John, I am highly impressed with you. Go with what works and makes money. I have been in retail, wholesale, and agriculture for 40+ years. I have often told these so-called Corp. buyers to buy the items that the customers want, not what they like. Buying what you like does not make money. Buying what you like is a hobby. Buying what people want is a business. In farming do what makes money. Do what you like is a hobby. I have always said that If I can't make money on my hobby, I change my hobby to something that has the possibility to make money. That is why my little hobby of propagating Muscadine vines make a large profit each year.
@Homesteadhow
7 жыл бұрын
Love the advice--your land will tell you what to grow. As a new homestead, going on year 3, we are learning this.
@Alex-eh7gl
5 жыл бұрын
Thanks for telling it like it is and being honest. We're in our third year of building our farm, and man it's a real rollercoaster, and we've made many mistakes, and hopefully we'll find our way towards a sustainable, profitable farm. We've tried most things, but our two main focuses are a microdairy (cows) and beef. Both of which we've got demand for. Now we just need to trim costs, become more efficient, and gradually as infrastructure is paid off it might become profitable long term...
@tyronefinks5878
7 жыл бұрын
John you are optimizing the farm's enterprises just what Richard Perkins teaches, awesome!!!!
@tpfarm3535
7 жыл бұрын
You have good business sense - I stumbled through farming for 30 yrs complaining there's not enough hours in the day to accomplish everything that needs to be done. I finally scaled way back just to breathe! Does your farm produce enough income to hire people and delegate the jobs out which would allow you to have your hands in everything without getting completely submerged? You have a very nice, well thought out map layout.
@iangehris6385
7 жыл бұрын
Good for you, John. Take care of your family and yourself first and do what helps get you to your “why”. Thank you for the honest insight into what farming really is and how it’s not always the romantic homestead people hope it will be. Way to be flexible and make good choices. A business is a business and I know you’ll do well.
@CiecieNewson
7 жыл бұрын
I'm so excited to see you get your farm where you want it to be this coming farm season. ~Smile!
@xayatale4269
6 жыл бұрын
I don't live on a farm but I do have a garden. The soil have a lot of rocks and works. Large tomatoes don't do well in our soil. They do get full sun and a lot of different plant can be grown. I have chickens too. They get to eat grass. I find that crumble is easier for my chickens to digest. Eating grass reduce my feed cost. I haven't calculate the cost of raising chickens.
@ChadwickHorn
7 жыл бұрын
Pastured eggs' profits are realized on the second and third year. There is a reduction in egg production year-after-year, but it's not as much as some people say. It also depends on the chicks - we use ISA Layers from a hatchery in Rudd Iowa.
@towcammo
6 жыл бұрын
What do you think contributes to this Chadwick Horn?
@shiawasseehobbyfarmer4844
7 жыл бұрын
if you got some grass areas, even 5 acres, but 10 would be better, put it into hay. avg 100 bales an acre on 3 cuttings per season.( maybe more maybe less where you live) but thats 1500 bales for 5 acres and 3000 bales for 10. If you have cheap hay prices at 3 dollars a bale, your talking 4500 dollars for 5 acres, or 9000 for 10 acres. Yes there is labor, but you can buy old balers for under 3000, a rake for around 1000, and haybine for around 3000. So you can pay off all equipment in first year. Then your talking a max of 9 days of labor over the summer. Then you can market the hay on craigslist, heck in your area hay might be 5 bucks a bale. It will also make your property look pretty, and will get mowed, so i would suggest, if you want to make money quick and change your cashflow into profit. ( i would say per cutting for fuel and labor 60 bucks for fuel, and maybe 8 hours of labor(10 dollars per hour for 2 people min. 160. so 220 bucks expense for 3000 dollars in gross bale sales.(on 10 acres). This is the quickest and easiest way to turn a profit in farming. Ya you have other expenses in twine, and taxes on land, but you would be paying those regardless. My other suggestion is to instead of pigs, or chickens go to beef. Feed them that hay, do grass fed and organic beef, the profit margins are better and your dealing with more meat. Chickens are hardly worth messing with for real farm income, why do you think they have large chicken barns. ( it sucks but thats the only way to make money.) I put more into feed for my chickens than i get for eggs, but i get farm fresh eggs and i enjoy it.
