Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
A Profitable Farm Business is a Sustainable Farm Business - Part 2
852 Plays2 years ago
In this episode, we sit down with Tom Bennett of Bennett Farms (MI) to discuss the importance of driving profits to build a sustainable business model. Tom shares why Farm profitability should be the main focus of Farmers looking to scale operations.
This is the second episode in a two-part conversation with Tom. Bennett Farms is a pastured-poultry Farm located in Edwardsburg, MI. Tom serves thousands of customers in Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Direct Farm Podcast
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to the Direct Farm podcast, the go to resource for farms across the US looking to grow and manage their business.
Weekly Farming Tips
00:00:10
Speaker
Tune in weekly to hear tips and tactics from our most successful farmers on how to increase sales, access more customers and save time and money. We'll also speak with industry experts, business leaders and partners to share the latest farm business trends selling direct to market.
00:00:27
Speaker
Hey everyone,
Interview with Tom - Part 2
00:00:28
Speaker
I just wanted to jump in before we get started with the interview here with Tom and let you know that this is actually part two of our interview with Tom. If you want to hear part one, you can listen to last week's episode where we kind of lay the groundwork and start diving into all these topics that we're going to continue talking about in part two. So if you want to go back and listen to that one first, if you've already listened to the first one, then without further ado, here is part two.
Tom's Learning Resources
00:00:50
Speaker
I know you talked about audiobooks being one of your big forms of learning for other people. What are some of the ways that other farmers can dive in and grow this part of their knowledge base? Yeah. I mean, the reason I'm where I'm at now with the audio books is because I basically ran out of
00:01:06
Speaker
everything else to listen to on the internet. I went through, I listened to every single podcast in the world that had anything to do with farming. When I was early on, when I still had a day job, and before I even started farming, I was consuming everything I could get my hands on. But it was all farm-directed stuff. I wasn't really thinking about the business stuff as much. I knew that I had to be proper, like you said, but there was so much farm stuff to still learn from.
00:01:30
Speaker
Joe Salatin stuff, you know, podcast, like your guys is which wasn't around when I was started, but I would have listened to every single direct farm podcast there was if I was me four years, four or five years ago. So I just, I consumed everything else there was on the worldwide web to listen to. And then I found Audible and ran out of anything that had farming in its name. And now I just great courses series or like college lectures from like professors at college, 27 hours long.
00:01:59
Speaker
most of them, you get your money's worth. Your one book credit that you use, you get 27 hours of Cambridge quality business courses. You can't beat that. It's good value. Every now and then, I'll light it up with something fun. Right now, I'm listening to something on the history of Chicago from
00:02:16
Speaker
It's founding until present day. And there's so much information there that's just fascinating because we do markets in Chicago every weekend. And it's interesting to me, but also now I know more about the culture and the history of the city. So maybe that'll help me at some point have an intelligent conversation with a customer at a Chicago farmers market. Oh yeah, at Pullman Street. Did you know? Yeah.
Book Recommendation: 'The Meat Racket'
00:02:37
Speaker
Do you have, and I know you mentioned one marketing book earlier. Are there any other kind of books that you would recommend maybe a good starting points for people to look into?
00:02:46
Speaker
Yeah. Besides the profits first for marketing, it's not really going to help anyone with like regenerative farming, but just from a business standpoint and like learning about growth, the meat racket by Christopher Leonard, which is more to do with the growth of Tyson and Cargill and Purdue and all of them and like how they came from being just a backyard farm, the conglomerates that rule the world of meat. It's a very fascinating listen. And even though a lot of us that are
00:03:16
Speaker
selling direct to consumer aren't fans of them. It's still an interesting read because even if you hate those companies for whatever reason, it's still good to know how they got to where they are and things. That was a very good book too. The Meat Racket, very interesting. Listen, and it's inspirational. Don Tyson, how he came from nothing, just like dirt road farmer. He had the half a bale of hay and a used pickup truck when he left home and
00:03:45
Speaker
built the, one of the biggest meat corporations in the world. He started out raising chickens in his backyard. And so it's a pretty cool story to listen to. You'll gain some insights from it.
Balancing Business and Farming Education
00:03:56
Speaker
Yeah. I know you mentioned this earlier. You said almost like a one-to-one ratio on business books to farming books. It's not heavier, if not a heavier ratio, more business than farming. Yeah.
