Successful Farms

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SUCCESSFUL FARMS AND HOMESTEADS: FIVE KEYS TO SUCCESS

I was raised in central Indiana on a small family farm. When my husband Paul and I got married, we bought a small farm for ourselves in his hometown south of Indianapolis. Six years and two kids later, we found ourselves burned out and exhausted. We decided that we needed a break, so we sold the farm and started traveling the country to visit small farmers and share their stories through our YouTube channel, Breaking New Roots.

There is a special skill to balancing the work needed when farming and homesteading; either you can work for the farm, or the farm can work for you. Overlooking this skill will lead to burnout and disappointment. I traveled through twenty-three U.S. states visiting over one hun­dred farms, ranging from backyard growers to those that have thousands of acres. Some of the farmers I visited are very well known, like Joel Salatin of Polyface and Will Harris of White Oak Pastures, while others work hard simply knowing that their friends and neighbors are taken care of and well fed. These farms and farmers have their unique stories with their own reasons for why they do what they do, but the most successful ones share common principles that can help anyone be successful in such a challenging lifestyle. Here are the top five things I’ve learned from these incredible farmers.

FARMING IS POETIC

Jesse Green is a farmer in north central Florida who found that he could make more money raising grass-fed cattle than using grains and pasture sprays. He does some direct sales but mostly just takes his cattle to auction. While I was visiting with him, he said something I will remember for the rest of my life: “Don’t move the cows until you can count the spiderwebs.”

What Green meant is that before you move cattle into a pasture, there should be enough regrowth; the grass should be tall enough. The way he describes seeing this growth is not with a measuring stick, however, but with the early morning dew, walking softly and slowly through the field. When you see so many spiderwebs that you can’t keep count of them, then it’s time to move the cows into that pasture.

Before my husband and I sold our farm in Indiana, I remember feeling exhausted about chores before even going out to do them. I walked with my head down and completed each task with nothing more than muscle memory. I had forgotten about the beautiful views before me, the calm anticipation of the cows as I set up their paddock for the morning move. Sometimes a chore as simple and monotonous as moving cattle can be tranquil and full of serenity, if we remember where to look.

IT SHOULD NEVER BE COMPLICATED

When Ben from Wild Harmony told me how he manages his pig herd, I was blown away. It made total sense! “Why didn’t I think of that?!”

Ben is in the harsher climate of Rhode Island, where the winters are cold and wet. He found himself stretched thin and fighting the elements each winter. He loved raising pigs, however, and had a great market for them, so he couldn’t see himself giving them up. Instead, he came up with a new way to manage them.

He has gilts (female pigs that have not yet produced a litter) farrow (give birth to piglets) in the spring. Once weaned, he then slaughters and harvests those first-parity sows for their meat. The piglets from that litter finish out at the end of the year and are harvested as well. He keeps some of the gilts back for breeding and to far­row in the spring, and the cycle continues. He avoids farrowing in terrible weather, and the meat is just as favorable.

This helped me realize that just because a sow can have two and a half litters a year doesn’t mean she has to. And this applies to many aspects of the farm and life. We get so caught up in productivity that we forget there might be another way to do things.

Raising pigs in the blistering cold can be dangerous to the animals and also to the farmer. Many nights are spent locked up in a cold barn waiting for piglets to arrive and assisting with any troubles, all while the rest of the family is inside happily sleeping in a warm bed. By using this management style, Ben can raise a great product while also saving his mental load for his family and other endeavors.

Ben and I finished our conversation by saying: “Things can be complex, but they should never be complicated.” Farming systems can have many interdependent and related pieces, but they should never feel difficult. If they do, something needs to change.

TREAT THE FARM LIKE A BUSINESS OR LIKE A HOMESTEAD, BUT IT CANNOT BE BOTH

I have not met a single farmer that is in it for the money. We farmers do what we do because we love doing it. It’s easy to see headlines like “They made one million dollars on their farm this year” and think, “I’m not in it for the money.” But this is the modern world, and one must pay one’s bills.

Jordan Green from J&L Green Farm talks about this really well. “If you want to have a full-time income for mom and dad from a farm, you have to be running a million-dollar business.” He goes on to explain that if you want a take-home salary of fifty to sixty thousand dollars, the farm must be grossing much more than that, especially if you want to bring on employees and keep up with maintenance and upgrades. This is a hard realization for a lot of people, myself included!

We started with chickens; then we got into beef and then hogs, all within a few years. We wanted to maximize our output and be in every market available. But we were not running a million-dollar business—we were grossing a fraction of that. Sure, our farm was profitable, but not enough to pay a decent salary in “take-home.”

