Got to feed the pigs to the cows and feed the chickens to the pigs. Feed the hops to the chickens and its a perfect system. My greatgranpappy taught me that
Sounds good, I think focusing more energy on your potentially most profitable area is a good one. On the last farm I was on, fields that were damp had a willow coppice, mainly a winter operation and very profitable, check out willow bank at ragmans lane farm
How many birds per 250 watt heat lamp do you use ? . I'm getting 150 chicks in a few days I have 4 lamps now but thinking about going with 2 more I'm in northern ca . It gets cold here but no snow .
I found John's site just yesterday. I have watched a dozen videos and he has already failed. Damn I was hoping to learn about successful chicken farming from him he seems to be a great guy, I hope he reconsiders chickens in the future.
It sounds like your land is telling you to do rotational grazing but you find it easy to tell brewery customers about hops so you are going to shift towards a single commodity. This is likely to be a mistake. You should be trying to create multiple synergistic sources of profit so you can take advantage of short term opportunities, rather than discarding revenue streams to focus solely on a short term opportunity. Your brewery customers care far less about “local hops” than you do, I guarantee. And what happens when you have a bad year for hops? If you want to be vertically integrated it needs to be geared to the farm, not the other way around. It sounds like you are making bad business decisions because you aren’t getting any good advice. What you should be doing is spinning off your stake in the brewery and using that payout or income to invest in multiple synergistic on farm profit streams. Sounds like ruminants is what works there.
Hi John, have you looked into keyline design principles to move some of that water around your farm to dry out some of the wetter areas? I know Richard Perkins touches on it but not sure how much. Good luck in 2018, ill be watching.
Good for you, John. Take care of your family and yourself first and do what helps get you to your “why”.
Thank you for the honest insight into what farming really is and how it’s not always the romantic homestead people hope it will be. Way to be flexible and make good choices. A business is a business and I know you’ll do well.
For those of us who don’t consume alcohol it is sad to see that be your primary focus of 2018. I have always watched your channel for the enthusiasm you bring to your work and the information you share about the livestock.
Beer and all that goes with it will be a lot more profitable then anything else (except canibus sales, LOL). Look at the big Bud! They have jacked up their beer prices and are really getting greedy! Have switched beers to snub the Big Budweiser! No matter the economy, beer and other alcohol will always sell well or be a great barter item!
I'm picking up a pattern from the content providers running multifaceted, regenerative, neo-farmering operations; Reductive Thinking. John Roberts, the former head of the National Association of the Specialty Food Trade, warn small gourmet producers "thems that feed the rich dine with the masses, thems that feed the masses dine with the rich." The great challenge in regenerative ag is scale. How do you demonstrate the ability to produce moral volume with quality. It should be a given, regenerative ag is hard work, long hours, and low pay. It is disheartening to hear ground breaking leaders in the field arrive at "it is not worth it" realizations. "The market garden is so much labor, the internship program takes so much of my time, the mob stock pasture program is so management intensive, who has time to collect eggs for $4 per dozen, the forest pigs require so much supervision, got to move the tractors..again, the csa is such an administrative nightmare." I'm reminded of a Farmer Butch story. Farmer Butch, after another great day at market, turns to his wife and says if we keep selling all the tomatoes we buy at $2 for $2, we're gonna need to buy a bigger wagon. Regenerative Ag is a tightly woven tapestry of loss leaders, cash cows, long hours, hard work, and a very expensive land restoration investment project. If you keep chipping away the little pieces, in the end you don't end up with a larger big piece. The idea is to heal the land in order to increase its yield. You want the land's output to force you to buy the bigger wagon. John, it seems to me you are in the brewery business, or the distilling business. A regenerative ag operation may not seem to be paddling in the same direction (not a lot of chicken, egg, pork, and beef goes into brewing beer). But the micro brewery/microdistillery thing is a phenomenon of marketing. A commodity product has been reinvented and is achieving unheard of margins through the pixy dust of marketing. If that concept is built on the smoke and mirrors of imagine marketing and group think, how much better to have a regenerative enviro-ag operation to use as an arrow in your marketing quiver. Grow more hops, mob graze ruminants in your rows for fertilization, and sanitize behind them with chickens. Use your shed pack and a pig-aerator system to improve and raise the pastures for barley production. You may not be able to grow what you need for production, but the “sheep” sucking on the “local” tap don’t need to know that. The Turn in this “magicarketing” trick is the regen-enviro-local -agro tourism gourmet beer buzz, The Prestige is more yield from responsible management and healed land.
