The Beginning Farmer

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Today’s topic for The Beginning Farmer Show is one of those subjects that is way over my head, but it is something that all beginning livestock farmers will have to deal with much sooner rather than later! I hope that there is something that you can take away from my thoughts, but more importantly I hope you join in the discussion and share your experience.

Whether you are raising cattle, hogs, sheep, chickens, rabbits, or any other livestock on your farm the breeding animals you keep and choose will have a huge impact on your business. They are the foundation of what you produce and they can have an impact (good or bad) that lasts for generations. So, it is very important that you select the right replacement heifers, gilts, ewes, hens, does, and so on and so forth! On this episode of The Beginning Farmer Show I will talk about how I go about selecting replacement animals from and for my farm in a very unscientific manner, and I will also share a few tips from people that really know what they are doing.

When it comes to selecting replacement breeding stock (heifers, gilts, bulls, boars, etc.) my biggest and first piece of advice is to consult someone with experience, knowledge, and results. I have none of those things (remember I’m a beginning farmer), but I have tried to learn as much as I can in a short while. Way back in 2008 I attended a Practical Farmers of Iowa field day feature Gearld Fry … a very well known and respected cattleman. Obviously he speaks specifically to cattle, but I think the importance he placed on selecting breeding stock has helped me with all of the different animals we have. You can learn more about Mr. Fry and his thoughts on cattle (including linebreeding) by checking out Bovine Engineering. If you’d like to read about the bullet point take-aways from a beginning farmer listening to Mr. Fry speak you can check out my blog post about the field day.

There are a few things that I look for though when selecting replacement gilts for the Hereford pig herd …

• Priority number one is that I select gilts from sows that are good mothers who protect and take care of the litters.
• I like to choose gilts that grow faster than the other gilts in their litter, and that have nice muscling and no physical deformities.
• The bigger the litter the better! Ideally we keep back gilts from sows that consistently have larger litters.
• Finally, it is important to me that the gilts are from sows that do a good job with the farrowing process (they go into a hut or build a great nest for farrowing).

All of that selection criteria though can be summed up in two points that I learned from a farmer that has been farrowing out on pasture for years …

• Select gilts with down ears (floppy) as opposed to up ears (ears that stand up). I realize this won’t be true in all cases because there are some great heritage breeds out there with “up ears”, but it worked for him and I saw the success he was having!
• Select gilts that lay down slowly. He said he watched his potential replacement gilts lay down and that he liked to see them get down on their front knees first, before settling down their backside. His reasoning is that if they lay down slowly the won’t just flop down on their litter of pigs and crush them.

That seems like very simple advice, but I saw the results of those two pieces of selection criteria and it was a sow herd that I would be more than proud to have on my farm. Also, it illustrates the most important thing that I can say on this subject … find people that raise livestock like you raise them or raise the same breeds you raise and pick their brain on the subject.

There is more to this show though than Farmer Ethan’s ramblings on subjects that he knows nothing about! As you can see from the picture on the right the pigs are loving their new woodlot paddock, and this image is exactly why I love raising pigs so much. Most of the time they get a bad rap for being dirty and stinky, but our woodlot raised pigs are just a joy to raise and be around. All is not always well though when it comes to pastured pigs … at least when they don’t know about electric fence yet. If you want to know what not to do with pigs and electric fencing then you need to listen to the “Hard Lesson Learned” this week!

As always, I want to thank you so much for listening and supporting the show with your encouragement and reviews on iTunes! I am continually working to produce a better show, and I’m thankful for all of the listeners sticking with me as I learn. If you do enjoy the show, don’t forget that you can subscribe on iTunes and leave a five start rating and review (by clicking the link or the image on the right). If you are an Android phone user you can also subscribe on the free Stitcher App. It is so very encouraging to know that people are listening and enjoying the show!

