We ask ourselves, is this enterprise the woman in the red dress?
Is it like the shiny object syndrome?
Yeah, direct marketing sounds great.
I'm selling beef. It's so much fun.
Customers are happy.
But is it the woman in the red dress?
Are you making the money or could you be doing something else and it be really
growing that enterprise and really expanding on your quality of life and profitability?
Welcome to the 342nd installment of Ear to the Ground, the Land Stewardship Projects
podcast on family farming, regenerative agriculture, community food systems,
and local democracy. I'm Brian DeVore, editor of the Land Stewardship Letter.
When I was growing up on a farm in southwestern Iowa, we used to hand milk cows while
balancing precariously on one-legged stools. It certainly made dairy chores an interesting,
if somewhat tipsy, endeavor. I think a lot about how today's farmers keep things in balance
whenever I visit Wholesome Family Farms, a livestock enterprise run by Rochelle and
Jordan Meyer in the Driftless region of southeastern Minnesota.
It seems like whenever I travel to the owned and rented acres they farm,
the Myers have just added a new enterprise. Besides running a conventional dairy,
they have pasture-based enterprises that involve rotationally grazing goats,
beef cattle, hogs, and poultry. Besides direct marketing meat and raw milk to consumers,
the Myers lease out their goats to people hoping to rehabilitate worn-out land that's been taken
over by invasive plants. So earlier this summer, when I traveled to their farm to attend the Land
Stewardship Projects Driftless Grazing School that they were hosting, it wasn't surprising to learn
that the Meyer family had added yet another enterprise in the form of an 800 head flock
of sheep. Besides selling used, they're leasing out the sheep to help control vegetation beneath
solar arrays in the region. But as they made clear during their grazing school presentation,
there's a method to the madness when it comes to deciding what enterprises to add as well as drop
on Wholesome Family Farms. The Myers are in their early 30s and have seven children. That means any
business decisions they make on the farm must be balanced against the needs of the family, first and
foremost. That became painfully clear in the spring of 2024 when they experienced the tragedy
of having one of their daughters, April, taken from them in a farm accident. Rochelle says they
keep their balance utilizing the three-legged stool strategy. The farm family perches on top
of this metaphorical stool and each leg represents a key ingredient to overall success. Profitability,
soil health, and quality of life. If any of these legs are out of whack, the whole stool collapses.
Such a strategy has helped the Myers not only determine that adding an enterprise like sheep
worked for them, the land, and their family, but also led them to decide that the cow, calf,
and turkey businesses they formerly had were not good fits. Their message received a good response
from the dozens of farmers who attended the two-day LSB grazing school, which was led by
other grazers from the region and which featured hands-on tutorials in everything from fencing and
watering systems to monitoring soil health biology, managing finances, and developing grazing plans.
Bringing together farmers to discuss cutting-edge approaches to livestock production
generates a lot of excitement around the potential for adding enterprises to an operation.
Jordan and Rochelle's advice to maintain a balanced approach via a solid three-legged stool was a good
practical reminder that even the most innovative management practice means little if it's not
sustainable on multiple levels. In between sessions at the grazing school, Rochelle talked to me about
how the three-legged stool concept drives their decision making. For one thing, she says, it helps
greatly in not being sidetracked by something that can distract a farm from doing what it does well,
the proverbial woman in the red dress. One of the things I've been to your farm several times
into land that you've rented and that you're kind of reclaiming using goats, which is a really
impressive system you've got going there on some some rented land that's pretty marginal, pretty
rough ground. I know one of the things that's a real focus for you folks is soil health, but one
of the things you were talking about today was that's part of a three-legged stool for you, and
I think that's a really important piece. Could you talk a little bit about that, what are what parts
of that three-legged stool there are and kind of maybe a couple examples of how you've had to
refer to that a little bit when you're doing your your management, your day-to-day management,
and your long-term management? Yeah, so basically the concept of the three-legged stool is you're
on top of the stool, and then the first leg represents your profitability, and then the
second leg would be your soil health, and then your third leg would be your quality of life.
