The Cost of a Cow: Part 4.5 - Labor
Yikes. I'm going to ruffle some feathers/cause depression with this post. Please accept my apologies ahead of time! There are two distinct scenarios for labor with cows for the small producer: the scenario where you do rotational grazing, and when you don't do it.
Rotational grazing takes at a minimum 1/2 hour per day unless you're very innovative and drive your ATV like a bat out of hell all the time. If you simply feed your cows during winter and don't do anything with them all summer, your labor costs look a bit different. Let's make up some (hopefully realistic) numbers and see where we end up?
Assumptions are as follows: you have 28 animals, you are rotationally grazing them but only move them every three days and then you winter feed at 30 minutes every other day since you give them two days worth of feed.
So, for summer, we have 60*1/2 hr or 30 hrs. For winter we have 90*1/2 hr or 45 hrs. So our herd costs us 75 hrs/year or 2.7 hrs per cow. You can brand and vaccinate each cow in 10 minutes so we have 2.8 hrs into each animal.
How much time do you want to account for monitoring cows whole they're pregnant? Yikes. Urm... Maybe an hour apiece? Now we're at 3.8 hrs.
For a skilled laborer who can likely repair machinery, weld, manage finances, crew boss, etc. (aka an average farmer), $15/hr is probably a low wage, but we'll go with it. The cost of our steer has now increased by $58 due to labor.
This number goes up significantly for any of the following scenarios: you have to truck your cows to/from their pasture, you have to haul feed over significant distances, you have to drive any sort of distance to move your cows if you're doing rotational grazing, etc. $58 labor per cow is probably a best case scenario for a small farmer. This is assuming his land is contiguous and close. With developers incoming and people wanting bigger houses all the time, this is probably a bad assumption for the long term.
The reason I said this post may cause depression is that farmers (at least in my experience) rarely account for labor in their cost analysis and it would make the crops they love to raise likely unprofitable if they actually gave themselves an hourly wage for the more labor intense crops (such as raising dry hay, haylage, etc.).
Now, the prudent observer would probably argue that you can spend a lot less time with your cows if you automate things, and this is true. But if you're raising cows and you're a lonely farmer, spending less time with them sucks and I'm not going to make that assumption. So prudent observers, please keep your observations about labor to yourself. 😉
If we don't rotationally graze, our labor per cow decreases to 2.8 hrs per cow or $42 per cow. A small farmer with limited land base should absolutely rotationally graze to maximize forage use and soil health, so I'm not going to examine this path beyond this point, but I wanted to leave the number here for reference.
Let's go back to the steer we're raising. We were at $2012 at the end of Part 4. Now we're at $2070 when including labor. Our steer now costs us $4.14 per pound of meat in the freezer.
Some major costs I haven't covered yet: trucking to/from the butcher, calf/cow mortality, brood cow depreciation (cows can't live forever, sadly), and meat storage. I'm going to address all of these very briefly in Part 5 and summarize things in Part 6.
Are you still interested? Finding the information useful? Think I'm blowing smoke? Let me know in the comments!
Be Blessed,
- Kenny
These are the posts I use for rotational grazing. This ground shouldn't be grazed yet, but we're doing some spring cleaning.