Sage AdviceFor Would-Be Farmers(part 4 of)ReestablishingThe Family Economy

Dateline: 22 January 2014

(Click Here to read Part 3 of this series)

One of New England's most-photographed farms
(photo link)

Farming is the traditional and, arguably, the best occupation for establishing a family economy. But you will never hear me encouraging anyone to go into farming these days. It is an extremely difficult and stressful business to get off the ground and make a living at, particularly if you are relying on the farm alone to support you and your family. 

Now, if you have an excess of money to buy the land and support the farming enterprise, that’s different. 

A crop farmer I know jokingly told me years ago that if he ever won the lottery, he would just keep on farmin’ until it was all gone. This particular farmer grew up on a farm and got his own farm right out of high school in 1960. He’s 72 now and still farming. Things were different years ago. It was not exactly easy to get into farming, but it was easier.

Unfortunately, a lot of good folks have been discovering the hard way that farming is an almost-impossible business to get into and succeed at. Yes, there are exceptions. There are people who do succeed. But they are, unfortunately, a minority.

I was reminded of all this last summer when I happened upon the blog of a woman who was announcing that her family was selling their farm. It was a downright sad story. They had bought a farm four years earlier with a lot of passion and desire to grow high-quality food. They also wanted their children to grow up in the country. They went into farming for all the right reasons.

It turned out that they absolutely loved the farm. They loved raising high quality poultry, pork, beef, and raw milk. They loved selling their farm-raised products at the market. Their customers appreciated their passion and the high quality, local food. The husband had quit his city job to come home to work the farm. The family was together every day. There were so many positive benefits in the lifestyle they had chosen to pursue. But they were selling the farm.

What was the problem? Why did they have to sell their farm? The woman said it was because there were not enough customers willing to pay the high prices they needed to get for their products. Well, that is one big problem with farming these days. But it turns out there was another underlying problem that I think was their biggest mistake...

It turns out that they had borrowed money to buy the farm. They had a mortgage to pay. They had also borrowed a surprising amount for supplies. They didn’t have sufficient income to pay the bills. The husband had gone back to working a job in the city. He was trying to do chores at night. The family was stressed. Their dream farm had turned into a nightmare farm. They were moving back to the suburbs.

Offhand, it sounded like this family was probably inspired by Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm and were trying to do much like he had done. They probably read his excellent book, Pastured Poultry Profit$. But I dare say they should have also read his book, You Can Farm, or, if they did read it, they should have taken the following sage advice seriously....

Here are some prerequisites to purchasing land [to have a farm]. Ask yourself if any of these have been met.

Have a viable patron base already purchasing what you are growing on land to which you already have access. This can be your own backyard, borrowed or rented land. The point is that you have a clientele that will follow you to your new location and provide a loyal marketing base to get a good profit on the very first thing that comes off your acreage.

Know how to make money on land. This, of course presumes you’ve been doing something long enough that you feel comfortable risking more than just sweat. When you begin risking your pocketbook, things get serious real fast. Your experiential confidence must be high. This does not include ideas you’ve gotten out of books or cooperative schemes you’ve picked up from magazine ads. If you’ve turned good money on a piece of land you’ve been working with, chances are you can duplicate this effort in similarly rewarding fashion on one you own.

Have enough money to live on for 5-10 years after you’ve completely paid off the farm. I don’t mean contracted for, I mean paid for. This one gets sticky. If your experience and knowledge level is low, your learning curve will be steep. You’ll make more mistakes than you imagine possible. Don’t worry, that’s normal for any fledgling business.

The average person who buys a farm today will have that farm back on the market within five years. This cycle is duplicated over and over and over again, and I don’t want you to go through it. Life is too short to be complicated with this.

I’ve seen this cycle repeated too many times. If you have enough money to buy the land debt-free, you won’t need to generate the cash to pay for it from your outside work. I cannot overstate the importance of this issue.

You can buy a couple of acres, move into a $3,000 used mobile home, and get started for perhaps less than $10,000. If you are debt free, you can work part-time while you develop your farm.

But if you have a mortgage to pay, even if it’s only 3,000 per year, it will saddle you with cash requirements that will push you into a more demanding off-farm job, which will leave you less flexibility to develop the farm. The magazine Countryside has featured testimonials time and again from folks who maintained a family on less than $500 per month. My own experience was like this.

Now, I ask you, how many would-be farmers do you think are willing to leave their comfortable house in a suburban cul-de-sac and move into a $3,000 used trailer on two acres of land, and try to live on $500 a month while they get their farm started? You’ve got to have a powerful desire to succeed at farming to do that, and so does your spouse.

But wait, there’s more.....

The best money you can make is what you save on living expenses. Get rid of the second car, quit patronizing the grocery store, and do more for yourself. If you grow most of your own food, harvest your own heat off the farm (firewood) and get clothes at the thrift store, you can live quite cheaply. As the farm becomes lucrative, you can begin to upgrade. You will see what you can more economically buy off the farm than grow yourself, and you can begin focusing more energy on the things that generate a high return per hour.

But you must keep your cash requirements low. If you’re going to move onto the acreage, build a nice, acceptable house with well-mowed lawn, you’d better have deep pockets. In such a case, if you can’t live farm-income free from 5 to 10 years, forget it.Why so long? It will take you that long to go through the learning curve.

Business guru Peter Drucker charts the business cycle and points out that any new business has a 7-10 year period before it becomes lucrative. There just aren’t any shortcuts to this no matter how you may think folks that are there got there easy. None of us did.

I think Joel is right on with his observations and advice. 

What do you think?

Also, Though I am not a farmer, I do have a successful (it pays the bills) home-economy business in the country, and much of what Joel has written is pertinent to getting a home business launched. That last paragraph says a lot.

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In the next essay of this series I will post some final thoughts on the family economy and how to establish one in your family.