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."
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<snip>
who can't understand the concept and think it's some sort of
advocacy for "pure homesteading" so some such.
BUT the moment we stepped over the line to offer things for cash, the
effort began to rise expodentially.
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.
All the models for homestead produce marketing look so good on paper.<snip>I've never found an > actual, *honest* CSA that has made it on
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. <snip>
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.
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