Can I get a better price if I buy a dozen?

I was talking with a fellow today about weaner pigs, and he asked me if he'd get a better price if he bought a larger quantity -- in this case he wanted 2, but could go to 6 for the right price.

And I found myself instantly conflicted. Part of me wanted to make the larger sale -- more volume, little less profit, pretty standard business practice.

But the other part of me, which I took a while to figure out, said NO. Pretty strong no, as well.

I've run across this from several small producers; like when I was buying tuna from a fisherman on the Washington coast (you can get GREAT locally caught albacore tuna for $1.83/lb, bled and frozen on the boat, btw) and I asked the other side of this question -- can you make me a better price on the fish if I bought more. He surprised me by saying no.

The fisherman, like me, has a finite supply of fish to sell. He knew that he'd sell all of his fish at the price he set. If he sold the fish to me at a smaller price, he'd forgo the profits he'd eventually get. The cost of letting the fish stay in his freezer for a few more weeks or a month wasn't really an issue.

I'm at the same place with pigs. I've got a small supply of pretty good quality weaner pigs that are carefully hand raised. I guarantee their health -- I'll replace them or refund your money if they die -- and I'm pretty sure that I'll sell them all. So I set a price that I can make about $20 a pig, figuring that's a fair profit margin, and that's my price.

But if I don't sell a pig, there's a good chance I'll sell it as a barbeque pig this summer, for $80 profit. Or if I don't do that, I'll sell it as a whole pig for $120 profit. Or as cuts at the farmers market and make $200. So the cost of keeping a pig a few weeks or months longer isn't an issue. This is the first business I've been in where the output I can produce is very strictly constrained. It takes me 6 months to come up with a weaner pig; a year or so to come up with a baconer, 7 months for a laying hen, and so on. I pretty much have to lay out the quantities of what I'd like to have available for sale set 6 months to a year in advance.

So when this fellow asked for a better price for a larger quantity, my answer was "no".

Bees and beekeeping, farming calendar

Today was cool and sunny; and the bees were out of the hive flying around. From the looks of their legs on the return trip something is producing pollen nearby. Pollen is a high-protein food for bees, and is used to feed both the bees and their larvae.

If you've considered beekeeping, now is the time of year to make your decision. The easiest way to start is to find a local apiary supply place nearby. I'm sure they'll be happy to help you. I've been patronizing the beez neez in snohomish, but there are many suppliers around. Packages of bees are only available once a year -- so you need to locate and order them NOW to have bees this year. More about packages further on in this post.

On a sunny day like today is when I open the hives for the spring check. I'm looking to see which colonies have survived the winter and which haven't, and what their relative strengths are. I'll open the hive, heft the super to see how much honey remains, look at a couple of frames, and then switch the top box of the two to the bottom. Over the winter the bees will have gravitated up into the honey, and by reversing the two boxes it allows them to gravitate up again as they grow during the spring.

Modern bee hives consist of standardized boxes referred to by their size. a "super" is about 6" tall, a "deep super" is about 10", and each holds a number of frames that the bees will build their comb on. The comb is used to store honey, pollen and to raise and brood young.

In my climate, the basic hive consists of two deep supers on a bottom board, with a roof. Later in the year I'll add additional supers that the bees will fill with honey, and anything above the first two deep supers is what I'll harvest. Between the harvested honey and the original deep super I'll put a queen excluder, which will prevent the queen from laying larvae in the top supers to keep the honey pure. A deep super that's full of honey weighs around 100lbs. A super weighs about 60lbs. A hive will produce 120lbs of honey on a good year here; in some areas with longer nectar flows and warmer weather you can get 200lbs of honey in a season.

At this time of year the hives are at low ebb; they've been living on stored honey all winter, and the bees are as old as bees ever get. The bees that are born in the fall end up living through the spring, usually around 6 months.

My winter losses this year was 15%. Not bad, not great. Average. The hives that survived have lots of bees, still have some honey, but not much. So I'll feed them a little sugar syrup, 50% water and 50% sugar by volume, for a month or so.

