned out to be a good decision to go away from the more grain intensive enterprises and more toward the grass-fed beef because there's no grain involved with that and as for markets the hope was that the people that frequented our booth that all of those markets we were going to would understand that we're moving to just doing one market a week on saturdays and so our traffic would increase on that day from customers that were coming that would normally come on another day that actually happened for the most part some customers didn't follow us but most did so we wound up saving a lot of time through those two changes businesses have different phases after their foundation creation i knew this from architecture where we spent time in an extended growth and expansion mode where we were pouring capital back into expansion and always growing and really with no end in sight with a farm i always had an ultimate goal once we reach that goal your business enters a different set of challenges so the first challenge that we faced was how do we make this sustainable as far as how much work we're putting in so that we can do it quite ways into the future and the other is how do we always look and see what's coming over the horizon and adapt to new challenges because if you become complacent as business and just say oh my model works and it's going to work forever that's not going to happen something's going to come along and knock you off your high horse and you always got to be looking out for that 9 16 or 238 millimeters year 7 was a momentous year i think because first of all it proved the proof of concept it was the proof of concept that what i was doing could work the plan worked and our business changed from growth mode into refinement mode i would call it doing more more easily and maybe most importantly i was able to tackle an issue that i hadn't figured out as part of the original business plan which was retirement i can't see retiring from something you love unless you're forced out of it by disability i can see slowing down as we get older because it is hard work and i never really figured out how to set aside money for that so in the seventh year i started the youtube channel so the youtube channel was started as a proof of concept sharing to say look here's how i did it you can do it too maybe not the same way maybe you keep working your job part-time if you don't have the savings or maybe you got to go out and buy land and you might have to pick up and move to get to a better place for direct consumer but anyway it could be done details will vary secondly the youtube income i hoped would provide some retirement cushion and rainy day cushion as well this is the last screw to titan before we can go on a joyride alrighty here we go open cap tractor rides the best thing on a hot day i think [Music] let's see if i can get this warmed up some it's nice that they mark the boiling point on here so i know where it should be running [Music] when are we just caught and here same thing in corn that's castled out and here we are back at the homestead the gauge came up how i would expect you got to be working it awful hard to get it up into this area cruising down the road won't do that to close this video two things one tractor one about the evolution of our business do i have any regrets changing from a well-paying job in architecture to an uncertain future in farming no money does not equal happiness times were very lean for the first five years of the farm and i never ever wanted to go back to architecture would i have done anything differently i've been asked that a lot and i've thought about it time and time again and i don't think i would have done anything differently even being an architect for 20 years i would have done that differently because it takes your life to understand where you are now and if my life had been different early on i wouldn't be where i am now i may not be as happy as i am now so it all works out in the end is my belief if you're doing what you're meant to do and number two do you plan on restoring this tractor it sure would look nice restored but as you all know it is a ton of work what do i plan on doing with it well this fall i have to rebuild the mcv there's a whole lot of troubleshooting that could be done to find out what's going on with it but it's easier for me just to buy a rebuild kit with a new pump in it and rebuild the thing and that way i know it's right and there's other minor things that i need to fix i need to put a transmission brake pad in it tighten up the linkages on the shifting with a bushing kit and i'll just be tinkering with it for a while i'm sure i'll be showing it in videos i hope this video was informative i like putting two things together tractor repair and business development have a great day and i'll see you next time

Channel: Just a Few Acres Farm

Views: 282,821

Keywords: farm, farming, hobby farm, hobby farm guys, hobby farming for profit, homestead, how farms work, just a few acres farm, life on a farm, day on the farm, slow farming, busy day, farm day, small farm, life on small farm, a few acres farm, few acres farm, just a few acres farm youtube, starting a farm, how to start a farm, farmall 756, farm business

Id: 0sM1ZZHidNA

Length: 25min 51sec (1551 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 21 2022