Episode 133: What is the difference between aggies and homesteaders?

INTRODUCTION AND RESOURCE REMINDER

Hi, and welcome back. I just want to remind you that you can get all my homestead science books on my website and many on Amazon for a new way of teaching agriculture to today’s youth and aspiring homesteaders by focusing on small-scale farming and self-sufficiency. If you are a school, co-op, or retailer and need invoicing, please feel free to reach out to me directly.
This also includes my newest products, homestead trivia, raising self-sufficient kids, and my gift cards. So, I’m so excited to have you guys back. Last week was our season premiere, and I talked about some things that I haven’t really; my chair is making tons of noise.
Kids have probably been playing with it. I talked about a lot of things that I haven’t been, that I’ve been chewing on and wanted to share with you and see what your thoughts were. So, if you missed that episode, be sure to hop back over there and listen to it.

HOMESTEAD UPDATE: HEIFER BLUE’S CALVING SAGA

I think it’s time for some homestead updates. I’ve been telling you about our heifer blue, our purebred brown Swiss heifer, who is bred to a purebred brown Swiss bull. We are so excited about this calf, and she was huge over the summer.
So we thought, oh, she bred right when we put him in. So we get the vet out to make sure she has all her shots. And he’s like, yeah, she’s five months along.
Oh, bummer. Okay. So from there, we counted out to when she’d be due, which was February 2nd.
She had started showing some mucus before then. So we’re like, okay, let’s get her in the barn. It’s really bad weather.
So we want her in the barn where she’s safe and warm and all those things. Get her in there, and no calf, no calf. The due date comes, and no calf. So then we are at the time of recording this. We are 18 days past her due date.
And this poor girl is still locked in the barn, but the weather is horrible. And she is absolutely the heifer that will. The minute I let her out of the barn, like dropping the baby in a mud puddle and taking off running, I will never see her again. So that’s how a lot of heifers are, actually.
But at least, you know, with dairy ones, they really mellow out after they have their first calf. But for right now, we’re still dealing with that heifer attitude. And there’s a reason they’re called salty heifers.

So I recalculated her date. Because when the vet said she was five months long, he was, like, four or five months. Yeah, let’s call it five.
So I was like, okay, let’s calculate her date to four months, which turns out I’d actually done like four and a half months just to be safe. So I calculated her to four months, which would have had her having the calf four days ago. And we still have no calf.

And she is the size of a house. Literally, she’s probably five to six feet wide. Her she is bagged up, and her vulva is large, and the tendons by her tail are completely gone, which is an indicator that they’re getting ready to go into labor. I am completely at a loss because I’ve never really dealt with this before.
We’ve always had really easy dairy cows or beef cows. And yeah, so I guess we’re just still waiting. You know, I had that fear, like maybe the calf died or something.
But I mean, her health is really good. She’s eating really good. And I’ve gone out there a couple of times, and her stomach is in a totally different position, which tells me it’s the calf moving around.

So, I guess we’re still waiting. But you know, we’re really looking forward to her milk. Our Belfair doesn’t provide enough butterfat for us to make butter and cream out of her cream or whipped cream, out of her cream.
So we’re really looking forward to some brown Swiss milk. Yeah, we have nothing. So that’s what’s going on with Miss Blue.
Seems how she’s making us wait so long. Will you guys please pray and keep your fingers crossed for a heifer? Because at least a heifer, we can train, breed, and sell in a year for quite a bit of money. Or you know, if we ever need a replacement, we have that.
But because we live cover, we have no clue what we’re getting.

EXPANDING OUR PORK OPERATION AND RECORD-KEEPING

Let’s see here. The next project I’ve been working on on the homestead is getting all of our pig records in line.
I’ve talked a little bit about how we are massively expanding our pork operation, which I said we were going to be shipping a couple of months ago. And we had some glitches with our website stuff, which I actually would like with the homestead education website. I had to pull my website guy off of development for the farm page and focus all his energy on fixing the homestead education page.
So we’ll be circling back to that soon. But we want about three to four new sows this year. Two of them are going to expand the herd, and two of them are going to be replacements.
One, we lost a sow, and then we had another sow that we thought had run her course. So I need to be taking better records so that I know you know who’s farrowed consistently, who weans a lot of piglets, who breeds back easily. We kind of know in our heads, but we’ll probably have 10 sows this year.

And so yeah, that’s not a large commercial operation, but it’s what I call a commercial homestead. We’re not just breeding one sow for our personal uses and selling a little to the neighbors. We are selling 100 piglets a year.
We are feeding out 100 pigs a year. We’re selling whole hogs, half hogs, breeder stock, and retail cuts and looking into the shipping. We are a jamming operation.

And the other night, we were trying to figure out when the last time this first year sow, we had farrowed to decide if she was doing what she was supposed to do. And my husband and I are literally flipping through two years of pictures on our phone. So we always take pictures like the day they’re born.
It’s hard to tag piglets, and we don’t do the ear notching. So pictures are always helpful because then we can identify markings and stuff. But we’re going through years of pictures, and then we get to the one we think it is, and we’re like, is that Boreo, or is that Pickles? Because all of our sows have names because they’re spoiled.