I'll also be ordering packages of bees from beez neez. A package is 3 or 4 lbs of bees with a queen. They're only available early in the year, which is why I'm suggesting that you make your decision now about whether you want bees. When the package bee season passes you're out of luck. A 3lb package should cost you around $75, give or take $10, a 4lb a little more. If this is your first beekeeping exercise, buy the 4lb package. More bees means that they have a better chance of producing some honey for you this year even if you make some mistakes.

In this area there are several different varieties of bees I can order. My opinions:

Italian bees: Sweet, good natured bees. You can work them without protective gear or smoke, even. I do it every year. But susceptible to mites and have a low survival for me. I keep trying them, but they're just not working for me.

Russian bees: Angry little bastards, but they produce honey, lots of it, and are surviving well for me. I cannot work these guys without protective gear, and in fact, there are times when I cannot walk within 10 feet of their hive without getting stung. That said, most of my hives are now russian because they've survived well.

New world carnolian: Somewhere between russians and italians. Survive better than italians, not as angry as the russians. I don't get stung by these guys randomly.

Minnesota Hygenic: I've had mixed luck on these guys. They seem to do well against mites, but their winter survival for me isn't as good as russian or new world carnolian. Production is roughly the same as carnolian.

The chicks have arrived, farming calendar

Received our first batch of chicks for sale this summer. In this batch there's 50 roosters, 100 buff orpington hens, and 100 cornish cross meat chicks. We also ordered 25 bantam chicks because I like to keep a small flock of bantams on the farm.
This is a buff orpington chick on the right, and a bantam chick on the left. Notice the size difference in the feet between these two birds. Buff orpingtons are a heritage breed egg layer, and are really quite pretty when they're full grown.
Here's the same bantam chick next to a cornish cross chick. I'll take some more pictures to compare these two as they grow. The cornish cross will be 4-6lbs in 8 weeks. The bantam will be about 1/4 of a pound in the same timeframe. This cornish cross chick weighs 50% more than the buff orpington chick at this age. It doesn't look that much bigger, but you can feel it when you pick them up.

This is a free chick of some sort. I don't know what breed it is, but it looks interesting.

It's got that pronounced stripe down the back and face markings. So it may be a sexlink... these free chicks are almost always roosters, which is fine by me. I like roosters.

Shipping mortality

Buff orpingtons; zero dead on delivery, but one with a birth defect that'll probably be fatal

cornish cross; zero dead on delivery. all look OK.

white leghorn roosters; all 25 doing well.

delaware roosters; all 25 doing well

straight run bantam; 16 out of 25 dead on arrival, expect a few more to die overnight.

It may be too early in the year to ship bantams. they don't have the body mass to withstand cold very well, so I'm guessing they got chilled somewhere in transit, poor little guys. I'm going to ask that they ship the replacements in a month so it's a little warmer for them.

Prep for recieving chicks

Fill bins with chips, fill wateres and feeders

Put lamps in and test surface temperature under lamps for 100 degrees. Adjust lamps to provide that temp at the surface.

allow the lamps to run overnight to make sure that the chips are dry and warm when the chicks arrive.

Putting chicks in the bins

Sort through the chicks and segretate those that don't appear to be doing well

dip each chicks beak into the water

Observe to make sure they've found the light, and tap the food to get them to notice it

24 hour check

Count and tally overall mortality, call hatchery and get replacements. Refill food and water, check temperatures again.

We have pre-ordered 300-700 chicks per month for the next 5 months.

Turkey breeding flock; farm calendar

Here's part of my breeding turkey flock. Click on the picture for a bigger version. There are blue slate, bourbon red, narragansett, eastern wild, sweetgrass and black spanish turkeys here. They're pretty fun to watch. At this time of year we're penning them by breed so we can get purebred poults. Turkeys can store semen for weeks, so it's important to have them separated for a while before you need purebred birds. In our case we collect the eggs as soon as we have them all penned and most of the (probably) crossbred poults produced will be our thanksgiving/Christmas birds. The purebred poults we'll sell to folks who want a particular type of heritage turkey, and some of those will go for the holidays, too.