It's talked a lot about holistic management. I think the legs are maybe different, and we kind
of catered it towards what our like our family specifically values. We really value the quality
of life, you know, we have seven kids, and then we really value that soil health and that profitability,
you know, we got to make money to make all this work. So they're all really really important to us,
and the way the concept kind of works is if you're really focusing on like your profitability side,
maybe you're running way more animal units than you should be, your soil health is going to lack,
or your quality of, you know, quality of life might might be lacking, or if you're really focusing on
that quality of life piece, and you're adding in a bunch of interior fencing, and you're not doing
daily moves like you should be, or you're overgrazing paddocks, you're going to sacrifice
on the soil health side. So any decisions we make on our farm, any enterprises we choose to bring in,
any fencing we add, any basically anything runs through that three-legged stool process to make
sure that we stay balanced. Of course it's not going to be a perfect balance all the time, but we
want to stay on top, and we don't want one of those legs too short or we're going to fall over.
I'm actually really glad to hear that, and don't take this personally, but I always am concerned
about how many enterprises you guys are involved with, and you kind of have a little bit of a
reputation of taking on a lot of enterprises. I know sheep you've recently added, but it sounds
like you there's a method to the madness. You really don't just jump into everything. You think
about that that three-legged stool a lot. Yeah, we really do, and most people that know us know we
lost our daughter, you know, April, a couple months back, and that really was like, okay, is everything
we're doing really making sense? Are we focusing on that quality of life? Because you get your family
once, and that's it. You know, you get one life, so you better be making sure that you really do
in everything in your heart that you should be doing, and that's kind of why we focus our farm
on that. We truly believe that God has put us here to take care of the land and to do all this,
and so we want to make sure that we're prioritizing him and what he wants us to do,
and so yeah, we run tons of enterprises, but we make sure that it goes through that stool first,
because otherwise you're not going to be here for the long run. If it's not sustainable for you,
it's not sustainable for the land. Well, and then Jordan being, you know, a fourth-generation dairy
farmer, we hope to continue that legacy, and if we still want to be here, we have to love farming,
and if we love farming, our kids are going to love farming, but in order to do that, it all has to
be balanced or somewhat balanced. Yeah, one of the things you talked about was the you don't get too
much invested in infrastructure. I mean, you need some basic infrastructure, but it sounds like you're
trying to strike a balance of not getting so much into maybe a one-use infrastructure that if that
enterprise doesn't work out and you have to drop it, and all of a sudden you've got this cost of
this big structure that you've put in, a big barn or whatever, that you're trying to focus more on
infrastructure that, for one thing, is as affordable as possible, but is not like this kind of big
bricks and mortar kind of solid thing that you can't adapt to something else or whatever, but
it sounds like that's a really important piece to you. Yeah, infrastructure makes sense, but it makes
sense, and we have found 99% of the time we've grown so much that that infrastructure isn't
relevant anymore, and that's the trouble. When you're trying to make money on your farm, you're
going to be continually growing, expanding, changing ideas, so you don't want to be too committed.
And now infrastructure, you know, we're not committed on any enterprise either. We had a cow-calf
operation here, and we ran numbers, and it didn't make sense anymore. The cow price went way up,
feed costs went up, and it makes sense to just get rid of them. And so just being able to be adaptive,
that's what we call it. And perimeter fencing, yeah sure, that makes sense, but not even being
too committed on that. Like you want to be able to utilize your woodland, you want to be able to
utilize all of your acreage, and so that's where that quality of life piece comes into place,
making enough infrastructure to make sure your quality of life stays intact. Yeah, and that you
talked about fencing, and I thought this was a strike, I've heard you talk about this before.
