How do ya'll do it

As someone who grew up in a small dairy operation, my first question is " ARE YOU NUTS OR WHAT? Do you have any idea of the amount of work involved? Do you realize you'll spend hours every day milking twice a day EVERY day? You will never leave the farm again.
I know that it all seems picturesque and all but it is killing work for one family. If you can get several families to go together on a dairy, you can spread the labor out. There may not be much profit but it's better than dying of exhaustion. Make one of them a lawyer so you can thread through the regulations.
Try and remember the hay making, manure moving, pasture management and other chores. Remember that equipment= time. Try and do the job by hand and you have no time Buy the equipment to have the time and you have no money. Think hard.

Lots of people around here ARE doing just that. By specializing in goat or sheep dairies and creating value-added products such as cheese or yogurt, they are actually making a good living doing what they enjoy. Some of us LIKE spending time with their animals.

Manure management with goats is a far different proposition than that of cows. Frankly, cow dairying has become so industrialized it would be difficult for a family to do it on the scale needed to be profitable. Confinement dairying is filthy too. And the poor cows have been bred so heavily for milk production it is a sin. When I see them struggling to walk with this gigantic, unwieldly, grossly swollen udder between their legs I feel so bad for them!

There is a goat farm in Virgina and the woman milks just 10 goats at a time, and she makes artisan cheese with the milk. I think it is BonnyClabber if you want to do a websearch. Her dh does have a job, also. And they sell meat and eggs. It can be done. You just need to plan it well, know what your goals are, and what it would realistically take to accomplish them.

With goats, pc, you don't need 80 acres either! Nowhere's near that amount. We are on 10 acres, and while we would LIKE more land, it won't be necessary to accomplish our goals.

For me personally, the guidance I receive through prayer is also an important facet of how I proceed.

Well, we have a rapidly growing farm with 2 milk goats (twice a day milking), 2 bucks and 4 meat goat does, turkeys, meat chickens rotating thru regularly (new batch arrives every 3 weeks), eggs hens andwe'll be adding pigs shortly. Add to that jams, butters, cheese and yogurt. I work full-time with a 2+ hour commute every day. Wife homeschools 3 kids and she is almost never at home.

I'm usually up around 4:30am - workout, feed and water all the poultry, quick dip int he crrek and it's off to work in the city at 6:30. Wife does morning milking and goat care around 8am. She manages to do cheeses and jams and whatever else she makes inbetween classes, playgroups and lessons. She checks the animals and tops off whoever needs it. I'm back home around 6pm. If it isn't winter, we work around the farm til it's dark. Clearing brush, building stuff, fencing, moving animals, vet work, etc. I do evening milking and usually do the feeding and watering. We almost never eat before the sun goes down. In the winter, I have a stand with 2 500watt halogen lights so that I can get some work done early in the morning or in the evening after the day job. In bed usually by 10, esp in the winter. I have found it is easier for me to maximize my time by getting up earlier. It does catch up to you - slept in this morning til 5:30 and I usually sleep in on the weekend til 7 or 8. There are weeks that all you can get done M-F is the standard chores and daily care of the animals. We get A LOT of work done on the weekend, esp the big projects and there is a never ending list of those.

If it were not for my wife being at home and the help of the kids, as young as they are, it would be next to impossible. We took a load of chickens to be proceesed last nite. My wife will pick them up, finish the packing and bag them this morning by herself. She does most of the deliveries and pickups. She gets the feed, runs the errands, does all the administrative work - That's a lot of work on top of 3 kids.

Maximize your time - up early, to bed early, lots of weekend work. Make your daily chores as efficient and streamlined as possible. Every step I take right down to where I pick up a bucket that was filled the night before is pre-planned to make sure I get everything done in the shortest amount of time. Look for ways to shave time. If I fill a bucket with water for the hens in the evening when I have extra time, that's 5 more minutes I have in the morning. Clothes already set out - 10 minutes. It adds up - 5 here, 5 there, suddenly I have an extra half an hour in the morning to get some chores or projects done.

I should point out that some things have to suffer and get put off. Our house isn't as immaculate as my sister's who spends all day cleaning instead of making cheese and jam. The grass doesn't get mowed until it's a bit out of hand because fencing needs to be trimmed. Laundry piles up and doesn't get put immeadiately. If your priorities are scrubbing floors over trimming hooves, you might be in trouble.

Teamwork is everything.

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Ultra Lord is not afraid of chickens!

Ok I'll offer my opinion FWIW...

Big mortgages suck and so do high taxes---not to mention heating expenses here in NEW ENGLAND.

