Prefer that I read this essay aloud for you? Happy to oblige! You can listen to the podcast version here:

Everything takes longer, costs more, and returns less than you think. These are the summary thoughts I have as I pour over the numbers while getting ready for our annual meeting and tax season.  I plan to make the argument that while income wasn’t as much as we’d hoped, educational dividends were high.  We learned a lot from our mistakes.  

I’m not the only one.  As I scan my Instagram feed each week, I see lots and lots of pretty shots from all the farmers I follow — winter sunsets, snow-kissed cattle, contented pigs bedded down out of the cold.  They give me a sense of assurance:  it doesn’t matter what’s happening in the news.  All is still right with the world.  The ruminants still chew their cuds, the snow still muffles the chaos of life. But periodically, there’s another kind of post.  And that’s when I see the pain:  All is not right with the world.  Occasionally farmers use the social platform as a confessional.  I can’t afford my winter feed.  I’m too tired.  I don’t know how I’ll make it through another season.  One post in particular comes to my mind as I face my own annual numbers:  I’m so grateful that my husband has a job.  I don’t think this farm can ever do more than nourish our bodies and spirits.

This post stirs me so deeply that I print it off and lay it on my desk with the 2019 income and expense calculations.  I feel like I owe this farmer words.  I don’t actually know her personally.  I don’t feel like the Instagram comments section is an appropriate platform to outline my own off-beat system for reckoning my financial picture.  

But the truth is, the numbers on the paper only tell a tiny part of the story of how our family makes a go of it with  these scrappy mountain pastures.  This is not an admission that a family cannot make a living farming.  But I do believe that the conventional understanding of “making it” is warped.  I spent a lot of years studying farmers and livelihoods for my masters and Ph.D. at Cornell.  The notion that the productivity of a farm, whether it’s the milk, row crops, or animal units, supplies the entirety of a family’s income is a modern post-World War II mythical expectation.  And, by the way, it was after World War II that we began seeing the precipitous decline in farm numbers.  Only the largest farms could survive under this modern “model” for success.  

If we want to know how small farms actually made it, and can make it today, then we need an understanding of earlier agrarian economic survival.  For a quick lesson, look back on some favorite childhood literature, like Farmer Boy or The Ox-Cart Man.  Income streams for a life in harmony with the land were, and should be, diversified. And diversified doesn’t mean “soy beans AND corn,” or “chickens AND pork AND beef.”  It has always been a diversification of the faculties, an equal application of the mind and all parts of the body.  Some income was passive; such as the letting of spare bedrooms;  some required more use of the mind, like teaching or training work animals; some required more manual skills and less trudging through the snow, such as shaving shingles, carpentry, or sewing; sometimes there was work-for-hire during slower times; and only one segment of the economic picture required the brute strength and endurance of tilling soil and tending livestock.  That’s the model of agrarian success I think is most effective, and most pleasurable, today.  

That means we can’t understand the farming picture with the straight-forward type of accounting that a typical wage-earner turns in on their taxes.  A farm with numbers in the red can actually be very profitable as part of an overall economic picture.  But in order for that to be the case, anyone who wants to make a life in harmony with the land needs to understand the four primary sources of income:  Earned income, business income, passive income (I include investment income in this), and non-monetary income.  Once those are understood, a farm family should choose at least three out of these four categories to ensure economic survival.  

Earned income is the most conventional choice.  Lots of independent free-spirit couples send one person out into the workforce to bring home the steady paycheck and health insurance benefits.  It provides a sense of security.  However, earned income happens to be the most expensive income to garner.  Earned income is taxed first, and then the wage earner must live on whatever is left.  With a business income, the business is entitled to cover the expenses and then pay taxes on what is left.  Thus, if one member of a family has a truly fulfilling job, then the business income of the farm (or any other small business venture), can help to substantially reduce the family’s tax burden and increase the net household income.…even if the business doesn’t generate a lot of profit.

As I’ve aged and slowly recognized the limits of my body to perform all the daily labors of my family’s vocation, I’ve embraced the importance of passive income.  The US government has a very strict definition of “passive income.”  But as a farmers, just about every form of income seems passive compared to the work we do in a day!  Thus, our family’s choice to buy the post office building where we house our cafe was critical.  Yes, we still have to maintain the building and the grounds.  But compared to processing chickens and cutting up fat for lard and hauling feed and water buckets, and getting up at 3am to make croissants for the cafe, the work is minimal in exchange for the monthly rent checks we get from our tenants.  Passive income can also include royalties (care to buy one of my books?), and in my broader definition, includes investment income.  It might also include cooperative marketing, like selling someone’s else’s products alongside your own at your place of business.  Passive income can save the day when an unexpected farm expense makes me fear I won’t be able to pay a feed bill.  Until farmers can be fairly compensated for the labor it requires to grow quality food, passive income is important.  It leverages our ability to re-build working regenerative economies. .  

But for our family, and for many farm families, non-monetary income is probably the most significant income source.  Non-monetary income never gets a dollar figure attached to it.  But it offsets considerable expense.  It includes the food we grow and cook for ourselves, the child or elder care, the tuition that homeschooling might supplant.  It includes what we might do for barter, or personal expenses that may be offset by a business (for example, we get to eat the meat that we can’t sell, or the leftovers from the cafe; and the farm pays for the cell phone and car that make our lives more convenient).  While working on my latest book manuscript on this topic last winter, I crunched the numbers and calculated our family’s non-monetary income.  It came to over $70,000.  This is how a family of four can thrive (and build savings) on less than $20,000 worth of taxable income per year.  

But the non-monetary income is greater than that.  There are parts that aren’t quantifiable, as I’ve talked about many times — the true wealth.  This is the ability to take off on a weekday morning to ski around the farm, to drink in the glories of the streams and mountains and stone walls.  It’s the freedom to sit with your kid over a cup of coffee and ponder the great mysteries that reveal themselves in algebra.  It’s the time we can give to keep a marriage solid, and to maintain good relationships with our children  It’s the opportunity to debate with mom and dad over principles of farming and business,  and share labor with them, rather than fixate ad nauseam on bladders and prostates and blood pressure.  

The trouble with non-monetary income, however, is that we often forget to collect on it.  We forget to enjoy the meal.  We forget that we are allowed to give ourselves time to take the walk, to have the lengthy conversation that our quirky lives have carved out for us.  Or we stare at the spreadsheets, see the red, and forget all the profit we truly garner in a year.  Reflecting on this, I push aside my own spreadsheets and call out to Bob.  He makes the coffee and we throw the skis and dogs in the car.  We set out on the farm trail just as day breaks.  We ski up the side hill and climb above the tree line just as the sun rises and scatters diamonds across the snow.  Finding find a place in the sun, we pull our coffee mugs from our packs and sit down with the dogs to enjoy January light on our faces while taking in the pastures and the lavender hues on the mountains.  

And as we sit there bathing in the light, I know that the bottom line on my numbers is just fine.  Income generated covered expenses.  End of story.  The real story, the real dividends, the real payoff, is right here.  Right now.  

And I think about what that woman wrote:  I don’t think this farm can ever do more than nourish our bodies and spirits.

If that’s what a farm can do, then that’s a lot. 

 

Folks – Don’t forget!  The new podcast, The Hearth of Sap Bush Hollow launches in just two weeks.  If you have any questions you’d like answered, or requests for special episodes, please get them in to me: Shannon@sapbush.com.  And if you feel you can help support my work, please consider signing on as my patron on Patreon.  You can do it for as little as $1/month, and you gain access to exclusive content (such as the working draft of my novel…).