How to Start a Chicken Farm (And Make Millions)

all right we can't start a chicken farm interview without catching a chicken first so let's do that i think the golden ones are a little bit easier come here baby come here come here little chicken oh that was too easy so we're here at marion acres farms to learn how to start a chicken farm and to see if a farm can actually be profitable how much you guys make all right we'll find out later marion farms was started with a humble purpose so that founders jeff john rochelle and amy could cook honest organic food for their families in their first year starting with 32 chickens they are now selling hundreds of chickens every year in addition to that they're growing beef pork and turkey we'll find out what it costs to get started the processes and systems they've implemented to handle the workload of this farm and how adding more animals a processing plant and a market has helped them scale their business and much more big thanks to nordvpn for sponsoring this video but let's go meet the founders of marion acres farms you must be john hey paul good to meet you likewise so where's the team team here we got jeff over here working the chat counter today jeff good to meet you you're chopping away at something oh we're working hard awesome and then i believe there's a rochelle rochelle you must be rochelle good to meet you it's a pleasure to do this interview let's do it tell us about your background when and why you started the chicken farm i mean out of all you can do my road here was not maybe uh super normal definitely don't have a background in act neither general nor i neat no so i mean we raised chickens at home and drew garden but that doesn't really qualify you for 10 000 20 000 chickens and 20 head of cattle i was an engineer so i started out as an engineer i went to school for engineering and then i met john we became fast friends and one thing led to another he had an opportunity to kind of hobby farm and so it started as a hobby and i tell people looking around everything that we've done here this is an example of a hobby gone way out of control good kind of way out of control oh absolutely it's so much fun yeah started 32 chickens grew them in my garage which we swore we would never do again um and then the very next year we ended up across the street over at the current landowner's house he wanted us to farm in his front yard and then he eventually encouraged us to come out here he owns the land and so we lease and uh he built the two buildings here that were not here there was nothing here there's no fences no utilities no water crazy land it was just farmed conventionally by the neighbor just grass seed so everything that you see is something that we had to put in and this is beautiful i mean the audience can see the surrounding here it's a great office it's a great office give us a quick overlook on what are we looking at you've got multiple buildings a ton of things going on what's here what's that so the red building here is the helvetia farm market that's our retail space the brown building here is kind of a dual purpose building this side on the left is brooder where the baby chicks live right side is the processing facility or slaughterhouse we've got storage in the silver barn and then got a separate hay barn out in the parking lot there but that's that's the structures that's the gist of it okay what is the most challenging part of starting a chicken farm if i'm looking back over the years and how it is now compared to then i would say finding some balance between work and life not easy farming is a way of life it's not really a job and i think that if you're going to get into farming you have to accept that that needs to become both your vocation and your avocation this is where you're going to spend all of your time so you really need to love the work otherwise you will hate it so that's the challenge are there any other challenges worth mentioning just besides that well i mean there's the ever-present challenge of finances and i would say the you know covid and and everything that it was brought a whole very distinct separate set of challenges too it's been challenging each step of the way and maybe the challenges have waxed and waned but those are the ones that stand out the most what's important for somebody watching right now that wants to start with 15 chickens and grow into this where where are the costs what can you get started with what's your story so i i'm a big proponent of do what you can now don't wait i love that tomorrow don't wait next year don't wait when i get more money everybody can do something now and so john and i are a little bit of an example of that we started with backyard chickens that's not a huge investment and you learn how to take care of animals you know starting a farming business i would say you probably there's an old saying in in the ag world uh the way you make a million dollars in ag is you start with two yeah you spend yeah yeah so it's uh you know the conventional way is you bring on a bunch of debt you get all your equipment and then you farm for the rest of your life and you hope to pay off that debt john and i took a little bit more measured approach we started slow and let the business push us and when we needed to grow we would grow but it was always in response to demand so we we were okay initially with being completely sold out in the middle of the year of chicken that we would produce that year because then that's demand deciding then next year how many you should produce so we weren't guessing in terms of like the slaughterhouse the slaughterhouse was a three-year journey to get it licensed and permitted and it cost us about a hundred thousand dollars to get it going but you don't have to have that right away for a chicken farm right no so what can you get started with so you can right now you can do the field raised chickens you can always have somebody process them for you so the the pens that we use are inexpensive maybe at least back when we build them about 200 a pen and you buy dale chicks you maybe raise them in your garage like we did if you're brave and then yeah it's low investment you don't need a tractor to raise chickens you really don't we have one but we have it for other reasons we started without a tractor we had a lot of coolers we had some chest freezers and we actually had an ice machine for a while because we were processing our own we were doing it ourselves so yeah it doesn't really take that much to get into it [Music] all right you guys so we're here at the halvation market uh with john yep there's a lot going on here at the store a lot of inventory