If you are feeling overwhelmed at this point with job and remodelling...large scale farming is not the answer...milking, haying, maint. on buildings and vehicles, sick animals.....Farmers get paid no OT but always work WAY more than 40 hours.

A homesteader however learns to produce at a comfortable scale...2 goats and 10 chickens and a good garden will get you thru and will take less then 1 hr a day.
Non-electric house and you stop paying the utility co. monthly
Cut wood from your own property for heat and cooking
Hang up a solar shower
Get a hand pump and put in a well point
An outhouse isnt so scary really.

If your cabin isnt fancy your taxes will be low....further cutting your need to generate BIG money....with saved money build your own solar/wind setup.

Simple is good....

Another reminder PC... real estate agents do not know, for the most part, diddly about farms. They know what "sounds good" but none of the nuts and bolts. The University of Vermont has a database (I think) of farms for sale which is designed to link young farmers with ones wanting to retire. The land is often encumbered by restrictions because they've put the land in a conservation program (so you'll never get rich developing it later on if you change your mind). But those restrictions also keep the current price down. And if you're buying a working farm you can be somewhat assured most of the infrastructure is there. Worn, but there.

We did look into this program but "farming" for us is not a livelihood. Farming for us is a hobby and avocation... which gets seriously ugly if you're dependent upon it to pay the property taxes. So we gave a pass to this program because the farms were "too big" and "too serious" for what we were interested in doing.

You might also bear in mind that the cost of maintaining your own haying equipment, the property you require to grow your own hay, etc may exceed the value of that hay. Or, put another way, I can run a successful sheep operation selling fiber and breeding stock on 7 measly acres IF I buy all my hay and supplimental feed. This is vastly more cost effective for us than purchasing the necessary equipment (and fields) to grow our own. I can't use first cut, I only want second, I only want rowen, I only want... just buy the bloody stuff and be done with it! I'll have a little more than $1000 into hay this year. I can't buy diddly in equipment or land for that!

Besides, it helps the farm down the road stay afloat.

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Icelandic Sheep and German Angora Rabbits

[QUOTE=MorrisonCorner]You CAN after all, walk into a grocery store and buy anything you want regardless of the season. You can buy canned food, fresh food, dried food... and biscuit mix, if you want to get right to it. The homestead thing, carried to an extreme, becomes irrational.
QUOTE]
I cant believe you said this on a homesteading site, I think homesteading carried to the extreme is the MOST rational way to live. Sure it does not hurt anything to buy a few things at the store if that is what you want, but I envy those who are as self sufficient as possible.

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marching to the beat of a different drummer

I love this post

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marching to the beat of a different drummer

Since your wife is in the health care field, have you considered employment there as well? I know you just invested a lot of time and money in education for a completely different type of work, but health care is a constant, reliable employer. Maybe radiology technician would appeal to an analytical mind? Once you too are earning a better salary, your options will be much improved.

You missed the point entirely. There is a point where health considerations, time considerations, financial considerations, make homesteading an irrational choice. It is not rational to "homestead" when your wife is in the hospital for six weeks and you're trying to hold down a full time job and visit said wife at least once a day. Something has to give. Now, you could decide to just let your wife hang at the hospital and do chores, make yourself a nice meal, and can up a few green beans, sure. That's a choice. Or, since the wife almost died a couple of times during the whole hospital thing you might make another choice... like slaughter everything you can catch, let the stuff rot, and spend time with the wife.

While I'm all in favor of the homesteading thing, I also think these things need to be looked at sensibly. It isn't sensible to drive yourself (or your spouse) into the ground over a few green beans and home grown eggs. Not when they're readily available elsewhere and certainly not when costing them out shows that they are cheaper to buy than they are to grow.

If someone insists on maintaining an expensive lifestyle, not saving a dime, spending irrationally, everyone on this board would condemn them. Yet homesteaders often spend irrationally. It is cheaper to buy corn in a can when it hits twenty cents a can than it is to grow it. But argueably there are positive externalities to growing your own corn which outweigh the basic savings of purchasing it at the grocery. However... there does come a point in some people's lives where store bought corn in a can is a plan. Or slaughtering the animals is a necessity.

To quote Emerson: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

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Icelandic Sheep and German Angora Rabbits

MC, I just want to say that I have often appreciated the intelligence and thinking of all the angles and possiblities that is present in your posts.

Yes actually I'm checking into jobs in healthcare.. Haven't checked on radiology tech, however as you say, healthcare is always hiring.

