Farm Startup — Year One Expenses
A Real Food Farming First Try, By the Numbers
(Quebec) Summer of 2015 was in some ways a bumpy beginning for my farm startup. When you embark on a small business endeavor like this, you have to figure out a lot of things no one ever told you ahead of time were going to be on the test. Somehow you make do.
Or you don’t.
Plenty of people just stop doing it.
A bombshell article (well, as far as farming articles can be called “bombshells”) came out on Salon around February of last year — at exactly the moment when I was researching and writing my business plan (which I turned into an ebook, incidentally) — which boldly said you can’t make a living farming:
On the radio this morning I heard a story about the growing number of young people choosing to become farmers. The…www.salon.com
I can tell you that I resisted hearing this at that stage of preparation in my nascent farming career. After years of WWOOFing, years of working around on other people’s farms, tons of farm visits — I was determined to try, no matter what anyone said to the contrary. (And I’d do it all over again, but I’m getting ahead of myself…)
Moyer writes in the above article:
What the reporter didn’t ask the young farmers was: Do you make a living? Can you afford rent, healthcare? Can you pay your labor a living wage? If the reporter had asked me these questions, I would have said no.
Based on my first year experience, I have to agree with all of that. I ended up in the hole — but that’s a story for another time.
Today I’m here to talk about expenses, and share a public view of a database I set up using Airtable. It adds up to just under $9,000 of expenses.
My expense sheet for a farm startup — year one:
Create a new grid view that you can use to configure your table and sort/filter your records.airtable.com
I wrote to Airtable to ask them to get their embeds to work on Medium (like Silk’s do now). They told me they are “thinking about it.” I hope they don’t have to think to hard about it, because Medium still lacks a native way to insert tables and Airtable has a really sweet product on their hands, in my opinion. If they could get their embeds to play nicely, it would be a win-win for everybody. Silk’s data visualization embeds, while impressive in their own right, are totally different from what Airtable is offering: basically a relational database you can build and manipulate right in the browser, complete with templates (which I didn’t follow, in any case).
Farm Finance Software?
What’s both good and easy already on the market?
I looked around a lot for finance software built specifically for small farms(paging George J Lee) and didn’t find anything that fit what I was looking for. I’d recorded all my transactions in a Calc spreadsheet in OpenOffice, and a primitive one at that. But it got the job done during the busy season when you don’t want to waste time navigating software that doesn’t meet your needs.
I tried setting up with things like Mint and other similar budget app services, and they all wanted me to link everything to a bank account as my first step. Which never made sense to me for my use case: I just wanted a way to calculate and organize my sales and understand where I really spent and earned money.
I also torrented Quickbooks to see what that was like, filled out my vendors, customers, products, blah blah blah and then when it was time to link it all together couldn’t fathom where in the interface I could record itemized transactions. Maybe I’m not as smart as I think I am, but I’m pretty “good” at computers…
Why Airtable
Which is part of what makes Airtable so good. It works more or less how you want it to work: I can just copy paste cells from my existing Calc spreadsheets and just paste it into Airtable (I almost wrote AirBnB by accident). Then you can split it up and link it in a hundred different ways. While I’m “good at computers”, I’m still not that good at databases — and even then I was able (after a bit of a learning curve) to hack together a functional table which tells me more or less how and where I spent my money.
Here’s the link again to the public view of my Farm Startup Year One Expense Sheet— some columns are hidden to protect the innocent.
Create a new grid view that you can use to configure your table and sort/filter your records.airtable.com
Again, prices are in Canadian dollars, which as of this writing is $1.41 CAD to USD. You might also notice some Franglais sprinkled throughout if you scan through. Do not be alarmed. It’s an inevitable side-effect of emigrating to Quebec.
Summary
Total expenses: $8,958.91
By Category
Note: Approximate at best… Had to adjust these a little due to overlap in my categories/mixed purchases that I didn’t split out in the spreadsheet.
