Archive for the ‘Farm Business’ Category
March 4, 2006 – Tax and Newsletter
It’s a drizzly, foggy day – a day for indoor work. Getting tax stuff ready and working on spring high hopes newsletter. As this is our first year filing as an LLC, I’m filling out the forms best I can, then taking it into the tax guy to finish.
February 20, 2006 – Trying to Make it all Work
The last few days I’ve been working on a high hopes newsletter and order form for the upcoming season. Today I called the locker where we take chickens to find out the minimum number we could sell to individuals and let them pick it up. They wouldn’t do it period. So something that was inconvenient for our customers becomes impossible.
Out options are to butcher the chickens on the farm or go to a locker licensed to sell retail – that would add about $3.50 to the price of the already expensive chickens without much of a margin for us. This is one enterprise where economies of scale sure help – driving 100 chickens to the locker plant vs driving 1000 would drive a lot of the costs significantly down, but growing 1,000 chickens does not fit into the balance of our farm at this point.
The chickens are such a wonderful product – but we can’t do it for free or little profit with all the risk that goes along with it. We NEED a plant closer to make it more economical.
So until we decide what to do – the newsletter is on hold.
June 28, 2005 – Soul Searching
Throughout the winter, we took a class Saturday mornings entitled “Growing Your Small Market Farm.” The culmination of the class was to write a business plan for your farm operation. Along the way, we formed High Hopes Gardens LLC for legal and financial protection of our non-farm assets, learned a great deal, and met some good people. We began writing a plan for an on-farm store – thinking that we spent too much time driving to and sitting at farmer’s markets and that our time would be better spent selling at retail from our farm – with poultry as one of the main draws.
The poultry processing rules put a kibosh on that aspect, but we still went ahead with a survey to other on-farm stores nationwide and to about 200 local consumers to gather info on profitability factors of on-farm stores and attitudes of local people towards shopping at an on-farm store.
Although not totally discouraging, we realized that it probably wouldn’t work on our location on a gravel road. So although we did lots of research, much of it original, we did not think it would work. We had our on-farm visit from our instructor last Friday and had looked at our schedules and life and found no room for a business. In some ways, Linda is starting a business in getting the sustainable and entrepreneurial program off the ground at school. The time in feeding ourselves, raising the kids, and having two other jobs doesn’t leave a lot of room for new adventures. Another challenge is that if we wanted to take the leap, having about three acres of hilly ground would be hard to replace one off-farm income.
So we’ll not have this immediate expectation of starting quite yet. We’ll look back and see if we’d like to do more long-term crops (christmas trees, nuts, lumber) or just try a short season at market with fruits, flowers and berries, or perhaps off-season hoops.
Deciding to let this drop, if even temporarily does not come easily or without its own angst. We’ll try it on for a while, breathe for a few seconds a day, and see where it brings us.
April 12, 2005 – Farm Store Survey
We have spent some time surveying farm store owners and have the results now in. See our web page for the results. We are now tabulating the results of the surveys to local residents about their local food purchases and will post that soon.
March 23, 2005 – Retreat Conclusions
We’ve only been gone less than 36 hours – but it was two full days, a night away and drive-bys of 100′s of farms – most not doing too well. Rural southeastern Iowa is not a particularly prosperous part of the U.S. It was quite jarring driving up from the south to Iowa City after two days in small towns and rural lands and seeing the difference in wealth and opportunity. What makes us value town jobs more than rural jobs? What would it take to have a person who grows your food make as much money as a person who landscapes your yard?
Yesterday was good for hunkering down and working on the farm business plan. It was raining and snowing, so we weren’t tempted to go outside. We made some great strides and are grateful for that. Today, we had a nice chat with the owner of the Bed and Breakfast whose town of 35 residents has been declared a national historic district, in whole, due to the efforts of a “newcomer” (she moved there in 1955) who made enemies for life in trying to move the town from a collection of junk cars to a place worthy of preservation and opportunity. The buildings are all built of red brick, fired from local clay by the Mormons over 100 years ago. We wondered why it was when you lived in a shithole it was so hard to flush and make something new and better? Kudos to those in the Villages of Van Buren for making something new out of a treasure of history and architecture.
Today we visted Premiere Fencing near Washington, IA – one of the biggest purveyor of fencing supplies. We then went to Red Fern Farm to pick up some chestnut trees for our silvopasture. Tom is experimenting with alternative crops in Iowa like chestnuts, heartnuts, persimmons, medlars, and others. Red Fern had 6 inches of snow overnight.
An upshot from this time away and bit of perspective is that we are now thinking that we are going to stop offering poultry for sale. The lousy return (even charging $2.00 lb) and huge risk (predation, disease, dogs, weather) along with the liability insurance cost, just doesn’t make sense for us to sell on a small scale and we are not willing to grow the thousands it may take to make it worth our time. For our small farm, it just does not work right now. This might change if there was an inspected locker close by.
It is not easy to drop this enterprise as it is a product our customers cannot easily get in the store and we are not happy with the conditions commercial broilers are raised, but we can’t do it without a reasonable return. We are going to shift our focus a bit – but more about that later, as I am now rambling.
March 21, 2005 – Vacation or Fence?