You suggested when people kind of jump into this, into say adaptive grazing, that type of thing,
to not maybe put in perimeter fencing right away. Talk about that a little bit. I think some people
were a little bit surprised at that. Yeah, so when we first started farming a lot of our farms, we
didn't have existing fence, and you don't know how your land is going to act until you've actually
ran it for quite a few years. You know, we've seen our land change. It's like this, so last year was
a, you know, one of the worst droughts we've ever seen, and our farm carried 50 more animal units
than we ever have in the past on a drought year. Now this year, we could probably add in another 50
plus more animal units. So it's like, you don't want to add in all this perimeter fencing and be
like, okay, now I'm stuck. Now I can't graze this correctly because it's too small or too big or
whatever that might be. So we really believe that running a farm for a few years and just using some
temporary polywire or whatever that is, makes the most sense that you're not dumping a lot of money
into something that might not make sense in a couple years. I would think maybe the direct
marketing, because you're very much involved with the direct marketing now, that that must add a
real, another wrinkle to that whole three-legged stool, because that can be time spent off the farm,
time spent doing maybe the stuff that's not so fun, you know, trying to figure out customers,
what the customers want, and process, dealing with processing that type of thing. Yeah, so that
actually, that was one thing we really evaluated when we lost April, and we added the sheep. So we
actually added the sheep in February, we lost April in April, and it was like, okay, something's got to
give because we can only, we have to take care of our family, we have to take care of our animals
still, so like what makes sense. So we are still doing the direct marketing, however, we did step
back from farmers markets, you know, they take up your entire Saturday, every single week for the
entire summer. It just made sense for our farm and where we're at. We kind of actually use another
analogy, it's called the women in the red dress. So if you were in a crowd of a bunch of people
just wearing normal colored clothes, and a woman walked down the center of the road with this bright
red beautiful dress, everybody's eyes would turn to her. So we ask ourselves, is this enterprise
the woman in the red dress? Is it like the shiny object syndrome? Yeah, direct marketing sounds
great, I'm selling beef, it's so much fun, customers are happy, but is it the woman in the red dress?
Are you making the money, or could you be doing something else, and it be really growing that
enterprise, and really expanding on your quality of life and profitability. And that's where the
direct marketing this year was like, hmm, she might be the woman in the red dress, you know, our sheep.
We have 800 ewes out there, and it's like that enterprise is a fully, you know, we have two hired
help people that help with them, and we sublease those sheep, so they go out to solar grazing.
And it's like, okay, that enterprise is very profitable, it's sustaining itself, we can hire
out help, that makes sense. Where the farmers markets, and our drop sites, and stuff like that,
I was having to do all that. So I cannot delegate those tasks quite yet. So we see that, yep, that
enterprise is the woman in the red dress, maybe it's time to get rid of that one. I was, so that's a
really good point, because I was wondering about the sheep, because I knew that was, I was, it was
interesting to hear the kind of the decision making that went behind that, that that sounds like it was
something that you had to, it had to fit, but it's also new, but you want to make sure it's not that
woman in the red dress. Yeah, so we saw the sheep posted on a Facebook page, it was 800 and, I don't
know, 50 ewes or something, and we ran numbers, and we were like, okay, a week later, we got the sheep.
And the reason being is, Jordan and I do not believe in adding another enterprise to our farm,
unless it is 100% sustaining itself, and it can be hired out. It just does not make sense for us
anymore to be expanding on a few things here or a few things there. It has to be fully profitable,
paying for that farm, paying for help, you know, because to expand, you need more labor force.
And so those sheep, we went with 800 of the ewes, we kind of called off 50 of them before we bought
them, so we went with 800 of them, and they just fit that farm like a glove. Now this year, it's like,
we've had so much rain, we could probably add cows in with those sheep, because we just have grass
coming out of our ears, but it fit the farm they're on, it can sustain itself, so we don't have to do
all of the labor ourselves, and so it just made sense. And that's a good point. We have had a
complete turnaround in the weather. We came off of at least three years of drought. Now we are
getting record-breaking rains. So that must be important, and I guess that's why it's so
important that you don't get invested in a lot of big-time infrastructure. Things can change,
you know, nature bats last, it has the last word, and so it could make sense to have all these sheep
or to add another enterprise in a year like this, but maybe next year, but and if you were invested
in an infrastructure where you had to push a certain number of animals through that, but this
way you can kind of flex a little bit from year to year, depending on what is the growing situation.
