How to start a Chicken Cow Vegetable farm (Profitable Organic Business) #poultryfarming #dairyfarm
to get a balanced diet from a single farmer with beekeeping organic dairy farm we started selling our own eggs and then i take care of the cut flower garden yeah it's totally different last year itunes all that stuff nice next to the vending machines hello everybody influenced by growing prices during the last two years 2020 and 2021 i have been looking to diversify my food supply have an alternative to the normal grocery stores just recently i have been a little bit arguing with my brother whether it is possible or not to get a balanced diet from a single farmer so this argument actually led me to find this really interesting farmer around brasshat in belgium in this interview you will learn about farmer's life and how to run a profitable farm business finally it will be clear who won the argument how did you decide to become a farmer i have to go back more than 10 years ago i went to australia for a year and then i was traveling around the country and and visiting all kinds of farms when i just uh did some work on the farm in order to have a place to sleep and to eat and so that's that's how i traveled around and when i came back i started with beekeeping just to have something more attached to agriculture than instead of doing nothing with agriculture and then after a few years uh i met paulie and then uh yeah we we started living together on the farm of our uh of my father-in-law and your stepdad so that's how we ended up farming how did you start to grow your own food and why when we came to the farm it was uh already an organic dairy farm uh but because we wanted to work on the farm as well we were looking for a different branch on the farm to do uh to make a living for ourselves and then we started with the chicken mobiles the reservoir is like the double reservoir and it has around 400 liters of water in it and then this side of the wall is uh like the feed troughs we can put in with 200 layer laying hands in it and uh we started selling our own eggs and then a couple of months after we started doing that uh venture or enterprise we started making our make your own vegetable garden and then continue from that is there any advantage of being organic meaning do they actually find some feed themselves or you have to calculate the feed as if they're not eating anything but your feed i mean some shrubs and bugs or anything does it help like does it reduce your costs or having the chickens outside really makes a difference in like the quality you can really notice uh like sometimes in winter we are not allowed to have our chickens outside because of like hopefully or something like that and then the color of our eggs get very paler then now when they're like roaming outside eating uh some grasses and other herbs and other bags and all all right so and if we would purchase right now eggs from you today what is the approximate price per 10 per dozen it's like uh 6 euro 60. and you call them no so when i came back from studying in antwerp i moved to the farm but before i met sandro i was i was a musician only so i was writing music but with music it's very difficult to make any money uh when you're a small musician so i was like because she can she can also play piano and sing too oh yeah so yeah i was writing using music but aside from that i wasn't really doing anything with my life so when i met sandro yeah we moved to the farm after being together for half a year and i just followed him in his ideas to make really nice big thing on the farm yeah i always wanted to do something with nature but i never really knew how or what so so yeah i just followed him and i like doing this so that's great now you have your own flower patch as well yeah so i i take care of the cut flower garden pauline please guide us about your vote until 2017 before you're certified organic so um yeah i studied clankins in antwerp it's a study that combines theater and music yeah it's totally different so yeah i finished that and well i'm i'm still writing music last year i uh it's yeah a bunch of songs uh in dutch and yeah the theme of the songs is very much about you know being in nature and being on your own and yeah that's nice where can we listen to it or where can we find it yeah it's on all platforms so it's on spotify itunes all that stuff nice nice we would like to have something exactly perfect this was my idea as well my artist name is catbug so like a cat and a ladybug together he's a cat bug how do you combine that so do you have time for both of them well um in the beginning uh when we started farming i was also playing a few shows every every month but that became a bit too difficult to combine so right now i just write music and i just take it how it goes also at the moment i'm not really playing shows because it's yeah actually that part is really difficult to combine with farm life because you know playing a show it's at night and you get home late and then next morning you have to get up early to take how many chickens per square meter or is there any um limitations are there any invitations for to be organic in organic you can put uh like 200 hens in one of these 200 i thought that's quite big you can put 400 600. probably like around 300 is also still possible actually give way more room than they need even in organic uh what's minimum investments are needed to open a farm how much did you invest in you this one we were lucky enough that we could start on the the farm of my father-in-law so we don't have yet bought the