@littlewhitedory1
7 жыл бұрын
Sounds like a great and enthusiastic plan for 2018. Good luck with executing it and best of luck in the next year, time will be the ultimate judge! Hope the colder weather brings out more beer samplers to the farm brewery and that you clear out the freezers of the last of your chicken harvest from 2017's efforts. Man I would like to get up there for a brew!
@CliffsideStables
7 жыл бұрын
For those of us who don’t consume alcohol it is sad to see that be your primary focus of 2018. I have always watched your channel for the enthusiasm you bring to your work and the information you share about the livestock.
@CreatingEssence
7 жыл бұрын
Looking forward to a great 2018 of development and growth for you!
@lunethgardens
7 жыл бұрын
Hi John, have you looked into keyline design principles to move some of that water around your farm to dry out some of the wetter areas? I know Richard Perkins touches on it but not sure how much. Good luck in 2018, ill be watching.
@kencoumou3166
7 жыл бұрын
Good luck with the changes.
@charliehobson33
6 жыл бұрын
Sounds good, I think focusing more energy on your potentially most profitable area is a good one. On the last farm I was on, fields that were damp had a willow coppice, mainly a winter operation and very profitable, check out willow bank at ragmans lane farm
@farmmarketing
6 жыл бұрын
I've never heard of willow coppicing Charlie. What are the applications? I have willow growing wild all over the farm and it's easy to propagate. Thanks for giving me yet more homework, haha.
@charliehobson33
6 жыл бұрын
John Suscovich hey john, chk out their website: www.thewillowbank.com Some good info on what and how they sell. They planted closely spaced using mypex initially to suppress grass and competition. I was growing veg there, we would use a broom to walk down the tree line and sweep up the leaves to use on our veg beds.
@601salsa
5 жыл бұрын
If you have that much water in the ground why not also plant suger maple and make maple syrup...... you can also plant chesnuts (edible) and oak for the pigs.... higher quality pork. Also perhaps expand the hops.
@601salsa
5 жыл бұрын
Willow loves water..... you could grow willow where you have too much water to help, you can coppice it for basket makers, you can coppice it for wood fuelled boilers, maple might also be good for maple syrup, they need water for that.
@TheApprenticeFarmer
7 жыл бұрын
I wish you could go into more detail as to why your pastured broiler enterprise wasn't profitable even at $6/lb and your egg operation even at $8/dz. I understand it can be a lot of work running multiple enterprises, but haven't you guys looked into creating synergies between different operations? Instead of composting spent grain from the brewery, perhaps you could look into feeding it to the layers and pigs to offset feed cost etc...
@neilmoffett9635
7 жыл бұрын
The Apprentice Farmer It’s labor. You can bulk sale a pig for eh, $1000 give or take. You go out once a week or so, move the fence, food, water, and pigs. There’s more than that, sure, but that’s the major effort. At $25 a chicken you need 40 birds to make up one pig. That’s basically one of John’s tractors. And you’re moving that daily. Bringing feed and water daily. And the margins on chicken are a lot lower. As Salatin talks about its a time motion study. George Harrison talks about this also in his books on farming. The good farmer knows what peg to hang his coat on so he expends minimal effort retrieving it when he wants it. Wasted effort is waste. Chickens work great in concert with other business lines where the chicken’s job is cleanup and pest control and converting that to fertilizer. And hey, you also get eggs and chicken! Chickens are very labor intensive and expensive if your goal is to use them to turn grain into protein. For a startup farmer who has more time than opportunity, maybe paying yourself $8 an hour to move chickens is better than making zero doing nothing. But we all know that’s not a sustainable business in the long run. The farmer needs to be using his time to do things that will net a reasonable living wage.
@Kowzorz
7 жыл бұрын
If you were to pursue the egg layers, do you think there'd be a silver bullet that would make the operation viable if that one thing weren't as much an issue? E.g. not enough customers, less labor inputs, self-produced inputs, etc.
@mascatrails661
7 жыл бұрын
Might feel bittersweet to be thinking about cutting back, but I'm sure next year every time you think about how much work them pigs took, you'll be glad to be focusing on hops. Afterall, hops can't break a fence or spill a feeder... they're pretty well behaved.