Yeah, and that's like the sheep too. We could have added more high-tensile wires to our existing
perimeter fence. Right now we have a three-wire perimeter fence, and it was like, do you do that,
or do you just buy some netting and run these sheep with netting and learn how the sheep graze? And
so we decided to get the netting. Yeah, we're running, you know, 40 plus nets for the sheep,
but it makes sense because you're learning how they graze. We learned that sheep have a really,
really hard time right now going through our woods. It's just so thick and dense where goats are
really agile. They can jump on those logs, they can go through all that, and so we kind of use
the woods as a natural barrier for our sheep. A lot of times we really don't need a ton of fencing,
so it's like if we would have invested in that perimeter fencing, it probably wouldn't have made
sense, and not only that, but we'd eventually are hoping that the goats really clean up that
woodland so we can grow more grass and the sheep can go down there then. So being flexible that
way, it just, it really makes sense. So you mentioned the cow-calf operation didn't work out.
Tell me a little bit more about what decision-making went into that where you figured out this isn't
really fitting for us. Yeah, more so just running numbers. You know, your costs to keep them animals
over winter is just so high. Cows eat a lot of feed. You know, where sheep and goats, you can
utilize a lot of the woods and you can just handle more animals per acre than cows. Cows eat a lot.
They take a lot of care, and if you're just selling, so specifically we are a grass operation,
so we are calving on pasture, so we don't like to calve till end of April, beginning of May. Well,
then if you want to go sell them calves come fall, nobody wants them calves. They're too small. They
want big calves. So we're not even playing in the market anymore, and so you're not making the money
you should be off them calves because they're so much smaller than everybody else's, and so when
you're trying to play in that conventional market, you have to play the conventional market game. You
can't play the grass game. So that's where it made sense. We ran numbers and what we were making off
them calves, it didn't make sense. We made way more money off of sheep. Well, that's really impressive
because right now it is tempting to get into the cow-calf market because it's pretty good,
but if it's not working for you, it doesn't matter how good the prices are. It's not working for your
particular setup. I truly believe even though the cow prices are so high, I mean we just took a
Holstein. She was a milk cow. She was a call cow. We got a dollar forty-four a hundred weight. That
is a lot, but she's playing in the conventional market. She's a conventional cow. When you're
talking grass cows, they're smaller animals, smaller framed because you want to be able to
have them utilize that grass. You want to be able to push them through the winter and not have to
use hay. You're not competing on the conventional market. You're competing on a whole different
market. So unless you can direct market those calves somewhere else, that's when it makes sense,
and we just found that we couldn't play in the conventional market here. One thing I was wondering,
so you own this farm. How many acres is here? The dairy is probably about 400. 400. But you rent
a fair amount. How many acres are you renting now? It's probably, so just what we're grazing right now
is about 700 acres. It's worked out nice for you as far as getting access to land because
it's pretty rugged acres. It's not prime corn, soybean ground, and so it's good for grazing and
good, particularly with using the goats to kind of bring back some of this land that's pretty
marginal, that type of thing. That must really play into this three-legged stool in that you're
renting some of these acres because you're renting it and you aren't owning all of it.
That must give you a little bit of flexibility as far as you can pencil the numbers your year and go,
well, you know, I don't know if you're thinking about this, but maybe we need to let go of some
of these acres or maybe we rent a different something that's lower price, that kind of thing.
Yeah, so in our area it's challenging to get cheaper land value for rent. The farm we're renting,
it is a little undervalued because it is, you know, it's 300 acres of woods and so it's, it runs a
mile north and west and a mile or a mile north and south, a mile east and west, and it is covered
in woods. It's very thick brush and then a lot of the pastures are overgrown too. That's challenging
and I will say having different land access just makes sense. You know, I wouldn't say it's kind of
the same thing we talked about, like that's permanent infrastructure. You don't necessarily
have to go buy a farm. However, I do think in today's market it is going to get even more
challenging to buy land. I think these next couple years the way land prices have been continuing to
climb, I hate to say it, but I think when my kids are trying to buy land it might be like it, it
might be hard to pay for a farm. Yeah, yeah, so that is, it does get, that's part of that flexibility
and not being invested in this solid, sunk in the ground kind of infrastructure where you're like,
oh we just paid this amount of money for this land, we're going to have to get, we better raise
corn on that and get that assured, you know, system through that. That's one thing that we really run
numbers hard, hard, hard, hard. You have to if you want to be able to either buy farms or know what
enterprises to add, know what infrastructure to add, because if you're not running true numbers,
and true numbers, I'm saying like you need to pay yourself for working, you know, you need to make
sure you have insurance figured in there, even death loss, you know, you have to figure a 30%
death loss, because if you don't figure those numbers in there, you won't come out in the end.