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"Let the beauty we love, be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground." Rumi

mpillow: this is exactly what we were planning on...

It sounds like big dairy is probally not our best option.. Something more along the lines of what Jillis is doing might be our best bet.. And take a lot less acreage.

We're not giving up on the VT dream.. I guess we just needed to hear views from others to get our thinking back on track.. When living in the city it is sometimes very easy to see things as "no way out of here" situation.. It really does get depressing at times and this board is our only "out" right now.

Thank you all so much for listening, understanding, and advising... I just hope we can return the favor someday.

Reguards,

Don

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"Let the beauty we love, be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground." Rumi

We are very new to this. We have 3 dairy does (all are not milking right now as we are trying to breed them), one meat buck and a wether. about 20 chickens, two rabbits with three kits, 2 breeder pigs, 3 feeder pigs, 2 ducks for slug management, and a very large garden which we did not fully get to planting.

I think it's important to diversify, obviously. I was thinking yesterday as I watered the garden. We have pigs for meat, sell the feeders we don't use which pays for the feed so our pork is free. Then we have chickens that have been sketchy layers (many are still young and we are still learning!), but once we get them regular we can sell the excess eggs to cover thier feed plus, so that's free eggs. Then the goats. We bought one in milk and have made goats milk soap to give as gifts and to sell with the excess. When we have more milking we plan to make our own cheese and yogurt. The rabbits are for meat as we have heard that they are much easier to do than chickens and replace them quite nicely. They are easy cheesy to raise thus far and very inexpensive.

This year we will have over 17 tomato plants. It turns out the tomatoes we fed to our pigs have gone to seed in thier old pens and we find more all the time as we clear. I think I spent about $2 (not counting the electricity to pump water from the well) on all those tomatoes total as I started from seed, plus the volunteers. Seed is cheap and I have plenty of beans, squash, cucumbers, herbs, lettuce and the like to keep us going for awhile. And the garden was only half planted. The fertilizer is free.

Anyway, we haven't turned a "profit" yet, but we have saved a lot of $$$. It'll take a bit to recover some of the costs of building housing for the animals. Like caberjim, I homeschool and am home with the kids. My hubby gets up everyday at about 6 and feeds and waters the pigs and ducks. We get up later and feed and water everything else, milk what needs milking (so nothing right now) do house chores and extras like painting the animal sheds, weeding, harvesting, canning. In the evening we do a repeat of the morning animal chores.

We bought woods, not farmland and have a lot clearing to do. That is on the weekends, and yes, we are BEHIND! With church and family obligations Saturdays have been hard to come by (we observe a Sabbath on Sunday and do not work), but we committed all the Saturdays in September to finishing a lot of projects.

We do hope to one day supplement our income so my husband can cut his hours, but we are looking at a long while down the road (At least ten years).

kids

We're in the middle of getting homesteading going and it still gets depressing when we can't get what we want fast enough, or we have money set aside to do something and something comes up and we have to spend the money somewhere else or our big plans fail, like a garden that dried up and died due to lack of rain. But, there is always time. The trick is to have your dreams and plans and to work toward those, while at the same time being content with what you have and having immeasurable amounts of patience! It takes time to build up to where you want when on a budget, you can't get everything you want all at once and sometimes you have to start smaller than you want to. My husband dreams of making a side income off sheep someday. His goal is 300+ sheep. Do you know how many we had to start out with? 8. Now we have close to 50. We're working on it a little at a time. He picks up sheep where he finds them and as we can afford them. He may never reach his goal, but he's trying. He's works hard 40 to 60 hours a week and I stay home and take care of the kids, the house and the farm. What I can't do (which isn't much if I put my mind to it) he does on the weekends. No rest for the weary.
Keep planning, keep trying, keep saving, don't get impatient because things don't happen as fast as you want, start small and don't give up!!

Personally I couldn't do it. Had to wait until I retired. Slaved in the city for 49 years..literally.
Cashed out on house, retirement. Bought my 250 acres with the cash.
Kickin back now. Growing, Cotton, Hay, even Lavender! Lucky I got my health. Hope most folks dont have to wait that long for a homestead.

I'm taking it very, very slowly.

My primary objective is reducing how much outside income I need. Practially speaking, I can't likely "make a living" off an acreage. I don't know enough, don't own enough land, don't have the skills or the time to learn them.

So, I'm trying to cut costs. My property taxes are lower in the country. I have solar power and a well, so few utility bills. Wood heat as well as natural gas, so I can supplement with free/cheap wood as available. Enough room for a garden - although this year the focus was elsewhere.

