This morning I woke up feeling warm and fuzzy from all the slow cooker bundle orders that have been coming in. It’s so fun to put together something yummy and have it received in such a warm way. Thank you all!!
Then I opened my email and saw this from Susanne: “I am always shocked at the prices . Living in the USA and Europe the elevated for profit USA prices are just obscene. I was already shocked at the prices you charge staying at your airbnb and wanted to end your emails . Now I’m done . Please take me off your email subscription. I also do not need to hear excuses or reasons.”
My first thought was, “Profit, are you out of your mind?” If I wasn’t so caught off guard and honestly offended by this email I would have found the whole thing hilarious. We don’t make a profit from our meat sales yet. We charge $89/night for our yurt and so many people thank us for creating an affordable and beautiful retreat.
Despite what you say, Susanne, I think you do need to hear some excuses and reasons. So here goes.
Calling someone ignorant is often used as an insult but ignorance just means, “lack of knowledge or understanding.” It’s not an inherently bad thing. Susanne is clearly ignorant of the realities of raising food well. What’s sad is that she took her ignorance and used it to be unkind.
Until I became pregnant with Hazel, I have worked almost every single day of the past nine years. Holidays, weekends, missed social interactions. Cold, hot, rainy, snowy, windy weather. I’ve also paid myself a salary for about one year of those nine years. It was during Covid when business was booming and we had no land costs thanks to an extremely generous landlord. I also hired a part time employee and had weekends off for three months that year. It was freaking glorious.
Ben has never received a paycheck from the farm. We are on Medicaid and receive SNAP benefits from the government. Not because we don’t work. We work every day of the year. For the first 3.5 years of owning this farm we lived in a camper through Vermont winters in order to rent our house on Airbnb so we could afford the mortgage, property taxes, operating loan, and insurance that totals about $5,000/month. The camper didn’t have running water in the winter and never had a shower in it.
We started a house cleaning business for a year to bridge the financial gap when we first moved to Vermont and Ben moonlights as website technical support contractor for his old boss to make our ends meet. Instead of going to things like vacation or a car with working AC, it has gone to things like our hay bills. We have two vehicles that are both over 20 years old. Our farm truck has 300,000 miles on it. I’m in a good place emotionally now that we live in a real house but damn I can’t tell you how many times I told Ben I wanted to sell this farm when I was pregnant, sick, and waking up in a 45 degree camper.
On paper it costs us $4,500 to raise a steer to butcher. That includes feeding his Mom for a year, labor to move the cows to fresh grass every day in the summer, bedding for the barn in the winter, certified organic hay, tractor and truck costs, mineral and kelp meal supplements, and slaughter fees. That’s with Airbnb covering the bulk of the mortgage, etc costs above. We could do what many farms do and buy 2 year old steers, graze them for the summer, and sell them as our beef. But ethically that doesn’t work for us. We think it matters that they are born here and live in the same family unit for their whole lives. We owe that to these animals that will become our food.
We sell a butchered steer for about $6,000 and we sell 12-15 steers per year as meat. We would be making a decent profit if things always went according to paper. But in three of the past four years we experienced either a drought or extreme rain and flooding. One year one of our Moms rejected her calf and it died. Two calves have been stillborn. Once a steer mysteriously died just a few months before he was going to slaughter. We fed about $4,000 straight to the coyotes that day. Things rarely go according to the spreadsheet. So the small profit we would have made becomes smaller or nonexistent. It’s not only a financial loss. We carry the emotional weight of these deaths. This summer one of our ewes got an infection from eating something sharp. Despite multiple vet visits and hours trying to save her, it got worse and worse and she died. We had to bring her body to the coyotes. We had to listen to her lambs bleating for days trying to find her. My eyes are filling with years just writing about this day.
Despite these hardships. The financial ones. The emotional ones. The physical ones. Despite them all, there is nothing else we could do that would bring our lives so much meaning. We are literally regenerating the earth. We are caring for wildlife. We are raising our animals in the absolute best possible way that results in meat that nourishes body, soil, and soul. While industrial food poisons the earth, abuses the animals that become our food, and sickens the people eating it, it is a gift to fill each order knowing that the food we raise is making the earth healthier and the humans eating it healthier. When you purchase the meat we raise, you are helping us do all these things. It’s an investment. An investment in your health, and an investment in the health of future generations of humans and animals that will come after us.
It’s ok to be ignorant. It’s ok if you don’t value these things that we value. I certainly am not going to waste my life trying to convince everyone that the earth is important and so is the quality of life of our animals. But it is not ok to use your ignorance to be unkind. You’re done Susanne, and I will gladly see you go. Part of me doesn’t want to be unkind and part of me wants to tell you to stick it where the sun don’t shine. But I won’t because maybe you’re having a bad day and we all need a little more love in our days. Although you say you don’t need to hear excuses, I think it’s important that more people understand the realities that small farms face.
We don’t do this for a profit. We do this for love. Love for you, love for the earth, love for the animals. And that’s where I’ll leave it. If you’re still reading, thanks for being here.
Love as always from the hills of Vermont,
Katie
And if you’re like to support our mission and eat the best beef and lamb available, click here to order!