A Brutally Honest Look at Farming With a Young Family (CC61)

And you're in the last time we talked, if we go back to 2020, you had this, I'll call it the bigger, not better or not bigger, but better philosophy where you were clear in staying on half an acre and just getting more productive, never really growing the footprint where six, seven years later.

Where does that philosophy hit you now? Did that survive reality? Did math force you to change? Did life force you to change?

Yeah, I think we definitely still stick to that mentality as much as possible.

We are at probably closer to three quarters of an acre

now.

And we have an additional high tunnel now that we didn't have yet back when we talked to you.

I think we were doing about a half acre with one farmer's friend caterpillar tunnel when we first talked.

And now we have... closer to three quarters of an acre and the farmer's front tunnel and a 30 by 96 high tunnel.

And then we're also putting up probably one or two more high tunnels that we recently purchased, used ones to put up.

So we're going to expand the tunnel production a bit more.

And the field is a tiny bit bigger than it used to be.

And we might go a little bigger in the field eventually.

But I think part of it is having employs It means we just need to do a certain amount of business in order to make payroll.

So if a small footprint and we're just doing it ourselves and we're not doing as much gross sales, as long as if that's enough for our lifestyle or whatever, then that's fine.

But as soon as you bring employees in, you've got to account for their paycheck.

every week.

And so I think we'd found that we've got to get the farm a little bit bigger to do the extra production to pay for the help that then kind of covers the whole farm, if that makes sense.

So as the current land base is maxed out, so they squeeze more revenue, it's adding beds to the farm.

yeah yeah yeah we get more revenue by adding more beds more tunnels winter production has helped a lot with the new high tunnel in the caterpillar tunnel this is our first year that we had both greenhouses in winter greens production and so making consistent sales to our local co-op grocery store a couple other places every week in the winter it wasn't huge it was like a somewhat passive initiative, but I think we're seeing that, oh, by keeping the sales going every week in the wintertime helps a lot with the whole picture.

Because your employees, are they seasonal? They are, yeah.

So we don't have employees in the winter, but if we're still making some decent green sales in the wintertime, that helps bump everything up.