But we can’t tell because they look really similar, and she is kind of far away in the picture. But I’m like, wait, I have a picture here of Pickles with a litter three weeks before that. And then here’s this other pig with small piglets.
So that has to be Boreo. I mean, it’s just that it should not be how our record system is. So we are putting all our records together.

There are a few things that just don’t interest us at this point. We don’t do what their weights are at birth and what their weights are at weaning. One, because I’ve bought three scales and my husband has lost all three of them.
That’s a whole other conversation. If anybody has an extra one of those hanging scales that you can hook a calf sling to, I have the calf sling sitting under my desk right here. I would happily get it from you.

But we just don’t think that. We just changed some feeding protocol stuff, which is great. But we don’t have data from before that to even compare to. At this point, that’s not really a huge concern for us, especially when we don’t have a way of weighing our pigs at larger weights.

We’ve had a couple of scales over the years. They were older scales. Scales are not cheap.
But we’ve been raising pigs long enough that I can look at them and be like, oh, those are about 100 pounds. Let’s go ahead and move on to a grower feed over a starter feed. Oh, they’re getting close to Butcher.
Go ahead and call and make the butcher date. And our pigs consistently weigh between 250 and 300 pounds live weight. So I feel really comfortable with eyeballing when I’ve been raising pigs since I was a kid.

But I still need some better records as we make some choices, because the scaling that we want to do, we want to make sure that we are saving the most money that we can. But we also really want a better barn situation because we lose a lot of piglets when we farrow in the winter. And so we want to be able to make some additions to our barn.

If we want to try to get maybe a business loan or some sort of grant or something to be able to do that, I need to have all my records in place. So this is really important for us.

DIRECT-TO-CONSUMER MEAT SALES AND HANGING WEIGHT

Now, this leads me to another conversation that I’ve seen kind of bouncing around on the internet a lot this week in regards to buying direct-to-consumer meat, which is what we do.
We’re the farmer. We sell directly to consumers. You can come to our farm, or when we ship, we can ship just 10 pounds of sausage. But a lot of people like to buy pigs or steers or lambs or whatever they’re going to buy in the whole or half from.

And the reason for this is, you can get a slightly better deal and fill your whole freezer. But the farmers like doing this because that meat does not have to go through a USDA butcher. It can go through a state-inspected butcher, which saves them money, or you know, saves the customer money. And it’s a lot easier to get in with those butchers.

The USDA butchers, there’s so few and far between right now that sometimes you’re looking at a three to four-month waiting list. And yeah, we’re small farmers, and I don’t have it locked in. If I say I have pigs that are 150 pounds today, then they will be 300 pounds. You know, come May, I would love for that to be the case.

But that’s just not the operation that we run. And it’s not the operation that a lot of small producers run. There’s even times I go to buy our grower and starter feed, and our local feed mill is out.

So I have to buy a maintenance feed because I still have to feed my pigs. But then they’re getting 3% less protein and 2% less fat for the next two weeks until I can get some more feed from our feed mill. During that time, they were still gaining, but I definitely lost the rate of gain amount.

So anyways, being able to go through those state-inspected butchers, a lot of times I can just call and be like, hey, I have a pig ready, and I have a buyer. He’s like, cool, I’ll be there next weekend especially when we work with them a lot.

What the way that works a lot, though, is people don’t sell their pigs for a flat rate because pig’s weights can be all over the place. Like I said, 250 to 300, sometimes they’re 325, sometimes they’re 225. I usually have them right in that window.

But it’s not, you know, I can look at a pig. And because it’s really long-bodied, I think it’s only 250 pounds. But it’s a really stout, long-bodied pig.
And it actually weighed in at 320. You know, I mean, it’s kind of hard to say for sure when you don’t have a scale. So also, if I don’t have a scale, I can’t tell a customer that I’m charging you $3 a pound on live weight because I don’t know what that weight is.

So what a lot of. That can vary, even somebody who does have a scale. If that pig eats a whole bunch, that weight could be five to 10 pounds more. And when you’re looking at $3 a pound, that could be $30 more than you’re paying for that pig. And that’s a lot when you’re looking at the big picture.

So the butcher comes out, and you know, they’ll slaughter a lot of times right on the farm, or sometimes they’ll pick up the animal and take it to their facility for slaughter. At that time, they’ll weigh them. You know, so slaughter is, you know, putting them down, eviscerating, some of their skin, some of them don’t, some of them leave the head on, some don’t.
It just depends. So the number you get there is called hanging weight. And that is what customers usually pay for hanging weight.

On our farm, we charge either $4.25 or $4.50 a pound for hanging weight, $4.25 for a whole hog, and $4.50 for a half a hog because there’s a lot more back and forth on that, and it costs us more. And the reason that we use that weight rather than the weight that the family picks up from the butcher is because it can vary. If one person orders all bone-in roasts and another person orders all boneless roasts, that end weight is going to be totally different.

