One of the biggest mistakes that any farm enterprise can make is specialization. There are too many farmers in the US that only do one thing. Honestly, specialization in only one or two markets has only been a common practice for the last 50 or 60 years. Prior to that, a single farm would have […]
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Dreams die with unrealistic expectations With any business, and farming is a business, it takes time to actually start making money. I’m not talking about income or revenue, I’m talking about a profit, after all the bills are paid. In this post, I’ll go over some hard truths for beginning farmers. Overnight success isn’t realistic
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In 1973 US Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz told American farmers to, “get big or get out.” Over the next couple decades the US saw vertical integration of multiple markets including poultry, beef, and pork. Today the 4 largest meat packers are responsible for 85% of the beef purchases and 67% of hog purchases in the
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How to farm the right way. This has been on my mind lately and it’s got me to thinking, are we doing it all wrong? Or, maybe we just do it all a little differently. There’s a Jeff Foxworthy video going around where Jeff says that when he was a child, Truett Cathy, the founder
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Droughts are part of farming and in my neck of the woods, the saying is that we’re only ever two weeks away from a drought. Things can change quickly, leaving even the most diligent unprepared. Last year we had a decent spring, a hot dry summer, and a really good fall. During the summer, many
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Intensive grazing is not necessarily about trying to get the cattle to intensively graze an area. It’s actually management intensive grazing, so the management is the intensive part. Like a lot of people, I also refer to it as intensive grazing. The idea is to get the livestock to eat everything in the pasture, then
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“There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every matter under heaven” Ecclesiastes 3:1 So a question that comes up from time to time whenever I meet people when I talk about farming is, why do you farm? I thought I would share with you our farm story and why we
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It’s nice to have shelter for your animals but unless the farm you purchase already has barns or an animal shelter on it you may be on your own to figure out how to get the job done. In this post I’ll walk you through the steps on how to build a pallet pig shelter
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A question that some have that might be new to farming is, “what do my animals need in this kind of weather? Well, the answer is often simpler than some might realize. Farming in a winter storm is not all that different than farming in the other weather conditions we see here in Southern Missouri.
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I like high tensile electric fencing better than any other fence system for a few different reasons. It’s the cheapest, it’s the most versatile, and it’s the easiest to build. I also hate barbed wire and think electric fencing has made it obsolete in many, if not most, situations. Of course, some people really like
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