00:04:05
Speaker
Yeah. So that was my question is how much time should farmers be dedicated to learning the business side of things? How much effort and time should they be putting into that? I don't know how you want to break that out, but, and I know it can get great because you were saying too, if you listen to this stuff while you're doing deliveries. So this time doesn't necessarily have to be exclusive to just sitting down and learning, but.
00:04:25
Speaker
How much time people should do. If your farm is suffering and like your animals aren't doing well, then obviously you need to focus on that and you can shift. It doesn't have to be a hard and fast, like number every week. So there's some, like today I'll probably spend only two hours taking care of animals and chores. That's it. Like two hours. And then, but I'm going to spend eight hours in my office right here doing computer work. Editing, already edited my website today, added another link to a news article that was published about us.
00:04:53
Speaker
scheduling stuff for next week. So I probably spend at least two thirds to three quarters of my time on business stuff. And during the summer, it's probably 50 50, because we got a lot more production going on in the summer. But yeah, I don't know, whatever suffering the most, like focus on that day, but don't forget about the business stuff. And don't ever get complacent. I remember when I was starting out. Right. And so when I was trying to make this a thing, like
00:05:19
Speaker
as a living. I would feel like I did a lot of stuff. I got my website up or I got this done or I accomplished this and I think some people would coast on their accomplishments for a little bit. I got this done. I can relax now. Don't ever relax. Keep it
00:05:36
Speaker
full till all the time, like your business depends on it and you'll be all right. It's when you're like, oh, okay, I've done enough. I don't need to, I've got all my websites out, my online store. Okay. I can just do nothing. Like now I can just play in the dirt. Like always stay on top of it. You either moving forward or you're moving backwards. Like there is no standing still. So if you're not making progress every day, you're losing ground. One thing that would drive me to
00:06:01
Speaker
early on when I was trying to build a brand and trying to make a farm, I would see these other farmers on Instagram that were killing it. They were doing it. They were doing what I wanted to do. It was a Sunday and I'm inside. Maybe I just got up and I was checking my phone and I would see these other guys doing it and it was like, man, I'm never going to. But it fired me up to be better. I want to be that good too. You got to have a little bit of competitive spirit maybe.
00:06:25
Speaker
Yeah, just don't ever coast on your laurels and relax. Just keep getting better every day. Also, one thing I want to add into this podcast is sometimes I hear farmers say when they're like, wow, you do 14 farmer's markets a week, but we can't do that because it just doesn't make sense for us to pay an employee to go to our farmer's market booth because it does it financially. We can't do that. It has to be me or my husband. If you can't pay someone to run your booth for you,
00:06:52
Speaker
You need to fix what you're doing because that means you can't afford to pay yourself to do it either. And that means you're working for free. That's a clear red flag. If you can't scale what you're doing, what you're doing is broke. Only things that function properly are scalable, like from an income standpoint. So you're like, Oh, we can only do some markets because it's just me and my husband and we can't afford to hire someone else because there's not enough money in it. Then you need to figure out how to get more money in it.
00:07:19
Speaker
Because you and your husband can't do it either. If you can't pay somebody to do it, or you shouldn't be, unless you're just retired and this is your hobby.
Social Media and Scalability
00:07:26
Speaker
You want to get out and see people on Sundays, which I see a lot of that, but just keep that in mind. It needs to be, if it's truly working, it should be able to scale. Yeah. That's a really great point. And I like too, what you said about accomplishing things and then being like, oh, it's done. Cause I think a lot of times with getting farms online, we see that a lot. That is the big hurdle. And so I got my farm store set up. I got my website set up.
00:07:49
Speaker
I'm good now, but that's, that's where the work starts. Now you're online. Now you got to work twice, three times as hard to start advertising and against the whole online world. Yeah. It's and some farms don't want to do that. I got a call. So there's.
