The Financials of Profitable Small-Scale Farming
From getting on YouTube to working in your neighbor’s yard, there are some creative ways to make money as a small farm.
Just a Few Acres Farm in Lansing, NY has nearly 500,000 subscribers on YouTube, where seventh-generation farmer Pete Larson posts videos with titles like “The basics of cutting hay” and “Playing in the Dirt with Pregnant Pigs”. The videos cover everything from dealing with his cattle and daily chores to advice for aspiring small farmers hoping to avoid burnout—many of whom leave comments thanking Larson for the tips.
The tips are especially helpful for folks hoping to make a go of farming on smaller plots of land. Given the challenges in an industry dominated by factory farms, such as slim profit margins and little control over pricing and markets, between 52 percent and 79 percent of small family farms are at high financial risk. More than half of small farmers also have to work a second job to make ends meet.
“We only have 45 acres, which is a really small farm around here,” says Larson. “Conventional wisdom was [that] you could never make a living off that small amount of land, because the farmers around here are all commodity farmers.”
But, some small-scale farmers like Larson have been able to make their operations profitable with creative techniques such as monetizing their social media presence and carving out interesting, competitive niches.
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One way Larson did this is by finding breeds with great marketing stories behind them, such as Dexter cattle. Brought back from near extinction by homesteaders who wanted a dual purpose for beef and dairy, this Irish heritage breed works well for Larson because of their smaller size and good beef quality when raised on grass without grain.
“You want to be able to tell a story to customers that they can buy into,” says Larson about his choice cattle breeds. “You need to have a marketing hat on as much as anything else.”
Eventually, says Larson, the farm began to make enough money for the family to take home a profit. Then, about seven years into the endeavor, Larson says he had another idea: monetizing Just A Few Acres’ social media to help support their small livestock farm.
“It’s enabled us to … gradually, taper down the numbers of animals that we raise,” says Larson. “And it’s allowed me to say, ‘well, if I’d like to retire before I die, I can do that now.’ It’s given us breathing room.”
Likewise, across the country, Rob Miller and Melanie Jones had to think way outside the box—and their own fence—in order to acquire enough land to farm in Woodstock, GA. As owners and operators of Trefoil Gardens, they adapted a “multi-locational” model that has grown into a neighborhood agricultural cooperative, and it relies on the partnership of their neighbors.
Through a program called SPIN-Farming, which stands for small plot intensive and teaches aspiring farmers to take a systematic approach to backyard-scale growing, Miller says he was able to connect with a farmer who already had a template for a yard-sharing contract. He brought the contract over to his neighbor, and they broke ground on their first neighboring plot on July 4, 2016.
Now, with plots spread across the yards of six of their neighbors, and a few others a two-minute drive from their suburban home, they currently have 15,000 square feet under cultivation. Since then, Trefoil has been able to take its yard and neighborhood to new levels of productivity. The SPIN program has also helped thousands of other farmers use this multi-locational approach to farming on limited space.
But, Miller says it took him a long time to stop burning himself out with the hard work, and to get to a sustainable mindset.
“We’re a mission-driven company, and I know a lot of a lot of people in our space are and so, for us, it’s not so much about money, but at the same time, we’ve got to earn a living. This thing has to be financially sustainable,” says Miller. “It’s been a big transition to move from that solely mission-based focus… you can only do that for so long before you just burn yourself out.”
Given the yard-sized scale of the operation, they have had to really look at which crops have outsized value for profitability, and which are too time-consuming or fickle to rely on in such a limited space. Miller says Trefoil has recently pivoted toward perennial instead of annual crops because they are more manageable and save time.
“We’ve also really dialed in to floral and mushrooms, and then also herbal products, botanical products,” says Miller. “It’s a joke, but it’s not really, that we grow food so that we can get into our farmers markets, and then we grow flowers so that we can afford to grow the food that we bring to the farmers market.”
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Trefoil has also had to look at non-traditional methods of selling, because growing on spec with such little land became not only impossible but also incredibly stressful. So, Trefoil took on a community-supported agriculture (CSA) food box subscription model with a short subscription period allowing them to pivot based on what was growing well.
Now, having been profitable for the last three years and selling 25 food boxes at the peak of this year, they’ve also found creative ways to cut costs as compared to a traditional agricultural plot of land.
“We’re in an older neighborhood and so everybody’s on septic systems, so there’s no sewer,” says Miller. “The water is pretty inexpensive for our neighborhood, and that’s really important.”
For many things, though, Miller says they rely on their relationships and community. “I wake up every morning fully indebted to everyone around me, and it’s the most freeing thing in the world. And it just sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true,” he says.
While Larson has also been successful by building up his community, albeit online, he cautions against expecting the farm to be profitable from the start, and he encourages aspiring small farmers to have some kind of a safety net, be it savings or part-time work off the farm.
“You have to have some kind of financial security to start out, because … you don’t have any income from the farm on day one,” says Lason, explaining that he and his wife had some savings that they lived off in a “very modest way” for a few years.
“When we sold our first products at market, everything that came back, the money that came back in stayed on the farm side, and we used that to reinvest and gradually, bootstrap ourselves and grow the size of the farm,” says Larson. Despite land becoming increasingly expensive for aspiring small farmers, a little creativity can still make the business viable.
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