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If you’ve ever spent much time around children you have probably heard the phrase, “that’s not fair!” In my eight years of researching my beginning farm and being a real life beginning farmer I have also heard that phrase from beginning farmers (myself included). In fact I’ve even heard it from politicians talking about agriculture when I visited them in Washington D.C. a few years back. What I’m trying to say is that it is very easy to fall into the trap of looking at my own farming situation and decide that it is unfair because others may have more land, more money, better markets, and a whole host of other things. I believe the reality is though that there is something about every beginning farmer (and experienced farmer) that is unfair … the business world calls that an “unfair advantage”.
On our farm we have the unfair advantage of buying a farm smack dab in the middle of an already successful Farm Crawl. Not every farm has something so great for marketing and not every farm can create an event like the one we are part of because you can’t just pull 7 farms within 20 miles of each other doing a variety of forms of direct marketing. Another unfair advantage for our farm is my prolific love of talking about the farm. I’m not saying that I’m the world’s best speaker or writer, but I do love to tell the story of our farm and I’m not afraid to share it with just about anyone who will listen.
My question for you is what is your “unfair farming advantage”? What are those things that set you apart from other farmers … things that they just can’t run to the closest farm store and buy? I would love to hear what your unfair advantage is … what are you going to take advantage of on your farm!
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This was our first year in farming, starting with egg layers. I often think about many unfair advantages that we have. Pasturing our birds on extra land on my cousins hay farm, our location being close to D.C. and Baltimore with our closest city of Frederick,Md having an up and coming local food movement, family with ties to restaurants in these cities, family with marketing, art, and video skills, but the two most unfair of all are my mechanical skills, and access to many free materials. In just this short year, I have seen and read about so many farmers spending a lot of money on things that can be built for free. My parents own an automotive shop where i have acquired much of this skill, and I know work at a Sign fabrication and installation shop. We have scrap everything. Aluminum, Steel, wood from signs being shipping in, plexiglass, inpact resistant plastic like lexan, and lots of hardware. I have built several structures so far for maybe 50 bucks, the cost of a bucket of screws. I think if more farmers found a way to be more handy and also to search for free materials, they would have a lot less pressure on their wallet.
Oh, and is Hoarding an unfair advantage? 🙂