Your Farm Will Fail! - Farm Business Mistakes

your farm's going to fail you are not going to be successful in this space [Music] well hey friends and neighbors just chuck out sheriff park farms welcome back to the farm it is an absolutely gorgeous saturday spring morning here in the foothills of blue ridge mountains on the farm so sondra has gone to do a delivery this morning uh jamie the gentleman that works for us he's going over to jamie miles is over seven stands he's working for him today so i thought it'd be a good chance for us to kind of catch up a little bit ride around do some chores look at what's going on and just spend a little bit of time together so hang out with me for a few minutes and let's go do a little farm the first thing we're going to check here this morning is this is a pregnant gilt that we've got we brought her down and put her in the cattle barn gave her a big roll of hay she is really close to farrell so stop in and look in on her see how she's doing looks like she's resting pretty quietly she's big as a house i don't know how well it comes through on camera but she's a she's a big old girl looks like she's got a dozen in here so put her in here the other day just giving her some space and some time so we'll just keep watching her she's got feeding water a lot of hay makes making sure she's getting all the creature comforts at home a little bit of an oddball here having a single that's about to faro but we'll get her taken care of let's go feed a little bit so this building here is what we affectionately call the feed barn that's where we keep up most of the feed or at least all the hog feet and we buy we buy our hog feed in these one-ton totes and a friend of ours who is a distributor for a miller for a mill that's fairly close he brings it right to us it works out really good and we're ordering enough now that uh makes sense for him to bring it to us and jamie miles and i are splitting usually we're splitting the load they'll bring six up and uh jamie used to come over on saturday and grab one of these and we'll load them up but we've noticed a little bit of a cost increase in our hog feed lately we went from 400 a ton up to i think it's 459 a ton now which a little bit of an increase but they like everything price of everything's going up and we're just trying to be as responsible with it as we can all right y'all i don't know how well this is going to come through on the camera on my side it looks a little grainy getting ready to load some feet up and heard this uh heard this guy up here on top of the hill um wild turkey up there strutting his stuff saw this guy yesterday over one of the other fields we've got a group of four or five hens around here that we've been seeing but i hadn't seen the tom other than just kind of in the edge of the woods but this morning he's up here gobbling and strutting his stuff and i think today i think i'm not much of a hunter but i think today is uh opening day of turkey season here in north carolina we'll see if we can get up on the hill and get a little better picture him here in a minute but if we can't i just want to catch a little footage of him good looking guy watch out babies so this is a group of our experienced sales these girls gave birth about six months ago now and uh gave us a good crop of feeder piglets and some piglets to sell we do have one uh pumpkin is in here i'm sure some of you remember pumpkin uh she's in here and she's kind of the outcast a little bit of the outcast of the group they won't let her uh eat usually so we've got to get her to the side and get plenty of feeding spots for everybody but uh group's doing well we do have a boar in here with them so we think that uh we think we're pregnant he's been in here plenty long enough now to have done his job so a little sal grip we have these bulk feeders we call them buckhorn boxes and th this one is empty right now actually both of them are empty need to fill them up that's why we brought feet up in the uh in the buckets typically what we'll do is we'll bring up one of those big totes up here and we'll fill these and we'll just feed out of them and it saves from hauling a bunch of buckets and stuff around really enjoy these things really like them i think we're going to get another one to feed some chickens out of um paying i think yeah they're a little expensive i think they're about 500 bucks but they save a ton of time when we use them and keep them full but yeah use these buckhorn boxes to bulk feed out take it so this is another breeder group that we got here's jack he's our big boar and he's a he's a house of a pig um i'm guessing he probably weighs 550 600 pounds something like that big old boy and then uh rest of them i do have one more and i've got two i've got stumpy here this is a black berkshire belongs to a friend jamie over seven stands um he and jack usually have a daily round and then i've got another small duroc boy he's right there um so we got three boars in this group everybody seems to be getting along good this big girl here right right here in the middle uh she's been kind of lame the past few days that uh left front leg hurts a little a little sore for some reason here's that little drock boy he's a good looking guy young fella we're going to put him in with clifford up on the hill with the those mamas that we showed just a few minutes ago he's good looking fella everybody here's growing doing well um this is the bunch that we had really counted on was really hoping for some piglets before now um but we've just not gotten there we've had boars in with them not sure if it's a bore issue if it's a sow if it's a female issue i'm starting to think it's a female issue because we've had multiple boards we've had lots of opportunity but we got the one down there in the in the cattle barn that's pregnant so i think what we've done honestly here i believe our mistake is we have left boards in with them too long and they have become somewhat desensitized to the estrus of the uh of the females so we're thinking about pulling all the boys out putting them all together in one group giving everybody three months three weeks and three days and if we don't have piglets um then we're gonna cull we can't be feeding pigs just to be feeding pigs we've got to be having piglets or we've got to be raising pigs for meat and uh if they're not gonna have piglets then i'm afraid we're gonna have to go to the processor that's just the that's just the deal in farming i mean this is an operation where we are trying to make a living and uh we can't just be feeding pigs to keep them around so i think we're gonna start a culling operation here sooner rather than later we've honestly we probably messed around too long but gave everybody an opportunity we'll see what happens this girl here she may be pregnant it's kind of wobbly i don't know so this is one this is our uh feeder group and these are all pigs that were either born on this farm about uh october about six or seven months ago or there's a group of blue butts in here that we had bought off of another farm uh kind of local a lot of these guys are getting really close to going to the butcher um we actually have five appointments coming up for uh this crowd some of the folks in this crowd in about gosh in about 10 days i think it is and we've sold three and a half of those pigs so we're going to the market we're going to the processor with three and a half of these pigs already sold and that brings up something that