How many acres?

[dlskidmore]

How big is your farm?
What’s your primary product(s)?
What percentage of your income comes from your land?

We’re hoping to buy land next year. I’m primarily interested in producing grass fed meats. I’d like the place to pay for itself, but it doesn’t need to be a significant percentage of family income. My husband does quite well with his town job.

The bank would finance a small place this year, but I think I should wait until we can get more land.

[J-L]

Different world here Denise. I run on a total of 1400 acres (some years 2000 depending on a section of forest having some rain). I ranch it full time and run 150 of my own cows plus 135 on shares for family members. It makes up the larger share of our income, but it would be extremely hard to do without my wifes town job with benefits, as well as my kids providing labor (sorry Mr. Obama, my kids ride horses herding cattle, drive tractors and teams, lift bales of hay, etc. before they are in middle school).
Even with all that help and extra income we are not very well off financially, but love what we’re doing and spend a lot of time together. Good life.

[J-L]

Forgot to say, primary crop is kids. Pay for them with the cows.

[blue80]

80 acres, 5 tillable, flood irrigated. 10 sheep, 250 free range chickens, two great pyrenees, 50 layers, 4 drafts, 4 saddle horses. goat, and a milking cow.
Main crop has been weeds, though we are irrigating our first crop dedicated to establishing long term turf grass.
5 % of our income has been from the farm, 4 % of that is agritourism vacation rental,
but it makes a great legal and viable tax writeoff for the construction company.

Have you looked into the land link programs at all to help you get on some land with infrastructure?

[gwpoky]

50+/- of which only 15 are owned, balance is currently rented. 16 ewes, 2 beef cows, 5-8 hogs, 40 layers, 5 to 600 broiler/year 4 Belgians, 2 lesson horses, 2 riding horse, and we board 15-18 horses depending…..oh and 2 useless goats. We sell most of our meat through our CSA. We make about 50% of our house hold income off the farm I am also a full time Farrier and do a little independent crop insurance adjusting when needed, my wife drives school bus in the winter. The long term goal is to farm full time and shoe a few horses.

[Andy Carson]

I have 12 acres, 4 in an evolving tillage cycle and the balance in pasture of some sort. My animals include ~50 layers, ~25 young chickens, 2 oxen (will add 2 more this year), 5 goats, 17 geese, and 3 dogs. The most lucrative animal/crop for me has been the chickens, which I raise for thier eggs and sell the cockerels and old or cull hens for meat. They produce about $200-250 per month. The rest I am still working on. This is not a big part of my income, but it does help (rather than hurt) my finacial situation.

[dlskidmore]

Thanks for the detailed numbers! I’m looking for 20-40 acres, I’m not dependent on income from it, but I can’t afford to take a yearly loss, so I do need to have some profit centers to offset my growing critters/veggies for the table. Hubby wants to keep working and does well. Sounds like a lot of you with less land do well with chickens. Do you slaughter your own? Do you have any special facilities for butcher, or do you just seasonally set up your equipment in a corner of the barn/yard?

Countrymouse, I’m interested to hear about your oxen on 12 acres. I’ve been interested in oxen, but on very small acreage I was not sure they’d be worth the trouble of keeping/training. I probably won’t try to raise any oxen for a number of years, but it’s in the back of my brain. I want to raise a few beef cattle first, and get used to handling them, before I invest heavily in a pair I can’t afford to make big mistakes with.

[Andy Carson]

What you do with the land probably has more of an effect on how much land you will want than anything else. Market gardening 4 acres is a lot more work than grazing 40, for example.