So instead of a whole hog, you get about 150 pounds, maybe more. If they do all boneless, they might only be picking up 100 pounds of meat. And yes, the other person’s paying for more bone, but there still are uses for those bones.

And somebody’s trying to open my door. She needs packing tape. This is what happens when my office, my recording studio, doubles as our shipping facility.

So she’s working on some other projects right now. You can take those bones and you can make dog treats out of them. You can do pork broth.

There’s a lot of other things some people like the bone on when they’re, doing certain smokings and stuff like that. It does vary. And that’s also another reason why a lot of producers won’t pay for the cut and wrap.

Because some people want their hams plain. Some people because they want to smoke them themselves, or they just like a roast. Some people want them smoked.
It’s $1.50 more a pound to have them smoked. Some people want plain sausage. Some people want breakfast.
Some people want Italian. You get Italian sausage. That’s an extra dollar a pound to have Italian sausage, at least from my butcher. But I mean, there are probably still those same types of fees across the board.

So when I’m as a producer, I don’t want to say, Hey, it usually costs about $150 or well, for that’s for a half a hog about $300 for cut and wrap. If I offered to pay that, and then they go in and do all sorts of things, they wanted everything smoked and special seasoning, little like smoky jerky sticks and all that type of stuff. I could be looking at like a $500 bill, for you know, when I only charge the customer $300. That could really hurt me as a producer.

And two customers could go in and each pick up their half of the same pig and pay exponentially different just because of the cuts that they chose. So that’s why we do everything based on hanging weight.

I’ve seen a reel floating around about this. And I also had a friend reach out to me this week. When I put out last week that I would really like to start answering your guys’s questions online, making sure that I’m meeting your needs, I’m answering these questions.

Through the podcast or on social media, she saw that, and she’s like, Well, Kody, this is perfect because I have pig questions. So she and I actually had a two-day long conversation about her getting started with pigs. But I saw that hanging weights probably the biggest question is why we do that and what it actually means.

If you want to submit a question for me to answer during this segment of my podcast, you can go to the homesteadeducation.com/helpmegrow. I will be happy to answer those questions for you.

AGGIES VS HOMESTEADERS: INTRODUCING TODAY’S TOPIC

What I want to talk about today might ruffle some feathers. I’ve really been looking at agriculture through a different lens.
Again, those of you who have followed me for any amount of time know that I was an Aggie turned homesteader. And now that we have an administration that’s looking a little bit closer at what farmers do, And I’ve been writing my homestead history book. I’m looking through it through a different lens again.

And I haven’t changed my stance on anything. I still think that there are some problems with Big Ag. And I still think that we should be focusing more on growing our own food as a society.

But there is a lot of information that happens in between. So we’re calling this Aggies versus Homesteaders, who will win in the sourdough bowl. I took a deep dive this week, I wrote some blogs about it. If you want to head over to my blog, I’ll link that in the show notes as well.

I’ve been talking about food waste, how we can take pressure off of farmers, subsidies, vocational ag classes, and those types of things. Because I think that these are a lot of topics that, as a society, we forget about a little bit. As far as being a homesteader, I still consider myself very agricultural-based.

VACCINES, HERD IMMUNITY, AND HOMESTEAD PRACTICES

I’ve seen a lot online, you know, where cattle ranchers come onand there’s nothing wrong with the vaccines for cattle. And then I have my homestead friends coming on and saying like, I don’t want my cattle to have mRNA vaccines. It’s a lot.

And it’s a lot to decide where you stand on these things. I would like to say as a scientist, I have seen a lot of really great research on herd immunity, both by using vaccines and through natural immunity. But then we’re learning a lot from the information that’s been provided to us about vaccines, both for humans and animals. I think that’s a whole nother deep dive.

But a lot of that funding was done privately, not through the government, which, and then the government like, kind of claimed it as their own. And I think we’re getting just a lot of misinformation. So, you know, personally, we don’t vaccinate the animals on our farm, we don’t feel a need to, everybody’s healthy.

If I’m selling 4-H pigs, they do have to be vaccinated, but I vaccinate them on the way out the door so that they’re not dropping feces and things like that where my other animals are. I also worm every piglet that leaves my property. And that’s something that I won’t change my mind on.

Piglets are very susceptible to stress. And because we have a holistic system on our farm, where, you know, all animals have a little bit of a worm load. I raise dirt pigs. They live on dirt.

And we are holistic enough at this point that my pigs can live on dirt, and I don’t have to worry about worms. But if a piglet leaves our property, and their immune system tanks, either any type of low-level worm load that they would have already had or any worms that they pick up in their new facility or new pen, they would have no immunity to, and they could end up with a really bad worm load. Especially kids who are raising them for 4-H, which can just kill their rate of gain and mess them up for fair.

And that’s not what I’m interested in doing for these kids. And, you know, one dose of a wormer at six or eight weeks old is not going to ruin that meat at six or eight months old. So that’s just kind of my stance on that.

