Small scale farmers–especially those getting started–usually buy feed by the bag. Throw a few bags in the back of truck and you’re good to go. That’s fine when you’re feeding a dozen chickens or two goats, but when you start getting into greater numbers of animals–especially dairy cows–it’s not a good plan.
First, you’re going to lose lots of money buying in 50 lb. increments. For example, here in NC, whole corn is selling for about $11.00 per 50 lb. at Tractor Supply. I can get it from a friend for $9.00 per 50 lb. However, I can buy it from the mill for only $7.50 per 50 lb. if I buy 3 tons. Now, let’s do a little math. 3 tons is 120 x 50 lb. bags. So, I can get 120 bags of corn for $900. That would only get me 82 bags from Tractor Supply. My friend can’t sell me more than 40, so there’s no use talking about that. If I only want 4o bags (1 ton), he’s probably a good deal…and the money goes to a friend. However, If I’m going to use more than 1 ton, buying in bulk is going to save me lots of money down the road.
Second, the savings increase over time. So, if you bought 3 tons per year for 10 years, assuming were relatively unchanged, your savings would continue to multiply. That’s how businessmen think, but most small-scale farmers aren’t good businessmen.
Now, if you’re going to buy in bulk, you’ll save even more if you have a place to store grain direct from the farms. The smart grain farmers save their own grains on their farm and wait for prices to go up before they sell. To sell their grains, they often have to drive a ways to the mills which adds to their expenses and reduces their profits, so if you’re willing to give them a good price and are closer to them, they’ll gladly sell to you. You can have a grain truck come from the farm and pump corn or wheat right into your grain bins.
That is, if you have grain bins.
A grain bin is a large metal tank (see picture), between 6 and 9 feet in diameter that stores grain. The top of the bin opens and a grain truck can pump the grains right in. The bottom of the bin has a dispenser that allows you to either (a) fill buckets, barrels or wheelbarrows by hand, or (b) connect the bin to an auger that can pump the grain from your bin into a building or anywhere you’d like.
The grain bin you would probably be interested in are only 6′ in diameter. Then, they vary in height–that’s what determines how much your bin canhold. The good news is that the height is determined by how many rings are set on top of the base of the bin and you can add rings at any time. So, you can begin with a 6′ wide bin with the minimum height (say 10′) and, if in a few years, you want to add more volume to your bin…just add a ring. If you look at the picture on the right, you can see where the first ladder ends–that’s the end of the standard bin. Above that you have a second ring, which also adds a section of ladder. So, you don’t have to take a gamble on a too-big bin today and you don’t have to suffer with a too-small bin tomorrow. Your bin can grow with you.
Here in NC, I can buy a grain bin capable of holding 3 tons for $1650–and that includes delivery and installation. A 4 ton bin will cost $1815. Yes, I know, the penny-pinching farmer will have chest pains to see that four-figure number, but he simply chooses to invest that money in Tractor Supply over the years instead of investing it in his own on-farm grain bins. Note: The successful farmers around you will all be found to have grain bins and not Tractor Supply accounts.
If you’re looking for something smaller, I’ve also seen from Sioux Steel company a smaller set of bins that hold 40 and 65 bags’ worth of grains. You can check them out here: http://www.siouxsteel.com/index.php/products/category/feed-bins/. That would make life more convenient for you, but you’d have to find out if anyone would be willing to haul a smaller quantity of grain to your farm. As their profit decreases, their interest in helping you will also decrease. This is business, remember, not charity.
So, if you’re buying a hefty quantity of grain, it’s worth looking into grain bins. You have to crunch your own numbers, but investing in a grain bin can benefit your small farm if your numbers line up right.
WM
WM, I have heard a lot of advice about starting a farm, and the people who seem to know what they are talking about always say, “Look around you at successful farmers and do what they do.” Well, there are no farmers around me for at least 200 miles. There are beef ranchers, and a couple of bee/honey businesses (within the forest itself, not on the prairie where we are), alpaca/fiber ranchers, and a few families with a few goats, chickens, and/or rabbits, but who don’t grow vegetables (at least not enough to seriously feed their own family).
If I drive south for a couple of hours, I can find farmers who grow chiles and other peppers in big fields. If I drive north a couple of hours I see acres and acres of one or two other crops. I don’t see ANYONE else aiming at feeding their family on their own land, besides us and a couple of other families further east, who are just starting, like we are. Everyone is specializing in one or two things in order to SELL them and BUY what food they need at the supermarket.
