Sugar Mountains butcher shop

Walter Jefferies is looking for more funds to complete construction on his butcher shop; he's put a bunch of his own cash into it, borrowed a bunch, and is looking for more funding via kickstarter. 

I'd like to see him succeed.  When you expand a business is a perilous time -- you have expenses, disruption of your existing business, and unforseen costs to contend with, as well as the normal business issues. 

If you'd like to support Walter in his project, you'll find it here. 

Disclosure:  I'm going to contribute $100 to this project. 

 

When state government gets involved with farms...

As my friend Sabra reminds me, not all government programs are bad.  Many projects are well intentioned, and many do good things.  We see a whole bunch of press about how government is impacting farms in a negative way, and this is an example of a positive impact. 

State of Vermont's Mobile Slaughter unit

Statement of problem
Small farmers all over the country have a problem when they produce animals.  They can only sell direct to the consumer, and only has whole or half animals.  To allow the farmer to sell individual cuts of meat, or to restaurants or catering companies, you have to have your animals slaughtered and processed under government inspection, either federal inspection, under the USDA, or in the case of Vermont, under state inspection. 

The problem that they had in Vermont is that most of the slaughter facilities that processed chickens did so as part of a larger business -- they didn't process anyone Else's birds, and the number of businesses that the small farmer could choose from was shrinking.  So even if you wanted to take the time and expense to have your birds slaughtered under inspection there wasn't anyone to do it. 

So the Vermont state legislature decided to help that by funding the construction of a mobile slaughter trailer; they initially budgeted $80k, and due to various changes in design and equipment ended up with a final cost of $93k.  . 

This trailer was designed and built to provide all of the requirements for processing animals, and was offered on lease to interested individuals.   During the initial budget and design process, lots of people expressed an interest in operating the trailer, but as with most ventures, when it actually came down to operating the trailer, of the 14 people that were interested, some had moved on to different work, some couldn't make it happen, some weren't good business planners...

They find an operator
One fellow stepped up.  George Eisenhardt agreed to operate it.   Financially the trailer was offered on a 10 year lease, with the lease payments going back to the state to repay the cost of construction.  At the end of the lease the goal was to have the leasee own the trailer outright -- basically an interest-free loan from the state to the operator.  The payments were $775/month.    The State of Vermont didn't want to own the trailer, they wanted someone else to own and operate it, as both operating and regulating the trailer is a conflict of interest for the state.

Operation of the trailer wasn't trouble-free; there were some changes that had to be made in the design, drainage didn't work right, so there were pools of water.  The trailer could have been insulated better for use in the cold winter months, and the state forgave part of the lease payments so that the needed changes could be made. 

Day to day operations
The basic operation of the trailer was to kill, pluck, gut and chill the birds of individual processors.  Each farmer was required to take and store those birds at their farm or business after the slaughter. 
To make sure that it complied with health code, the farm where the trailer was located needed to have their water tested to make sure it passed, and that were was some way to dispose of the waste water  on the farm. 

Restrictions on poultry that could be processed
The trailer was allowed to kill birds from other farms during any particular stop, as long as 51% or more of the birds being processed were from the farm location.  Over time several farms would pool their birds and bring them all to the trailers current location and the processing would happen there.   If you were killing less than 51% you had to have an approved septic system and other engineered amenities (per State of Vermont law), and most small farms didn't want to bear that cost; so the 51% rule was observed. 

Inspection costs and procedure
The trailer would arrive, the hosting farm would bring their birds out, other farms would bring theirs out, and the processing was done under the State of Vermont inspection.  The state would send an inspector out to the location, and the inspector would be there for an 8 hour day.  The trailer operator, George in this case, could elect to keep the inspector longer, provided he paid the overtime for the state inspector, at $62/hour.    The average cost for an hour of inspectors time is $32, plus $0.51/mile travel, to and from the inspectors office, sometimes more than 50 miles away.   So on one of these processing days, the state would pay an average of $275 a day to the inspector to be present.  The trailer operator and farmers didn't pay anything as long as they held it to an 8 hour day. 