I would love to hear your questions, show ideas, or comments about the show. Feel free to shoot me an e-mail! As always you can follow along with The Beginning Farmer and Crooked Gap Farm by checking out these links …

• Crooked Gap Farm
• Crooked Gap Farm on Facebook
• Crooked Gap Farm on Twitter

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(if you are interested in the music in this episode check out my brother’s record label, Historic Records)

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I mentioned in the previous episode that we had to sit down and take a hard look at product prices a few weeks ago. This was something that I knew we needed to do, but I did not want any thing to do with it for a variety of reasons. First of all, I love doing many things on the farm (even some things that aren’t especially fun), but I do not love doing the “business” aspects sometimes. And secondly, I am always worried that people will think my prices are to high and that we will lose all of our customers. The reality is though that the farm is a business and if we are going to run it like a business we need to be continually keeping tabs on our pricing, our inputs, our marketing, and all of that business’y stuff.

With all of that in mind, on today’s episode of The Beginning Farmer Show I am going to spend some time talking about how we eventually came around to setting our prices (and recently raising them). There was a lot of thought and research that went into setting those prices, but there are also “pricing values” that we follow when it comes to our product prices. Here are a few of the values that we follow …

• We do not want to have high priced products just because some think that we can.
• We believe that we should receive a decent wage for the work that we do on the farm raising great tasting pork, poultry, lamb, eggs, and beef.
• There is a defined amount that we feel we need to make in profit for each animal.
• We will be “price makers” instead of “price takers”, but at the same time if our input costs lower for a sustained amount of time we would like to lower our prices to reflect that (as long as we still make our defined amount per animal).
• Our pricing will be transparent because we are not trying to sneak anything by anyone. Our customers are not just nameless/faceless cogs in a system, they are our friends!

As always, I want to thank you so much for listening and supporting the show with your encouragement and reviews on iTunes! I am continually working to produce a better show, and I’m thankful for all of the listeners sticking with me as I learn. If you do enjoy the show, don’t forget that you can subscribe on iTunes and leave a five start rating and review (by clicking the link or the image on the right). If you are an Android phone user you can also subscribe on the free Stitcher App. It is so very encouraging to know that people are listening and enjoying the show!

I would love to hear your questions, show ideas, or comments about the show. Feel free to shoot me an e-mail! As always you can follow along with The Beginning Farmer and Crooked Gap Farm by checking out these links …

• Crooked Gap Farm
• Crooked Gap Farm on Facebook
• Crooked Gap Farm on Twitter

(if you are interested in the music in this episode check out my brother’s record label, Historic Records)

Here we are on May 14th, 2013 and, as you can see from the picture above, the only animals on my farm enjoying the bounty of the pasture are the chickens and the rabbits. In fact it is all that I can do to stop myself from turning the cows and sheep out on the pasture … especially since I’m purchasing small square bales of hay about every 10 or 12 days! But, I know that it is for the best because my pastures are just not to the point they need to be for them to be grazed.

I believe there are a combination of factors that have my pastures lagging behind a little bit this spring. First of all it has been a cool spring (we had 9 inches of snow on May 4th). That has kept everybody’s pastures growing slowly, but especially mine that still have a large amount of warm season grasses as the main forage (even after 4 years of intensive rotational grazing). On top of the cool spring combined with the warm season grasses there is the whole issue of the drought of 2012. I ran my pastures pretty hard last year, and if I am going to be truthful with myself I used them up a little more than I should have. So, even though as you can see from the picture below that we are statistically out of the drought I’m still paying the price.

All of this has led to me having to make the painfully tough choice of keeping my cattle and sheep off the pastures and up at the house still eating hay. Each day as I drive to town for work I see what seems like every other farmers cattle out grazing while mine are still eating expensive (still have drought prices here) hay. And, each time I see those cows grazing I try to tell myself that I could put them out on the pasture and just give them bigger paddocks while feeding a little hay still. In my “want to get grazing” mind that seems like the perfect solution, but in my “need to do what is best for the longevity of the pastures” mind I know that I need to just hold off and let them heal as we keep getting some decent moisture this spring.