I make more money of of eggs than meat chickens. I only ever have a trickle of chickens for meat. I sell these almost exclusively to friends that happen to be immigrants for China or Korea. They are happy to get unplucked, ungutted chickens and they process them at home. They show up, buy a chicken, then I (or they) cut the head off, put it in a bag and go home. These cultures are used to buying chickens like this and seem ti appriciate the feshness of the chicken. They are also used to cooking techniques that tenderize and bring out the flavor of older birds. Americans, for the most part, have lost this knowledge and expect their birds to be cleaned and plucked for them. I have sold to some Americans too, but I’ve always got people waiting for meat birds and you can guess who I would rather sell to. The kegakity if the arrangement is suspect, but really they bought the chickens live and then did what they pleased with them. I keep this on a small scake, because there is some trust involved in this. By the way, those seemingly worthless silkies are known as “black chicken” by the Chinese and you can get a premium price for thier meat. This is a niche within a niche, however, so investigate you market well.

I am not sure I what the heavy investment in oxen refers to. Bottle bulls of major breeds make good oxen and are dirt cheap. If younwant to work oxen eventually there is going to be a big investment in you time no matter how you do it. You are going to spend money on feed for cattle whether you work them or not, and they are beef no matter what. It kinda like hearing someone say ” I want to learn to drive a truck, so i am going to buy a truck and let it sit in my driveway for several years. Then i’ll sell that truck and buy a second truck that i will actually drive.” Why not just drive the truck? It’s just sitting there… I believe there would always be potential work for a team of oxen on 20-40 acres, but if you are going to be doing it all with a tractor or something else, perhaps the effort isn’t worth it. Perhaps it would be helpful to think about what exactly you want to do with 20-40 acres. Depending on how and what you do on this land, this can be a bigger bite than you can chew. I will admit I sometimes struggle with 12.

[dlskidmore]

@Countymouse 35697 wrote:

I am not sure I what the heavy investment in oxen refers to. Bottle bulls of major breeds make good oxen and are dirt cheap. If younwant to work oxen eventually there is going to be a big investment in you time no matter how you do it. You are going to spend money on feed for cattle whether you work them or not, and they are beef no matter what. It kinda like hearing someone say ” I want to learn to drive a truck, so i am going to buy a truck and let it sit in my driveway for several years. Then i’ll sell that truck and buy a second truck that i will actually drive.” Why not just drive the truck? It’s just sitting there… I believe there would always be potential work for a team of oxen on 20-40 acres, but if you are going to be doing it all with a tractor or something else, perhaps the effort isn’t worth it. Perhaps it would be helpful to think about what exactly you want to do with 20-40 acres. Depending on how and what you do on this land, this can be a bigger bite than you can chew. I will admit I sometimes struggle with 12.

I was under the impression that A) working them made them tougher, that critters meant for consumption should have the good life, and if you eat a working ox you’ve got to be careful how you cook him. B) They’re old enough to eat before they’re old enough for their full adult working load as oxen. You seem to indicate that you just use your beefers as oxen and then still slaughter them as soon as they’re grown?

Do you make your own yokes or did you have to buy them? Working with young steers you’d need to upgrade the yoke frequently?

I’m not intending to till more than 3 or so acres, most of the 40 acres would be forest and pasture, and I doubt I’ll even have all the pasture fenced in the first year.

[Andy Carson]

I am not sure how different the taste of a lightly worked young steer is from a young non worked steer. I am sure I would eat either one. That us the wonderful thing about oxen, they are both livestock and working animals. I won’t be eating either of my oxen for another 5 years at least (they would be 10+ years old then) but i am not committed to eating them then, either. At that point, they might be good starter team for someone, but who knows? The prospect of eating both if them is daunting just from the point if view if the mountain of meat that this is. I might sell them for meat too, but again thus is speculative at this point. What I will definately not do is sell them for less than beef price. There was an old English model of working oxen where two were calves were worked lightly, for a few years, then worked heavily in thier middle age, then fattened for slaughter in their old age. I think there is alot of wisdom in a system like this. Lots of beef and lots of power.

I am still very new with oxen, and i bought the yoke I use now. This was not the most economical choice, but i wanted to do heavy work right away and wanted to make sure it was built right as it will be the model for everything else i build. The small one for calves look especially easy to build.

Good luck no matter what you decide.

