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market-farming - Re: Making a living

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Subject: Market Farming

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  • From: "David & Crystal" <consalvi AT midmaine.com>
  • To: "market farming" <market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Making a living
  • Date: Tue, 9 Jan 2001 08:40:42 -0500


Thank you for your responses to my question about how many are making a
living by farming. Not to offend anyone, but it seems like most of you are
not making a living through farming, but by being food processors, bakers,
etc... which maybe what is necessary, but I find it depressing. Don't get me
wrong, I'm very glad for those of you who have found a way to making money
and keep farming.

Maybe I'm short-sighted in my thinking, but I do not want to cook and
process food, I have more than enough of it to store food and cook food for
my own family, if I did, I could open a restaurant or something. And I don't
want to be an employer. Maybe my list of "I don't wannas" is too long, but
we didn't move out here to have to deal with government hassle and people
around the farm all the time. Even if I wanted to, my house would not pass
Maine's inspection, we live very simply, no hot water, very limited
electricity, and a very small 600 sq ft house with 2 young children so that
my kitchen could not be partitioned off. Not too mention that we do not have
the money to upgrade or afford the liability insurance -- my dh's off-farm
job makes $8.00/hr. It's one of those catch-22s, since dh works off the farm
fulltime year round, it limits the amount we can grow. If he could quit, we
could grow a lot more and probably make a good living, but how to pay the
bills in the meantime?

Also, we live very very far away from an upscale suburban/urban area
(minimum of 4 hours drive). And there are very few people around that do any
type of farming so that it would be pretty impractical and expensive to set
up a community kitchen. I've considered approaching the blueberry growers
who have a coop kitchen, but it's 1 1/2 hours away. I've also considered
talking to the local technical college to use their kitchen when they are
not using it. Maybe that's an idea for anyone out there that wants to
process food.

We do a CSA which we charge $190 per share for approx. 2 1/2 gallons of food
from around mid-June to our first hard frost, usually somewhere in mid-Sept.
We will be setting up a greenhouse and will try to grow food almost year
round (ala Eliot Coleman style) and build a root cellar. We could triple our
income just by offering year round shares since our summer growing season is
so short. We would have a lot of shareholdres for a winter share since we
cannot get good veggies during the winter from the regular food store and
the "health food store" does not sell veggies.

I think, like someone else on this list mentioned, I'm just burned out on
all the work involved for so little money. I am interested in if anyone
knows of any good info on doing taxes for a farm. We have always done our
own and a friend had mentioned that if you farm, almost everything can be
written off. Anyone have any good sites or books about it?

I hope I haven't sounded too negative.

~Crystal
Crystal Dawn Farm
Perry, ME








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