How are your pastures? Has the cool spring kept them from taking off? Did you do a better job managing them last summer than I did (most likely you did)? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject.

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One thing that we have learned on our farm over the last five years is that animals that are born on our farm, from stock raised on our farm, do much better in our farming model than others that we purchase and bring to the farm. We have found even when we bring them from farms that have similar farming models or farms that we really respect, there are some animals that just aren’t as hardy or don’t grow quite as well on the pasture and in the woodlots. Over the last two seasons of raising meat chickens, we have found the same to be true. In the case of the chickens though, all of our meat birds come from off the farm … and that is something that I would like to change.

Up until this point, it was something that I was interested in doing but not really in a hurry to do. That changed when our source for naked neck Poulet Rouge chicks (which come from a farming friend) was not able to provide chicks for us this year. If you have followed along with the blog for awhile you will remember my frantic call for help and our solutions (which included ordering chicks from the hatchery). But, the long-term solution is that we are going to begin hatching our own meat chickens and keeping a flock for breeding stock. This means that we need to research all sorts of things from incubators and incubation to various heritage breeds that we can raise!

At this time I am leaning towards the Mottled Java as a bird to try out, but I think I would like to have a few other options that we are working with at the same time so I’m open to suggestions! As far as incubators/hatchers go, we have been doing a lot of research and reading about the various styles and brands and prices … it can be exhausting! If you would like to check out some of the models we have been looking at for cabinet incubators just take a look at these links:

• G.Q.F. Incubators/Hatchers
• Dickey’s Incubators/Hatchers
• Red Rooster Incubators
• Brinsea Incubators

As always, I want to thank you so much for listening and supporting the show with your encouragement and reviews on iTunes! I am continually working to produce a better show, and I’m thankful for all of the listeners sticking with me as I learn. If you do enjoy the show, don’t forget that you can subscribe on iTunes and leave a five start rating and review (by clicking the link or the image on the right) or on the Stitcher App on your smartphone. It is so very encouraging to know that people are listening and enjoying the show!

I would love to hear your questions, show ideas, or comments about the show. Feel free to shoot me an e-mail! As always you can follow along with The Beginning Farmer and Crooked Gap Farm by checking out these links …

• Crooked Gap Farm
• Crooked Gap Farm on Facebook
• Crooked Gap Farm on Twitter

(if you are interested in the music in this episode check out my brother’s record label, Historic Records)

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Have you ever wanted to raise your own livestock? Have you ever wanted to work for yourself? Have you ever wanted to become a marketing genius? Have you ever wanted to farm (which is a combination of all of those things)!?! Well, today is your day if you answered “yes” to those questions because today we are excited to introduce “The Beginning Farmers Guide to Becoming a Beginning Farmer In Six Easy Steps”. All you have to do is follow these six simple steps and you will find yourself well on the way to becoming the most successful farmer on the block. It get’s better though! If you order this six step program today you will also receive, at no extra charge, the companion series, “What You Wish You Would Have Done When You Were Starting Your Farm With Six Easy Steps”. Don’t delay and order today!

Don’t you wish that it was that easy? I know that when I was in the beginning stages of my farm dream I was looking for the perfect/easy formula that would get me well on the way at making my living on the farm. I searched many websites, I read lots of books, and I attended agricultural conferences. The reality is though that there is no six step (or ten or twenty or … well you get the idea) plan for starting a farm. It’s not just something that you can create a formula for, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to try and make a six step plan for beginning a farm anyways!

On today’s episode I’ve put together six basic steps that I would take if I were starting a farm from scratch (using the benefit of hindsight). This isn’t the end all list (it doesn’t even come close to covering everything you need to consider), but I believe it is a good basic plan for getting a beginning farm started out on the right foot. There is one thing though that would make this list better … your input! If you have a step you would like to add or modify or even if you would like to tell how completely wrong I was I would love to hear your thoughts!