You know you are a real farmer when you’d rather spend your money on a new fence than a caribbean vacation! I started building the fence for this year’s tree planting. I ultimately decided on the cattle panels as they will be most flexible and “always on” even though they are a bit pricey. Today, I finished pulling the snow fence posts and got about 6 panels (96 feet) worth of fence hauled and up. That means I’m about 1/14 done with the fence. Here’s about half the pieces on the wagon.
Tomorrow morning I leave with Linda on a 2 day get-away to the Villages of Van Buren County. We’re renting a “cottage” and today I went shopping for food and drink. It looks like the weather is going to be crummy, so we’ll probably spend less time hiking at Lacy-Keosauqua and more time working on the farm business plan.
March 14, 2005 – Googled Out
The most time-consuming part of the “Growing Your Small Market Farm” class has been writing the surveys and finding survey recipients. Today, I sent out a web survey to 83 people who have on-farm stores or stands. It took a lot of searching and dead-ends, as many farms did not have e-mail addresses on their web sites, just phone numbers. We’ll see how many respond. I was steadfast and did not follow any web tangents and only sent e-mails to others three times for things I found along the way! Next task is to compile addresses for 200 or so local residents. I went to the Post Office to buy 400 stamps today (gulp!)
Here’s a picture of the rest of the people going through the class with us! No doubt each of their enterprises will improve along with ours.
Random unrelated thought
Men’s NCAA Tournament teams from basketball happy Indiana: 0
Men’s NCAA Tournament teams from Iowa: 3
March 9, 2005 – Pasture Improvement
This morning Martin and I tried a low-cost experiment. We broadcast (by hand) some seeds into two acres or so of ho-hum pasture. We spread some Birdsfoot Trefoil, clovers, and some pasture mix grasses. It was a cool, but sunny day and not too windy day to do this. Now we just wait for the freeze/thaw to gently place the seeds where they need to be for spring rains. We also cleaned up part of the barn.
Late in the afternoon the UPS man came with some marsh seeds from Ion Exchange for the small mudhole we are trying to renovate – a mix of sedges, grasses, and flowers. Yesterday the UPS man brought beehive boxes for Joanne’s supers.
There’s been a story off the radar – Iowa’s biggest grass/brush fire, consuming between 12-25 square miles, including burning down some homes and farms. It happened this windy weekend.
I checked the Secretary of State web site, and found a new company! High hopes gardens L.L.C. is now a registered entity. So, also applied for IRS EIN number for tax reporting. Also worked some on adding farm store survey to web survey tool
March 4, 2005 – Catch-up Day
Today was a day to play catch-up. Got the LLC Articles of Incorporation completed, ordered pine,hardwood trees, and native marsh mix for back pasture, and did some updates to the high hopes brochures. Figured out the fencing, but did not order yet.
One of the Sustainable Ag classes from the school came out today and looked at fruit trees for a pruning lesson. Also got some goat hoof trimming done on the side. That’s about all for now.
March 3, 2005 – On the Bubble
It’s the time of year that the NCAA basketball tournament brings talk of “bubble” teams – endless speculation about which teams might or might not make the tournament. Enough of bubble teams, what about bubble items for high hopes gardens? But first, what’s in this year:
More flowers
Tree planting in the pasture
Whizbang chicken plucker
The following are on the bubble for this year:
Establish breeding flock of chickens
Scrape and paint one side of house
Heirloom turkeys
Beginning sauna construction
Reroofing house
The following are out for this year:
Belted Galloway (cattle in general)
Vacation in Sedona (Daughter is traveling instead)
Vegetable gardening for fun and profit
I’m sure all of our venerable readers will chime in with their bubble ideas as well.
As a postscript to the corn cob comments to yesterday’s post, I posted a question to the Whizbang Chicken Pluckers Yahoo! group about the best use for ground corn cobs. High absorbancy was a landmark trait reported by all respondents, so the use of the ground cobs as a helper for “eliminational hygiene” may indeed be good for certain textures of “elimination” whereas the whole cob may be good for other more firm “eliminations.”
February 18, 2005 – Turtles Lurking
Although it is still early in the season, it seems that a turtle is crawling out of the mud and commenting on this blog. They say turtles are one of the wisest totems and have been thought of that way for a long time. I think this turtle is no exception.
Stopped in for lunch at the “Alternatives in Agriculture” conference today put on by local extension, (thank you Sally Wilson) and was a able to meet some more interesting people.
Spent some more time going through the paperwork to set up the LLC. Was trying to get a checking account set up, but found out you can no longer get a checking account for an LLC until you have the Federal EIN number, so that goes on hold until another bit of paperwork gets completed.
It was nice to have an “average” February day – about 36 and sunny. Most of the snow is gone, except for the blazingly white drifts along the ditches and crests of hills.
February 13, 2005 Valentine’s Eve
Although we are leaving the dead of winter, high hopes is bustling. This week we have decided to take the plunge into forming a LLC (Limited Liability Corporation) as a result of a “Growing Your Small Market Farm” class we are taking. Tomorrow our plan to integrate an agroforestry component goes before the local NRCS council. If approved, it will offer us cost share to improve our small pasture.
It’s a foggy rainy day, and we’re tempted to toss some lettuce seeds out… but the rain has melted the last of the snow and it’s a tad muddy outside.