how do you manage it what systems are you using to keep track of right let's say no what's out so the the great system we use is clover clover has a lot of different apps that they can integrate into that system so the one that we use and we just recently started using is shop.ventory shop inventory keeps track of your inventory it keeps track of like power levels you can set so like if you're down to one item two items it'll trigger an alert it's gonna show up on your phone or email yeah email phone we get a daily report and it shows us what is getting low what what we need to order do you have anyone else that goes around and really looks at inventory tell us how that works so we have janelle she's our main ordering clerk and dave he assists her in her job it's a full-time gig just to maintain all the different vendors we have gosh i think over 50 vendors that we deal with wow we have some major vendors that ship a lot of the big name products here some of the big brands and that's a full-time job for her so tracking what's on the shelf what we need to order contacting those vendors and then placing those orders so besides software you you definitely need right natural person to right on the floor always need somebody how much land do you really need to have a successful chicken farm and you know what factors do you consider when considering a location etc well for us i would say we really needed a couple acres you don't need much more than that enough that you can produce maybe a thousand chickens and when looking at a spot to raise them good perimeter fence is probably good to keep out predators shade helps so dogs couple dogs are great too although not not super required if you're gonna do the meat chickens in the chicken tractors if you're gonna do open range layers for the eggs then definitely those you you'd want some dogs in good pasture you probably want to be on a piece of ground that has established pasture or you're gonna have to plant it yourself and wait let's talk about goal setting some people do unofficially some people do two officially where are you guys at we look 12 months ahead three years ahead i would say we're kind of unofficial a lot of the growth that we have had is is just kind of the market driving us that way the demand driving us with growth now the goals we have are probably you know how to become more sustainable as a farm how to become more self-sufficient interesting um down the road and that could be a one the two-year venture depend again we're affected by a lot of things like environment by retail i mean right now everything's so fluid with the economy and also with employees you know finding the right people to help you attain those goals and to move forward with those goals okay so right now we have kind of a short-term strategy and just dialing in the farm dialing in the store that's not a big deal but if you guys want to learn more about strategic planning check out our podcast episode 16 where we interview on strategy ceo erica olsen about strategic business planning and why that's super important for any small business let's talk about retail versus online sales what's what does that look like for you guys has that shifted over time has right so i would say before we had the market we didn't really have a retail business we had a little place in the corner of the bar where people came in any uh what do you call it a refrigerator open that up put some cash in there we did a lot of online sales there but it wasn't as big as it is today so it really is hard to judge i would say today with the market i would say our market is eighty percent of the sales and twenty percent online online how long has the market been established then market's been here for three years three years and over those three years it's been consistently roughly 80 20. um yes and no again with covid uh with the pandemic i mean we we started in october 2019 and our business actually shot up because of covid um so we were struggling just to get customers in the door from october to march and then the shutdowns happen and then boom everybody couldn't find food at the stores they heard about us started telling their friends and family about us and they just took off sometimes things like that which aren't positive right can you create something good for your business right depending on where you're at that's good when you first started there's always challenges how did you overcome them what were they uh you know maybe you implemented strategies systems to overcome a certain challenge in the beginning yeah i think a lot of it is uh two business partners uh one of the challenges just the amount of work that has to be done so the fact that there was two of us we could break away and take some time off i'd also say you know finding quality people to help you with certain things so being able to let go of things and let somebody else take care of it is that hard to do oh it's incredibly hard to do very hard to do especially if somebody into your heart and soul is in this business and to turn it over to somebody i remember distinctly the first time i left the market and it was not closed there was an employee in there working the market it felt very strange very strange it's like your baby it is it's like man it's like the first time you leave your kids with a babysitter you know you don't really have a good time because you're thinking about the way you know but you can't grow if you try to do it all yourself that's what we you have to learn one of the things we actually ended up doing sort of not on purpose is we we grew big and that allowed us to have a quality of life because the bigger we got the more we could afford employees to take care of stuff when you say bigger what do you mean you just take on more debt no uh you know adding the store and the process and growing more chicken adding beef adding beef is pretty low in terms of cash flow you buy initially the the steer and then not a lot that goes into it over the course of growing it out so adding things adding different revenue streams too so that we've got revenue all around the calendar you know farming is notoriously bad for being seasonal and it's pretty hard if you only get paid at harvest well you know adding all of these things meant our revenue streams uh were developed and we had a year round right you know we can make a living out of it be more of a consistent process so how can someone start a farm a chicken farm with little to no money uh it's actually easier with chickens than with almost anything else so especially the way we do it with the chicken tractors if you find another farmer or another landowner it's