Step #1 :: Farm Location
Renting is the key on this one. I would look for a rural house with 2-7 acres and maybe even some buildings.

Step #2 :: Farm Enterprises
I’ve said it before, many people have done it/are doing it, and Joel Salatin has been saying it for years … I would begin with chickens! Both laying hens and meat birds because I’m too impatient to only do one or the other.

Step #3 :: Farm Marketing
Know your story, share your story, get all interneted up (social media, website, etc.), partner with a local vegetable CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), and attend a smaller farmers market.

Step #4 :: Farm Learning
Find a farmer … any farmer … and offer to work for them (and learn) for free! Oh yeah, and raise three pigs as well.

Step #5 :: Farm Goals
Do I need to say anything more than survive and then want to do it again next year?

Step #6 :: Farm Moving Forward
Year number one was great, but now it is time to think about moving forward so we will expand the poultry business and move into marketing pork.

As always, thank you so much to all of you who have taken the time to subscribe and listen to the show each week. I hope that I’m growing as a podcast producer and that as time goes along the show just gets better and better. If you do enjoy the show don’t forget that you can subscribe on iTunes and leave a five start rating and review (by clicking the link or the image on the left) or on the Stitcher App on your smartphone. For those of you that have taken the time to leave a review on iTunes … thank you, thank you, thank you! It is so very encouraging to know that people are listening and enjoying the show!

I would love to hear your questions, show ideas, or comments about the show. Feel free to shoot me an e-mail! As always you can follow along with The Beginning Farmer and Crooked Gap Farm by checking out these links …

• Crooked Gap Farm
• Crooked Gap Farm on Facebook
• Crooked Gap Farm on Twitter

(if you are interested in the music in this episode check out my brother’s record label, Historic Records)

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Before moving to the farm I had a lot of ideas about what I wanted my farm to look like. As you can tell from the previous episode I read a lot of books, and after reading all of those books I thought I knew just want I wanted for the farm and how everything would work. I had done a bit of market research for the area, I had studied various breeds, and I had even began to purchase cattle before I even had to call my own! Now that I am almost five years of running the farm though I have found out that my initial plans are really what suits the farm or the farmer the best. All of that means that now I am headed a different direction than I had planned and that I’ve learned the need to continually evaluate things.

Dexter cattle where what really made me interested in farming. We had researched grassfed beef after finding out about my high cholesterol and I thought instead of just buying the beef I might as well raise my own (at my dad’s place to begin with and then eventually an acreage of my own). What began as an idea to raise a cow and her calf eventually blossomed in my mind into a full-blown farm. After reading books like Salad Bar Beef by Joel Salatin and Grass-Fed Cattle by Julius Ruechel I was convinced that cattle could and should be the centerpiece of my future farming operation.

Now my tune has changed … I’m beginning to realize the real limitation of only owning about 20 acres of pasture even if my cows are smaller in stature and I’m also finding out about the intense competition for rental grazing ground. There is one other thing I am learning though that is encouraging … my Katahdin lamb is a very popular thing at the farmers’ market and there are a lot of people interested in purchasing whole lambs.

With all of that and more on my mind I sat down for todays show and shared some of my “thinking out loud” thoughts on changing the pasture focus for my farm. It has also been raining a lot on the farm lately meaning the big projects have come to a stand still and the mud has appeared just like it does every spring! Which leads me to my hard lesson learned for the week … learning to defeat mud!

I also wanted to thank you so much for everyone who has taken the time to listen and leave a review on iTunes. I am learning and growing as a “podcast producer” with each episode and I hope that there are little nuggets that you can learn from in each show because one thing I love to do is share my passion for farming!