BRIDGING THE PERCEIVED DIVIDE BETWEEN BIG AG AND HOMESTEADERS

So, but like I’ve heard, you know, I’ve seen a lot online, I’ve heard from other exhibitors who go to like ag conferences and stuff, that they’re just not really fond of homesteaders. They think that we’re all against them. And that we’re not, you know, agriculture, of course, when you are a big farmer, you’re doing it for profit.

I’m not saying that in a bad way. We all have jobs. I mean, what if someone told you, you should feel really bad about yourself that you charge people to be an accountant? Like, yeah, you’re doing it to make money.

But I went to this conference, and I was really surprised as to what people had to say. I touched on it a little bit last week, but I said that today would be the day for the deep dive.

So yes, like I said, farmers, they’re in it for their paycheck. But the individual farmer is doing it because it’s a way of life. And at the Ag Expo, the Expo was catering to Big Ag. That was completely the design.

I mean, they had farming equipment there that, I mean, you’d practically have to be a millionaire farmer to even consider affording. I mean, there was side by side there that the starting rate was $50,000. I was just blown away.

Drones for putting fertilizers and pesticides and things like that on fields that were bigger than my car. I mean, it was awesome. It was so cool to see somebody that came from an Ag background.

But I mean, I don’t need a drone the size of my car to fertilize my garden beds. It was a little bit outside of something that interests me beyond just pure curiosity. However, I wouldn’t have been able to learn anything anyway, go to any of the talks, or visit any booth for any amount of time because I was slammed the entire time I was there.

I was shocked at how many people wanted to stop and have a conversation with me about what we were doing, which I got a new beginner specifically for this conference, but I actually think I’m going to stick with it because I like the message that it sends. And it says, Ag class for home educators, which is exactly what we’re doing. I’m teaching home economics, vocational agriculture, along with science and business in a way that families and small schools can easily do.

I mean, it could even be scaled and used in a larger school super easily. It’s just that it is designed where a small program can do it. Or, you know, just a family and that you’re not just doing art projects.
It’s legitimate skills and products when you’re done.

However, this conference was great for, if you are a chemical or pesticide applicator, you have to be licensed for that, and you have to do continued education. And they had a lot of classes there for that.

It’s great that something like that is available, and they only had to pay $15 to come to the event. So I mean, that makes that really great for them.

There was, I looked at all of the classes, and there were some that looked a little interesting, like real estate and ag.
One, that really stood out to me was farm-to-table social media marketing. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to go to that class, which was taught twice. I’m actually thinking of reaching out to the woman who did the talk, but a lot of people that stopped by my booth were asking for the same thing, even like old-school farmers.

There were actually two conversations I had a lot while I was there, but a lot of old-school farmers stopped by, and their biggest question was, how do I diversify my products? They were like, COVID almost killed us. There was no way we were going to keep the family farm. We are still struggling.

And we know a lot of people are doing this to direct to consumers. We tried that model, but I mean, we were going to, lose the farm, not being able to sell product.

I had a lot of really long conversations with people on how to diversify their products and to change their model to more of a direct to consumer versus the conventional model.
And I mean, it happens to be that that’s something I do. I do direct-to-consumer. I’ve worked with some direct-to-consumer marketing companies.

And back 15 years ago, I used to work doing small farm consulting, specifically with these smaller farms, after coming out of a conventional ag setting. So it led to some really, really great conversations, but I really was surprised how many conventional farmers were looking for ways to diversify similar to how we homesteaders are.

So if that’s the case, I don’t know what information, what you might do with that information other than maybe know that that divide isn’t as far as we thought it was.

I do offer homestead business coaching. I mean, I’ve talked about that before on here. And so, if you are looking to diversify your products, that is something that I do.

But I was just really surprised. I didn’t have a signup that said that. I’m a homestead business coach, come to me to talk about diversifying your products. That was what people were there for, and they wanted to know how to do it.

And the conference was not providing that for them. And, you know, I let a lot of them know about the homestead conference that we have in Idaho every year, which is just a half hour’s drive from where the ag conference was. So you will get more information there.

But then the hard thing is it might be going too far. They didn’t necessarily want to know how to start their own sourdough. They’re literally just interested in how to kind of bridge that gap between large farmers and the commercial homestead that I talk about a lot.

So yeah, like I said, I’m not, I’m not even 100% sure what I want to do with that information, but I really hope that that helps you see where farmers sit on that topic as well, that they’re struggling and that they see the value in, you know, shopping local and filling that market niche.

AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION, CTE, AND LIFE SKILLS

Another reason is that they were really excited about education. Oh, I had ag teachers, retired ag teachers, people that do like education and agritourism, the Grange Farm Bureau, Washington State Extension Office, all coming to me and not just being like, oh, what you do is cool.

I have been looking for this. How how do I implement this into my program? Can you come to talk to my group? Do you have a curriculum designed similar to ag in the classroom, which is a great program? I just want to put that out there right now that I don’t have any issues with ag in the classroom.

