If you’ve been reading our blog for awhile, you probably already know why we started our farming efforts – initially to improve the quality of our own food supply, but as we talked with family and friends, we realized that others were also interested in, but not necessarily capable, of raising food for themselves. And so our efforts to produce nutrient-dense, humanely, sustainably raised foods for use beyond our own pantry began.
Looking at how the industrial-mechanical food system works, their practices include:
1. Find most cost-effective “food” to feed animals (recycle other animals waste products as feed if at all possible [e.g., the practice of feeding chicken litter to cattle, a widely-used in the beef industry).
2. Keep space usage to a minimum, resulting in cramped, dirty conditions for animals. This affects food quality, necessitating “sanitizing” of resulting food, which sometimes fails and results in widespread outbreaks of foodborne illness due to the distribution scope of factory farms.
3. Minimize human labor wherever possible – mechanize and automate processes to eliminate the need to pay a wage. Treat animals as mechanicals, not biologicals.
4. When human labor cannot be eliminated, find least expensive employees to do the work and exploit them where possible to keep costs low.
5. Maximize profits by trimming costs as much as possible, even at the expense of the food, the animals, the land, and the people.
In contrast, our farming practices include:
1. Find best quality animal feed, while keeping costs manageable.
2. Give animals sufficient space, and clean, engaging living environments.
3. Implement and observe best practices, whether these are discovered from a third party, or by our own experience.
4. Grow sustainably, perhaps someday to the point where hiring an employee or two is possible, but only if we are able to pay them a livable wage.
5. Maximize animals happiness. Happy animals yield higher quality items, whether that is eggs, milk, or meat.
We’ve met a lot of folks along the way, some who are small-scale farming themselves. We’ve seen some of them start to expand and sell to others, but not count the cost of what it takes to produce and distribute that food, and several of those folks have either scaled back to simply producing for their own families, or abandoned their efforts altogether. This was many times due to the fact that they were not able to continue raising food for others at their own expense. Or, they were not feeding their animals properly, in an effort to work within the budget constraints created by not charging the fair price it costs to produce that food. Neither of these methods are sustainable, and that’s been proven out to us time and time again. Beyond our own direct experiences, we have read so many books and magazine articles that remind us that we cannot subsidize other people’s food with our money or labor over the long haul and expect to maintain quality of life for our animals or ourselves, and certainly not for the food being produced.
It is with that in mind that we have found it necessary to update our pricing to reflect our costs. Our feed and fuel costs have gone up over the past few months to a degree where we cannot afford to absorb the increased expense ourselves. We really don’t like having to raise prices, but we have to be realistic, too. We hope that these small increases are manageable within our customer’s budgets.
Chicken Eggs will now be $4.00 a dozen. We will continue to offer a price break on 3 dozen, which will be $11.50 (instead of $12.00.) We were recently assured by a regular customer and friend that this is still much lower than the price she’s had to pay at Whole Foods for eggs that are somewhat comparable – those are almost $7.00 a dozen! And we have been told that other local farms have had to raise their prices on eggs due to all of the increased costs we are all seeing.
Goat Herdshares will now be $35.00 for new owners – this is a one-time fee for you to purchase an ownership share in our herd. Monthly agistment fees will be $26.00 for both existing and new owners.
We are now offering a chevre upgrade for herdshare owners – your share can be converted to chevre at your request. There is a $7.50 upgrade charge for this per share per week you’d like to have chevre. So, for instance – if you’d like to have one of your week’s shares converted to chevre, your agistment fees that month would be $33.50, and you’d get 3 weeks of milk, 1 week of chevre. We will need one week’s notice for this service.
Duck Eggs remain the same at $8.00 a dozen. We have had several inquiries regarding getting duck eggs for hatching. We are happy to sell hatching eggs – it’s the same price, and we just need to know a day in advance that you’d like them so we don’t put them in the fridge.
We appreciate your understanding, and all of the support we’ve received for our farm. We thank all of our customers for their continued support!
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