• Crooked Gap Farm

• Crooked Gap Farm on Facebook

• Crooked Gap Farm on Twitter

As always, I would love to hear your questions, show ideas, or comments about the show. Feel free to shoot me an e-mail! As always you can follow along with The Beginning Farmer and Crooked Gap Farm by checking out these links …

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Over the years I’ve received quite a few e-mails from people wanting to pick my pea-sized farming brain. Usually when that happens I have two thoughts run through my mind … #1 :: Have they ever read any of my blog posts, I even know what I’m doing half the time! #2 :: Don’t farm … it’s not worth it! Thought number one is true no matter what … and thought number two is something I only half mean. It’s not that I want to discourage people from farming, but rather I think it is important to spend a lot of time considering what it really means to be a farmer. With all of that being said, I do love hearing from people that stumble on to the blog and want to ask a question.

On today’s show I take some time to answer an e-mail from Patrick who asked one of the questions that I receive most often, “What books and websites would you suggest reading?” As an avid reader this is an easy question for me to answer. The biggest problem that I have when I think about this answer is whittling the list down a little bit to a manageable size. So, what I’ve done is come up with my “10 Books a Beginning Farmer Should Read”. It should be noted that these books are coming from my livestock based background.

In no particular order here are my 10 favorites … for the moment. I have also included links for each book if you are interested in purchasing them. These links are affiliate links, so if you are interested in one of the books and enjoy the show it does support the show a little.

• You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Start & Succeed in a Farming Enterprise by Joel Salatin (The very first farming book that I read … and I’ve since read it more than once) -The Beginning Farmer blogs about Joel Salatin

• All Flesh is Grass: Pleasures and Promises of Pasture Farming by Gene Logsdon (A passionate call to pasture based agriculture) -The Beginning Farmer blogs about “All Flesh is Grass”

• The Contrary Farmer by Gene Logsdon (The yeoman farmer does not have to be a thing of the past) -The Beginning Farmer blogs about Gene Logsdon

• The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture by Wendell Berry (A great book for the person interested in the “culture” of agriculture) -The Beginning Farmer blogs about Wendell Berry

• The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan (Maybe controversial depending on your views, but I did take a lot away from it) -The Beginning Farmer blogs about “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”

• Making Your Small Farm Profitable by Ron Macher (The nuts and bolts of beginning a farm) -The Beginning Farmer blogs about “Making Your Small Farm Profitable”

• Comeback Farms by Greg Judy (One book that I wish I would have read before I began farming) -The Beginning Farmer blogs about “Comeback Farms”

• Dirt Hog by Kelly Klober (Lots of knowledge … maybe read this one after the next one on the list) -The Beginning Farmer blogs about “Dirt Hog”

• Small-Scale Pig Raising by Dirk Van Loon (Recommended by Walter Jeffries of Sugar Mountain Farm, that is enough of a reason to read it if you ask me) -The Beginning Farmer blogs about “Small-Scale Pig Raising”

• A Bountiful Harvest: The Midwestern Farm Photographs of Pete Wettach, 1925-1965 by Leslie A. Loveless (A book that I pick up when I need to be encouraged in my farming ventures)

As always, thank you so much to all of you who have taken the time to subscribe and listen to the show each week. I hope that I’m growing as a podcast producer and that as time goes along the show just gets better and better. If you do enjoy the show don’t forget that you can subscribe on iTunes (by clicking this link or the image on the left) or on the Stitcher App on your smartphone. For those of you that have taken the time to leave a review on iTunes … thank you, thank you, thank you! It is so very encouraging to know that people are listening and enjoying the show!

I would love to hear your questions, show ideas, or comments about the show. Feel free to shoot me an e-mail! As always you can follow along with The Beginning Farmer and Crooked Gap Farm by checking out these links …

• Crooked Gap Farm
• Crooked Gap Farm on Facebook
• Crooked Gap Farm on Twitter

(if you are interested in the music in this episode check out my brother’s record label, Historic Records)

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Making major purchases on your farm is always a necessary part of beginning a farm and expanding your farm in the future. But, they are not always easy decisions to make! Before you go out and drop your hard earned cash on that next great piece of equipment or structure you need to examine whether or not you even need this “next great thing” and where you are going to purchase this item. Just because you have a need for something doesn’t mean that you need it. It may mean that you need to borrow one, rent one, or hire someone to do the job for you. There are times though when a purchase just needs to be made to move the farm along or make your work more efficient. If that is the case then you need to consider where you are going to make that purchase.

