End of School, Big Decisions, "The World-Ending Fire"

School’s out for summer. The homeschool school year comes to an end. I don’t know who’s more excited, Amy or the kids. Now they have more time to help with chickens. As hectic as it was for Amy to teach Hallie and Hasten while also trying to juggle farm admin and house work, along with Wren and Carter running around on the loose, Amy’s reflection on the school year, “It was worth it.” She’s already reading homeschooling books to begin preparing for next year, adding Wren to the mix this fall. Although she took a break from teaching the kids, she still gets no break from teaching. For the next few weeks she’s teaching a MailChimp email course through Barn2Door to help other farmers with the communicating side of farming and selling direct to consumer. She’s a great teacher. And a great mom (although often times she doesn’t feel like it). 

More rain showers this week have kept the grass green and growing. I’d rather have too much rain than not enough. Thankful for water. We have plenty of grass. We’ve been putting off buying calves thinking that the prices would eventually come down. They’re still crazy high. We’re going to buy about 100 weaned calves from my dad later this spring. 

We’ve also been thinking about buying back some momma cows. Again, not really wanting to buy them when prices are at all time highs, but we also don’t want to ride the commodity rollercoaster of buying calves every year. The reason we sold our momma cows a few years ago was for cash flow reasons. We had loans for our cow herd and yearly payments on those loans. Which is fine if we’re selling those calves every year to make the payments. But the cash flow doesn’t add up if we’re keeping those calves, growing them out, finishing them, taking them to the processor, freezing the meat, and selling it directly. By keeping those calves, it not only ties up our cash by not selling them to the feedlots, it also requires us to put more cash into finishing, processing, and storing the meat. Considering the whole process, when a cow has a calf, we’re looking at 3 plus years before seeing any return on that momma cow investment. But in the mean time, we still have 3 plus years worth of loan payments to make. And 3 years worth of operating expenses. I don’t know if I explained that very well, but trying to cash flow a momma cow herd on borrowed money, going from baby calf all the way to the freezer and into the hands of our neighbors is pretty tough. But it’s also pretty tough to buy a $2000 calf to grow out and finish. And put another $1000 into processing. 

Do we get back into momma cows to try to control more of our costs? Or from a cash flow standpoint, does it make more sense to keep buying calves every year? I don’t know. My mind won’t turn off at nights. Not finding sleep, I’ve gotten up in the middle of the night multiple times this week crunching numbers and thinking. We have some big decisions to make. I don’t want to make them impulsively. I’m not worried. And I’m not complaining. I’m just trying to figure this out… We’ll figure it out. 

In addition to the mundane, Amy is keeping the cabins cleaned. We’re thankful people keep coming. Amy and I filled next month’s beef shares. Carter, Wren, and I joined Amy yesterday evening for meat deliveries to Bristol and Kingsport. Deliveries to Marion and Abingdon tomorrow. Knoxville on Monday. We know how busy you all are. We know that for most of you, getting meat from us means adding another inconvenient errand to your already filled schedules. We appreciate you more than you know. 

While mowing this week I listened to more of “The World-Ending Fire” by Wendell Berry. Here are a few quotes:

“The idea was that when faced with abundance, one should consume abundantly, an idea that has survived to become the basis of our present economy. It is neither natural nor civilized, and even from a practical point of view, it is to the last degree brutalizing and stupid.” 

“Arrogance cannot be cured by greater arrogance or ignorance by greater ignorance. To counter the ignorant use of knowledge and power, we have, I am afraid, only a proper humility. And this is laughable, but it is only partly laughable… If we find the consequences of our arrogant ignorance to be humbling and we are humbled, then we have at hand the first fact of hope. We can change ourselves. We, each of us severally, can remove our minds from the corporate ignorance and arrogance that is leading the world to destruction. We can honestly confront our ignorance and our need.”

“We decided, in the language of some experts, to look on technology as a substitute for labor, which means we did not intend to save labor at all but to replace it and to displace the people that once supplied it. We never asked what should be done with the saved labor. We let the labor market take care of that. Nor did we ask the larger questions of what values we should place on people and their work and on the land. It appears that we have abandoned ourselves unquestioningly to a course of technological evolution, which would value the development of machines far above the development of people.”

“We must abandon the homeopathic delusion that the damages done by industrialization can be corrected by more industrialization.” 

Have a good week.

Will