I keep a large breeding flock because it's often impossible to find full-grown heritage turkeys in a timely fashion if you lose one. So having one tom is a mistake; you need at least 2. Having 3 hens is a mistake; you need at least 6 to make sure you have replacements in case of predators, accidents, or other mishaps.

I want all of my heritage birds for the holidays to be hatched by may; it takes 20 days to hatch a turkey, so the latest we'll set eggs for holiday birds will be the first week of April. Which means that we have Feb/Mar/April to collect eggs for this years Thanksgiving turkey crop.



The eggs that are layed from April to mid-may are the Christmas birds, and then the eggs that are layed in June are the replacement birds for the breeding flock. I keep a mixed-age breeding flock, with some first-year birds, some 2 year birds, and some 3 year birds.



I find that my survival rates for birds on pasture are better if there are some older birds to show the younger ones around.



The turkeys are bunched up like that because I'm working with the puppies on herding. Turkeys are a good practice animal for the pups because they can fly if they feel threatened but don't want to. Plus a turkey can, as a last resort, smack a dog pretty good with its wing. A smack or two and the pups learn to keep their distance -- the pups respect the turkeys, and the turkeys respect the dog.

The farm calendar - what I've found useful as a new farmer

I'm a relatively new farmer. Most of my adult life has been as an engineer or teaching engineers, and that background works pretty well for analyzing and breaking down situations.

When I was looking at farming, what I didn't really get a handle on is that each crop or animal or activity like plowing, fencing or clearing, had its own time. That is, each task required a certain amount of work, and that time really was related to the date more than anything else.

Turkeys as a crop
For example, turkeys. When you first get turkeys you spend quite a bit of time making sure they thrive. My experience is that turkeys are very delicate for the first two weeks, and then suicidal for the next 2 months, and then they settle down to adult life. At the end of their span there's a bit of work related to marketing them and processing them and then getting them into the customers. So a turkey calendar looks like this for me:

Early Feb: Order poults or put eggs in to hatch
Early Feb: Prepare brooding areas, check lights and equipment, water, and order feed
March: Hatch poults or receive poults.
April/May/June: 2-3 hours a day tending to turkeys. 7 days a week.
July-early November: 10 minute a day feeding turkeys
November 1: Count turkeys, confirm orders, set delivery days/places
Early November: Select breeding stock from this years birds
mid-November: Process & deliver turkeys

When I started thinking about my activities this way, I found that I got a better handle on what the workload would be for me. I could look at the calendar and figure out if I needed to bring in extra help, or for a time that I could do things that can be deferred until sometime when I'm less busy.

Adding more crops
With a calendar, I can then choose crops or activities that fit in well with my current schedule. So for instance, if turkeys are consuming 4 hours a day, I have another 4 or so hours that day I could be doing other things. I can then choose crops or animals that fit in well and don't overload me for a particular day or week or month. Load averaging by date.

Chickens and turkeys
For me, chickens and turkeys are two very similar crops. I can grow out batches of chickens at the same time as my turkeys for not much more labor, so that's a crop mix that works for me.

Timing animal breeding for minimum work and best price.
Another thing a calendar allows me to do is time the breeding and birth of my other animals, particularly the sheep and cows. By controlling when they're bred I can have a better idea of when they'll lamb or calve, and do it at a time that allows me to schedule some time for them.
Piglet prices are pretty seasonal. If I can get a sow pregnant in November, for instance, her litter will wean at pretty much peak market.

So on my farm calendar for January:
Look at turkey breeding flocks, cull any birds that aren't perfect
Look at chicken breeding flocks, cull.
Order chickens from hatcheries for delivery in Feb, March, April, May, June
Order turkeys from hatcheries for delivery in march.
Pregtone all sows, cull as appropriate
Inspect and repair fencing
Make salami