2020: The Year in Review


Building a livestock enterprise is slow-going, even under the best of circumstances.  Farm infrastructure is extensive, and time consuming to install.  Animal growth only happens so fast, and developing a herd is a years-long process.  So when we began developing this enterprise in 2016, we knew that we wouldn't feel the full business experience until years later.  2020 was that year.

2020 Goals

  • Herd Goals
    • Replace herd sire
We lost our herd sire due to natural causes in 2019, and 2020 would be the year that we selected one of his descendants as a replacement.  Now that the 2020 kid crop has come of age, we have now selected our next herd sire:



He does not yet have a name, so any suggestions you have are welcome!
    • Diversify female stock to meet different customers' needs
As we have interacted with more and more customers, we are recognizing the need to diversify our herd, to offer cuts that meet specific requests that customers have.  To date, we have diversified our herd, but have not yet been able to begin forming lineages of animals that meet certain requirements.  This is a slow process, which will take many years, but we have taken the first step of diversifying the herd.
    • Growing feed on site
Although we grew a good amount of feed on site in 2020, we found that the optimal window for harvesting this homegrown feed is relatively narrow.  Although we got a tremendous amount of feed off our own land this year, we also wasted some, as the ideal harvest window passed, and the feed value of the feed went down.  Next year, we will be growing plenty of feed on site, but it will be staggered to produce throughout the summer, instead of ripening all at once.
  • Farm Infrastructure Goals
    • Begin transitioning to a tree-based system
It has been a few years now since we've recognized the tremendous value of trees as a keystone element of our system.  Just like everything else in agriculture, it takes a long time to gear a big project like this up, and 2020 was the year to begin our tree based system.  We built five "air prune beds", which are a seed starting system for trees and other perennials that ensures you get a great root system for the permanent planting we will be doing.  We also invested in grow bags, that have a similar root pruning effect, but with added flexibility.  Finally, we bought seeds!  Lots of seeds!  Black locust, mulberry, Osage orange, American elm, raspberry, currant, chestnut, walnut, hickory...  We aim to grow our own food forest to the benefit of our animals, but humanity as a whole.



    • Additional paddock fencing
We have been implementing a complex rotational grazing system over the past few years, and 2020 saw great progress on this front.  We now have a complete rotation around the farm, with fencing available for each stage.  We still have a long way to go to get to the finished product, but 2020 was definitely a productive year for our paddock shifting system.

2020 Challenges

  • River Fire
The River Fire in August 2020 was extremely disruptive for our operation.  It required that we move a ton of materials around on site, remove (and later replace) certain fencing, and feed an excessive amount of hay that we wouldn't normally feed at that time of the year.  Although all was well in the end, we did end up with a huge un-planned for time commitment, and some additional un-planned for financial commitments.  We have not yet fully recovered from this disruptive event.
  • Time available for farm projects
Although Covid-19-imposed travel restrictions may seem like a farm work-promoting policy (keeping people on site, and not leaving the farm!), it brought with it an overload of additional tasks that we normally don't experience.  The kids were learning from home, our day jobs required huge transitions and extra work, and projects became harder to complete due to supply chain disruptions and high materials prices.
  • Transitioning the herd to meet the demand for goat meat
Since it is our first year marketing to a large audience, this is the first year that we've had the chance to truly understand the demand profile for our products.  Although we started out with a 50%-50% mix of lamb and goat, we have found that the regional markets we serve have a higher interest in goat meat, so we've begun the process of switching our heard to 75% goat, and 25% lamb.

We believe that 2020 went reasonably well overall.  The farm truly has a whole new level of interest, activity, and ideas, and we continue to make progress on many fronts.  A near-term goal will be to hire help, to really get the farm up to speed more quickly, but under the circumstances, with the capacity that we had this year, we are proud of what we've accomplished.

We wish you all the best in your 2021 endeavors!

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