What happened?
In the first year of operation, George processed 4,000 birds.  In the second year it was 10,000 birds, and in the final year of operation it was 14,000 birds.  Most of the increase was by the original farms growing more birds; most of the farms involved increased their bird production, some of them by as much as 400%.  Farmers are a cautious lot, and conservative; from these results I think that they're finding their market expanded and having more success. 

The processing fee per bird was $4, which gave the following gross sales amounts for each year: 

year 1: $16,000
year 2: $40,000
year 3: $56,000

The yearly lease was $9300, and fuel and labor costs are unknown to me, but I'd guess that in year 3  the operator probably cleared (NNN) $15,000.  

The problem that the operator had was that the locations for processing were long drives; and towards the end of this he'd be criss crossing the state to get from one to the other; driving and setup time wasn't compensated; so he's doing a lot of birds, but eventually decided to move on. 

Notes on how to make this work better
One way to reduce that would be to have 4 or 5 docking stations with approved water and facilities and concentrate more of the processing there; this is complicated by the 51% rule I wrote about above, but it would reduce the travel somewhat.  Another method would be to have routes around the state so that you only move the trailer the shortest distance you can on any given day.  Even with these sort of improvements, to provide a living wage for the operator I think you'll need to raise the price of processing to $6, which would net the operator $43,000 -- a decent wage, and enough to keep them doing it next year.  Competitive with other industries. 

Sale of the trailer
The state of Vermont auctioned the trailer  in January of 2012, getting a  final bid of $61k for it.  The auction occurred after the poultry season had concluded for the winter, and it's not clear whether the new owners, tangletown farm, is going to be processing birds for any other farmers.   Several of the farms that were using this trailer expressed an interest in purchasing it, but were not interested in processing birds for other farms in the area, seeing them as competitors.   

Its interesting that the final sale price + the lease proceeds ended up being pretty darn close to the expense for the trailer in the first place.  Unlike some projects, the state didn't lose its shirt on this project. 

"Accidental farmers" review

Tim and Liz Young have a lot to say about farming; they've blogged, they've done interviews,and they're now running a farming forum called farm-dreams.  This is a review of the book that they wrote about their farming experiences. 

Tim is the author of the book, and I'll talk about what is said as if Tim said it, but Liz has some part of the farm and is involved in the day-to-day operations; not ignoring her, just working with the book as written.  Hi, Liz!

This book is self-published, which is perhaps the easiest way to get published.  You really don't have to have anyone proofread or edit it, or write about something that a publisher would consider interesting to a wide audience, and this book shows some of that.  A good editor is always a good investment.  Chapter 9 is a bit of a slog for that reason. 

Tim decides to become a farmer
Tim had a prettty typical midlife crisis; of confidence, of desire, of goals.  Riding horses one day at a resort, he decided to become a farmer, and set about purchasing land. 

Having impulsively purchased the land, the problem soon became what the heck to do with themselves, and so began the pattern that runs throughout the entire book: 

1) Decide that something is a good idea
2) Start trying to build a market, or promote whatever it is as the best thing ever
3) Buy/build/grow the good idea and broadcast the  good idea to a wide audience.* 
4) Decide that the good idea isn't such a good idea, or didn't work out as planned
5) Dump everything involved with it, and start over with the next Good Idea

Here's an example:  In chapter 5 he talks about purchasing berkshire pigs, which of course are the best thing since sliced bread according to Tim. (In fairness, I raise berkshire pigs, and know the breed very well, and they are pretty great).  Step 1

He starts talking about how great pastured pork is and looks to line up customers before he has pork to sell.  Step 2

He buys an electric fence setup, and puts the little pigs out on the pasture, only to be shocked to find out that the pigs ignore it.  Various mishaps ensue.  He has a hard time with breeding.  he has a hard time with farrowing.  He loses a litter of piglets.  He loses several litters of piglets.   Step 3 and 4

Tim concludes from these struggles that it's the pigs fault -- that they have no mothering skills or instincts, and eventually gets rid of everything but a feral breed of pigs, step 5.   Ossabaw pigs, a feral breed, being the next Good Idea that he's promoting. 

