One thing we haven’t found a lot of information about online is the operating costs of running a small, homestead farm. Instead, we’ve visited a bunch of farms, thought long and hard about what we spend money on and slowly put together our own operating expense budget. We thought it would be helpful to share some of our findings and maybe provide some clarity for other beginning farmers. This is a long post, but there's no other way around it, it's not a simple subject to tackle.
Read MorePlight of the Small Hog Farmer
image courtesy of www.clintonnc.com
Deconstructing the USDA’s Hog Report
The USDA released a report last month titled “Trends and Developments in Hog Manure Management: 1998-2009”. While trends in manure management are important and interesting, I found the industry’s production stats to be much more intriguing.
First, a little overview of the report. The analysis spans the eleven year period from ‘98 to ‘09. It includes farms having more than 25 pigs at any time during the year. To give you some perspective, with just a few sows and one boar a farmer could get well beyond 25 pigs on the farm at any given time. 25 hogs is about what you’d get from one sow in a year if you pushed her (3 litters, 8 per litter). So this study includes the very small to the very large. The survey represents more than 90% of all hog inventory in the representative years.
Here’ a tabular overview of the hog operation statistics between 1998 and 2009.
Getting a Six-Pack on a Weekly Basis
If you're a facebook fan you'll know that I started chiseling away at my six-pack a couple weeks ago. I’m not talking about a Mike “The Situation” six-pack, I’m talking about beer. About a year ago I started home-brewing on an ultra-micro scale. In fact, it would be difficult to brew at a smaller scale. I brew one gallon at time, which equates to about 6-8 beers per batch. It’s not that I don’t want brew more beer, it’s that we live in a 600 sq ft apartment and don’t have room. My closet is already full of canning equipment, preserved jars of everything, sacks of espresso beans, liquores of who knows what, and oh yeah, my clothes. A 2 sq. ft. corner holds a case of aging beers, two one gallon carboys (one fermenting, one dry-hopping) and a little space for the blow-off tube. In that amount of space I get a six-pack every week.