Armed To Farm (Part 2)

Part 2 of Armed to Farm began with a training on farm planning and marketing. For a business to be successful, you have to understand exactly what it is you want the business to do. To that end, we used worksheets to ask questions like:

• What things in life will farming help me achieve?
• What are my income goals for the farm?

Answering these questions early is critical to later developing an accurate business plan. The discussion continued by breaking into small groups to examine a fictitious scenario in which a farmer must decide whether to expand their business to increase profitability, even though their partners (family) are not engaged in the business. This exercise underscores importance of balancing work and life priorities. The marketing portion of this discussion mainly centered around which markets the veterans may choose to sell their goods through, such as:

• Pick-Your-Own
• Farmer's Markets
• Restaurants
• Institutional Markets (schools, nursing homes, ...)
• etc.

Back on the road, the veterans group traveled to Ben & Armonda's alma mater, Purdue University, to visit the Purdue Student Farm. It was a great opportunity to ask questions, walk the grounds, and see a processing facility built around Good Agricultural Practices.

After visiting the Student Farm, the group traveled to Crowl Cattle Farm. (Sorry, no pictures; just a business card.)

The family farm is run by Cadel and Rebecca Crowl (great hosts; Cadel is also a veteran). They focus on producing high quality beef. They also showed us the NRCS (conservation) improvements they've done to improve the health of their cattle. Record keeping has helped them to accurately determine the most productive mama cows, which in some cases was not what they expected. We got to see their [poop] mountain from the cattle, and how they are planning on turning something they used to give away into sellable compost! We also got to visit their herd in a nearby rented pasture.

In our next blog, we'll cover financing a farm and record keeping, law as is applies to farms, and visit Blue Yonder Organic Farm.