Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

Got way behind on my reading of this list, and more's the pity because the 
threads have been good.

Having read all the Marketing and Farmer's Market posts to see if the major 
points were covered, they were, but if I could add a bit of another way of 
saying some of the same things:

This year we are selling nearly nothing off the farm (farm produce-wise) 
winding down some five to six years dabbling in it.  We've incidentally sold 
some 
laying chickens, rabbits, and goats this year, but we didn't initiate  the 
sale, didn't  'market' them.  I'm thinking that training horses wouldn't 
count 
for this thread.  So our gardens and flocks have eased their way back down to 
subsistence level.

In our heyday, we frequented the farmer's market with produce, honey, eggs, 
bread, flowers, soap, beeswax candles, and a lot of other things.  The 
politics 
of the farmers' market was the pits so the second year and subsequent years, 
we kept an email list took orders by email and delivered.  That was much 
better, but marginal still as I will explain later.

To put this into persepective, we never put ourselves in a position to depend 
on marketing farmstead products to stay afloat.  It was a sideline at best 
and we set up a sort of set of books in a 'free food' program where we wanted 
to 
supply all our food but not expend any cash at all doing so.  Selling things 
from the farm was only intended to cover the expense of the greenhouses, a 
little supplemental feed (when we had too many chickens), farrier costs, 
seeds, 
fuel to haul manure and organic material from off farm, fencing, etc ..... 
and 
to buy our bulk items we didn't grow like cooking oil and wheat (although we 
are growing wheat this year).  We weren't trying to pay a mortgage and not 
even 
the taxes and insurance with it, so like Gandi said when an interviewer was 
amazed he could weave the cloth for his own clothes, he said "Well, I only 
wear 
a loincloth so for me it is not a very big accomplishment."

We've always viewed the farm as a 'Render unto Caesar' operation and 
separated out in our thinking the subsistence aspect of what it produces and 
the other 
modern expenses.  Mixing those two metaphors has not been satisfactory for 
us.  It is much easier to work a few hours off farm or produce some 
marketable 
item in our shop to pay for electricity, tools, insurance, dental visits, 
taxes, and such than to grow enough turnips to feed us AND sell enough for 
the cash 
to pay for those things.

It's a difficult concept to convey, and I know I'm not doing an dequate job 
of it.  I can usually do nothing but wag my head at those who can't 
understand 
the concept and think it's some sort of advocacy for "pure homesteading" so 
some such.  So let me make it even worse by continuing:   We can cut enough 
wood 
for our heating needs with only a modicum of effort.  It's close by, we can 
cut it and gather it and stack it at our leisure (at least on our schedule).  
But if we tried to earn cash by selling firewood, the stakes are raised 
considerably (hmmmm, seems like there ought to be a pun in there somewhere).  
We need 
much more wood, we have to haul it so there are truck expenses, we have to 
intermesh with other people's schedules, we have to market it.  The biggest 
shift in the paradigm is that we are able to get all our own heating and 
cooking 
wood with hand tools.  Can't possilby do a firewood trade without chainsaws 
and 
such so there are those expenses and annoyances as well.  What if we decided 
to pursue a firewood trade and use the money to run a heat pump??  We would 
work many, many times as hard as we would just gathering the fuel and burning 
it 
ourselves.  In fact, we could go to the local convenience store and work an 
easy shift a week and get our fuel costs with a lot less effort.

We found marketing farm produce to be much the same in the end.  It is 
astounding to me how little space it takes to supply all the food needs for a 
family 
of six, and some of those six have vastly expanding appetites!  We can 
maintain plenty large enough gardens with a generous margin of hedging our 
bets, 
fowl, goats, cow, rabbits, bees, orchards and vinyards on a very small 
percent of 
the truck available to us.  And since the place is being used below capacity, 
input of feed and organic material form outside the farm is minimal to 
non-existent.

BUT the moment we stepped over the line to offer things for cash, the effort 
began to rise expodentially.  

I read the comments and advice here about this or that marketing ploy, 
finding the highly motivated customer base, value added, promote the healthy 
aspect, 
etc.  To that I say, try it for a few seasons and let us know how it works 
for you.  The reality in the trenches for us was more like this:  The 
customers 
are fickle in the extreme.  There is not such thing as that group of 
wonderful 
customers who buy your produce on a regular basis.  They come and go.

Lynn has mentioned the problems of raising the price of eggs from $1.25 a 
dozen to $1.50.  We sold eggs for several years at $2.00/dozen.  One week 
we'd 
sell every egg we had and had people highly annoyed that they didn't get any. 
 
The next week we'd have 20 dozen ready to sell and no one wanted them.  
Couldn't give them away.  Next week the chickens would begin the moult and 
the egg 
count would drop, "Where's my damn eggs!!" is what we'd hear.

The most profitable thing was salads which we sold from $4 to $6 for a half 
pound bag (depending on what was in it).  Of course, the salad plots had to 
be 
replanted continuously depending on what you thought the demand would be in a 
few weeks.  "Love the salads, can't get enough, oh, you're out?  so 
disappointed!"  So we planted more. As the lettuce and mizuma and tsa-toi got 
sizeable, 
then mature, then over-mature and became rabbit food, we heard "None this 
week, thanks."  So we planted less, and when these plots came ready to 
harvest, it 
was "What?  Out?  I was really depending on getting some from you!"

All the models for homestead produce marketing look so good on paper.   So I 
began to look around my area for more successful models to follow, someone 
who 
was marketing on a regular basis and turning a credible profit at it.  What I 
found was that all operations who claimed to be doing that were being 
supported by some sort of grant, they weren't making it on their own at all.  
Our own 
local farmers market supported by the city and state and a few federal grants 
had as many as 25 to 30 farmers at the peak of the season (which is not very 
long) and the most prolific were making about $3000 for the season, with the 
average being about $1000.  But the market was supported by over $180,000 in 
grant money!   It's like trying to heat your house with sodden leaves which 
you 
can do so long as you have enough gas or coal to burn them with!  

I too heard all the stories about "Happy Gizzard" farm or some such that was 
held up as a model of success for organic specialty marketing on a small farm 
basis.  But whenever I looked into those closely enough, there was other 
money 
floating the operation so that it really mattered little whether they sold 
anything or not.


Yet, none the less, we turned a profit for our effort.  We abandoned the 
farmers market as a rum start and did a subscription business (I've never 
found an 
actual, *honest* CSA that has made it on it's own without grant supplements). 
 We only offered what we actually had, a la carte, as it were.  Finally, 
though, fuel prices brought that to a halt.   And the notion of putting a few 
buckets of salad oil in a diesel truck falls into the same sort of 
speculation as 
those perfect, golden produce customers.

Having been there and done that, I am stuck by the difference in the effort 
and worry of making an item in my shop and selling it on eBay for the same 
money it woudl take me six weeks to earn selling farm produce.  But much more 
than 
this, I am mindful of the difference in the effort of putting overflowing 
abundance on the table from the garden and pastures, and the effort of 
earning 
even a little cash by selling same.

I'm not attempting to offer a satisfactory explanation of it, but it seems in 
my experience that the lightest and most effortless thing eaten directly on 
the farm takes on leaden shoes when it walks past our gate.

James