The farm had almost everything you could ask for, good buildings, open space, low cost labor and no mortgage.  There was upside everywhere you looked except where it mattered most.  The customer.

The customer, who historically was your partner was quickly becoming adversarial.  I was told about it, but didn’t get it.  Lose a little money here, make it there,  invest in equipment, produce more, expand the market it was a race to the bottom on price and race to the top on workload and tighter and tighter margins.

The worst part of the deal was respect.  That fine line that constantly moves.

Now we have the internet, that is another race to another bottom that experience tells me is really a perfect giant corral, we are fenced, coerced, sent through shuts, re-penned all while looking at pretty pictures and being sold a bill of goods, but I digress.

There were 125 chickens who lived really well, clean nests, clean litter fresh water 2 or three times per day.  Not a huge business but as a piece of a farm, 15 dozen eggs per week. In 1984, the cost to produce these was near a $.90 cents per dozen, when I arrived I believed it should be profitable .. sell them for $1.25.  The argument I heard from our band of customers … “but at the store they only cost .. .85 cents and the extra lg. cost $1.05 … we lost a customer then 2 then 3.  A quick restudy, is this wrong or right, do we have a right, do we want to be disturbed over $1.   Are the customers unrealistic or  ??   I found it easier, smarter and far more cost effective to sell the eggs to a farm stand in a better town, that sold some other products that people wanted and we could be part of that.  We made our extra profit, covered our cost and became respected somewhere else.

In that first year we looked at animals, feed crops, reopening a retail farm stand, leasing the land, Christmas trees and nursery stock.  The one constant that problem that existed then as it does today is the customers buying habits.

We began producing firewood, log length is easy, but then you need to move it, cord wood is a bit labor intensive and has some measurement reality, split truck loads were the simplest, flat fee for this… buying habits didn’t really want to measure just let me feel good about my purchase.

Those customers would buy even smaller quantities of wood at the grocery store … 1 bag $3 … that put a cord at roughly $400 per cord…  then tastes change, fossil fuels fall, go up, fall again and then pellets arrive, energy standards go up, wastefulness falls etc ..  Firewood gets commoditized to its smallest amount, to produce its greatest financial yield and is now sold everywhere 1 cubic foot at a time. Remarkable.  Wholesale price in the forest, maybe, $10 cord.  At the grocery store now $600 per cord.

Lets talk hay, enough equipment 1-2 people – not enough equipment 3-4 people. Hay used to be sold in a 25 mile radius now it is 200 mi.. radius and growing.   We used to lease the fields when I first got there, a dairy farmer from the next town, paid a $1.00 per bale from the fields.  It was actually a great idea until we needed some hay for ourselves and had to buy our hay back at a discount for $3.50.  We took back one field after another as need outstripped desire to pay for our own hay.

Lets talk Christmas Trees … planted thousands, harvested some, sold some as nursery stock and then some kid came along and said … sort of a waste, we grow these for 7 years, they sit in a house for 2 weeks, then they get thrown out.  Seems kind of stupid.  Only from a child’s eye.

As with all farm activities there is a great wonderfulness in the work.  Its cycle of beginning, middle, harvest and enjoy… Then plan, grow, harvest again.  The sense of accomplishment far exceeds the income.  Income for work is only that, we may have sold ourselves short.

In 1984 and 94 and practically 2004 the problem for farms was really the customer, and the buying habits, local wasn’t important, sustainable wasn’t  important.  The customers wanted a low price and not much else.  Quantity, not really quality.

Thankfully,  in 2014, we may now be at the stage of reclamation of quality and local and sustainable.  Agra-tourism is now a becoming a “thing”.  People will now pay money to go into a corn field, they will pay to pick their own vegetables, pay for a tractor ride … Farmers markets are the latest rage.

Marketing is everything and everything is marketing.