It’s through like the extension offices. But kind of what it does is it gives material for someone like the Farm Bureau to go in and have a pre-written class that they’re doing. And it’s, it’s one of those things like, you know, you have like an assembly and, or, you know, it’s special, it’s Ag Day, and the Farm Bureau comes in for like one afternoon, maybe a year, maybe every six months or something.

They do some sort of small activity with a fourth grade class or something. And then you don’t hear anything else about that. It’s done.

There’s 4-H in different states that actually teaches it in school. So that’s pretty cool. So they have a little bit more long-term learning with that, like they’ll incubate birds and stuff.

But especially I can speak to West Coast a lot and that’s not the case. 4-H is strictly like an evening. Go to meetings and show at fairs. There’s no 4-H in schools.

There is FFA in schools. But recently was looking at what my options might be to be able to help schools provide a more holistic life skills and agricultural type program. So, I started doing some research into what used to be called vocational agriculture and vocational education.

Now, it’s called career technical education, looking into what various state programs offer and how that’s going. And what I found is that they do not necessarily have a set curriculum, but a set of, what’s the word for it? What cores it teaches, like the whole common core thing. This is actually isn’t even part of the Department of Education.

It is, I think, part of the Department of Agriculture. Don’t quote me on that one. Is where CTE money comes from.

It’s a federal program called. Currently we’re on the Perkins Five, and every state gets a certain amount of money to fund CTE education. So they had a list of everything that, you know, say, a student that’s studying animal science would need to know. And these CTE programs are designed where these kids can come out of high school with maybe a degree or certificate, like a two-year degree or a certificate and be able to go right into the workforce.

And that was how it was designed. You did regular schooling up to eighth grade, and then you did just some core stuff in high school. And the rest of your high school time was vocational training.

So then you could either get a job right out of high school, or if you really enjoyed what you did, or if you wanted to go into a more scholarly field, then you could go on to post-secondary school. The way our model is now is you have to go all the way through high school learning your core stuff. Then you go to college, and you have to pay a lot to go to college, and maybe you will find out that’s not what you want to do.

Or you could have become a certified welder and started welding as soon as you graduated from high school and be making $50,000 a year without debt and possibly, over your lifetime, make more than somebody who went to college. And I know a lot of guys who were in like ag programs to do ag mechanics, where they basically just wanted to be welders, but they got their degree. So now they have a degree where maybe they’re more qualified to be a welder on a farm or something, or with large equipment on farms.

But they don’t necessarily make more entry-level than just a regular welder who could get a job on a farm and learn the rest. I’m not saying one over the other is better, but I’m saying why we let this CTE program become not as valued.

And the reason I say that is because when I found these cores that they need to learn, there’s also a comparable, the students were tested on their ability to demonstrate each of these cores. They do it yearly and compile the data.

And within the ag department, where I didn’t dive into each one, I perused them and saw, for the most part, what I needed to see. I plan on going further into this in my future studies. But there was a chart and it could either be red if they either didn’t understand it up to 35 percent, yellow like 35 to 60 percent that they kind of got it.

And then I think, yeah, green, I think, was from like 65 on. So, even a 65 percent demonstration of understanding in any one place would be considered green. And these charts were completely red and with one or two spots of green or yellow.

And a lot of the places where they were green only fell under. Can you demonstrate what a leader in an FFA program would exhibit? And I look at that, and I’m like, so basically, this program is just designed to push the kids through the competitive part of the FFA program and not actually the deep studies of that.

And I would really love to see more holistic programs, which, I said, I wrote a blog about it. I’m probably going to talk about this a little bit more on another podcast because today’s is still about agriculture, and just filling in some blanks on that.

FAMILY FARMS, CORPORATE STRUCTURES, AND FARM ECONOMICS

So one of the concerns I did hear from a lot of these farmers was that, you know, we’re having the conversation about not wanting corporate farms. And this woman goes, but we’re a corporate farm. We needed to be able to protect ourselves.

So, my husband, my brother, and I incorporated them. We’re still a family farm. And I was like, OK, like let’s back up because I feel like I really like hurt your feelings right there.

And that was not my goal. My goal was to state that I don’t want Monsanto running all of our farms. I’m fine with the mom and pop down the road that incorporated, but that is a really hard one to quantify. What’s the word for it?

So when we say there’s, you know, say, a million farmers, I think there’s more than that. There’s definitely more than that, but say there’s a million farmers and 250,000 of them or maybe, you know, 50,000 of them are like the big corporate like bad guys. But the thing is, they also produce 40 or 50 percent of all of the outputs.

So they do have the biggest control because they own the most and they have the most money. Then you have 250,000 that are incorporated family farms. Are they considered corporate farms when we’re looking at who the big bad guy is? Then there’s also, then there’s, you know, there’s the farmers, and then there’s maybe another 250,000 or more.