very easy to just work out a hey can i raise a couple chickens on your property i'll give you the the chicken manure is sort of payment it'll feed your pasture it can work in orchards it can work so fieldwood orchards it would work in apple it would work with a beef operation it's very easy to to insert chickens uh to other operations existing operations so you have the land cost right they're very interesting okay and it doesn't take a big budget as we talked earlier in the video right now 10 chickens 15. start somewhere yep exactly okay i am genuinely excited to share with you guys 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free when you sign up for their two-year plan so visit the link and get the exclusive nordvpn deal it's risk-free 30-day money-back guarantee [Music] how many employees do you currently have and um how do you find good people that you work with so yeah we currently have 52 employees that's a lot of them work here on the farm in the store in the processing area what have you learned over time in terms of finding good talent to join your team and right work together that's that's a hard one you want to find somebody who's generally like-minded with what's going on here at the farm someone who has a little bit of knowledge of the areas that they're working in like retail processing especially farming you just don't want to throw a heartbeat out there because you're dealing with live animals in other lives those lives can be a risk if somebody doesn't know or have any kind of inclination about how to take care of an animal if you were to find or look for more team members right now how would you do it is it indeed is it a software is it craigslist what's the best thing for you typically our online platforms like that we haven't had much luck with we do use one for the processing area because that's uh it's called poached i think that attracts more of the food service industry people that are used to handling knives and processing things stuff like that so we use that for the processing facility but here in the market on the farm it's a lot of it's word of mouth we do put up a sign when we are desperate you know now hiring and there's an interview process and a uh kind of background check process as well anything unique about that or pretty standard in terms of the interview and background um it's usually done not by uh either jeff or i it's done by um michelle she'll do the recruiting initially and then we we hand it off to our managers of the various areas of the farm to do the final interview [Music] i want to ask you why you added beef pork and turkey how did that help your business what was the deciding factor sure well i mean without getting like super farm nerdy about regenerative agriculture and different production models it really was to complete what was being done on the farm so that the chickens have a job the other animals have additional jobs so that every it's important that we close loops on the farm so the output of one thing is the input of the neck so we're standing here with all these layers yeah everybody thinks we have the layers for the eggs which is not true we have these layers because they help with our fly management program and they interact with the cows in a very specific way that gives value to them being here the eggs are a huge sideburns yeah so each of the animals that we've added have been a piece in that sort of overall picture what key steps do you think people watching they need to take to scale a chicken farm right so that's a that's a good question we started with 32 chickens that we brooded in jeff's garage so scaling up i think it keeps you keeps the reins on like there's always a temptation to grow really fast grow really quick but then you got debt load and you've got a lot of farmers especially don't pay themselves we did our best to pay ourselves at the very beginning which was awesome very little maybe it was a free chicken here and there but you can't scale up unless you're financially stable and you're financially strong and the books are looking good as well too it's not that easy to do in the farming business no you've got quite a bit of debt to take on animals land how did you manage and what case steps you took to actually because you have the plant you have the processing center i mean right a lot of things going on in terms of scaling how did you take the first step second third and so on right and it was uh it was uh demand drove the growth as far as the chicken goes yeah i would also say that a lot of this has to do with our landlord we don't own the land but we own the businesses on the land so we lease that property that guy was very instrumental in helping us along financially to be able to build these buildings and also just kind of the encouragement we needed from him as being a business owner himself that's awesome but also i the taking economics classes in college i learned one thing and one thing that was key to survival of a business was cash flow cash flow cash flow if you don't have good cash flow you will have all sorts of problems [Music] let's talk about must-have equipment i've got 30 chickens i really want to start scaling sure what's good thing to start with so this design is exactly where we ended up with two scale so we started with one next year we added three more and on and on and on the key components i'd say are the actual structure or what we call a chicken tractor okay so the pen it's it's open floored it's the size that it is because it's all dimensional and it's eight by eight so all the lumber we buy is eight foot and the metal is eight foot so that's why yeah um the second i'd say the most important thing is the water delivery so we use a gravity fed system that this drinker is the brand is placing and it operates just off of gravity and it comes out of the waters stored here in the five gallon bucket i would say the the money you spend on that drinker is worth the investment they've got to have water that's very important they die pretty quick they will yeah especially in the heat i mean certainly the summers have been hotter certainly last summer and then i'd say the next thing is probably the the feeders in there it's important to have range feeders like we have or or people make them out of abs and pipe and stuff you want to keep the birds out of the feed and you don't want them roosting on top of it so you want to make sure all that feed gets into the chicken and the range feeders do a really good job for us so what would this cost if i just wanted to start with this one yeah so the uh and again it's been a while since we built one fortunately yeah back when we built the