Yesterday I was looking for a new magazine to subscribe to because my subscription to “The Stockman Grassfarmer” had expired (great magazine, but I can only do one at a time so I wanted to try them all out). I just wanted to get a glimpse of what some of the articles were like in the various magazines out there for small scale farmers when I ran across an interesting article from “Graze”. The title of the April 2008 article was, “From zero to $300,000 in five years”. That caught my attention because I was under the impression that there was no money in farming, especially if you were starting with nothing.
Well, I don’t have time to pontificate on the article too much, so I will encourage you to go and check it out. But, before I go I will leave you with a few thoughts of mine after reading through the article one time.
- Even though we bought land I do believe renting is one of the best ways to go if you can make it work for you. The reason we bought was because we were going to build our own house and spend about the same as a couple in our position would on a house in town.
- Having someone to help you get started is a wonderful thing. I haven’t had the chance to have a mentor like I would have loved having, but the connections I have made through this blog and field days that I have attended have really been a help in planning.
- “Sweat-Equity” really does work. Just read the article to see what they were able to do.
- Record keeping, record keeping, record keeping! I love how detailed the information is in the article.
I believe this was a very encouraging article. There are plenty of risks to be hand in such a venture, but I think there are risks no matter what you do these days so you might as well enjoy your risks. If the rest of the articles are like this one I think I’ll enjoy a year’s subscription to “Graze”. Do you have any other magazine suggestions before I pull the trigger?
My but that article was fascinating. My husband and I just moved to a small dairy (USDA Certified Organic) here in NY about 9mo ago. This dairy runs a little over 200 cows (not including the heifers born this year or the ones not quite big enough for breeding yet). We don’t rent, we work here (and live here) but it sounds like this article is spot on. It’s really an art, dairying, mixed with careful planning, budgeting and science. Our boss is all about saving money, responsible farming and sustainability. I can’t tell you how much we’ve learned living here.