farm from him but eventually that's the plan in order to start at the market garden in the beginning we didn't use any tractor or something like that only like a little walk behind tractor and i think we started our first year with two small poly tunnels the walk behind tractor all in all like 15 000 euro or something like that there was a first investment to get started with with the parking lot what is your typical working day skill i usually first thing i do is check if the a check if the vending machines are still i mean if i need to add add eggs or check if there's still bouquets next to the vending machines and what time from so yeah between seven and nine i usually also go and pick berries or making a small walk between the flowers to you know to meditate and then it's usually just you know work in the garden for the next day or taking care of the eggs sorting the eggs packaging them and then i collect the eggs too and then it's time to make dinner i guess i forget a lot of things there's so many things kind of a similar thing but i mainly look after the garden and uh ordering the the plants and and seeds and all yeah in the morning it's like a walk around uh what needs to be so you happened enough yeah actually yeah yeah the good thing is that the main part of the season is when the days are long so we can work longer in the day if you have to but yeah that's that's a nice part and none of us are like very early risers my mother and my stepfather are like also eat risers so yeah um actually it's like a mix of all different uh milkweeds i mean i think there's some flakvy in it there's one with jersey how much milk can you get from one cow every age per day and do you milk it once two times a day or three times a day we built two times a day one in the morning and one in the evening and the average is around from outhouse which isn't really that high it's around four thousand five hundred to five thousand liters per year machine had a must for a farm in the beginning we didn't want to invest actually anything into machines because we were very idealistic and wanted to do it all completely by hand and at start you can do it all and after months go by yeah you you feel your body gets tired and all and then first we bought the walk behind tractor because it's already and then last year we bought our tractor and planting machine and a precision hero so now we we can plant with the tractor which is more ergonomic than crawling over the field uh with the precision arrow uh we can just drive very slowly over the plants and it's like a a comb and it comes out the weeds from in between the plants so yeah that takes care of a lot of hand labor what we used to do by hand by hoeing and picking the weeds by hand yeah so now we have or we can make some free time if we want to like before we were working from the morning till the evening every day but now yeah we can go enjoy the sun or go out with friends have a drink or a barbecue so that's not every day what would you recommend to a beginner farmer who would want to buy things like that and get 200 chicken we buy our chickens at point of lay it's like when they're around 17 weeks old and then it means like they will start about two weeks or so okay and we use like the typical uh industrial blading hand because that's really the only one we can get in high enough numbers throwing your own uh chicks you could do that but also means if you need 200 hands you get around 200 roosters as well so you have to do something with your sisters as well and this breed being like a laying breed it means that the roosters aren't really they don't have a lot of meat either compared to the typical uh royal chickens so that's why we we choose to just buy the hands what are the must-have skills and abilities for a farmer oh gosh like i learned most of my skills from sandro um and we also just learned a lot from youtube and online courses you know finding a flow in your in your work and becoming more efficient in doing the things you do every day i think that's very useful but those things are not so easy to learn to learn from a video or something so most of the things you're learning from your own experience yeah i i guess so yeah i just learned them by by doing them how much length is needed for growing enough food for a balanced diet depends how many people do you want to feed just a person like a balanced diet what do you need to grow and then scale from one person on maybe it might be easier to like explain how many people we are feeding okay all right at the moment we have like around 200 people or even with the restaurant and the vegetable boxes maybe you can say around 250. yeah yeah around 250 people we are feeding uh year-round and by saying feeding means they're getting food from you daily or not yeah yeah yeah they picked the vegetables uh fruit uh milk we have year round and eggs we have year round as well uh yeah i think we have usually around 400 hands on the farm you can you can feed way more people than 250. so that makes it pretty balanced diet with vegetables combined with meat and milk and milk products yeah yeah together yeah yeah i think the total size is around 40 hectares of the farm 40 hectares yeah and uh wanna one and a half uh two hector is uh is the vegetables from the farm so i can see that you have some different varieties here so the bigger one what is the name for this variety uh i think that one is perlati but the thing is with the small tomatoes the cherry tomatoes cherry they're uh they're wrapping for ripening faster faster compared to the bigger