pen completely finished was about 220 dollars and we would build it ourselves we'll build the ship yeah i was gonna say no labor there the drinker is you know shipped obviously if you buy more you save more um so i'd say 60 bucks for this drinker and then the range feeders i think at the time we bought them were 15 each not bad what have you learned in terms of getting out there and securing financing private file you know government whatever program's out there what can you share with us sure so i'd say three things uh one is conventional lending can be difficult in our situation when you don't own the ground we don't own this ground so we had no collateral to bring to that discussion so that closed some doors for us so we actually ended up with an institution that specializes in that kind of a situation their name is craft three they charge more for it but they're providing a higher level kind of service right they're willing to take a bigger risk so the main construction loan that we got was through them and they were willing to loan to us even though we didn't own the property and then i would say private money that's out there we have through some people we've met just along the way we have access to private money which is a little bit of a different game and i guess being an ag it's important to know that there's a lot of resources through the federal government the state government and even the counties just be aware of the grants that are coming up be aware of the different incentive programs like we had the heat wave last year there's money available to help offset losses that you had on your farm okay [Music] what are some qualities that you would think would be necessary to be a successful farm leader owner etc uh hard work work ethic i think also if you're going to grow a business like a farm like we have i think it's very essential to have a business partner someone who is related to you as well because you can go home and you can disconnect whereas if it was just me my wife rachelle uh we would go home we talk about the business all the time but we do it already yeah because she works for us farming is kind of seasonal but it's it never stops so with that in mind you'll never have a vacation if it's just you by yourself as a sole proprietor so having a business partner like jeff and his family i can go away on vacation for a week or two and know that everything's gonna be taken care of just the way i would like it to be taken care of if it's just me take the load off someone who has the same mindset the same you know understanding of how things operate what have you learned in terms of working with partners in this business i mean there's ups and downs to it there are risks and right cons so i think how do you make it work i think it helped that jeff and i were friends before we did this we did you know we were duck hunters together we go to the same church again that like-mindedness i think is very important and i think just just having the desire to be a farmer like this i don't know if jeff had shared this with you at all but i i said to jeff i said what are the two if you could do anything you're doing now and he was an engineer at the time other than what you're doing and what would it be and he said uh farming or commercial fishing i was like i've got an opportunity for you so and that's what got it got us started this is this rabbit hole that's awesome so okay [Music] and you've got the prosthetic facility so i want to show our viewers kind of what that entails but before we go out and show you guys tell us the process of getting that up and running you said it took a while anything else you want to highlight is it just the permitting the wetlands and and all the regulations and red tape it was a lot of red tape it was dealing with you know all the requirements about what to do with the the byproduct of slaughter somebody we're being distracted that's pretty typical here on the farm right you got a name every day all day you got an itch you got it yeah all right back to it uh yeah just the red tape uh it was it was the building um uh permits it was the the permits with the states so that we could run a compost facility it was three years it's wild that it would take that long it was a long time [Music] what are some things you wish absolutely wish you would have known before that if you have that knowledge now or earlier how would that change things what can you think of i'd probably i wish we would have known more about the how it was going to go with the the county in developing the process absolutely and what would have done differently i think we probably would have just hired a project manager and said deal with the county make sure everything is taken care of let us focus on the stuff we're good at and i don't want to be distracted by explaining to the county you know about our storage tanks so that took a lot of bandwidth out of your main focus right yeah exactly yeah land use consultants can go a long way even though they're can be pretty pricey but in the end i think it probably wouldn't work a lot on schedule i bet that's a good tip you guys don't try to do it yourself right right we're not land use experts we can't do everything you're farmers as much as farmers want to believe they can do everything you you can't you gotta sometimes you gotta pay an expert to get you through whatever you're dealing with that's a good lesson learned [Music] you've got an incredible market lots of inventory lots of cool things to choose from but what about creating a delightful customer experience what is that like for you we're in a unique location we got an incredible view of the coast range we've got beautiful these mountains out here i think that is part of the experience a lot a lot of times you go to a farm store and you just go in as a store you know or a market it's just a store you don't have the view you don't have the animals that you don't have that working farm type of feel vibe we have the backyard area where people hang out with drinks and food yeah we have a fire pit so cool we also do farm dinners so i think you know based on our reviews people love the experience of being here and having that feeling of like oh man i'm able to relax but also able to shop at the same time and that was kind of our goal with this was to be able to play provide a place where people can do all sorts of things and not just coming and go it's like come in and hang out coming to get to know us as owners i want to get to know our employees don't come and go come and hang out right and once you've done shop and you know if they're hanging out they love it here they'll come back because