If we had focused on making our farm a homestead, where the “in­come” it brings in is the food it produces for us to eat, we would have been in a much different place. This is where it helps to realize that one can be a farmer and grow his or her own food without it being reportable income, and that having a farm be a full-fledged business takes more than just positive numbers on an income sheet.

Running a million-dollar company does not happen overnight, especially in farming. Getting to a level like that takes time—ten years or more! Homesteading, on the other hand, can happen right away. Start with a few chickens in the backyard, or a few tomato plants, and process them yourself. After ten years, you can build yourself a fully stocked pantry and freezer, and all this without a business line of credit charging you interest (but that is a different conversation).

A farm business and a homestead are two completely different things. Treating them like they are the same or even similar will get you only to one place: burned out, fed up and thinking you are a failure.

If you want to run a farm business, start small with something you enjoy, and build on that. Jordan talks about that, too. Build your farm with “Lego pieces” that can be added or taken away as needed. I will say more about this in the next section.

DIVERSIFYING VERSUS SPECIALIZING

When I was taking Farm Business 101 at Purdue, there was a whole section dedicated to diversification. It was taught that if you are going to create a business from your farm, you need to have many types of products to offer. The idea was that if one fails, you can lean on another to carry your income.

Fast forward a few years to my own farm. I thought we needed a diversified operation with cows, pigs, meat chickens and laying hens. We started with meat chickens, got a few laying hens, bought feeder calves, then feeder pigs, then sows. Within three years, we were finishing twelve calves, thirteen pigs and thirteen hundred chickens and maintaining three sows along with our backyard chicken flock. When the burnout set in, we couldn’t figure out what we had done wrong.

After talking with so many farmers about how and when to scale a farm, we realized our own shortcoming. If we had focused solely on broiler chickens, we would have been in a much better position by year six than the one we found ourselves in.

There are plenty of pros and cons for both sides. If you diversify, you have a backup plan already working for you, but that also means that you can feel pulled in many directions without much down time, ultimately leading to burnout. If you specialize, you can do one thing really well and easily scale it up or down depending on market demand, but one source of income can be dependent on volatile market changes.

This isn’t to say that diversification cannot happen at all. I think there is a way to success­fully diversify. To start, you must grow very slowly and focus on one thing. Amanda Hand at MKONO Farm was really interested in Kunekune pigs. She started with a few, found a good market for their high-quality meat and grew her farm over ten years before she decided she was ready to look at another species. Over those ten years, she was learning. She found a way to better market her product, she tested value-added products with her customers and she was able to understand shipping across the country.

Another way to ensure successful diversi­fication is to have a great team. Corrie at Bread and Butter Farm says that the way her farm can successfully have so many enterprises is because she has built a team to work them. The chef in the kitchen, the veggie manager, the herdsman, the day camp counselor, the CSA manager and the social media manager are all different people working on the same farm, for the same goals.

There is certainly room for both diversified and specialized farms. Both start by growing slowly and putting the right systems in place first.

YOU CAN FARM ANYWHERE

The biggest thing I have learned from all of these amazing farmers is that you can farm anywhere! I am a generational farmer; land ownership is everything. You grow up, go to school, buy your own land and you stay there. So, that is exactly what Paul and I did.

After we sold the farm and started traveling to see different kinds of farms, we found that a lot of farmers don’t even own their land at all, and even more farmers have fewer than five acres to farm. Out of the one hundred thirteen farms we have visited, twenty-two operate with a land lease agreement in some form. Some farmers use a community garden; some use their backyard. Some farmers have a lifetime lease, and some farmers operate on a farm where their payment is to help the landowners as they age.

The biggest lie I ever told myself was that I had to own a lot of land in order to be a farmer. Sure, the land size may limit what can be done on it, but it doesn’t mean that you aren’t a farmer or can’t ever be one.

After visiting farms across the country, one thing became clear: farming doesn’t look the same for everyone, and success doesn’t follow a single path. Whether you’re farming a backyard or hundreds of acres, raising cattle or growing vegetables, the key is to find a system that works for you—one that isn’t complicated but allows you to thrive and enjoy the process. The beauty of farming is that it can be as diverse and unique as the people who live it. You don’t need to own endless acres or follow someone else’s blueprint to make it work.

As I continue to visit more farms, I’m also reminded that complex­ity doesn’t have to mean chaos. Success in farming is about finding the balance between working the land and letting it work for you, all while keeping your heart and mind open to the simplicity that leads to fulfill­ment.

This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Winter 2024

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