tomatoes so we're picking cherry tomatoes like two weeks before we started picking the bigger ones so your season is already a little bit longer and in terms of demand do you see more demand for the cherry tomatoes or for the bigger ones uh it's more or less the same thing yeah yeah now we'd only do dairy with the cows but if you could do there some dairy and some meat i think you can yeah more or less get everything from uh from the home from your own farm it's good to know 40 hectares can feed 250 people or more understood yeah i think way more if you really want to but then the main thing is people are so used to have like oranges year-round tomatoes year-round and that's the the main problem yeah if people learn more to live with uh with the seasons then you can feel even more or a little re-learn how yeah things work in the past yeah check if the cracks are there so we take those out and then the the whole eggs they go to the customers um we'll so check if they're clean if there's i mean if they're fresh stuff like that and i think about the rest of the our products i think sandra can tell you more yeah actually the vegetables the the people do it themselves because we we grow and plant all the vegetables we take care of the garden but when something is ready we just put a sign up next to the bed that people can harvest from the the vegetables so if a vegetable doesn't look good people just leave it and even then if it doesn't look good you can still cut it off that's the same for the flower so people pick them themselves and everyone every person likes a flower in a different stage of bloom some people like them when they just opened and some people like flowers when they were almost dead so yeah they picked them themselves regarding the cost of feed for the chickens uh what was the price before and what it is now procurement during uh corona it was around 55 cents a kilogram and then now we're in the 70 cents so it's a quite a big increase and that's just for for like layer uh feet but if you need feed for uh broilers or meat birds then you need more protein in the feed and it gets more expensive that's yeah doesn't mean what about have you thought about growing your own feed or it's really complicated because you need mix of everything and then yeah you need a mix of everything and and you also need a place to storage that amount also a place to mill it yeah and and be sure you get your own feedback yeah uh then also the the ratio from yeah how much of protein how much fat how much carbs yeah that's a different study and how far are the bees from here because i've seen just one bee coming over to our table but actually uh there's a small uh a few hives over there used to have around 250 hives but now it's more like four or five hives 250 yeah that's a lot of honey yeah yeah and a lot of driving around so yeah we had to downscale that part what is the turnover of the farm the vegetable part it's around or almost 90 000 total and then uh yeah from x it's kind of hard to say because last year uh the the whole peoples of pfas scandals started and we we're not really in the zone but our our sales just crashed yeah because people were afraid right yeah yeah yeah and it's still not getting better and now with all the the feed that's it's getting really expensive okay so the prices of the eggs price as well and actually all the prices are rising right now so people are hesitant to buy uh like organic uh stuff at the moment or sometimes because of the price is already higher so yeah with the egg venture it's it's not the best at the moment but yeah hopefully that turns around what is for you the hardest part to run in the farm i think making sure i don't forget anything on the lists that needs to be done because there's just so many small things that need to happen on the farm and if you if you miss one of them it can be a disaster so for example if you forget to give the chickens more water well that's a big problem so you can't forget the small things so mainly that and for me personally to just um you know talking with lots of people or customers can be a bit difficult for me so yeah just a small thing i don't know how to explain there are lots of had difficult customers no it's just um because i'm i'm very introverted it can be difficult sometimes and for you i think also the the heart this is like pauline says yes you have to keep in check with with all with a lot of different factors in the farm and also check each other that you didn't forget anything like like when the chickens don't have their water in time or we also have to look out with the weather like when we have to plant new plants and it's going to rain like for the next three or four days it's better than to have the plants in the in the ground before it starts raining because it rains a lot maybe we can't go on the on the field for the next week or so with the tractor um so it's it's a lot of small things but still important things then you have to like kind of follow the whole planning of the season like when when to prune your open the tomatoes or have the the the wires up in in time because if you're too late with that then it all gets a tangled mess yeah just yeah keep in check with all the things you you don't want to really need yeah you say don't yeah yeah don't procrastinate too much and even if you do just don't forget you did okay and how many votes it's almost like the question for santro what is the key to manage the farm when there are two or more owners um i think the main thing is try to communicate communicate and and talk about