So that's one thing that we found is very important, is running your numbers ahead of time.
What's your market for your sheep? Right now we're selling you lambs, and then, so we're actually
making extra income off of them because we're doing some solar grazing jobs. So we're subleasing
these sheep, people are coming in subleasing the sheep, going and doing some solar grazing jobs,
so we're making some income off of that. And then I'm assuming we'll sell quite a few you lambs,
quite a few ram lambs, and then we'll keep some obviously back for replacements. And then any ram
lambs that we don't sell, we'll just go to either one of the local markets. We haven't quite ran
numbers if it makes sense to, because we have so many we could maybe ship a semi-load, if that makes
sense. So we'll see where we're kind of at and what makes most sense. The sales barn here, I don't
know that they could handle that many lambs at a time. We'd have to bring them in smaller groups.
You know, just going back a little bit to the renting some of this land that maybe is marginal,
all that. One of the things that I've always been impressed with, because you focus, you folks focus
so much on soil health, and you're using things like goats. Like I know one thing Jordan talked to
me about once was the goats kind of transport biology from the woods into the grazing paddocks,
into the more open land. So you're adding value to that land. That's really critical to think
about the adding value to land that is not maybe top crop ground to look at, but is you're improving
it. And it is part of that, it's maybe a lower investment in that infrastructure at the beginning,
but you're over time adding value to it. Yeah, so like that rented farm, you know, like I said,
we carried 50 more animal units on a drought year. And so now this year, it's like, man, we could
probably raise that 50 plus more animal units from that number. You know, so it's like, just being
able to have more grass, house more animals, you're making more money, you have a better return on
investment. That's what makes sense. Just keep an eye out for that woman with the red dress. That's
all I say. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Any just general advice for someone who is looking at getting into
grazing and yeah, in any of this kind of regenerative grazing, adaptive grazing, and maybe
they're interested in adding direct marketing, whatever, you know, but just those first steps so
you don't get in over your head before you even get launched out of the launch pad. Okay,
it'll be two things. One, you just got to start. You can watch all the YouTube videos. You can talk
to all the farmers you want. You can look at this way and that way. You just got to do it because
your farm is different. You just got to start. You just got to try something and do it. Second thing,
you got to find a mentor or a friend, someone else that is at your next level, right? What you want
to be doing in five, 10 years, because that's the person you're going to look up to and that's the
person you're going to push and strive for. They say, I don't know what the statistic is, but you're
like the top five people you hang out with, that's who you are. So we always try to be connecting
with other farmers who are doing more, you know, that push us to our limits because then we try
new things. So if you can have a good connection of people, buddies that you call up or whatever,
friends, that is how you really grow. It's good to see there is a method to the madness that you
are thinking about this. Oh, a hundred percent. If there wasn't, you could run yourself to the
ground. You could. And we've learned over time as farmers, like you think you just need to work more
hours, like, you know, and that's just the mentality that a lot of farmers have. That's,
you kind of got to overcome that. Otherwise, like I said, you have one life. You don't have to
work yourself to death. You don't have to work hard. You have to work smarter. You really do.
And if you want to be here and you want your farm to be here for your kids or the next generation,
you got to start thinking outside the box. So there is a little bit of method to our madness.
And, you know, we make mistakes too. We've learned, like I said, we are dropping enterprises,
you know, we don't do turkeys anymore. We used to do turkeys, you know, like we used to do laying
hands. We used to have 350 laying hands. We don't have laying hands anymore because they just don't
make sense. You got to run the enterprises that you can grow profitably and sustainably.
For more on building soil health profitably and sustainable business planning,
see the podcast page for Ear to the Ground episode 342 at landstrewitshipproject.org.
If you have comments or suggestions about this podcast, contact Brian DeVore at bdevor
at landstrewitshipproject.org or you can call 612-816-9342. By the way, it helps us greatly
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