@neilmoffett9635
7 жыл бұрын
Masca Trails Hm, capital intensive commodity product with one identified buyer vs multiple sale opportunity product that has a plethora of possible production methods from capital and investment intensive to extremely cheap depending on what opportunities you face...and the former is net resource extractive while the latter is additive if properly managed. When there’s a windstorm or hail pigs take shelter. What do hops do then? Short term thinking leads to bankruptcy.
@mascatrails661
7 жыл бұрын
Neil Moffett I appreciate you pointing out that there are certainly potential downsides to what John is choosing to do. I was choosing to be supportive. For arguments sake, while pigs may have a plethora of production methods, John has specifically chosen to raise pigs on pasture at a scale where he must take his pigs out to a butcher. He has lost a pig who accidentally impaled himself creating a huge loss. On his farm, pigs are (human) energy intensive, require external processing, carry risks, and are not the primary product of desire by the customers who are coming to his door. While hops... Sure they can't take shelter, but they also don't kill themselves. While his own brewery will probably be the main consumer of the product, hops do sell for $15/lbs where he is and we are in an age where microbreweries are growing while meat consumption is dropping. There are even establishments buying hops to simply infuse water. This goes to show that with a little marketing, there is a HUGE market for the hops he is growing. Most importantly though, John is already set up to value-add with those hops, but not with the pigs. While the profitability may not be there for the crop itself, the marketability of home-grown beer has potential to increase beer sales. Touring a beautiful hop yard while sipping the beer it has been turned into... that's a marketable experience. Looking out at the pigs and wondering what they have to do with the beer you're drinking is just confusing. Finally, I think the most important thing to consider is this decision does not drive John's production into eternity... He's simply chosen to focus on hops this year... He might learn some first hand lessons that have him focusing back on pigs next year. Or sheep. Or drone footage. The admirable thing is he's putting himself out there, doing big things, and sharing his lessons with those of us who need 'em.
@neilmoffett9635
7 жыл бұрын
It sounds like your land is telling you to do rotational grazing but you find it easy to tell brewery customers about hops so you are going to shift towards a single commodity. This is likely to be a mistake. You should be trying to create multiple synergistic sources of profit so you can take advantage of short term opportunities, rather than discarding revenue streams to focus solely on a short term opportunity. Your brewery customers care far less about “local hops” than you do, I guarantee. And what happens when you have a bad year for hops? If you want to be vertically integrated it needs to be geared to the farm, not the other way around. It sounds like you are making bad business decisions because you aren’t getting any good advice. What you should be doing is spinning off your stake in the brewery and using that payout or income to invest in multiple synergistic on farm profit streams. Sounds like ruminants is what works there.
@swingline76er
7 жыл бұрын
I just subscribed, like what your doing. I'm interested in the chickens, do you have cows for beef?
@whatthefungus
6 жыл бұрын
Hey Man! Great focus! What's your brewery name?
@salmonhunter7414
7 жыл бұрын
Maybe you could have your own farmers market on site. Rent stall and so on. Just spit balling.
@denocktvulf4538
6 жыл бұрын
I found John's site just yesterday. I have watched a dozen videos and he has already failed. Damn I was hoping to learn about successful chicken farming from him he seems to be a great guy, I hope he reconsiders chickens in the future.
@darylbickford1913
6 жыл бұрын
HEY JOHN! Ever think about creating a documentary about your story?
@joenadeau4419
7 жыл бұрын
We also live in CT, when do you do your farm and brewery tours, do you have a web page for the brewery?
@highviewfarms7104
6 жыл бұрын
How many birds per 250 watt heat lamp do you use ? . I'm getting 150 chicks in a few days I have 4 lamps now but thinking about going with 2 more I'm in northern ca . It gets cold here but no snow .
@AhmedMakkiyah
5 жыл бұрын
How to secure a farm that's NOT next to your resident ? I hope you can give me some ideas or dedicate a video about this important topic :)
@carolineclark5369
5 жыл бұрын
your small land holding[lifestyle block sized] plus wetness has limitations. goats? hops your main drawcard... in nz 300-500 acres an average sized farm, so larger livestock more viable etc
@GordieHockley
6 жыл бұрын
if this is not profitable how can someone start a farm and get excited about it ?
@caramoonlynn
7 жыл бұрын
Are you a Farm Bureau member?
@bobbyzaloski1
6 жыл бұрын
Where in CT? I'm growing hops in CT too.
@danaoneil6010
5 жыл бұрын
Have you looked into swales for water management?
