Wow, 2020 was fun
I'm going to preface this blog by saying my wife and I are incredibly blessed. I don't mean that in a proud or “look how cool this year went for us” or anything, but in a humble, we didn't do anything to deserve this, kind of way.
What happened? Let's start at the beginning of 2020, which was just before the all wise governor of Montana decides to lock down the state despite having nearly zero cases of Covid-19 here. So what else happened?
We sold a bunch of beef. Literally everything we butchered was spoken for before it went to the butcher. Thank you all for that!!
Cattle markets took a dive due to Covid-19, so I kept a couple cows I wanted to sell. One died. That sucked.
The government decided to give farmers who lost a pile of money due to Covid-19 a leg up. We thankfully qualified for some assistance.
We applied for a food sustainability grant to build a retail location for selling beef, making it possible to sell smaller quantities and potentially sell for other farmers too. We got the grant. I applied for the license last week.
We're expecting our first child the end of March 2021!! We’re pleased to announce it will be a new gate opener I'll get to use in about six years (it's a boy!).
I started renting some ground from my dad for grazing, which will, in the long term, decrease my feed costs significantly. (Short term, made them way more expensive!!)
My blog post on buying beef from a farmer has had about 2000 unique visitors every month since Covid-19 hit, which is both encouraging, but also discouraging that farmers are clearly not explaining themselves well to their customers when pricing their beef. We have work to do in this area, fellow farmers!!
We’re still living in our tiny house, but are working on plans to get it moved to a permanent location and start building another one. Or at least add onto this one!
We’re going to throw in some Galloway genetics to our small herd, which I'm very excited about. Galloways were developed on grass and I believe will shrink the cow size while also increasing feed efficiency. I have two generations of cows that are starting to show their age, so some new blood is probably a good path to be going down right now.
Lots of fun stuff coming for 2021. We’re excited and blessed to be able to do what we do. Some aspects may be changing in this upcoming year, but I believe they will all be good changes and help us advance ourselves faster towards our vision and goals.
Be blessed!
-Kenny