I wish you could go into more detail as to why your pastured broiler enterprise wasn't profitable even at $6/lb and your egg operation even at $8/dz. I understand it can be a lot of work running multiple enterprises, but haven't you guys looked into creating synergies between different operations? Instead of composting spent grain from the brewery, perhaps you could look into feeding it to the layers and pigs to offset feed cost etc…
if you got some grass areas, even 5 acres, but 10 would be better, put it into hay. avg 100 bales an acre on 3 cuttings per season.( maybe more maybe less where you live) but thats 1500 bales for 5 acres and 3000 bales for 10. If you have cheap hay prices at 3 dollars a bale, your talking 4500 dollars for 5 acres, or 9000 for 10 acres. Yes there is labor, but you can buy old balers for under 3000, a rake for around 1000, and haybine for around 3000. So you can pay off all equipment in first year. Then your talking a max of 9 days of labor over the summer. Then you can market the hay on craigslist, heck in your area hay might be 5 bucks a bale. It will also make your property look pretty, and will get mowed, so i would suggest, if you want to make money quick and change your cashflow into profit. ( i would say per cutting for fuel and labor 60 bucks for fuel, and maybe 8 hours of labor(10 dollars per hour for 2 people min. 160. so 220 bucks expense for 3000 dollars in gross bale sales.(on 10 acres). This is the quickest and easiest way to turn a profit in farming. Ya you have other expenses in twine, and taxes on land, but you would be paying those regardless. My other suggestion is to instead of pigs, or chickens go to beef. Feed them that hay, do grass fed and organic beef, the profit margins are better and your dealing with more meat. Chickens are hardly worth messing with for real farm income, why do you think they have large chicken barns. ( it sucks but thats the only way to make money.) I put more into feed for my chickens than i get for eggs, but i get farm fresh eggs and i enjoy it.
You have good business sense – I stumbled through farming for 30 yrs complaining there's not enough hours in the day to accomplish everything that needs to be done. I finally scaled way back just to breathe! Does your farm produce enough income to hire people and delegate the jobs out which would allow you to have your hands in everything without getting completely submerged? You have a very nice, well thought out map layout.
If you were to pursue the egg layers, do you think there'd be a silver bullet that would make the operation viable if that one thing weren't as much an issue? E.g. not enough customers, less labor inputs, self-produced inputs, etc.
Pastured eggs' profits are realized on the second and third year. There is a reduction in egg production year-after-year, but it's not as much as some people say. It also depends on the chicks — we use ISA Layers from a hatchery in Rudd Iowa.
Sounds very like my own decision to give up on goats after too many years of them not thriving on my land. You have to go with what works.
grain free chicken raising. Let them forage through the cow poo mound for worms etc. Free all year
where are is your farm? city/state. I want to buy your chicken n pigs.
I want to be a farmer but I have no idea how to start
good work
if this is not profitable how can someone start a farm and get excited about it ?
Got to feed the pigs to the cows and feed the chickens to the pigs. Feed the hops to the chickens and its a perfect system. My greatgranpappy taught me that
Sounds good, I think focusing more energy on your potentially most profitable area is a good one. On the last farm I was on, fields that were damp had a willow coppice, mainly a winter operation and very profitable, check out willow bank at ragmans lane farm
How many birds per 250 watt heat lamp do you use ? . I'm getting 150 chicks in a few days I have 4 lamps now but thinking about going with 2 more
I'm in northern ca . It gets cold here but no snow .
Hey Man! Great focus! What's your brewery name?
Where in CT? I'm growing hops in CT too.
I found John's site just yesterday. I have watched a dozen videos and he has already failed. Damn I was hoping to learn about successful chicken farming from him he seems to be a great guy, I hope he reconsiders chickens in the future.
It sounds like your land is telling you to do rotational grazing but you find it easy to tell brewery customers about hops so you are going to shift towards a single commodity. This is likely to be a mistake. You should be trying to create multiple synergistic sources of profit so you can take advantage of short term opportunities, rather than discarding revenue streams to focus solely on a short term opportunity. Your brewery customers care far less about “local hops” than you do, I guarantee. And what happens when you have a bad year for hops? If you want to be vertically integrated it needs to be geared to the farm, not the other way around. It sounds like you are making bad business decisions because you aren’t getting any good advice. What you should be doing is spinning off your stake in the brewery and using that payout or income to invest in multiple synergistic on farm profit streams. Sounds like ruminants is what works there.
OMG: https://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/portal/fsis/topics/recalls-and-public-health-alerts/recall-case-archive/archive/2017/recall-119-2017-release
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/national/more-than-10k-pounds-of-chicken-recalled-over-possible-metal-contamination
Hi John, have you looked into keyline design principles to move some of that water around your farm to dry out some of the wetter areas? I know Richard Perkins touches on it but not sure how much. Good luck in 2018, ill be watching.
Good for you, John. Take care of your family and yourself first and do what helps get you to your “why”.
Thank you for the honest insight into what farming really is and how it’s not always the romantic homestead people hope it will be. Way to be flexible and make good choices. A business is a business and I know you’ll do well.
For those of us who don’t consume alcohol it is sad to see that be your primary focus of 2018. I have always watched your channel for the enthusiasm you bring to your work and the information you share about the livestock.
Beer and all that goes with it will be a lot more profitable then anything else (except canibus sales, LOL). Look at the big Bud! They have jacked up their beer prices and are really getting greedy! Have switched beers to snub the Big Budweiser! No matter the economy, beer and other alcohol will always sell well or be a great barter item!
What? Just hops?!?
Are you a Farm Bureau member?
I just subscribed, like what your doing. I'm interested in the chickens, do you have cows for beef?