I mean, obviously, I’m working with theoretical numbers that are considered small farms that, because their main source of income is off-farm income, don’t even list themselves as farms on the census but actually do have, make a valuable difference in, like, the farm economy and stuff and where our food comes from and filling that supply chain need.

So, it’s just something to consider when you’re having that conversation about corporate versus small farms. So I want to chat with you about what agriculture is like today.

It’s still a way of life. It’s probably. I hope it always stays a way of life. Like I said, farmers farm because, yeah, they have to pay their bills, but they would farm anyway.

They would figure it out because they just want to farm. It’s, it’s different, but it, there has been a huge shift away from the small farm and the standard family farm since the ag revolution in like the 70s, which is when so many things became mechanized, and crops were able to yield so much more due to some of it being GMOs, some of it being fertilization practices and that type of stuff, that the same piece of acreage could produce more with fewer labor outputs, which in a lot of ways, that’s great because that opens up the labor force to provide other things.

But then at the same time, I think having a bored labor force that isn’t having to work has led to a lot of the sociological issues that we’re fighting against right now.

Not to say that everybody needs to get out there and start picking tomatoes or something, but I think that there’s something to be said for it. This has led to Big Ag getting a really bad name, and that’s not the whole picture.

In fact, so these family farms that I’m talking about, the ones that are incorporated, their median household income is about $100,000 a year. That’s primarily due to off-farm income. Their median farm income is negative $900.

So when I say the farmers are doing it for the paycheck, their paycheck is they owe $900. And their off-farm income is that the wives have to go out and get jobs so that they can have medical insurance. They have to have regular yearly jobs, like year-round jobs, so that they can pay for the farm labor and pay the mortgage and that type of stuff.

And then at the end of the year, when they harvest everything, that’s when they get their paycheck through various ways. But with that, a lot of times, that money is just turned around and rolled right back into supporting the business, paying for next year’s seed and fertilizer, paying the tractor leasing company.

But here’s the key one: it also pays the farm taxes. If they were to stop farming, they wouldn’t be able to afford their farm taxes.

But the farm model that’s going on is so much money has to go into next year’s crop because they can’t save seeds because they’re all non-GMO. We have to massively fertilize because otherwise, they’re not going to have the yields that they need to be able to keep up with the market.

You have to be able to afford the equipment to farm your fields at that high level. And so there aren’t really any other options without selling out.

THE LINEAR FARM MODEL AND CONFINEMENT OPERATIONS

One that’s become really popular with chickens and pork is called the linear farm model. And that is where, say, you become like a chicken farmer, you contract through Foster Farms or Purdue or whoever is doing those chickens, and you take out a loan or put your own farm inputs in to build this $30,000 building that you can cram 300,000 birds into.

You buy the birds from Foster Farm. Then you buy the feed that they have stated what type of feed they need. And so you pretty much have to buy it from them or one of their suppliers. You can’t say, hey, I think they grow up better with more protein.

No, no, no. This is the feed they get. These are the medications they get.
These are the antibiotics they get. But you have to pay for all of those. Then, after you buy them all at the rate that they set, you turn around and sell them to the next step in the line, which is like the slaughter plants at market value.

Market value might make you money. It might not. But you’re going to pay the same amount for those birds regardless of market value.

But you’re going to sell them at whatever the market deems appropriate at that time. So I hope you see the problem with that. And they’re confinement operations.

Those are what we don’t want to do anyway. So for a lot of farmers, that’s the only way they’re able to keep the family farm at this point is to buy into that model. And I feel bad for them.

But because when they go to farm conferences, when they get their farm periodicals in the mail, those are not talking about how to diversify your products, how to make money in different ways, how, you know, if you stop getting subsidies or whatever, that you can go into a regenerative agriculture model and get grants and then still sell your product at top dollar, not subsidized amount, and probably make more than you were ever making before.

They don’t talk about that. They put Purdue pays for the big ads that say, hey, you could make $100,000 a year if you sign up with us.

And they go, we have never made $100,000 a year. Let’s do it. But they don’t talk about what you have to pay to make that $100,000.

So that’s my rant. That’s my high horse. I’m gonna go ahead and get off my soapbox and keep talking to you about what’s going on in agriculture.

HOW SUBSIDIES SHAPE OUR FOOD SYSTEM

Okay, so I am just now really starting to understand subsidies. I learned about them in college, but I never felt like they clicked. It was, and I still think that there are a lot of facets that I don’t understand.

In fact, I know there is because I’m reading a book right now that is talking about every layer of ag policy from 1900 through the present. And there’s a lot that I’m like, I can’t even begin to absorb this, but let me get the big pieces. There’s a lot I could go into on this.

But what I’d really like to point out is that subsidies are only for certain crops, and they do not include meats, fruits, or vegetables, which, if you notice, are our highest-priced items at the store. Milk, however, is subsidized.

But a lot of times, go look and see how much milk is, like how much a gallon of subsidized milk, which is going to be commercial milk, like whatever is in the big gallons.