If the goal was to raise animals that could live in the wild, why start with chickens and pigs?  Deer do just fine on their own. 

Tim does this over and over again with different breeds of livestock.  He lets his sheep die of parasitic infection, watching them waste away despite having an easy cure available.   He allows hundreds of laying hens to get sick, and so many die that he has to use his tractor to pick up the bodies; when a simple vaccination may have solved his entire problem, and throughout this he talks about the evils of factory farming, and how the instincts have been bred out of the animals - and having had hands-on experience with the animals he's talking about, I just don't agree.   I have a big problem with the basic philosophy of letting everything die when there are cures readily available.     

When you're a new farmer, as Tim is, you're going to make mistakes and lose animals.  I have no problem with that; we all hate it, but it's part of the process; what I object to is the overall feeling that he's trying to fit a square peg in a round hole:   He makes an assumption about livestock, it turns out wrong, and he doesn't learn anything from it and hundreds of animals suffer needlessly.   All of the animals he tried are raised all over the country by thousands of farmers successfully.   
Here's what a reviewer said on Amazon, about this practice: 

" Also, the ideology involved in wanting their animals to live completely "natural" lives doesn't jive with the fact that livestock are not wild animals. The point to which they expected their animals to live with minimal support on depleted soil scares me a little, and I wonder if these chapters will end up as fodder for the animal rights movement and conventional ag to argue that pasture-based agriculture is not a viable solution."

Tim talks about his experience in corporate america, and his marketing background.  That's a field where it actually makes quite a bit of sense to cut your losses and move on  if things don't work out, but my experience of farming is that it's slower, more deliberate, and not at all intuitive.  Not accidental in the slightest. 

With any venture it takes time and effort to become proficient at it.  What Tim does over and over again is set himself up for farming failure.  With the pigs/chickens/rabbits/sheep/beef/bees, he doesn't stick with it long enough to know what it looks like to succeed at it, and at this point he's not raising any commercial quantities of many of the animals he describes in his book; beef cattle, laying hens, rabbits, large black and berkshire pigs, bees and sheep.  None of those products are for sale from Natures Harmony now.   

Tim talks about Joel Salatin in this book.  The difference between them is that Joel is still in business, still producing food, and still using the methods he promotes.  Natures harmony isn't doing the majority of what Tim describes in the book, and he never talks about the reasons he stopped doing any of it.

In my opinion, sustainable means you're still in business, and by that measure, Natures Harmony as described in this book is unsustainable. 

Tim, you could make this book much more interesting if you included a few pages on the end of each one of your farming attempts (sheep, bees, beef, etc etc) that talks about why you don't do that any more.  As it is, the reader is left with the impression that he's still out there doing this, when in fact, the interns have been dismissed, the equipment sold or given away, and the farm train has left the station. 

As a book that would like to influence farmers, I'd find it much more credible as a "sustainable" farm if it had lasted more than a year or two.   

Would I recommend this book to a new farmer?   No.  I wouldn't because it doesn't have any way to overcome the hardships that are talked about here.  I'd rather that they started with a more balanced book that talks about problems and solutions, perhaps one that is based on a farm that has figured out and overcome the typical problems and has found a way to make a profit.  

Tim does spend a bit of time in this book talking about making a profit; in fact, chapter 10 is mostly about Tims view of farm economics and making a profitable farm.  With this much animal death and destruction, purchase and then disposal of equipment and the huge sums of money spent on the custom house, swimming pool and acreage (and 14,000 feet of woven wire fence and 8,000 feet of water lines installed), in my opinion I  can't see Tims farm as having pulled a profit at any time by any reasonable measure. 

* While Tim does like to broadcast his views, he takes a dim view of anyone who has any view that is in any way contrary to his.  He's banned me from his site, his blog, farm-dreams and any other venue where he has editorial control.  Tim is strictly broadcast-only with his view on farming.  It's not a dialog.