00:08:05
Speaker
several farms at the farmer's markets I've met that utilize Barnadore and it's funny because I'll spend my time like when it's slow to farmer's market like helping the other farmers that are on Barnadore and so I'm like anyways I had one lady who's like a social media like marketing person that's wanted to be hired by this other farm that I know for three hours a week to run their online stuff and she called me she was like hey they use Barnadore
00:08:28
Speaker
I know you use it too. Can you tell me about it?" I'm like, look, because he's wanting her to set up his store and do all this stuff. I'm like, he has all those tools available to him. He doesn't need you. He has a Barnadore rep that does that stuff, helps him with that for you. All you're going to do is find out who's Barnadore person is and call them and ask them. I was like, no, he needs to learn how to do this himself because
00:08:49
Speaker
He has to update his store. If you do it for him, he's never going to learn and then he can't add a product or things like that. So yes, you do need to do that and figure out how to do it. If it's not your thing, say you're maybe you have a daughter or an aunt or somebody that works on your farm that can do it full time, but you also don't want to have just one person know everything because then they've got the golden handcuffs on you. If you've got one key employee, that's like your entire like
00:09:19
Speaker
internet knowledge is all with that person. You are screwed if something happens and they leave, like you'll be starting over. So make sure that everyone knows, or at least you do what's going on. Yeah. I forget what the original question was. Oh.
00:09:32
Speaker
Yeah, you got it. You're never done. Always keep. I set a goal for myself a month ago. You were asking me before the podcast started, you're like, Hey, your social media has been doing good. We love your whatever, a couple of videos. And I was like, yeah, like we doubled our followers in a couple of weeks. And the whole reason that's happening was because I was in my bedroom one day and I said to my wife, as I was walking out, I was like, you know what I want to do? Like just for kicks. I was like, I want to see if I can get to 10,000 followers on Instagram.
00:09:57
Speaker
12 months from today like just to see if I can do it not because I care because I like just as a goal like challenge to myself I was like and so that's why we double our followers that fast and that's why I've been posting like more entertaining content and stuff like that and it's just a side thing that I can just a personal goal and see if I can do it so follow to see if like that happens I'll include your handle at the end definitely I was curious to like is
00:10:27
Speaker
how much of a plan social media could be a little different in terms of that there is almost
Profitability and Farm Values
00:10:32
Speaker
like the wild west where you just need to get things out but when you decide to make a goal like that i think what's really important is having that plan first did you come up with any plan for social media in terms of oh we want to start doing this kind of stuff or we want to start posting this much or if not social is there another example of that with your farm where you've put that plan together to accomplish the goal not just said the goal and
00:10:54
Speaker
Cause I think sometimes people can put that goal out there, but then there's not a real path to reaching or accomplishing it. Yeah. No, I probably to my detriment, I always set the goals and then I figure out how to make it happen afterwards. At first I did the math when I said it and I'm like, crap, I've got to get 35 new followers a day or something. And then I started making some reels and I started getting a hundred and something followers a day new ones. I'm like, Oh, maybe this is possible. But with social media, my goal there.
00:11:24
Speaker
is more brand building and just fun and light. Like I'm not trying to sell stuff on Instagram. Instagram's like niggas. Most of our followers are regional and local to us probably. I'm just trying to have fun on there and just that people want to consume. I'm not like
00:11:39
Speaker
trying to sell people stuff and if you are using it as more of a sales avenue which is fine keep in mind you should do three maybe three posts that are fun not trying to sell people on stuff and then one post it's a sell post you're just constant buy our meat bundle oh this is on sale or buy this click link to follow like people are gonna tune you out like they don't want to be sold to all the time what are you giving them
00:12:03
Speaker
For them following you, you have to give them some entertainment or some knowledge or something. Some farms come at it from, they're more of an educator and they want to educate people. That's cool. That works. I'm just more of not so much in educating. I just make the Instagram stuff fun.