that's itching their minds like the view the experience of sitting out on the porch and drinking a beer so you guys make it an effort to remember people's names we do is it a seasonal business or is it average the farming end of things is very seasonal so we're in the spring right now we're just starting to process our first chickens those chickens now are hitting the store and people are waiting for fresh chicken so we're going to have a lot of fresh sales i see turkeys are super seasonal as much as we want people to buy turkey other than for thanksgiving it's always thanksgiving and then beef and pork tends to be a fall revenue stream so the investment is made in the spring and the return comes in the fall okay these guys are super duper cute yeah they are rude killing the ground they are rooting and that's their job here is to root and to break up the ground because then we come over after they get moved we scrape everything off and reseed and the pasture is renewed i can't help how adorable they are they're terrible terribly cute so nobody at the farm gets a free pass is what i hear everybody has a job that's right and they do it okay so keep that in mind you guys you got a lazy pig no free lunch it's not gonna last too long no all right so we're here in the uh little piglet pen right yeah these fun little guys we're gonna do a quick blitz with jeff um how much land do you need to be successful not that much i mean you can be successful in your backyard what are your main competitors who are your main competitors you know uh we're we're servicing a market that's really huge we need more farmers we don't really think about competitive competition okay are you using non-gmo seeds and products for your livestock we are yeah we are non-gmo non-corn non-soy non-gmo this is an instrument jeff which came first the chicken or the egg okay sounds like a joke but actually from a good operations consideration so if the question is whether you buy fertilized eggs or day old chicks you definitely want to buy day-old chicks leave the hatching of the eggs to the hatchery to the hatchery they do that well and let them do it well said okay between illness disease and predators how badly can a chicken farm take losses if you do things really wrong you can lose all of other animals yeah and last but not least what's your favorite business book well uh staying true to my chicken love i would say pastured poultry profits by joel salatin i love that well if you're watching this obviously you want to know how to start a chicken farm comment below on how we can improve our blog and we're going to pick a random winner and send you that book as our gift about margins we always love hearing margins so what are your best most popular products or produce whatever you sell the most of it let's talk about margins as well how they vary the largest margins of items in this in the store obviously coffee is a huge margin you know you got your cup you got milk and you got coffee that's in it but my customers willing to pay quite a bit of money for a nice mocha in the experience i would say second to that would be beer and wine beer wine or larger margins there's a lot of than a lot of the other products in the store surprisingly our farm products don't have large margins because it's hard to remain competitive unless you know you have lower prices so can you give us numbers especially if you're one of those yeah i would say in the chicken area and since that's kind of what we're talking about today yeah uh chicken is about a 30 margin that's not um i'd say beef it's a little bit higher margin than that pork is a little bit higher um but it's a lot less input into that where the chicken because of the way we raise our chicken the pasture raised mobile tractors that sort of thing it's very labor intensive right and we're outside so those chickens are taking a longer time to grow anything else you want to highlight in terms of margins like where do you want to operate what makes you happy what it's like that's a little too low let's figure out how to increase that right so our target target margin in the store is about 40 generally that's just kind of the base and then from there we kind of build our pricing on that depending on whether or not it's a product that's got a high demand um high turnover if the product is just flying out the doors and probably it's too cheap maybe we should raise that price the higher the margins you can go if you're doing a retail business the better you'll be in the long run financially by keeping higher margins by keeping higher margins now you also have to remain competitive so you don't want to deter your customers right if you have milk that's you know 10 times as much as the store milk you're probably not going to sell a lot of milk so you got to you know balance out the margins you know based on that so the competitiveness of the product okay [Music] let's talk about building customer reputation when you first get started that can be a challenge for some people don't know you what did you do specifically to get that word out and really build that reputation that you have today a lot of it was being super super focused on customer service if there was a problem you owned it you didn't blame anybody else you know john and i are the owners there's nobody else to blame it's our responsibility so owning a mistake fixing it going above and beyond willing to just engage with customers individually and we we got that connection and if you're here during the day and john smith's a lot of his time in the market you'll see customers come in and john probably knows hundreds of customers that come in by name so the coffee bar is another place too the baristas that work at the coffee bar they know the regulars they call them by name and there's a genuine relationship there huge and people value that they want that connection they want to be you know appreciated and known that takes time right are there tools or instagram help maybe i mean maybe i'm just thinking outside of sure no things have an impact in the beginning not really i would say that's a good good example social media you can't avoid it as a business you have to have it and early on it was facebook it's now instagram i would say but when something would bubble up on facebook confronting it head-on rachelle's very good at that so if somebody has a complaint or just doesn't like the fact that we raise livestock we deal with that head-on we don't let it just fester and again she's really good about that addressing the concerns and then you know moving on [Music] you have an amazing website like well designed thank you so who does that what