And then just look and see what, even organic, a lot of organic is subsidized. Look at like if you have raw milk in your area or a big raw milk dairy, not like buying from the mom-and-pop down the road, like what you would buy at the store.

Some of the organics that don’t get subsidies they’ll be a different brand than the commercials, and they’re going to be about half the price or twice the price, if not more, because that’s how much milk really costs.

Because what you are getting charged is, so basically, the farmer sells the milk for a fraction of what it actually costs them to produce the milk. They buy the grain out. They feed the cows at a fraction of what it costs to produce the grain.

Then, farm subsidies come in and pay that difference to make it where the farmer gets their money back, plus hopefully some income.

But you don’t have to pay the price that is subsidized by the government. You’re still paying that lower price that basically the farmer was charged. I mean, of course, there’s a lot in between.

And if you pay $2 for a gallon of milk, the farmer probably got about 25 cents a gallon. So just, and then even still, that was way lower than it should have been. And you’re still paying $2 for your gallon of milk.

Although I don’t know that I’ve seen $2 milk in a really long time, so subsidies usually have to be things that can be stored. I’m not sure why milk falls under that, except maybe because you can do so many other things with it, like making cheeses, or because milk is so necessary for children and stuff.

I’m not really sure about that one. But looking at it, milk was pretty much the only profitable subsidy, in 2023. That doesn’t mean you should go out and buy a commercial dairy because that is a lot.

What it does mean, though, is that none of these farmers are really making any money. These subsidized crops are the ones that, honestly, make the foods that are like probably the least nutrient-dense out there.

So yeah, if you use the flour to make a nice loaf of sourdough bread, that’s pretty nutrient-dense. But the majority of it’s not going to that. These crops, it’s not just wheat, it’s corn, and sorghum, and sugar, and a whole bunch of other ones.

So I mean, literally right there, like cereal, and not like oatmeal, which even oatmeal is a great, great, but like boxed cereal with all the colors in it. And it’s like puffed rice, so there’s really nothing left of it at that point.

And then they add a ton of sugar. And that, and then you could buy that for, well, I don’t know, cereal’s gone up too, like every once in a while.

Like, I mean, I need some Cinnamon Toast Crunch. And I went to buy some the other day, and it was like $7 for a tiny little box of it. And I was like, okay, well, I don’t need it that bad.

But what I’m getting at, though, is these products are by weight, usually cheaper. Or it looks like it because if you really broke it down what the weight is, it’s way cheaper to buy nutrient-dense products. But then they like, they taste good, and children want them, and children are marketed them in schools and down the line.

And then a lot of these products, grain products, just go into storage in case we ever need a surplus. Like as a country, they go into ethanol production. So all of this isn’t even coming to our plates, which I’m fine with going to ethanol production.

But if you’re going to subsidize ethanol production and then turn around and charge us an arm and a leg for it when you’re not charging us an arm and a leg for cereal corn, I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know what should happen with that.

But basically, it has skewed the food pricing system to where people, like small farms, can’t sell their products. Small farms are not subsidized. I’m going to get into that in a second.

They can’t subsidize their products. Even though beef can’t subsidize their product, the grain that they buy for their beef is subsidized. So it does keep those prices a lot lower.

So then, if you go buy beef or pork from your neighbor, you’re going to pay more for it because they’re buying grain from a local farmer. They’re feeding their animals on their local farm. And then these animals are actually paying for their homes versus the government covering the difference.

So yeah, it’s skewed the system, which also has made us less healthy because we’re going to choose the cheap, tasty foods over the nutrient-dense foods that require work.

So I guess maybe not tasty, like cheap, unhealthy, convenient food over nutrient dense food that has to be cooked.

And I think that between the subsidy system and the lack of education, both in vocational agriculture and in home economics or consumer sciences or whatever you want to call it, has caused a big piece of this childhood health crisis that is currently being addressed at the national level.

GRANTS, LOANS, AND BARRIERS FOR SMALL FARMS

So, like I said, small farms don’t receive subsidies. There are some programs available for some grants and things like that. And I think that’s great. They’ll do for regenerative farming and education, but oh my gosh, it is such a small piece.

One of the regenerative farming programs is less than 0.01% of the farm bill, and it is one of the bigger regenerative agriculture programs. So I mean, if that tells you what we’re really looking at, I mean, heck, three-quarters of the farm bill or two-thirds or something like that goes directly to welfare.

And I was on welfare at one point. Like I was a single mom in college. I got my food stamps.

But when that much of such a large bill is going to welfare, and then they’re not being educated properly, and they say as they failed at the level of teaching food stamp recipients what is healthy food. No, you failed at teaching a society what healthy food is. And now you also have food stamp recipients that are using it to buy soda pop.

I mean, it’s last year or two years ago, something like $8 billion of food stamp funding went to soda pop, I think. It was a lot. It was way more than I think should have been spent.

So, and it’s in my blog. You can go look at that. I’ll link it. The one on nutrient-dense food.

