Four Hard Lessons Learned Starting a Farm from Scratch By Mark Shephard
CANTON, New York: It’s 1:46 in the morning. I can’t sleep. I bought a used stock trailer a few months ago and put four new tires and a new trailer jack on it. Total cost: $4,500. I THOUGHT it was a soundly made purchase. We moved some cattle. We moved some sheep. It had everything I wanted. An inner partition, which works great. A combination sliding and swing door at the rear. An additional door near the front. Perfect.
EXCEPT. I just found out that both axles are rotten and about to fall off. OUCH!
In my sleepless attempt to turn this “sow’s ear into a silk purse” I’m sitting on the couch writing down some of my thoughts and how the hard lessons I’ve been learning are invaluable not only for me, but perhaps for some other dewy eyed newbie to farming who just might read them.
1. Finding Land: There are land owners you can work with and there are land owners who will push all your buttons and make you wish you were dead. My first landowner immediately drove me crazy. She drove me crazy just negotiating the lease. She drove me crazy every time we had a conversation, which with her ALWAYS took at least 45 minutes. But I kept moving ahead because it was during the pandemic and I had just moved to the area to live with my 90 something year old father. She was the only lead I had and the land was CALLING to me.
On the positive side, not wanting to deal with her drove me to find a better situation, which I eventually DID find after two full years of frustration. But then, the livestock guardian dogs caused a ruckus in the new neighborhood. In this case it wasn’t the land owner it was the NEIGHBORS and I had to find another farm fast.
I just knew from the first experience that I did not have the time or energy for fighting that battle. And in a small community you can’t really talk about why you don’t want to work with a landowner. But most people who I dared mention these issues to would nod their heads and say, “Oh yes I know her, and I totally get it.”
The Lesson: Eventually, if you keep looking and talking to enough people, you will find sane, easy to work with folks who genuinely want you on their land. And all of the above trials led me to a great collaboration with a regenerative orchardist (CantonApples.com) who I wrote about in October, 2024. The right landowner situation IS possible. It’s just not guaranteed. Keep at it.
2. Pigs Require Inputs: Sows eat more than their piglets are worth and sometimes they eat their piglets (or sit on them). In 2020, I started out on my home three acres with pigs. Just three of them. All females. One of them liked to have her tummy rubbed. I named her Rub-a-Tummy. BIG mistake. And of course I decided to keep her to breed her. Eventually I kept three gilts thinking I could raise my own piglets (and save $100 per). I thought that by selling the piglets of these girls, it would more than pay for their keep. Well one of them didn’t have any piglets. Sweet Rub-a-Tummy sat on most of hers. But I ended up selling the piglets I did raise for $150 each, because they were pretty big by the time I realized I was going broke. I made $1,200 on the piglets but when I did the math a year of organic feed for three 600 pound sows plus a couple of boars, who did their job and then went to freezer camp. I can’t force myself to look at the amount of money that cost. Let’s just say it was in the thousands of dollars.
The Lesson: Yes we did eat great pork. And Yes. I did sell some pork. And yes I learned a lot. And Yes. I proved that I could raise pigs in Northern New York state in a brushy forest/former pasture environment without a barn. Yes. I learned why naming and taming a pig has con- sequences that need to be managed emotionally. Yes. I learned how to train them to hot wire and to get onto a stock trailer. And YES! I learned that I will BUY three piglets from someone else, use them for specific landscaping and fertilizing purposes and then enroll them in FREEZER CAMP.
3. Saint Croix Sheep: As a student of Greg Judy I was primed to be positive about the St. Croix hair sheep breed. They may be parasite resistant but the ones I found locally and ended up buying were way too small. I had no idea how small a sheep carcass could be. I did all my numbers on a theoretical 50 pound carcass. And a year later when I harvested them the reality was more like 25 pounds. The butcher charges the same amount to slaughter a sheep as to slaughter a pig or a steer. To be fair to the St. Croix breed, the person I got them from basically did zero grazing or breeding management. So they may have been undersized. They may have been seriously in-bred. They may have had any number of growth inhibiting diseases.
The Lesson: But the hard lesson there was that I needed sheep who were big enough to have at least a 50 pound hanging weight. Katahdins fit that bill and so that’s the other lesson from that one. But the hanging weight is just one of the challenges. You also want animals that don’t need help giving birth, that don’t need their hooves trimmed a lot and on and on, so many lessons! So little time. Your assignment: Read Abram Bowerman’s book, The Practical
Shepherd.
4. Stock Trailers: Stock trailers rot from underneath. This article is a result as I mentioned above of discovering that my used stock trailer would cost over $10,000 to fix. Sometimes it pays to buy new. That’s one possible lesson. Sometimes you have to make dumb mistakes so you really learn a hard lesson you need to learn. We call it “tuition.” It NEVER occurred to me to look underneath the trailer! It had all the features that other stock trailers I’d been borrowing did NOT have. It had a dividing door! It had a sliding door! It had a front escape door! I did not notice the tires were rotten. I did not notice that it had no jack. I just saw what I wanted to see.
The Lesson: Or, perhaps the better lesson is that no matter what we attempt in life, there will be hard lessons. This stock trailer may make a great hunting or bird watching blind. Or a storage shed. Or until the axles finally finish falling off, a semi-moveable shelter for the sheep or pigs. So for now it’s back to borrowing other people’s stock trailers.
Mark Shepard is a regenerative farmer, minister and musician in northern New York state’s St. Lawrence River Valley. He has been putting his lifelong dream of farming into action since 2020. Check out his YouTube channel https://www.you tube.com/@healingpasturesfarm89 or Website: HealingPastures.org Email: HealingPasturesFarm@ gmail.com