[Howie]

I have butchered two working oxen for home beef one was five, he made great beef and I sold half of him .
I butcherd an eleven year old last winter becuse nobody would give what I wanted for him in money.
We got 520 # of great hamburg, about 30# of great cube steak, 29 quarts of great canned beef, about 25# of great beef jerky.
Then we sliced the tender loins into the greatest steak that I have ever eaten.

[dlskidmore]

Hrm… Duly noted: oxen taste just fine…

I’m still not really wedded to any particular plan with cattle, I need to do one thing at a time and expand my skills slowly. I think part of my attachment to more acreage is that there are more options. You can always decide you need less land, and plant sugar maples on the excess land, you have to move if the operation you’re planning will require more land.

[Blake]

Hi, I think I need some time to be adjusted with the community. It seems to be interesting and informative. I don’t a have
a previous draft animals background.
My grandpa used mules for cultivation and dogs for carriage and I’m still wondering about it.
Well, Now there is modern machinery is available. buy dog treats
Grandpa had no more patch. It was only 5 acres.

[Farnorthfarmer]

The biggest thing, is to have a plan on how much you want work, grass etc. I just inherited 640 acres and another 160 of bush. The farm was run as a tax write off for my grandfather who worked the oil industry. While i have lived and worked here since 97 i haven’t had a say in how things were done now i have to turn the farm around while dealing with the mentality of it not making money so don’t put money in it lmao strange I know. It is a daunting task when i look at the 640 acres trying to figure out what to plant what rotations etc I would so like to have started with only 20-40 acres. A good but dated book to read is Ten Acres Enough he makes the point that it isn’t how much land you have it it is how much land you can manage and properly fertilize so for me that would be two acres to start lmao.

here is a link to the book http://books.google.ca/books?id=KjsMAAAAYAAJ&oe=UTF-8&redir_esc=y in the top left corner there is ebook -free put your mouse over it than click which version you want to download. I prefer PDF they are savable once they come up and easier to read.

[Russel]

Over here in South Africa the farms are generally larger (>1000 hectares). Most if not all are family farms being past from father to son. We have 1200 Hectares on which we run 100 breeding cows plus hangers on (Bulls, calves, young heifers).

We have 30 Stud Hereford cows and 10 Stud Black Angus cows. We artificially inseminate the stud cows and use the our stud bulls on the commercial herd. The rest being commercial cows (Baldies etc.) We select the best heifers and young bull calves and keep them back for breeding. The rest are sold to the feedlots once most of the calves have reached 200kg.

The stud Angus and Hereford bull calves we sell as registered bulls after using them on our cows for 2 years. This way we never have old bulls. All are tested for diseases and fertility. Through selection and prudent culling we get >95% pregnancy in our herd every year.

We also have 1000 Dohne Merino Ewes plus there hangers on. We tried synchronizing this year and it turned out very well. Although trying to lamb 1000 ewes in 2 weeks is no mean feat.

We have approximately 200 hectares of fields which we work with our 3 tractors(Rip and disk, we only plough if the weeds start taking over). Just over half of that is down to Lucerne (Alfalfa) which we cut and round bale if we get enough rain and store in the sheds for use in winter. The rest of the fields are planted to greenfeed such as oats, stooling rye, triticale, arrowleaf clover etc. We rotate our lucerne fields with the greenfeed fields as the lucerne plantings thin out (although some of our lucerne plantings are 17 years old and still produce a large amount of bales. The rainfall in our area is too low to plant crops for harvesting although if we are lucky we sometimes get rain spaced evenly enough to combine harvest the stooling rye or triticale fields. We use saved seed and only use bought seed if we run out of saved seed. Also no fertilizer or chemicals of any kind are used on our fields. Its not really that we have chosen to be organic or anything its just that there is no need as the soil is fertile and pests are far and few between.

We have windmills that fill concrete reservoirs and a pipeline system throughout the farm fills ball valve operated troughs. And of course the whole farm is criss crossed with barbed wire fences to correctly utilize and spare the grass and ensure a good mix of the “sweet veld” grasses.

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