Northern Farmer

We’re being invaded by Box elder Bugs around here! Came home to the house at noon today and I couldn’t believe my eyes. There must have been thousands of em near the entryway of our house. Then they’d fly into a person’s face, down the shirt, just an invasion! Seen that happen in the fall of “88″ too. That was after a huge drought also. Must be something about a drought……

Been off line for a week, internet down again and we finally figured it out, it was our computer rejecting our server. I don’t know, and I don’t really care what it all was, I’d never figure it out anyway. I know how to get to a few sites that spark my interest and that’s about it for the internet. This new computer has Windows “Vista”, kinda neat, different than XP, don’t know how to describe it, just different. Then the task of figuring out how to get back onto Northern Farmer’s dashboard, the old computer always did that automatically. But as anyone can tell, I figured it out, (after a bit).

This past week of being off line was alright though, cut ten cord of firewood on the buzz saw Tuesday and have about half of it stacked here in the yard near the outdoor wood boiler, waiting for winter, but besides the computer bucking up this last week Sunday evening we all of a sudden didn’t have any water here, make my day. So Monday morning start the week out right with no water here, all work gets shoved aside just for that, but the good news is…. the pump was OK, just a relay box went out. And more good news is, I haven’t gotten the bill yet! But I’m sure that’ll find it’s way to our mailbox one of these days!

One thing on my mind the last few days has been the difference nowadays as the farm is going and selling more and more direct to the customer, the difference in lifestyle. I mean the day to day stuff. Before in modern industrial farming there was basically no interaction with any customers. The buyers were corporations basically, even if a person sold to a co-op the corporations were the final customer behind it all. Day to day farm activity made it so the only people we’d really see was either suppliers or buyers, (industrial buyers), and even in the farming crowd there’d only be other farmers like ourselves to talk with and so forth. The biggest change that I’ve noticed since going direct to the customer is the difference in social life. The customers become friends, very loyal too! There’s no more trying to get the other guy, trying to get the best price or the lowest price. And there’s no shortage of customers! And all of that with not one dime’s worth of advertising.

I don’t know where all this is going but I know it’ll be good. I always used to get a bit nervous when thinking about taking the farm where it’s currently heading because like anyone else I would read up on some books on the subject. I guess we got into it a bit different than alot of folks, we just took a chance and saved a slug of steers instead of selling them for the highest calf prices in history. But the story with that is I was thinking about selling them as calves but there was an inner voice that said “save them”. I kinda figured that was the Lord cause whenever there’s something like that said in my heart I don’t want to listen. But I figured if it is the Lord it would probably be a good thing to listen to it. But in that running debate we had I said, “Lord, the books all say that direct marketing is the toughest part in all of this” and I figured I’d add, “if You want me to do this and not make the highest calf prices in history You’ll have to help me sell em cause I’m about as poor of a seller as there comes”. Because when you spend a lifetime in industrial agriculture, the one thing you never have contact with is the consumer, so I didn’t even know how to go abouts selling something like our beef, let alone a good sized slug of em.

So on calf selling day I held back a large batch of good looking angus and baldie calve and hunkered down, knowing that any payday would be a long time away. The months went by and come fall some of the front runners were getting there and money was getting tighter plus we had a drought last year too and I had to shell out a few extra thousand for hay. The big day was at hand, some steers were butchered, let humg for over two week, I was a bit desperate for money, just waiting for the first check. Meat pickup day came and the first customer was scheduled, a couple more would come in a few days to pick up theirs and I was really looking forward to that check. Doing chores that morning, driving the Bobcat it came into my heart to give the meat away to that customer. Now this customer wasn’t exactly poor and I could handle giving something away to a desperately poor person and feel all good about myself, I’ve done it before. But it came upon me to give it away that morning. A few hundred dollars worth of beef. As usual I sure didn’t want to, and that tells me it must be from God. With a running debate going on in a roaring Bobcat I argued it out, plus worried a bit about what my family would say when I break the news. But that inner voice said, “You said I could manage the selling of the beef, and this is what I say to do”. About that time I didn’t feel all that great but submitted. The customer put up a good argument, but gradually accepted. I came home and told the wife and to my surprise it was OK with her, hmmmm.

After that day the selling of quarters, halves, and whole steers took off and there was always a customer when ever I had a few to go. Looking back I know what I know to be true. I mentioned it almost two years ago on this blog, that the Lord is my manager and I will tell anybody anywhere that a better business manager cannot be found. Just obey HIm and watch out!

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 7:40 pm and is filed under Northern Farmer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.