So anyways, if a farmer wants to get one of these grants that I talked about, if it’s sorry, my phone went off of do not disturb, and my kids needed to know if we could buy a new heat lamp because our pig keeps killing the heat lamp and she’s got the one that has the babies out in the open wind, which is why I need to figure out a better farm system. But well, I just need one part of my barn enclosed, but I don’t have that kind of money.

Anyways, they have to apply for these programs. They have to apply for them as a loan, which means they have to have good credit and stuff like that. And I don’t know how many of you deal with farmers, but a lot of them have bad credit because they have to use their credit to run the farm throughout the year because if they’re not getting those subsidies and stuff like that, they have to use credit cards and loans and whatever else to run their farm.

And they can’t always pay it back until the harvest season, which is where they get into that circle of not being able to be like, I want to take out a USDA loan to rebuild my barn and figure out a new way to do rotational grazing. And then they get like a small farm grant and they get a or a small farm loan and then a regenerative agriculture grant because they have to use their small farm loans, if they can even get one, just to be able to still function.

So it’s this really bad circle. Whereas if you have a subsidy or a crop that can be subsidized, you literally just have to register and show that you are contributing enough to be part of this program.

I mean, it’s like one page of paperwork versus applying for a grant or a loan is huge, which a lot of farmers, they’re too busy and lack of a better word, like uneducated in that. And I don’t want to say farmers are uneducated because they’re the smartest people I know most of the time.

But if they didn’t go to school to learn about finance or writing grants and grant proposals and things like that it’s just not available to them. And there’s definitely not the state ag department knocking on doors offering you money.

They just can be really daunting and not available to a lot of farmers.

RETHINKING POLICY, EDUCATION, AND LOCAL FOOD SYSTEMS

So what I think this new administration could do to help the farming situation is which they actually have a line item in the new executive order that states they want to work with farmers to come up with cheaper, more affordable, and available foods. But there’s not a lot farmers can actually do to provide that.

You need to educate the people on what to buy, where to buy it, and how to create local food systems.

But unless you’re going to subsidize some of these other products or help these small farmers be able to get into local markets and things like that, there’s not a lot a farmer can do to lower prices. They already are charging their lowest price possible and probably losing money, that negative $900 a year. Yeah, that says something.

So yeah, I mean, they need to be teaching kids and high schoolers really, like high schoolers who are getting ready to go out into the real world and be the ones that are grocery shopping and cooking and things like that. Stop teaching fourth graders how to plant seeds. No, don’t stop teaching fourth graders how to plant seeds, but don’t make that their main source of agriculture education, and don’t end it there.

Like, teach them how to save seeds, teach them, and continue that. Teaching them how to eat tomatoes. I mean, I know a lot of you’re probably laughing when I say that, but there’s a lot of kids who don’t know how to eat fresh fruits and vegetables and ways to pair them that actually taste good to kids.

And I’ll admit, I was probably the first one on that. I remember as a kid, I went to a friend’s house, and her dinner was cottage cheese and peaches. And I thought, like, who eats that? And why would, even if they did, why would that be considered a dinner?

I’ll tell you what, that’s one of my favorite meals now, except I don’t always do peaches.

A lot of times I like fresh tomatoes with a little salt and pepper, or maybe a chicken or turkey patty on the side. One of my favorite meals.

But if you’re not taught and allowed to taste it and those types of things, if your family isn’t providing that, you’re not going to learn that. And if your family, if your parents were born in the last two generations, which they probably were, they weren’t taught that in school either.

So it ends up with a cycle of children and adults who don’t know how to eat healthy foods, don’t know how to preserve foods, and don’t know how to cook. And so it’s easy to just go buy the convenient foods that are primarily the subsidized sugars.

So yeah, I would love to see more money funding into local programs for Victory Gardens. I joke that everybody should have a victory cow. Maybe not everybody, but I mean, I would be more than happy to be part of a program that my small dairy gets a certain amount of money to be able to provide milk to the community, you know, or provide, I don’t know, my jars or something like that, or a cheaper feed program that I can still get that high quality that I want to be feeding my animals or the good quality jars where I’m not putting it in plastic, which people don’t want.

And then people just have to pay for the milk, not all the other stuff. I think that would be an amazing program. As a farmer, I can still feed my family.

As a farmer, I can still feed my community and feel good about it. I think that there should be more of the home ec and vocational agriculture type classes. Like I said, they call them career technical education or consumer sciences at this point.

I don’t think home ec should be just for girls because boys need to know how to cook. They need to know how to budget. They need to know how to clean a house.

And that all should be part of it. And it shouldn’t be an optional class because I know I’m going to get so many people coming in saying they haven’t got rid of those programs, so don’t be spreading false information. No, they haven’t gotten rid of those programs.

They aren’t required and they aren’t valued in the same way that they were historically or that they could be again, to help people get real jobs and know where their food is actually coming from and be able to feed themselves.

I am developing programs along with a few agencies for more outreach. I’m looking forward to seeing what changes we can make together.

CONCLUSION

Until next week, I hope you keep growing.