i've been wanting to talk about for the past couple weeks and i just hadn't done a video on it and i want to i want to have a real conversation with you and i'm not fussing at anybody but i think this is really important for you to hear real important for you to know recently i've been seeing a ton not one or two i mean dozens of posts on different pit groups chicken groups farming groups and that kind of thing on social media with a very very similar question or a similar thread to the question i have these chickens where do i sell them or i bought three pigs last year they're grown out we're ready to process them where are you guys selling your pigs at if you are at the processing stage or you've got animals that are ready to be butchered and are ready for retail sale and you don't know where you're going to sell them you don't know how you're going to price them that's been another real common theme that i've seen how do y'all price your pigs what are you asking for your for your chicken or whatever the case may be if you're to the stage of processing those animals and having them ready for retail sale and you don't know where you're going to sell them and you don't know how to price them your farm is going to fail you are not going to be successful in this space in terms of selling we'll talk about that real quick you need to be marketing now even if you don't have animals on your farm you need to be marketing your farm right now telling people who you are making folks aware of who you are how you're raising your animals how you're going to do business what products you're going to offer you need to be marketing that today not whenever it comes time to sell those animals or when it comes time to go to processing market today market now in terms of pricing you need to know how to price your products and it's not a complicated thing i get tons of messages from folks emails comments all how do you price how do you how do i know what to sell my pork chops for so it's real simple number one you need to know what is your cost of input what did it cost you to get that animal to slaughter stage what did the piglet cost you what did your feed cost you you need to account for your infrastructure you need to count for your labor what's your cost of input how much did it how much money have you got in that animal standing right there i know how much money i've gotten that animal standing right there what's your processing cost going to be add all that together and now you know what your cost of goods is you know what that pig what the pork chop off of that pig has cost you to produce take that and add your percentage of profit that you want to earn and you need to decide what that is is it one percent if it's one percent you're not gonna last very long is it thirty percent is it fifty percent that's up to you to decide what do you need to make on that animal to make your farm go that's the fir that's the primary thing that we use to determine pricing we will also go and look at the usda actually there's one for north carolina we will look at the north carolina pastured pig pasture poultry grass-fed beef whatever whatever it is we're selling report to see what the average price is what the range of prices are and what the median of the prices are on individual cuts so we'll go back and look and so let's say that we hypothetical numbers let's say that we've determined that for us to sell a pork chop off of that pig right there we need to charge 10.99 a pound okay we go look at the usda report the north carolina report and we see that pork chop averages are 9.99 to say 17.99 and the median is 14.99 okay we're at 10.99 whatever we decided we typically will raise that price a little bit to add some margin to our cost to increase our profits so it's all about knowing your numbers and yeah it's good to know what product what prices are in your market in your general area but that should not be what's driving the price that you're charging for a pork chop or a piece of bacon or a pack of sausage off of that pig what should be driving your cost is what do you have in that pig what how much money have you got tied up and there's another comment that i just i've got to make there are some goobers out there on on youtube that are going to tell you that you're competing with grocery stores no you're not this is not a grocery store pig this is not a this is not a commodity pig that's not commodity bacon that's not commodity pork chops on those pigs this is a craft product this is a product that you've got a lot of sweat time energy and effort in raising you can't do it you can't raise these pigs and sell them for what they're what they're charging in the grocery store if you do you're going you're gonna starve to death you're not even gonna have enough money to feed your pigs so be aware of what you're raising know how to price it know what prices are in your in your market use that as as part of the determining factor but that's not what drives your price you need to know what you got in these pigs know what you got in the pork chop put you a little money on it and survive people are looking for this there there's a market out there for this product you just got to go find it and don't wait to the last minute to go find it go find it now okay so i got back to the shop and i was checking the the video that i'd shot and somewhere along the way the battery died on my lapel mic and on the mic that feeds into the camera that attaches the audio to the video so we missed out on talking about the turkeys and the meat chickens and angel and cinnamon and barney and lamb chop and all that crowd down there so we'll do that on another video but i'm going to wrap it up here one last thing i want to say um if i if we can help you in any way please send us a message um shoot us an email we're glad to help in any way i'm not ranting to because i'm mad at people i i want to see folks succeed in this business we need more farmers we need more folks growing food locally we need more folks feeding their communities and we need more folks caring for the land in this type of way it may not be the way i do it it may not be the way joel salatin does it or justin rhodes or anybody like that but we need more farmers uh in our communities because this big industrialized system uh you know we've seen it recently and i think there's some things going on now i think it's on the uh you know it's on it's it's on a ledge it's on a it's in a precarious situation and precarious position but we want to see you succeed so if you've got questions if we can help you please reach out i try my best to respond sometimes i fail to get responses done in a timely manner i had a gentleman the other day he was a little ticked off at me because he'd sent me a couple messages and i i'm sorry i i'm trying to get to folks as quick as i can you know we're doing the farm i've still got a full-time job we're doing you know we just got a lot going on but i want to help you so please send me a message i'm glad to help you any way i can i want to see you succeed i think that's enough i appreciate you watching may god bless you and your families please keep us in your prayers [Music] you

Channel: Sheraton Park Farms

Views: 36,004

Keywords: farming, farm, agriculture, business, farm business, farm business management, farm business plan, how to, urban farming, backyard farming

Id: cohiu9SRbOA

Length: 17min 4sec (1024 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 05 2022