buying heifers, Preg checking, Reassurer
Happy 4th! Thankful for independence. And those who paid the price for freedom. I pray we don’t take it for granted. Or let it slip away.
Another busy week on the farm. Monday was a lot of cattle sorting and hauling.
Tuesday in between rain showers we moved 50 momma cows about a mile up the road to have them closer to the barn for Thursday’s preg checking. Not quite 3/4 of an inch of rain this week. With a full day planned for Wednesday and Amy’s Farmville delivery on Thursday, we went ahead and filled coolers and orders. Got the disc mower hooked up. Amy taught a Barn2Door class that afternoon. We welcomed a new bull to the farm. Then we crated over 300 chickens in the field for Wednesday’s harvest.
Wednesday was a 15 hour work day. That morning getting the processing area cleaned and set up. Chores. A new batch of baby chicks in the brooder. Meat back from the processor. Three tons of ORVF beef and pork into the freezers, one box at a time. Amy keeping up with me, box for box. Then over 300 chickens killed and on ice. Our amazing processing crew was in high gear. It used to take us all day to kill 135 birds. On Wednesday we were putting chickens on ice at a pace of 135 birds/hour. Hasten helped me with the killing.
That afternoon we parted about 145 of them and packaged the rest whole. After clean up, we hauled over 300 big chicks from the brooder out to the field to go in the shelters we emptied the day before. Then we moved the momma cows across the road and into the barn to be ready for the vet the next morning. Mowing hay the remaining hours of daylight.
Thursday morning John and Samuel helped us run the cows through the chute so the vet could see if they were bred to calve this fall. Afterward, we got Amy loaded and off on her quarterly delivery to Farmville, getting back home safely around 10:00 last night. After getting cows situated and making all the rounds, I spent the rest of the day mowing more hay. Hopefully we’ll get along good baling it today and tomorrow.
Over the past couple weeks we’ve bought about 120 locally raised heifers averaging in $2300-2400 per head, which is up $400-500 compared to last year’s already crazy high prices. Of course with this comes evaluating and adjusting our prices. We picked out some of the better heifers to turn out with the bull to grow our momma cow herd in hopes of not needing to purchase as many calves in the future. While we are crossing our fingers that this proves to be a good long term strategy, it by no means delivers a quick return when you’re in the farm to table business. Heifers that get bred now will calve next spring. By the time they graze to harvest size, it will likely be 2028-2029 before we see any return on investment, requiring a lot of work and thousands of additional dollars between now and then.
So far this year we’ve spent over 400K on calves, chicks, and piglets. I’m sure by the end of the year we’ll have spent 100K in processing. Probably 100K in feed. Another 100K in land payments and rent. Thinking about these numbers and trying to make a living makes my stomach twist up in knots. Cash flow wise, this is going to be a red year for us. Lord knows we’re not doing this for the money, but it only takes a few years of running in the red to not be doing this at all. We’re trying to be prayerful and careful with these decisions.
More from The Mad Farmer Poems by Wendell Berry. Here’s a few lines from “The Reassurer.”
“A people in the throes of national prosperity, who breathe poisoned air, drink poisoned water, eat poisoned food,
who take poisoned medicines to heal them of the poisons that they breathe, drink, and eat,
such a people crave the further poison of official reassurance. It is not logical,
but it is understandable, perhaps, that they adore their President who tells them that all is well, all is better than ever.
The President reassures the farmer and his wife who have exhausted their farm to pay for it, and have exhausted themselves to pay for it,
and have not paid for it…”
Have a good week.
Will