Ask your Rancher Part 2
Question: How much did it cost you to start the ranch?
Our Answer: This is a hard question to answer, not because I don’t want to share, but because it has been a slow accumulation of land/animals/equipment since 2016.
I can tell you it is not cheap! And, our cows have not been the ones to pay the bills, if we didn’t shoe horses we would have never been able to afford the land. This is the sad truth of farming/ranching these days. Our first 4 years with the cows, we spent 2x as much on them as they made us. This is what opened our eyes to the need to change something.
We didn’t start with the idea of raising meat for customers. I honestly never thought much about the US food system and how messed up it really is. The idea to provide meat for customers was to help us make money off the ranch and the longer we are in this business, the more my eyes are opened to the craziness that is the US food system. And how we can help heal it a little and make your food supply more reliable and healthy!
But, I can tell you that to start the meat business was $5,000 in freezers and around $8,000 to raise the first animals and get processed, and $2,000 in shipping materials. And we did things as affordable as we could with used freezers and using the facilities we had available to us. It can get much much more expensive if you aren’t careful!
Our Answer: This is a hard question to answer, not because I don’t want to share, but because it has been a slow accumulation of land/animals/equipment since 2016.
I can tell you it is not cheap! And, our cows have not been the ones to pay the bills, if we didn’t shoe horses we would have never been able to afford the land. This is the sad truth of farming/ranching these days. Our first 4 years with the cows, we spent 2x as much on them as they made us. This is what opened our eyes to the need to change something.
We didn’t start with the idea of raising meat for customers. I honestly never thought much about the US food system and how messed up it really is. The idea to provide meat for customers was to help us make money off the ranch and the longer we are in this business, the more my eyes are opened to the craziness that is the US food system. And how we can help heal it a little and make your food supply more reliable and healthy!
But, I can tell you that to start the meat business was $5,000 in freezers and around $8,000 to raise the first animals and get processed, and $2,000 in shipping materials. And we did things as affordable as we could with used freezers and using the facilities we had available to us. It can get much much more expensive if you aren’t careful!