Seeds & Plants: $1,750
Vegetable Production (General): $750 (compost, soil, fertilizer, horticultural supplies, planting trays, grow lights, materials for a grow rack)
Mushroom Production (General): $250 (includes mycelium and materials)
Livestock: $550 (buying animals)
Feed: $1,300 (for 2 pork, 6 turkey, 80 broilers, between 6–17 layers)
Animal Production (General): $500 (expenses other than feed or livestock, includes fencing)
Slaughter & Butchering: $760 (provincially inspected for poultry only)
Tools & Equipment: $750 (includes a table saw and a gas roto-tiller)
Building & Maintenance: $200 (Materials and fasteners, not including fencing)
Irrigation: $90 (a hose, sprinkler which I never used and some valves)
Pest Management: $120 (mostly rat traps, poison and fly strips)
Transformation: $200 (materials to build small drying rack, food dehydrator, salad spinner)
Packaging: $215
Gas: $816
Car Maintenance: $340
Business: $86 (registration and farmer’s market space rental)
Office: $10 (receipts)
Promotion: $175 (business cards, web domain, hosting, materials to make branded bags)
Education: $95
Notes & Takeaways
Some quick impressions
- I spent more money on gas than I realized, for a total of nearly 711 L.
- All year long I kept at least 6 laying hens. Between probably June through the end of September I had 17. From beginning of October until mid-November I had 12 birds in the flock. The remainder were gradually sold, except the 6 we keep for our own use.
- I raised 6 turkeys to about 18 weeks, and 5/6 (the other was a female) weighed out at 30lbs dressed. I raised 80 broilers (Cornish cross) to staggered weeks, ranging from about 4 to maximum 12 when I did my remaining 25. I did not do the greatest job with the broilers for size, but my turkeys were awesome. I raised two Tamworth pigs to at least a month too old (7 months) and hired a neighbor to slaughter and butcher them — but we’re not allowed to sell that meat as it’s not provincially-inspected. All our poultry was inspected and processed at the slaughterhouse where I have been working part-time this past season. No matter how you slice it though, slaughter adds up to a big expense on top of already having to buy in livestock, feed them and get them up and equipped with housing and feeders/waterers. Nevermind the daily chores of working with them (which can admittedly be pleasurable as well).
- Considering I made $76 in oyster mushrooms once I got a functional non-sterile technique figured out, the $250 I sunk into that area to learn and try things out is a pretty good investment. With what I learned last year and maybe another $250 in equipment next year, I could probably produce a good quantity of oyster mushrooms this season. Some good “growth-hacking” to be done here. Something to keep an eye on…
- I had probably I would say $2,500 dollars of tools for a pretty decently-equipped small workshop before this in the same long narrow one-car garage where I housed my laying hens. Apart from a circular saw bought during the season, the only other big machinery expense was buying an old used roto-tiller which stopped immediately after buying it. Luckily a family relation was willing to work on it in exchange for eggs. I will make greater use of this tool next year.
- The original indoor pen for six birds was already built the year prior (Year Zero) with a pop-hole leading outside with a moveable fence (non-electrified) for them to pasture in. I just built a second room for another dozen birds and a second nesting box adjoining that with a second pop-hole outside and a multi-chambered fenced in outdoor run. In a run next to that I housed first my broilers, and then after that my six turkeys to finish weight. Next year I want to get better at staggering the birds growth cycles & start dates to more smoothly handle traffic flow.
Next Steps
If you’re into this kind of thing, you might get a kick out of buying my ebook that I wrote last year as a kind of rough research summary, and estimates. I’m in the beginning stages of re-writing it as a new version with my real Year One financials, but the basic premise of the book is still good, even if my projections versus what actually happened were a bit off.
Lowering the barrier of entry for new and aspiring farmers. -- Dreaming of starting that urban or backyard farm but…payhip.com
Obviously, I spent more than $1,000 getting started. That’s why I’m so interested in showing exactly where and how a new farm spends money. As I get my Airtables all sorted out for my sales, I’ll be able to link the above expense areas into a better picture of how my various investments of time, energy and dollars worked out for me.
It’s a strange trip, but a good one. What they say is true: farming is hard. But I think if more examples of real-world financials were openly shared, some of the difficult parts would be alleviated a little.
Or at least that’s my goal.