platform it's on right and do you invest time on who manages that well uh when we first started we all kind of invested time on that but right now it's managed by actually a team of employees we have mainly my wife who oversees that team uh rochelle how many people on the team two people right now besides her so three total we use wix which is very user friendly a very simple platform it's just you know upload some pictures and type in some things and they make it look good so kudos to wix the team that manages that also manages the inventory of the the shopping part of that portion of the website and why is it important for you to have a website is it important for the chicken farm to have a website or is it mainly geared towards the market here it's mainly for the whole business so it's not only just the chicken in the market but it's also the processing as well processing does have its own website because it is very different than what you know the retail part of our business not really food-oriented it's where the food comes from and how it's processed and i think it's important to have one going back to that original question is you need to have a website everybody's online everybody's connected to the internet and i think that's how we got a lot of our initial customers people doing a search online optimizing the search engine performances that's what brought people to us originally [Music] you do everything from raising chickens pork to dispatching the animals here packaging selling what's the benefit of that vertical integration of having to be able to do everything here i would say two things one is we have total control over what is done so control is good it is and it's important to us when we're dealing with live animals that they're treated and respected all the way to the end and it's done with as much compassion as possible so we control all of that and it's important too when we sell that that mean to the customers that we can stand behind what we're selling them because we've controlled every step of the process so there's a accountability dimension to it the second thing is flexibility so the the processing facility before we had that we had to go to a processor which meant we had to schedule and we had to show up on time and there was no flexibility so if the weather was bad or we needed to wait a couple days for whatever reason we absolutely could not do that now we have that complete flexibility we can process on our schedule and we set that schedule what was the challenge in getting to this point having full control because you mentioned it took a while to get the processing plant why is that what tips insights can you share with our audience that maybe want to go that route for full control so specific to the processing facility we're in washington county and it was a lot of work working with the county to get that permitted it actually wasn't on the slaughter house end of things with the oregon department of ag it was all the regulations for the development of the property and the construction of the facility okay so i would say getting in touch with the regulators early in the process this is what we're thinking about doing making sure that they can help you identify things that will take a lot of time and just give them a roadmap of exactly what you're going to do and why you're going to do it so that they feel like they can approve it they want to feel confident that what they're going to approve is is going to work out [Music] in terms of financial side of the business it's important to have the right tools in place to manage all that so can you give our audience a breakdown of what tools and systems you use to manage the financial things so i don't handle much of that in the things but we uh we do use quickbooks online a lot of spreadsheets jeff is a spreadsheet guru he's a he's a wizard tracking her daily expenses daily sales especially in retail we've got to make sure that our sales don't exceed amount the percentage of what our budget should be for labor so sending people home early on slow days oh yeah that sort of thing shopify clover clover yeah we use clover for here in the store um shop.ventory

which handles our inventory and we do a square for some of our online where are you right yeah okay so squares only online right clovers for the indoors what's the difference between the two why clover for in-store clover is a little more user-friendly as far as retail goes where square i think is more catered to the restaurant business some of the service businesses clover has actually done a lot even for us to be able to do more of a shop presence like this with multiple items multiple inventory and keep track of that with their system jeff tell us what's behind us you've got a greenhouse yeah so something we started this year this is actually some expansion for us we can't get enough salad greens in the winter so we thought well let's try our hand at growing our own salad greens and develop a vegetable program so that this is the center of that effort this is just in the beginning stages okay let's see how they keep the pigs from walking across this it doesn't shock grab onto it no i'll let the audience uh grab on to your own electrical wire no don't do that so i gotta like hold on to it well because it pulses so if you're just doing this you're you're going to hit in between [Applause] oh i just felt it's nothing it doesn't need to be too much i bet the bottom wire is hotter oh and because we came in and out there that wire is down on the ground and so it's sucking a lot of those oh yeah we saw that happening we can grab that that wire no let's move on i'm not a fan of uh electric execution is there a seasonality to the market like you sell more meat certain time of the year versus other things there's a kind of average throughout it so there's a seasonality as far as busyness goes we kind of take a dip in the winter time but pick back up in the summer or spring and summer and i think mainly that's because of the outside portion of our farm store and that people like that experience right they don't get the experience now over the years those numbers have grown over the winter so i think people are now starting to rely on us more for their daily grocery needs and their food needs one thing we've done too is add a lot of products so we're very diverse in what we have to offer indeed before we it was just a couple shelves here with a couple items from who knows what you know a couple vendors and now we have a lot more we've all got you've got some room for more shows maybe right right we get a little tight at some point yeah some things take up a little too much