My local climate, rainfall, elevation, wind, and growing season is vastly different from where the farms are. Technically, this is considered desert. I can’t help but ask if there is a good reason there are no farmers here? Are there no farms because the land and climate are too difficult to work with, or is it just because the people who live here don’t want to farm, or both? The county extension office told me that the northern part of my county was potato farms 30 years ago. I know for certain that my particular piece of land was part of a large beef ranch that was here for decades (but this land has been empty for a LONG time, and is not fertile), and I don’t see ANY potato farmers here anymore. They could have been further east, possibly, but again, that is at a lower elevation and has different weather patterns from what we have.
My question boils down to this: Can ANY land be a successful family farm, if we put a cow, pigs, chickens on it to fertilize it, and work hard? Or are we better off trying to move to a more temperate place and do the same there? We are not afraid of the work; we just don’t want to waste our time if our land is unsuitable or if we won’t be able to feed the family no matter what we do here. There doesn’t seem to be anyone around here who can help or has had any success in what we want to do. Aside from the ranchers who are not interested in growing food crops, we are the oldest family out here, having lived here for almost 12 years. Everyone else around us has horses for riding, or moves in one summer thinking it will be a Romantic experience to “live in the country,” spends the winter hating the wind and snow, and puts a For Sale sign out front in the spring for the next “let’s play country” family to buy.
Thanks for this blog and letting us have a glimpse of what family farming can be. My 9-y-o son likes to see pictures of your boys working hard. He worked hard in his grandfather’s garden this summer, and saved his money to buy a sow! Now we need a place to put her.
Hi Paula,
As you said the “do what the successful farmers are doing around you” is a loaded statement. “Successful” is relative to one’s goals and I know that my goals are not the goals of the guys around me driving million dollar combines over oceans of…soybeans. If you want to convert farm produce into money…then, yes, you need to raise cash crops and your best crops would be those that do well where you are. That’s why they grow wheat, corn and soybeans here in NC. They all grow like weeds.
Better advice would be: do what will make you a sucessful farmer. I think most people spend too much time trying to learn from a book what to do instead of putting their boots on, grabbing a pad and pencil and getting outside. If you’re working to provide for your family, you need 1 gallon or so of milk. YOu can get that from goats–not 4 gallons from a Jersey cow. If you need meat, you can eat sheep and chicken–you don’t need a 1200 lb. Black Angus steer. If you need vegetables, you need high-calories veggies, not luxury vegetables like most suburban gardeners work on (tomatoes, peppers, carrots, etc.). You need bread and water to live…everything else is good. When you consider what you need to provide for a family, it’s really simple.
As for location, that depends on whether you’re committed for some reason to a particular location. We moved to a warm area where we can garden year-round. If you have no grass, you can’t raise milk cows. However, you can raise milk goats like most of the world does. If you are committed to a location, then you have to make do. You don’t need 500 acres of 2′ deep black soil to grow vegetables–but you can’t grow tropical peppers on a cold, windy mountain either. If you try to, you’ll be so inefficient in doing so that you’ll end up investing $100 to get a pepper…that you don’t even need.
What I recommend to everyone is just starting by eating only what you COULD one day provide for yourself–even if you have to buy it from the grocery store. Start eating as if you were growing all your own food…where you are. Then, slowly, work to produce one thing at a time–starting with the most expensive things possible and working down to the cheapest things. We started with milk because dairy was our biggest expense. We started with goats and then moved up to cows. We then found that the second biggest expense was vegetables. So we started growing potatoes and greens (broccoli, spinach, collards, etc.). Now, we’re working on the less expensive things like animal feed. In the beginning, I was paying $4.00 per day for a gallon of milk, now I’m paying $2.50 per day for corn, soybean meal and alfalfa hay and am getting 2-3 gallons of milk–like getting a 75% discount at the store on milk–plus my cows reproduce every year. In another year or two, the corn and alfalfa hay will grown right here and I’ll be down to pennies per day.