What Do I Really Need?

• It will vary from farm to farm, but ask yourself what you need to get started and what can wait for a little while.
• Are there other ways that you can use something that you feel like you need? Borrow, rent, trade work, hire, etc.
• Ask yourself if you are better off spending some time and sweat instead of your cash?

Where Do I Get What I Really Need?

• New is an option, but not really the best option most of the time.
• Check the farm auctions out if you have time to spare, but make sure you don’t get caught up in the “fun” of an auction.
• Craigslist is a pretty good choice and I know most farmers already check it often, but don’t forget about posting “wanted to buy” ads. You’d be amazed at how many farmers have what you want sitting in the back of their shed.

Remember, the bottom line is that it doesn’t need to look perfect … it just needs to work perfectly (or close enough to perfect)!

Lately things have been very active on the farm and a bit of rain in the forecast made things ramp up this week as we tried to get things ready for what I hope is a bit of spring mud. That meant finishing up some projects to get ready for our next back of chicks and doing as much tractor work as I can so I don’t have to use the tractor when it’s muddy. And, as always I take some time this week to share one of my hard lessons learned … this one was a little costly and I hope you don’t have to learn this lesson the hard way.

Some stuff mentioned in this episode …

• The Beginning Farmer Show Episode 003 (What happened to the first tractor?)
• Craigslist App for Android (I’m sure there is an iOS counterpart somewhere)

• Crooked Gap Farm
• Crooked Gap Farm on Facebook
• Crooked Gap Farm on Twitter

(if you are interested in the music in this episode check out my brother’s record label, Historic Records)

Chick Brooder #2

I will be the first to admit that it is very easy for me to become the “Danny Downer” of farming. Sometimes it feels like the farm is only overwhelming, only discouraging, and only failing. But, then there are moments … and these moments probably happen more than I allow myself to see … moments when I just feel a huge sense of satisfaction from farming. There is just something extremely satisfying about building, raising, growing, harvesting, sharing, and consuming! Yesterday was one of those days that was full of satisfaction.

• A friend at church had continually been asking to try some Crooked Gap Farm beef jerky and pork. This was the week when I finally remembered to bring it and they were very excited to take it home with them. Satisfying!
• I needed to load four pigs and a lamb to take to the locker for processing this afternoon, so I hooked up the hog cart (which I recently bought, broke, and fixed) and headed out to sort and load pigs. Things went very smoothly (as they have been with loading recently) and I was done much sooner than I had anticipated. Satisfying!
• There are another batch of 125 chicks coming this week (and rain is in the forecast as well), so I needed to finish up my second brooder (pictured above). Even though I had a few broken tool issues I was able to accomplish this tiny construction project and with a little more work today I’ll be ready for chicks. Satisfying!
• Speaking of chicks, the first batch that came in a couple of weeks ago are doing great. Growing and staying very snug and healthy in their brooder. They’ll be ready for pasture before I know it. Satisfying!
• Even though the grass hasn’t really taken off yet it seems like the animals are just enjoying the spring days that have been popping up more often today. It may seem weird to say this, but as I was doing chores today all the livestock just seemed to be more chipper. Satisfying!
• As I mentioned I needed to load four pigs and a lamb for processing. I dropped them off at the locker last night and the unload went on without a hitch. Plus, I just love dropping off pigs (and a lamb) that have been raised only on this farm. Satisfying!
• I love direct marketing the fruits of the farm. To know that customers we know and call friends will be enjoying our pork, lamb, beef, eggs, and chicken … well that is just awesome. Satisfying!
• And then as I was making the last pass to collect a few eggs around the shed I peeked into the hut occupied by our latest litter of Hereford pigs. A very cool sight. Satisfying!

What do you find satisfying about your farm (no matter how little or big that farm is)?