Looking forward to a great 2018 of development and growth for you!
Maybe you could have your own farmers market on site. Rent stall and so on. Just spit balling.
I'm picking up a pattern from the content providers running multifaceted, regenerative, neo-farmering operations; Reductive Thinking. John Roberts, the former head of the National Association of the Specialty Food Trade, warn small gourmet producers "thems that feed the rich dine with the masses, thems that feed the masses dine with the rich."
The great challenge in regenerative ag is scale. How do you demonstrate the ability to produce moral volume with quality.
It should be a given, regenerative ag is hard work, long hours, and low pay. It is disheartening to hear ground breaking leaders in the field arrive at "it is not worth it" realizations. "The market garden is so much labor, the internship program takes so much of my time, the mob stock pasture program is so management intensive, who has time to collect eggs for $4 per dozen, the forest pigs require so much supervision, got to move the tractors..again, the csa is such an administrative nightmare."
I'm reminded of a Farmer Butch story. Farmer Butch, after another great day at market, turns to his wife and says if we keep selling all the tomatoes we buy at $2 for $2, we're gonna need to buy a bigger wagon.
Regenerative Ag is a tightly woven tapestry of loss leaders, cash cows, long hours, hard work, and a very expensive land restoration investment project. If you keep chipping away the little pieces, in the end you don't end up with a larger big piece. The idea is to heal the land in order to increase its yield. You want the land's output to force you to buy the bigger wagon.
John, it seems to me you are in the brewery business, or the distilling business. A regenerative ag operation may not seem to be paddling in the same direction (not a lot of chicken, egg, pork, and beef goes into brewing beer). But the micro brewery/microdistillery thing is a phenomenon of marketing. A commodity product has been reinvented and is achieving unheard of margins through the pixy dust of marketing. If that concept is built on the smoke and mirrors of imagine marketing and group think, how much better to have a regenerative enviro-ag operation to use as an arrow in your marketing quiver. Grow more hops, mob graze ruminants in your rows for fertilization, and sanitize behind them with chickens. Use your shed pack and a pig-aerator system to improve and raise the pastures for barley production. You may not be able to grow what you need for production, but the “sheep” sucking on the “local” tap don’t need to know that. The Turn in this “magicarketing” trick is the regen-enviro-local -agro tourism gourmet beer buzz, The Prestige is more yield from responsible management and healed land.
I wish you could go into more detail as to why your pastured broiler enterprise wasn't profitable even at $6/lb and your egg operation even at $8/dz. I understand it can be a lot of work running multiple enterprises, but haven't you guys looked into creating synergies between different operations? Instead of composting spent grain from the brewery, perhaps you could look into feeding it to the layers and pigs to offset feed cost etc…
Good luck and keep the faith my friend.
Hope to see your chickens in the farm again.
Hugs from Porto Alegre (City – Happy Port), Rio Grande do Sul (State – Big South River), Brasil (Country – Brazil).
Ricardo (Rico) Campos
if you got some grass areas, even 5 acres, but 10 would be better, put it into hay. avg 100 bales an acre on 3 cuttings per season.( maybe more maybe less where you live) but thats 1500 bales for 5 acres and 3000 bales for 10. If you have cheap hay prices at 3 dollars a bale, your talking 4500 dollars for 5 acres, or 9000 for 10 acres. Yes there is labor, but you can buy old balers for under 3000, a rake for around 1000, and haybine for around 3000. So you can pay off all equipment in first year. Then your talking a max of 9 days of labor over the summer. Then you can market the hay on craigslist, heck in your area hay might be 5 bucks a bale. It will also make your property look pretty, and will get mowed, so i would suggest, if you want to make money quick and change your cashflow into profit. ( i would say per cutting for fuel and labor 60 bucks for fuel, and maybe 8 hours of labor(10 dollars per hour for 2 people min. 160. so 220 bucks expense for 3000 dollars in gross bale sales.(on 10 acres). This is the quickest and easiest way to turn a profit in farming. Ya you have other expenses in twine, and taxes on land, but you would be paying those regardless. My other suggestion is to instead of pigs, or chickens go to beef. Feed them that hay, do grass fed and organic beef, the profit margins are better and your dealing with more meat. Chickens are hardly worth messing with for real farm income, why do you think they have large chicken barns. ( it sucks but thats the only way to make money.) I put more into feed for my chickens than i get for eggs, but i get farm fresh eggs and i enjoy it.
You have good business sense – I stumbled through farming for 30 yrs complaining there's not enough hours in the day to accomplish everything that needs to be done. I finally scaled way back just to breathe! Does your farm produce enough income to hire people and delegate the jobs out which would allow you to have your hands in everything without getting completely submerged? You have a very nice, well thought out map layout.
If you were to pursue the egg layers, do you think there'd be a silver bullet that would make the operation viable if that one thing weren't as much an issue? E.g. not enough customers, less labor inputs, self-produced inputs, etc.
Pastured eggs' profits are realized on the second and third year. There is a reduction in egg production year-after-year, but it's not as much as some people say. It also depends on the chicks — we use ISA Layers from a hatchery in Rudd Iowa.