@farmmarketing
5 жыл бұрын
Yes, but I need to work with a professional geo hydrologist (is that a thing?) to plan it out. I need more information and better equipment to have the proper effect. Also my zoning laws are insane here so it’ll be a process if I want to move water around.
@checkyourfacts6457
7 жыл бұрын
I understand the financial reasoning, but as a KZitem subscriber less animals is a bit disappointing.
@varadarajuluvenkatachalam7314
6 жыл бұрын
good work
@nickpratko7171
7 жыл бұрын
Hey John how do I sign up for farm tours?
@QueenLega
6 жыл бұрын
I want to be a farmer but I have no idea how to start
@OldesouthFarm
7 жыл бұрын
Beer and all that goes with it will be a lot more profitable then anything else (except canibus sales, LOL). Look at the big Bud! They have jacked up their beer prices and are really getting greedy! Have switched beers to snub the Big Budweiser! No matter the economy, beer and other alcohol will always sell well or be a great barter item!
@pprspanishgoats
7 жыл бұрын
What? Just hops?!?
@CoachJoshsteel
7 жыл бұрын
I'm picking up a pattern from the content providers running multifaceted, regenerative, neo-farmering operations; Reductive Thinking. John Roberts, the former head of the National Association of the Specialty Food Trade, warn small gourmet producers "thems that feed the rich dine with the masses, thems that feed the masses dine with the rich." The great challenge in regenerative ag is scale. How do you demonstrate the ability to produce moral volume with quality. It should be a given, regenerative ag is hard work, long hours, and low pay. It is disheartening to hear ground breaking leaders in the field arrive at "it is not worth it" realizations. "The market garden is so much labor, the internship program takes so much of my time, the mob stock pasture program is so management intensive, who has time to collect eggs for $4 per dozen, the forest pigs require so much supervision, got to move the tractors..again, the csa is such an administrative nightmare." I'm reminded of a Farmer Butch story. Farmer Butch, after another great day at market, turns to his wife and says if we keep selling all the tomatoes we buy at $2 for $2, we're gonna need to buy a bigger wagon. Regenerative Ag is a tightly woven tapestry of loss leaders, cash cows, long hours, hard work, and a very expensive land restoration investment project. If you keep chipping away the little pieces, in the end you don't end up with a larger big piece. The idea is to heal the land in order to increase its yield. You want the land's output to force you to buy the bigger wagon. John, it seems to me you are in the brewery business, or the distilling business. A regenerative ag operation may not seem to be paddling in the same direction (not a lot of chicken, egg, pork, and beef goes into brewing beer). But the micro brewery/microdistillery thing is a phenomenon of marketing. A commodity product has been reinvented and is achieving unheard of margins through the pixy dust of marketing. If that concept is built on the smoke and mirrors of imagine marketing and group think, how much better to have a regenerative enviro-ag operation to use as an arrow in your marketing quiver. Grow more hops, mob graze ruminants in your rows for fertilization, and sanitize behind them with chickens. Use your shed pack and a pig-aerator system to improve and raise the pastures for barley production. You may not be able to grow what you need for production, but the “sheep” sucking on the “local” tap don’t need to know that. The Turn in this “magicarketing” trick is the regen-enviro-local -agro tourism gourmet beer buzz, The Prestige is more yield from responsible management and healed land.
@fiore-livinglife_0630
7 жыл бұрын
hey jhon can i add you i your facebook account? so that aside from youtube i can still follow your operation in the farm.thankyou
@iayang2106
6 жыл бұрын
where are is your farm? city/state. I want to buy your chicken n pigs.
@tealkerberus748
6 жыл бұрын
Sounds very like my own decision to give up on goats after too many years of them not thriving on my land. You have to go with what works.
@tuc37789
4 жыл бұрын
Thinking about getting goats. What characteristics of your land do you think were unsuitable for goats?
@blindjohn2969
6 жыл бұрын
Got to feed the pigs to the cows and feed the chickens to the pigs. Feed the hops to the chickens and its a perfect system. My greatgranpappy taught me that
@TheKristenGibson
6 жыл бұрын
Blind John cows don't eat pigs. What do you mean?
@johnsmith-pc3wz
4 жыл бұрын
Farmer-Worker On Instagram Helped Me With My Farming Business, Now My Business As Develop So Fast...
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