valuable real estate but yes we're working on that [Music] what was it like for you when you actually got your investment back and you started becoming profitable i'd say you know the really the second year because we didn't get out over our skis too far we were growing and doing what demand was asking us to do so we sold out the first i don't know five years we sold out every year that's amazing and so when you sell out you can stop producing you've made your money the investment came really when we moved here the big investment so the construction the the processing facility you know that's going to take years to earn back but in terms of just raising chicken because it's such a quick turnaround you can get your return pretty quickly [Music] what is the biggest mistake you've made as a business owner and what did you learn from it the biggest mistake i have made personally would be working the business in the business too much and not delegating things to other people that puts a lot of stress on the person because not only are you doing the day-to-day operations but also running the books you know schedules managing employees the jack and what training you know dealing with some of the fires that you got to put out and you know like today i was fixing one of the lights here because it burnt out so you know just just really delegating is i think really important if you can delegate and find good people that's the other thing is don't hire just a heartbeat hire people that are good people like-mindedness i think is important because if they come in and they're you know they don't care about organic farming or chickens or whatever you know this isn't the place for them right but hire good people with good skills and good backgrounds [Music] so you've got a lot roaming right the true free range chickens for you you've got a bunch of birds here that are that would love to grab them right they don't pay you for them not a good business model if you let your chickens roam and you lose for a day what's the solution for that those who are struggling with the same you've got this beautiful dog here tell us the story a little bit well the cut to the end i mean the dogs were in the end the solution we had some bald eagles at their migratory here they moved in and we were losing chickens every day and we you feel horrible as the one responsible for those chickens and you can't have a business if you're feeding the wildlife so we tried everything we tried fishing line we tried hanging cds we tried some owl decoys and you'll see them around the farm those al decoys were useless yeah absolutely pointless eventually we ended on getting a dog kept iv this is basil this is our second dog oh you're cute so is it a particular dog or did you guys just train him to to do what he's doing no we get a great pyrenees so they are livestock guardian dogs they're bred for this they know what's going on and after you kind of show them the ropes on the farm after about a week they are pretty intent on making the farm a no-fly zone for predators wow i love that you're in charge of kind of what's going on inside the market right right give us a quick tour sure everything here is local and that was kind of our goal from the get-goes we wanted to be local to help reduce that that carbon emission the carbon footprint with the a lot of the imports and exports and whatever else is going on in the world so yeah i can show you along and see what we got i mean everything from like our popcorn here is from newberg oregon which is just 20 miles away baskets from a local guy that imports them from uganda i believe who's in charge of choosing everything is it you john no that's my wife rachelle gosh so she will pick those things uh either through uh visiting a lot of food shows or just you know her her little do or out the bouts around town looking at vendors or farmers markets and and uh just getting to know people that way so that's amazing what do we got here on this side kind of just walk us through the story so as you guys know we are a chicken farm this is kind of our main main thing is the chicken and we like to showcase that this is what people come here for is the chicken mainly the chicken so that's the controller um that is the value-added item of the store people are like the chicken but also we can get all our grocery needs here we got one of our good customers here he's always here no where is he feels like family here so yeah that's awesome [Music] you also give tours of the farm you have events here which is pretty awesome right talks about that experience that we talked about yeah where did that idea come from why is it important you think and how will that evolve in the future you think um i'll take the last first i think evolving in the future we're going to be doing more events more farm to dinners events people want to come to the farm and and eat food that was produced on that farm away from town too it is it's uh well look at this beauty people love the the landscape and a lot of effort goes into making the landscape look like this and people enjoy it i think people enjoy meeting their farmers not just us any farmer so they like that interaction the tours were maybe that that's a better answer to how much we spend on advertising because it is in a way advertising true so we have people come out to the farm second saturday of every month in our production season so may through october and it's important for us to explain why we do what we do there's a purpose for everything that we do in the field and we want people to be educated about their food so that when they're buying from us they know what they're buying and it helps explain why it costs what it costs too which is important to us that they don't compare say our chicken to a rotisserie chicken at costco or something like that that'd be a sin to do i bet it is it is they're not the same nope what else do you want to show us i mean you've got a lot of things you've got a coffee beer um being that i had coffee espresso experience back in the day i i want to have a coffee stand so we we have our espresso coffee area that one gets me going in the morning yep beer and wine down there okay full selection of oregon uh wines you guys are frozen aisle here frozen aisle so this is a one-stop shop for everybody and their their family and their grocery needs and food needs so wow a lot of our meat um this is all your meat here right so the the beef is from our farm uh the pork we get from a different farm that's a whole usda versus state inspection thing you know we bring in products from places like uh kachka it's a russian restaurant in downtown portland they