I'm working up to a few animals which may be able to 'pay for themselves' as well as provide me with income opportunities above and beyond (sheep for fiber goods, as I absolutely LOVE working with wool - it doesn't feel like "hard work" for me to spend hours carding fleece or washing dirty wool!). I have no illusions about making a full time job out of this, but it's nice to have some options to fall back on if TSHTF for me, as it can for any of us (as evidenced elsewhere on this forum right now!).

I would suggest looking for an affordable place that is large enough and zoned appropriately to have some animals, but nothing like a "full scale farm". You'll need to be commuting distance to work for one or both of you. That drives up the cost right there, but it means off-farm income is still available. Factor in the cost of fuel to your expenses - and assume it will go up, and assume you'll need a farm truck and a fuel efficient commuter something or other (some use a motorcycle to commute to work in summer, as it uses so much less fuel!).

Then, work on 'trying out' different animals and gardening and canning and such to see what you enjoy and what turns a profit where you are. Get to where your off-farm income is less and less, or is used more and more to build up savings (catatrophes happen - regularly, it seems).

Making the leap full scale has too much risk, IMHO, unless you can swing some kind of a deal with a farmer looking to set up a transfer of his operation to someone else, like a 'rent to own' thing. Even that would be too risky for my tastes, but I've got a kid to provide for so that changes things a bit.

Good luck, keep exploring options!

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Apple Jack Creek
near Edmonton Alberta
author of Just Keep Knitting: a journey of healing through forgiveness, faith, and fibre and The Rookie's Field Guide to Supported Spinning

As long as your wife continues to work....you may have a built in line of customers for eggs and garden produce...

Right here in a small barn (hay and milking area is 16 by 16) stall section is 10 by 12 baker off one side...and a 1/2 acre pasture...7 goats (plus one borrowed) 2 pigs and a calf that is growing fast on goat milk.

My chickens free range in the lawn..28 layers and 2 roos...our gardens are fenced and I do tie out one particular goat in the lawn everyday.

I was just out in the garden picking brocolli and tomatoes...and the thought occured to me to count all the volunteer pumpkins that came up and are growing beautifully....there are 4 huge ones ($10 a piece) 4 medium ones ($5) and 10 smaller ones($3)...$90 in volunteer pumpkins....You could buy an unpapered milk goat for $90. I did nothing to make those pumpkins grow.

A strawberry patch will also bring in some money with considerably more work.

Thoreau started his venture with green beans

PC, I apologize in advance if you have already done this, but have you really looked into the nitty-gritty of having a dairy farm, or do you have prior experience in dairy?
I ask because we have family members who have dairy farmed. It is without a doubt the most labor-intensive, 24-7 type of farming there is. You can literally NEVER leave the farm for more than a day, unless you have experienced help who can do the milking for you while you are gone. It doesn't pay all that well for the amount of work that goes into it. As our relatives became middle aged and their sons grew and moved on, they had to sell out the dairy, it was too much for 1 or 2 people to handle. Just something to consider before you get too far into it.

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[COLOR="Blue"]Expect Little - That way you will be seldom disappointed.../COLOR]

Just off the top of my head, on the remodeling issue. Is there a Lowe's or Home Depot you could work at for a few months? My former neighbors remodeled by having the wife work and pay the bills, then hubby(a construction jack of everything)worked at Lowe's for awhile(about 9 months), got great deals by buying the clearance stuff with employee discount dirt cheap to get materials and appliances to remodel the home(he was doing complete new kitchen, cabinetry and drywall, decking), he also sorted through the lumber as time went by and got lumber for 10% of retail. He then quit work to stay home full time and finish the house. It took about 3 months and he made a 50K profit when the house sold--how many "jobs" can you make 50k in three months?

An interesting book to read for thinking outside the "making a living" box is Scott and Helen Nearing's Living the Good Life(or any other books they've written). I think everyone needs to read it before any more life goes by...we get one life to live and how do you want to spend it? Me, I'm going to go pick some Vit C rich blackberries to make syprup, jam, and berry slush for smoothies, not to mention listen to the wind, the birds, the trees catching time in their needly fingers and reminding me(like I need one)that I'm sooooo happy to live here.

Another tip for selling your house is to buy a used hot tub, install it. People always go "how cool" when they see a hot tub.

You definately need to practice "personal homesteading" before taking on a dairy.

dang.. This sounds almost like our story to a tee. Only difference is a friend works for lowes and gets the stuff for us (we toss him a 50 every now and again for doing all the work)..

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"Let the beauty we love, be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground." Rumi