Farm Musings
The Reality Check
March, 2025
I’ve always been transparent about the realities of small-scale farming, specifically market garden vegetables and pastured chickens for eggs. In that spirit in this new year, I thought I’d once again share an in-depth analysis of the egg portion of our business:
2024 Egg Totals:
- 24,204 eggs laid
- 2,017 dozen total
- 1,528 dozen sold
- 260 dozen donated (Loudon Food Pantry mostly)
- The remaining 230-ish dozen eaten by us, gifted, made into cookies, etc.
Now here is the interesting bit. I’m not an accountant, but as I understand it, gross margin is revenue minus cost of goods sold (COGS) divided by 100. However, since we have never truly paid ourselves for our labor, our COGS in this example is just feed and supplies used to keep the girls healthy and laying, and packaging. Using those numbers, our modified “gross margin” is approximately 20%. Sounds pretty good, right? Well, if we took that 20% in actual dollars and spread it out over all the hours we spent in 2024 feeding, watering, cleaning, moving the girls, fixing stuff that broke, collecting, washing and packaging eggs, driving to the store or farmers market to stock or sell the eggs, we could pay ourselves the very generous wage of – wait for it - $3 a day.
THREE dollars a day for us to bring our customers arguably the best eggs in town. That is after raising our prices and working as hard as we could to get better feed prices and reduce our other costs. That was after expanding our flock and then not being able to sell all the eggs when they came on line because we were determined to stay local. If we evaluated our egg business as a “real” business, our gross margin is zero, with completely unrealistic wages. Considerably negative if we paid ourselves a real wage. But the reality is, no one would continue to run a business with these margins.
Why be concerned with accounting for labor costs? It is quite simply the difference between having a fun hobby versus a viable business that would allow a farmer to survive. Farmers deserve to be paid for the unrelenting work of raising the animals or vegetables we put on our tables. Without food, we all die so shouldn’t farmers be held in such regard that they make a wage they can actually live on without selling their souls to a corporation to become a contract poultry grower or ruin their land producing feeder animals for some far away CAFO system? If we want real food grown right, it takes more time and effort on the farmer’s part. It takes a level of care, dedication and love for our entire ecosystem not found in a dozen eggs from an industrial egg producer, or a foam shrink-wrapped tray of industrial CAFO hamburger or the plastic carton of berries grown in fake soil and nutrient solution on a plastic covered strip of land that was sprayed to kill all life. It takes an understanding on the consumers part that the cost of real food is right there on the label whereas the costs of the cheap food is hidden in taxpayer subsidies, our health, the animals raised and eventually in our fragile and rapidly failing ecosystem. And that difference is the farmer’s payment for taking care of the soil, the animals, the plants, and our health while rebuilding the ecosystem.
Why do we do it? We’ve joked sarcastically about how we’ve never “lost money” selling eggs but understood that we weren’t really earning anything for all the time we’ve spent managing this aspect of our farm. My desire to provide ourselves and our community with food that is raised to the highest standards of animal welfare, nutrition and environmental stewardship made it possible to overlook the fact that it was never going to be a money-making proposition. I knew this going in. But, after nearly 8 years of the work, 365 days a year, and the need to slow down a bit, I feel we’ve reached the point where we need to face reality and regroup.
Starting this spring, we will no longer be selling eggs at the farmers market or the Canterbury Country store. We will downsize our flock to a more manageable level and sell eggs only at the farm at our self-serve egg stand. There will be a transition period as we downsize the flock while making sure we can provide for our regular direct-from-farm customers so you will still see eggs at the store for a bit longer. We welcome those of you who were buying our eggs at the farmers market or the store to let us know if you would like to come to the farm instead so we can get a handle on what flock size will be able to meet demand. Our regular and pre-paid farm customers will be our priority going forward but we welcome anyone to wander down our road and buy a dozen from the cooler.
In addition, we won’t be selling vegetables in the future either. Market gardening was a truly rewarding part of my farm experience but I wish I’d started down that path at a much younger age. The week over week push to get vegetables to market just became physically too much without enough monetary reward. Although the vegetable side of our business was much more profitable than our eggs, to make it be something I could call a “living” I would have to expand it to something bigger than I am willing or able to do. I will still be growing a large garden for our own use and I will be actively encouraging others to grow their own food too. There will be more on that subject in the future.
We are so very grateful to the Canterbury Country Store for supporting our business with more than generous terms. Jane and David could not have been more accommodating to try to make our consignment business viable. If our eggs are what brought you into the store, please continue to patronize them as the store is truly the heart of our community. A shout out to Gilmanton’s Own as well for being willing to save us shelf space when we needed to move some eggs. Please take a ride to visit that amazing market! To those farmers market customers who eagerly lined up to buy our eggs each week (and those former veggie customers from years past!), we are also incredibly grateful. Interacting with customers who appreciated what we offered was truly the most enjoyable part of it all. It is because of them that we continued to work so hard every day. We are not going away; we are still here in lovely Canterbury. We will remain fervent advocates of a resilient, diversified food system where real food is raised right. We hope you will join us in this fight.
Know your farmer. Buy local food. Grow your own food. Stop buying industrial food.