the things you want to do and usually it goes pretty well and of course you also have like like a generation gap like my father-in-law is a different generation even though it's it's more open-minded than than a lot of farmers because this is organic uh but then yeah we we have different visions about some stuff but yeah usually just talking about it makes it that we don't have any real issues something like that and and also the plan is that that we will take over the farm in a couple of years so yeah we kind of have to be already moving to that that time because yeah was it difficult to certify organic because as far as i'm aware you must not have non-organic operations very close by and then there are some checks and then there's a time frame you cannot use a lot of pesticides and so on and so forth uh well stan was already stan is my father-in-law was already farming without uh chemical pesticides or chemical uh like uh manures so the the move to organic wasn't really that big for him the only thing he stopped was planting uh mice for silage and now we just only use his grass to feed the cows and and the thing why you stopped with the maize is uh because of the yeah you're not allowed to spray for herbs and uh to use herbicides no right could you name top five mistakes that you made since the you start uh the farm i think our biggest mistake was in the beginning thinking we could do it without mechanization yeah just being a bit too idealistic in general we watched a lot of videos uh from polyface farming and we really wanted to do that from the first day we started and you just just can't start your farm and be banned like polly face for me yeah exactly is 3rd generation i think or now he has a third generation his son is taking over and his father was doing it and i remember in one of the videos he was explaining his his land was absolute disaster when they first took over yeah definitely requires a lot of time yeah and also when when you work together with an older generation so my mother and my stepfather live here too so when we want change that's difficult for them so just take small steps when you work with with your family just small steps small steps then it works if you keep arguing then it doesn't work do you do rotational phasing i want to do that in the future but now the crowds are still following law what if i do the get the electricity from the sun for instance would that be better for nature or it doesn't work in terms of the costs does it could that work here for example the solar power might be that it could work but yeah the problem we have is is the the roof needs to be changed as well so we first have to get some money to do that so yeah at the moment we're still paying for all the other things yeah like a tractor and all so yeah i hope that we can do that one day one step at a time and then uh yeah put some solar panels on the on all the the stables okay and if someone um in terms of the some someone new would you recommend to go like you have uh volatiles yeah exactly polythenes and they're quite they're massive actually you have a lot smaller ones as an option but you have already big ones and um would you recommend for some new to go with three five or in five or just small in this scale i think in your first season when you're just testing the waters first at first then it might be best to get like a second hand caterpillars on all uh like those polytunnels with the ropes over the plastic when you have the feeling that you really have your markets around you and things are possible and you can get a loan or something i think it pays back to have like a bigger funnel tunnel because the climate inside is much better it's much easier to vent the the polytunnel as well and it looks more professional as well if a lot of at our farm a lot of customers are coming directly to the farm and also when the first time or the first uh big polytunnel we put up that day more uh new people came to visit the farm because they saw something new yeah but if that's not your plan and then you don't uh plan on having a lot of customers at your farm maybe that then things are a little bit different but to grow growing wise it's much better for the plants and also much better for yourself working in in a bigger polytunnel because the heat is all all the way up in the summer it's a nicer climate to work in yeah yeah and um how do you maintain fertility inside the tunnels because uh yeah obviously you need to be fertilized the earth here how do you do it inside okay i can understand it's easy with with probably manure and so on and so forth outside but how do you do it inside uh we mainly use uh compost compost yeah yeah and we can get compost from uh pretty close it's like a municipal uh compost okay okay uh that's what we mainly use and then if there is enough time we use some like chicken manure or stuff like that as well that doesn't work today what are the most popular and least popular products that you produce and sell like fast runners in terms of the volume and slow runners as well so now we already understood that the eggs have problem because of the news and the people are afraid that that is good yeah i think you know just a couple of weeks ago we started with a milk vending machine so that still has to grow its audience but you mean the one that is at the entrance yeah yeah um i i think the flowers are also steadily growing yeah so last year it was really difficult to get customers uh to the flower garden and this year this year it's it's already easier so it's also much better better than last