My husband and I milked 30 cows.
We shipped milk to Organic Valley.
We've been farming nine years or so, and we started off renting this farm seven years
ago.
We just bought it in April.
Brooke and I started laughing child to farm in 2007.
We had the opportunity to move to Pallet here and buy this farm, and at about that
same time, we really came across the idea of growing sweet potatoes.
So for the past, this will be our fifth year growing sweet potatoes for the wholesale market.
We dairy farmed down in Bradford, and then we moved up here to Hardwick in 79 with our
dairy herd, and in 86 we sold the dairy herd, and all along, we'd always been raising whole
steamed beef on the side and a couple of pigs for the family.
Then when Ben graduated after college, he decided to increase our pork production.
So this August, I will have been here for 15 years, and Melanie's been with me for the
last nine.
This is our tenth season, milking organic cows here on the farm.
We started sort of messing around with beef, and bringing the farm back to life.
It's been a process of revitalizing an old dairy farm, and an exciting one at that.
We were kind of running through different business ideas.
When we came across sweet potatoes, we thought it could work, but we felt like that business
part of it.
We weren't sure about it, so we looked for help outside.
We got in touch with VHCB.
Part of what we did was trying to figure out where, how we could support two families,
because Ben is married now, and he wants to be part of this.
What started as an advanced hobby and grew into a business, subsidized through some other
businesses, fence building, and photography on my wife's side of things, continued to
grow to the point where we needed some assistance.
I think the most helpful thing about it was for Joe to be able to have a time and a place
to flesh out some of his own ideas, and to kind of get his mind going, and to have support
to do that.
It really had exceeded our expectations.
I mean, we had like, we thought we had kind of business plan, because we'd written about
three or four business plans, but there was all this accounting stuff that we didn't know,
the incorporation of our business, and then also like decision making, like it really
helped us to be able to figure out how to make decisions that like had long-term payoffs.
So we kind of, we kind of knew like the day-to-day decision making, but those like, where to
invest money, that was probably the most valuable part of things for us.
We now know what it costs to grow an animal, produce an animal, and get it to market, and
I think we'd still be floundering around, guessing if we hadn't done the farm viability
program.
Yeah, spreadsheets have become central to our life.
I've got spreadsheets for days of production.
Some stays away from them, but Ben and I are like, okay.