00:12:17
Speaker
Yeah. And it is. It's Bennett Farms, Michigan on Instagram. If you guys want to check them out, there is some really fun stuff on there. One of the other things I wanted to ask you about, because like you just said, a lot of your social media content is just focusing on the fun side of things and giving people, giving them stuff to entertain them. And we've talked so much about like the numbers and the business side of things, but
00:12:36
Speaker
At the end of the day, you are running a regenerative sustainable farm. You're rotating your birds daily, you're rotating your hogs, I think you said every couple of weeks, and your non-GMO foods. It's really
Scalability of Regenerative Agriculture
00:12:48
Speaker
a great farm that you are running and it's having a really great impact on your land. How do you balance that? Because that is, I think, a thing people worry about is I don't want to be just worrying about profitability and end up with a farm that goes against their moral values. But making sure that you can run a sustainable farm
00:13:06
Speaker
if you're poor you're gonna have a sustainable farm because you won't be able to afford the stuff to do it the bad way basically if you're starting out from nothing we're all going to start out as sustainable farms because we don't have confinement buildings and things like that to me there's never been any temptation as far as like to switch over to a conventional method there's no incentives in it it's like what do i want to take on half million dollar loans for
00:13:30
Speaker
to sell commodity pork. That's one of the things. Why do people buy for me and not from the grocery store? Because it's a higher quality product. If I lost that, I would lose my customer base. They're not buying for me because I'm the cheapest because I'm not. Everything they're buying for me is more expensive than they could get at other places. But you can. It's funny, I just got off an interview with a college graduate student from, I think it was Western Michigan or Michigan University. She's doing, I think, like a thesis paper on regenerative agriculture and its place in
00:14:01
Speaker
like the future economy. And that was one of the things we were talking about. Is regenerative ag scalable? And yeah, it is scalable. You could feed everyone in the country through regenerative practices. The problem is that most people aren't willing to pay for it because it's always going to cost a little more. The processing cost, things like that, it's going to be McDonald's is never going to sell a 99 cent pasture-raised chicken sandwich. And there's some people that can only afford that with 99 cent sandwiches.
00:14:29
Speaker
it's yeah we stay true to who we are because it's what we do it's what we believe in and there's we would have to build an entirely different business if we did it differently so yeah all our branding and everything would be out the window so
00:14:42
Speaker
Yeah. Scale is not bad. Like it's not evil. And I'm still small. 300 hogs a year, six to 10,000 chickens a year, a few hundred turkeys. Like that's not big by anyone's standards. But you do have to get to a point to where here's basically how
Sustainability and Profit Goals
00:15:00
Speaker
it works. Okay. You're never going to be able to make a living. So I tell people the magic number to get to is a half million a year.
00:15:07
Speaker
At a half million dollars in sales a year, just revenue, you can support a family off that, like comfortably, as well as you could getting a hundred thousand dollar a year job off firm. Like you'll live well, but you need to get to at least that skill because once you get to a certain size,
00:15:24
Speaker
Your personal expenses in your life, those become a rounding error. Imagine if, even if you were getting to keep so many cents per dollar, the more dollars you make, the more cents per dollar you get to keep. So at some point you've got to get to a certain size and then your life expenses become a joke. My mortgage is like 15, 1600 bucks a month from my house that we had built on the farm. That's laughable. I spend a thousand dollars a week on milk, like, or that we, from how much country dairy that we resell, like,
00:15:53
Speaker
your life expenses become a joke because it's so insignificant once you reach a certain volume of sales through your farm. So you do want to grow, but you want to grow profitably. Yeah.
00:16:07
Speaker
as a final wrap up, what would be some of your advice, whether it's a new farmer or a beginning farmer, in kind of diving into this or maybe fine tuning some of this for their business, making sure that things are sustainable, that if they have a regenerative farm, that farm will be around long enough for their practices to actually make an impact. I think the key to all of this is that
00:16:27
Speaker
Like you said at the start, you can have a sustainable farm that's good for the earth, but if your farm is only in business three years, then your impact on the earth has only lasted three years. And you may have actually done more damage that way, because while you're in business for those three years, just losing money on every single sale you make, you're screwing another farmer that's actually making money on the sales he makes for three. Like you're flooding the market with another farm that's not going to be around next year, that's selling their ground sausage for way less than they should.
00:16:55
Speaker
and keeping sales from a farmer that will be here for 50 years. So you're almost like, if you're gonna do it, do it for real. Don't sell yourself short. You might run sales or specials to maybe try and gain some market share. But yeah, one of the things I would say that would probably help the most is when you start out and you're doing this as a hobby farm, as a side hustle, start out doing bulk animals, whatever, you need to keep growing until the point
00:17:24
Speaker
to where you're going to break because you can't do it all anymore. When you get to the point to where you're about to have a mental breakdown because you cannot work your off-farm job and continue to do the farming that you're doing because you've reached a point in sales that you're farming by headlamp every night in the dark, that's when it's time to either quit your day job
Transitioning to Full-Time Farming
00:17:47
Speaker
or scale back on the farming because you can't go like that forever. I took that as long as I could before I jumped into farming full time. And it probably shaved a couple of years off my life at the end. It was rough. It was so rough. It wasn't good on your marriage. You will all find this, you know, that this transition is going to be hard on your marriage, on your lifestyle. Try and do as much as you can. But once you reach that point and make that jump, the first year is a little scary.
