Balancing Multiple Enterprises on the Farm

0:00Hello, growers. Looking to turn your homestead into a profitable business? Or are you a farmer looking to boost your sales? Check out my book, Sell Everything You Grow. This book is the ultimate guide to choosing the right farm business model that fits your farm, time, and location. Discover which model has the highest profit margins and why diversification is so important. Whether you're selling apples, vegetables, or microgreens, Sell Everything You Grow will help you find your first market or expand into new ones. Get Sell Everything You Grow on Amazon and start selling more today. There's all these problems that we had and we're just now, literally, just now pulling out of it. Our soils are re-enlivening. But it's, our morale, the morale on our farm is increased. Our manager Jason, he's like, let's grow more vegetables.

1:00I'm like, man, last year, you were ready to stop. We only grow about a third acre of vegetables. Yeah, it's about a third. Gaker of flowers. Yeah. And yeah, that's about it. So the way we make the three enterprises work is by niching down within the enterprises. So in the vegetables, we only do those few crops and that's our MO. And then for me, we just do pigs. Yeah. We're not trying to do all the meats. And for flowers, we keep it pretty simple with our sales channels. I have old sale accounts and we sell at the market. I'm not trying to do CSA. I'm not trying to do weddings. I'm not trying to add in all that extra stuff. So by keeping each of those pretty simple, I think that's how we can make the three work. I think it would have been smarter to start wanting to get really successful at it and then add in building all three at once. I think made it take longer for the whole. A lot longer. To kind of get to where we wanted it to be. Wow. I know.

2:01I know. I know. It's not even close to being where we wanted to be. Yeah. I mean, I think that's just kind of, you know, we're the biggest critics of our own farm. You know, people combine the record. It's amazing. And I'm like, yeah, but don't look at all the weeds. Like, no, look, you know, it's, you know, where your biggest critic and you want it to be perfect and you want it to, you know, be so much more developed and all that. But I think I know one of the big things that I was so intrigued about Pagan Leaf and what you guys are doing is that kind of multi enterprise aspect. I've seen some people with the kind of multi enterprise thing. It'd be successful. And with other folks, it's, you know, they, it kind of crashes and burns and they end up sort of settling on one enterprise. I think for most people, especially, I don't know, I don't know if this is a farmer thing or if it's just birds of a feather, you know, we all kind of find each other and stick together. But it's just like, there's that entrepreneurial thing that we have where it's always like,

3:04but there's this part of the property that's not being utilized and we could run hogs through that. It's like, I've got this pasture out there and it's like, what if we ran some sheep, or it's like, we've got this area right here. And if we, if we added veg onto that, maybe it would work. I mean, I know you had mentioned that kind of you're doing the hogs and then kind of adding in the, the veg to do that. What was it always the intent from the beginning is like, we're going to have multiple streams or was it just sort of like one thing sort of necessitated another and then you find another thing that you're into and like, let's try that and that's successful and we'll do that and you sort of balance things out until they worked. Yeah, well, it wasn't really a question. No, it is. We, we started with the intention. The reason we named our farm, Pagan Leaf was because we knew we were going to do work and vegetables was the idea to start with. So that's what we started with. And simply because we love both of those, it was a matter of just love. Yeah, we love what those, we love those things and that's what we're going to do.

4:07You know, we didn't, we didn't get any more strategic than just the fact that we love those things. Yeah, well, he loves the pigs. I'm not so into the pig. Yeah, she's not into them at all. I tolerate it. So yeah, we started as Pagan Leaf, pork and vegetables and then our first market season, we noticed that there wasn't really anybody selling flowers at our farmer's market in a big way and we had actually lived on a flower farm. We had tried our hand at a very weak, horrible attempt at flower farming once in Florida, I remember. Many horrible attempts at the beginning. I'm going to give it up pretty quick, but the idea was just kind of like, oh, you know, if we're already here at market, we're already setting up like, what else can we sell to make this more worth it to bring in more money? So I was like, I'll just, I'll grow some flowers, I threw some seeds in like, they only bloomed for about a month before the freeze came, but I brought some bouquets to market. People loved them. And it just, it would became like a rabbit hole for me like, I, yeah, I have session

5:10maybe. I had grown vegetables for so long, like it didn't stimulate me in the same way anymore. It wasn't exciting. I wasn't like, I mean, I love doing it and I love having fresh food and growing food for the community, but it just didn't have that like excitement anymore. We were just kind of doing it. Make money. Just funny. But the something really ignited in me with the flowers and I just fell in love and I just became obsessed with learning how to do it and how to do it well. And so that's why we added the flowers. And then actually last year we considered dropping the vegetables and just like converting all the veg into flowers. But we're still considering it. It's just that there's some between between me and Jennifer and Jason, our manager, is a major part of this as well. We would love to drop the vegetables, honestly. But, but they make money. Yeah. They make money than anything else, actually. On paper they do.

6:10I have, you know, on paper they do. And then the most indomain, our customers come for them. It carries the weight at the market every time. So you know, it's, that's, that's fine for it. But we have, we have decreased the amount of space we get to vegetables to just the third of an acre. We went down to half and we're producing, now that we have the well, we're producing more than we were before. With half the, with half the land. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Become more efficient. So we're just, we're growing that little bit. We're not trying to expand it. We're not trying to sell it to restaurants. We don't sell it wholesale. We just grow enough to bring to the markets that we attend. Today's episode is brought to you by Modern Grower, a proud retailer of the Sumisoker system. The Sumisoker system is an irrigation game changer. It offers multiple advantages for market gardeners, even gentle watering without dry spots common with wobblers.

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