actually some commercial production so we bring in their products here and then everything from you know we try to keep a lot of the stuff here as healthy as possible but we can't find healthy we'll get clean cleaner yeah but everything from like grass-fed yogurt to pickles fermented pickles instead of just your plain old pickles and then really the the showcases are um i love it our produce again from all local local growers they don't necessarily have to be organic but organic practices [Music] what's your day-to-day life as a farmer i mean i know it's a lot of work a lot of hours but give us a six a.m to midnight or what does that look like uh reality it's pretty varied i mean uh the standard schedule i'd say is i i'm usually here on the farm between 7 and 7 30. uh is that seven days a week or six days a week we're pretty pretty solid on which we try to take a day off it's important to not be here at least one day but sometimes especially in the spring when everything is starting i am here seven days a week so i work both john and i work anywhere from 40 on a slow week to 80 or 90 on a really busy week and uh can you briefly break down the roles so what do you do sure john focuses on so john really manages the store i manage the processing facility we both kind of deal with the the farm itself i do the finances uh john does kind of operational stuff so scheduling and those kinds of things richelle does all the marketing and my wife uh amy amy yeah she just works in the market she's one of the workers in the market she really enjoys that that's awesome you guys got a great solid team [Music] how do you engage your customers besides the website what social media platforms are are doing very well for you and what are you doing specifically on those platforms yeah to bring them in the the biggest one is instagram instagram is very fluid in that people are always looking at that they're always looking at that on a daily basis sitting down with the couch sitting down in front of the tv waking up in the morning sitting on the toilet you know so whatever maybe um i think facebook was good in the past uh i think it's it kind of caters toward a different generation where instagram is broad across the board as far as generations go and so you get to reach a lot more people that way so what are you specifically doing on instagram that's a success for you guys yeah so daily drops for people daily drops about what's happening at the farm what we're doing here in the market some of the new products that come in that sort of thing and also events so we do farmers markets outside as well uh or a farm-to-table dinner as well so yeah just daily drops like that that's awesome new products coming in what's the freshness of the produce area that sort of thing and that just brings them in they know what they're coming the experience is so right right [Music] earlier in the video you mentioned the challenge of starting a farm or chicken farm right because it's totally full commitment tell us how you overcame that how did you live with it where are you at now it's been 10 years uh how did you figure out that challenge of always needing to be here yeah a couple things one again i i come back to the the real need for a business partner being able to step away and go to the beach for a week and pour some time into your family right so that's the other sort of casualty in all of this if your family isn't with you they're not going to see you so it's important to be able to break away be able to leave the farm and know that it's in good hands so when i leave you know john's run on the show here and i i don't have to worry about it got it so that's that's awesome and i can pour into my family and i can be present you know i'm not thinking about and answering my phone and i can be with them so that was one thing we we developed this okay you take a break i take a break you take a break i take a break and the other reality is uh you just have to really want this lifestyle i'm okay with being here all the time my family is too they're invested in it with me and we enjoy it so there's a wendell berry concept for those that read wendell berry work where you play where you live if you do all three of those things in the same place it changes what you do with that place so if i have to work where i play i'm gonna make sure it doesn't smell it looks nice i enjoy being there and then as sort of a side result other people the customers they get that enjoyment too yeah so we try to work where we live where we play [Music] so why chickens i forgot to ask you that and we could have done turkeys you could have done piglets you name it but you started with chickens give us a quick backstart backdrop story on that sure yeah so we when we started uh we didn't have anything specific in mind we were on a farm needed a lot of work in the fields the fields were fallow the tractor needed to work on so we got to september we'd finished all that and we're like well it's too late to plant anything i had read somewhere that you can turn around to chicken in eight weeks so we're like well let's go get some chicken so we went down to wilco bought every chicken they had and which was 32. which was 32. raised them into my garage processed them in early november then we left that farm came across the street over here the landowner we decided to focus on a single thing because we can't you know do one thing well not five things poorly so chicken is what we decided on because we had good success the previous year and the rest is history you were kind of you weren't forced but you kind of just led down that path and it just happened yeah it was it wasn't very purposeful on our part sounds like we kind of wanted to do everything and we had to choose one so we we chose the chicken because it kind of chose us okay the chicken chose jeff you were chosen by chicken right there [Music] well this has been incredible last question for you and i want to talk to our audience you know if you guys are looking to start a chicken farm jeff you know john rachel what would all of yours advice cumulative advice be to people watching you can talk to the camera what would you tell them they want to start a chicken farm today what's up the top of your advice list i would say start now don't wait for extra money don't wait for extra time even if it's two chickens in your backyard start now you you know use what you have don't wait and then let demand and customers push you and pull you in in the different directions that you'll eventually go awesome well thank you so much it's been a pleasure likewise

2022-06-04 12:53

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