00:18:15
Speaker
Cause you wake up. Oh my God. Like the only income I have is from the farm. Then after a while you realize those sales are always, it just keeps getting better. So you're scary, but it gets better. So yeah, do both until you can't do them anymore. And then make the leap.
00:18:32
Speaker
Don't quit your off-farm job too early because you'll just end up back with a job to support you. Or maybe you don't want to quit your off-farm job. Some people are just happy farming down the side. It's just something to do and sell bulk animals. And that's great too. Get a lot of the infrastructure stuff done out of the way while you still do have a steady job. So that way your first year in farming, you're not having to put in $10,000 worth of fences and buy $5,000 worth of chicken crates and all these things. Try and do those in your early years if this is the direction you're going. That's what I would recommend.
00:19:02
Speaker
Yeah. Awesome. Thanks so much, Tom. What would you say is next? I've
Expansion Plans for Bennett Farms
00:19:06
Speaker
been at farms. I know you, before we started recording, you were saying it's a little, going into a little bit, hopefully quieter time of year, but what's heading at the farm? Oh yeah. So we're staying busy. I actually still have chickens on pasture right now and I will have until December 6th. So I know I told you in the beginning, Mother's Day through Halloween, but we spoke out of all of our chickens so fast throughout the summer.
00:19:25
Speaker
because of some new markets and we don't like selling out is a, like a product is not a good word around here. Like we don't want that to happen. I know a lot of farmers like sold out. No, that's bad. That was, that means you failed to plan properly on like your forecast and sales. That's a, that's lost opportunity when you're sold out. So we ended up, I ended up squeezing in another batch of 800 birds.
00:19:49
Speaker
And it was cold last week. It was rough, but we made it through and I only got a week left. So anyways, I still got chickens out here to take care of. But next year we're going to go increase chickens, increase turkeys. Pigs will probably stay the same, maybe a little more, maybe 50 more than before. But yeah, we want to keep growing and we're going to take on some more markets, add more. People ask me all the time, they're like, what's your end goal? Like, where's this going? Like, where are you trying to take this? Enough, enough.
00:20:19
Speaker
And honestly, I think what I'm trying to do right now is for the future of my farm, I want to grow our sales in this tri-state area, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, as high as I can, multi-millions a year in direct sales in this area. And once I've tapped that out or I've got this on autopilot, I'm going to leave.
00:20:41
Speaker
either my eldest daughter or a very capable farm manager here and I'm going to go to Tennessee or another location that has
00:20:51
Speaker
metropolitan areas, but maybe there's a spot for me to fit in and build another farm. Doing exactly what I did here, I'm going to do it somewhere south 10 hours. So then I can even ferro piglets and warmer weather in the winter, like in that three state region. So it's, I would like to start another farm within five years. Maybe that's my plan. Once I figure out that's after beef and
00:21:17
Speaker
after we completely dominate this footprint, but seems like a good idea to me. Yeah, does to me too. Awesome. Tom, thank you so much, especially after we talked about how valuable time is for farmers. I appreciate you taking the time to come on here and talk with us. Yeah, no problem. Thank you guys. I want
Closing Remarks and Resources
00:21:34
Speaker
to extend my thanks to Tom for joining us on this week's podcast episode. Here at Barnadore, we're humbled to support thousands of farms across the country, including Bennett Farms.
00:21:42
Speaker
If you would like to connect with Tom and other farm advisors, you can attend those Barnadore Connect sessions that we mentioned. You can register for those weekly sessions at Barnadore.com. And for more information on Bennett Farms, you can follow them on their Instagram at Bennett Farms, Michigan. Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next week.
00:22:03
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in. For more free farm resources, tips, and tactics that are most successful farms use to grow and manage their business, visit barnadore.com slash resources. Also don't forget to subscribe to the direct farm podcast to automatically download our weekly episodes. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.