The business side of things is the real work and I’ll admit that I work at that end constantly. If I see profitable opportunity come up, I seize it. The benefit I have now is that because my neighbors and connections know I’m always interested in a good deal and am ready to pay a good price, when they find someone selling something–they come and tell me. I get e-mails from breeders who are looking for my needs. My neighbors are thinking of projects they can undertake for me. I’m constantly working and building…and in time, with God’s blessing (which is really the key of it all), everything comes together. This is actually a complex idea that makes my mind hurt but I believe that when we align ourselves with God’s will in creation, everything begins to serve us. I’ve noticed this since I was a young man in college and I used to call it “the secret of the Lord”–a secret way things happen for people who seek to do God’s will. After all, Jesus said, “All these things will be added unto thee”…how would that possibly work if we were not seeking them as others do? When we seek God’s kingdom, we find that all the obstacles and boundaries most men face are only mirages and we’re allowed around them as if God whispered in the ears of people in the world who simply let us pass and lay treasures at our feet. My religion drives me in these pursuits and I believe that God reserves the greatest riches for those who humble themselves most sincerely. Inasmuch as I have learned to humble myself and trust in God and work patiently, I have been blessed. I don’t mean that in some flittery spiritual way, I mean really and tangibly. I often feel like Bugs Bunny, when he walks off a cliff blind-folded and things rise up under his feet and he walks across the gulf safely to the other side. I ask, seek, knock, push, (and, yes, use some tricks I learned from Aristotle every now and then)…and things open.
For example, I needed to buy grains once and asked the miller, “How much would you charge me if I bought 3 tons of corn?” He gave me a very low price. Well, I didn’t want to buy 3 tons of corn, but I also didn’t want to pay $11.00 for 50 lbs. He offered me $7.50 per 50 lbs. if I ordered 3 tons. Well, that’s $900–with $400 saved. I said, “Great, let’s do that. I’ll take 120 bags. When can I pick it up?” Suddenly he realized that he couldn’t get 120 bags together soon enough so he made ME a deal—he’d sell it to me at that price and let me pick it up in smaller loads monthly. So, now, I get my corn at a discount not because I buy in bulk (which is risky) but simply because I offered to do so and found that when pushed he couldn’t prepare it that fast and so made a deal with ME. The secret of the Lord strikes again. It happens all the time…ask my wife. Another time I offered to buy a truckload of alfalfa hay from a dealer and the guy asked me if I wanted to become a distributor. I said, “What the heck.” so, he gave me a wholesale discount and now since I’m a “distributor” he delivers them to me.
Just trust…and work. That’s what ORA et LABORA means. Trust and work.
You are right, “do what successful farmers are doing” is a loaded statement! I don’t want to convert farm produce into cash – I want to feed my family and provide them with good work to do. I do know families trying to do this, but we are all starting out, so we’re all looking for the best way to go about it. No success stories yet.
As for location, there are pros and cons to staying or leaving, which Ian & I will need to discuss more deeply than we have. For now, it is safe to say that unless there is a miracle or a disaster, we are staying here.
As for “the secret of the Lord,” I know exactly what you are talking about. “Inasmuch as I have learned to humble myself and trust in God and work patiently, I have been blessed.” YES! That’s the secret.
Your examples of deals that others have made with you are really encouraging, too. Once, a few years ago, just by saying that I was wondering if goats would be a good investment for my family, someone pulled out a checkbook and asked me how many I wanted! I didn’t even know the person (the friend of a friend – our family has a good reputation and people want to help us)! Same thing happened last year when I mentioned I thought we might get chickens. A friend suddenly had to move out of state and GAVE me her 22 hens and a rooster, along with waterers and several bags of feed. Some neighbors noticed and offered us some wire fencing they did not plan to use, as well as straw for bedding whenever we want it. Since then, 2 other families have offered us some chickens for free. Now, just because we’re good neighbors, we’ve been offered space in a barn right next door to keep a cow, help finding good pigs, and lessons in tanning wild rabbit hides from the rabbits we shot on our property. Other friends have put us in touch with a local beekeeper who is willing to teach us step-by-step how to keep bees and harvest wax & honey, which other friends have already told us they want to buy from us. And we haven’t even said a thing about doing most of that stuff to anyone but God! But if we had not tried to be a humble family, helping others when we could, and doing what we say we’ll do, nobody would have cared to give us anything or help us do any of this.
Interested in more information on grain bins. You mentioned the cost of a bin in your area and if you could pass the name of the company and how to contact them to me it would be helpful . Thanks in advance for your help. Bill
Good article – can you pleasesend me the contact information for the grain bin dealer?
Griffin Farm Machine in Monroe, NC. FYI: that price delivered was to our farm nearby in Monroe.
Thank-you. And BTW if you are ever looking for more Nubians or Alpines (or perhaps a new herdsire) check out our farm on FB at http://www.facebook.com/sunrisefarmnc
Thanks..any Nubian does for sale? I’d love to add some. I see you have Nubian bucks for sale. We may be shopping for a new buck soon depending on how our Jan-Feb kids turn out. Thanks.