year and what about the fast runners suppose something that you grow not enough in terms of customers are saying i'm here where is it and it's already gone so they can do you have such a product uh actually we really try to avoid it we try to grow always in a abundance okay yeah yeah so we don't really have that problem they also sell processed food for example tomatoes either pickled or chicken if it's already dried chicken for instance or dried with seasoning or anything such we do make uh some pasta from our eggs okay uh we don't make it ourselves but uh we go to a small we'll call it pasta make a woman yeah close to the border uh with germany and uh yeah that she makes pasta from our eggs then okay and like spaghetti and macaroni and also yeah but besides that we don't really have any uh processed foods no i think also um the the people who bake something they use a lot of eggs for sweets sweet stuff the bakers do you sell any any eggs to them in antwerp for example or it's too far away or considered to be far away um the main problem with that is uh like bakers they get pushed to use uh like the pastured pastured eggs in a in a like in cans yeah in cans so it's kind of hard to to sell natural eggs to uh to a professional customer for a bakery and all not that there's something wrong with our eggs but so it's like convenience for them convenience and also because there is a small chance even though we get checks checked several times for salmonella and all right there's a small chance that there is someone la in the neck and that's why they use the pastured jars yeah so it's kind of already processed in a way there's no that eggs is actually coming to them yeah it's it's like uh in a bottle like a bottle of milk but then a bottle of egg that seems awful yeah the profitability of each product what is the least profitable so what brings you the least margin and what is the most profitable if you can sell all the milk yourself to the customer then it's realistic stan is now milking only like 40 house it's not really that much yeah every day it's kind of hard to sell 300 liters of milk every day and of course you can go make your we wouldn't manage to do that like uh time-wise yeah everything yeah and then um the solar how does it work um the chicken more well has like uh lights inside okay and also the the door uh opens in the morning automatically and uh also closes uh when all the chickens are inside so it's all automated yeah it's all automated yeah i heard from the farmer uh also in belgium but that was already a time ago that was um just when corona started so in in the shop the liter of milk was about at that time about 80 cents roughly and he was selling his milk to a processor and was about 23 cents something like that so since then the price of milk did rise in the shop but do they still keep the same prices for you as a farmer or they also increased it actually the price that the conventional farmers get for their milk at the moment actually gets close to what organic farmers get for the milk at the moment and the price that organic farmers get for their milk is not really changed since uh since all the price rises started so interesting hopefully that will uh still happen soon which means that the shops are actually earning but not the farmers yeah that's not fair yeah that's also why we we our plans for the future is we we want to move away from that kind of setup and more have more products go directly to the to our customers so according to the data in the industry average farmer profitability is about 28 somewhere depending so some grow more vegetables and grow more chicken and so on and so forth but that's the average is it some somewhere that that is here on your farm because you have it very balanced how i look at it i mean you have chickens milk you have vegetables so we have a little bit of everything yeah i don't know about yeah the profitability way i mean yeah we we earn a living but it's not really that way i mean if i would go back to my work which i wish i had before i went to farming then i would earn more in a month okay with doing less hours but the farming brings way more of uh like uh yeah satisfaction uh kind of way it brings different riches than the normal money plus you know what you're eating and they don't in the city yeah and i know what my customers are eating yeah so yeah i have two channels one is uh ovary channels for the for the farming another one is this one in regards to research but all of them are actually in the long run have the same goal ever seen in for me i always ask the final question in respect to what would you change in a business that would bring you closer to a regen regenerative way meaning that it would less pollute or less you would use less plastic for example or anything and such so what what do you think what would you change on your farm that would bring us closer to to living in balance with nature they already try to to work as regenerative as possible like peas or something like that to to make like an unknown plant for the chicken feet and maybe even have like grain for uh for baking maybe that would make the whole thing a little bit more regenerative in a way because now actually the only thing we buy in for uh for feed is chicken feet you're already organic you're already far away from comparable way from many other businesses uh in terms of uh regenerative way you can always think of one step further you could think of something else that's it also maybe more trees in the fields right something else we hope to do one day
2022-07-31 02:12
