Growing from Pains | The farm in 2022
@honestmomphotography
Growing from Pains
I am a planner, a goal-setter and someone that really thrives on solving problems. Which makes the farm a really great vocation, because there are always new problems to solve. This year I finally took the time to look at some of the challenges of the farm that I’d ignored, or brushed off as ‘growing pains’. Maybe it was because I am now farming with a toddler, or maybe I finally felt like I had enough data to make decisions with a clear vision. Either way, my goal setting and planning for the year took a different turn than I had imagined when our farm first began.
First, it started with personal goals, not business goals. Again, I can probably attribute this to my daughter and a change in my vision for life - knowing life is about far more than business. For the first time I sat down and looked at what I wanted for my life and how the farm fits into that instead of making decisions based solely on growing the farm.
You see I believe it’s easy to get caught up in the pressure to grow, especially on a farm where it seems money is always tight. I think it’s especially easy as a new farmer (only because this is what I did) that bigger means more money - which means stability. Or at least that is how I mentally justified growing and pooling every resource to do so. I mean look at how many farms do all the things, raise every type of livestock and never actually make a living from it - it’s more than you might think. What I’ve realized for the first time is there really isn’t much of a living in purely raising beef and lamb. But that doesn’t mean diversifying is the answer. Being smart when diversifying is crucial to the success of doing so because more livestock doesn’t mean more profit just like more products doesn’t always mean more profit. In fact, in my opinion, it means the opposite in most cases. From what I’ve seen and experienced myself is it only means more irons in the fire, being stretched too thin, more stress, and less time to do the other things you value in life.
What I realized is that in an effort to ‘maximize’ the farm profitability I was directly inhibiting my ability to maximize my life.
A really tangible example of this is my ability to travel - which was ‘hugely’ important to me prior to starting the farm. Over the last four years it has taken a complete backseat to the farm. Because let’s be honest, spending that ‘vacation’ money on farm stuff can always be justified as a good investment. I mean automatic waterers to save time, chutes for sheep handling to save the need for more hands, skid-steers to move larger bales, more livestock - well duh! It’s easy to think that someday that financial sacrifice will pay off…. or it won’t.
I guess I finally hit a point that I could no longer justify this excuse, looking at the numbers with a critical eye instead of rose-colored glasses gave me a clear answer. One that I wasn’t totally ready to accept if I am being honest.
What I realized is that my precious cattle need a lot of resources, mostly on the financial spectrum. They take a long time to grow, they eat a lot, they break things and harvesting them is a challenge. Now, let me step back and just note that cattle are my first love and they are where this all started - that will never change. But, that doesn’t mean that I need to focus my growth here, in fact, it is a place I know I need to stop growth, at least in this season of my life.
As it turns out, the sheep have the most potential to be financially viable within the constraints of my land, resources and the little detail of raising a toddler in the midst of running a farm.
So, what does that really mean for the farm going forward? Well, first it means a halt on growing the herd and more attention to the flock. It also means maximizing the potential within our waste products to add financial additions to my revenue stream without adding loads of more work. It means maximizing each and every life, both from a stewardship standpoint and a practical farm-stability one.
Which leads me to my goals in 2022 which read something like this:
Utilize all the fat from our livestock harvests
Utlize all of our sheep hides from harvests
Find an avenue for our cattle hides from harvests
Capitalize on farm experiences for our customers
Maximize customer relations
Remove the lens of ‘future payoffs for investments now’, this is a personal one because it seems to have been my way of justifying everything and not looking at things critically. This season I am choosing to simply follow-through on projects already in the works rather than finding new ones. This one is going to be HARD for me.
Book that trip to Alaska
