2013 Goals Recap....How'd We Do?

Well as this year comes to a close I'd like to take a look at our goals again and see how we did for our 2013 "farming" year.

Dolly loves to play in the snow.

Here is a quick review of those goals from a previous post:

#1  Bless others.  By Sharing experiences and time, making memories with people, and sharing the bounty in various ways.  We'd like to donate to our local food pantry, and to give some of the bounty to family and friends.  We'd also like to incorporate a form of ministry into our efforts: fellowship, discipleship and giving.:)  Value of this goal= Priceless.

#2  Put food in the freezer/pantry at low or no cost.  Pork, chicken, green beans, tomato sauce, diced tomatoes, salsa, pickles, canned pumpkin, ground zucchini, frozen corn, frozen broccoli, plus fresh produce over summer too.  Value of this goal= $1,700+

#3  Earn enough from farm to pay property taxes and home owner's insurance. This would also allow us to maintain our farm deferral status for the property taxes.  Value of this goal= $2,600

#4  Have enough $ in the farm account from all of 2013 farm projects to cover the start-up of 2014 farm projects.  This prevents us from dipping into the normal monthly budget to start up the farm projects.  We will need roughly $900 to start up the meat chickens next year (to cover feed, chick costs etc for the first 1.5 batches) until we can sell some to pay the expenses.  For pigs, we will need approximately $725 to purchase the feed and piglets for the year.  Garden, we'd need $200 to cover supplies, seeds etc.  For the hay, we need minimum of $300 to have the 1st cutting of hay custom cut.  Laying hens we'd need $300+ to cover the cost of the chicks and feed to get them to laying age if we want to go into more egg production with a few more hens next year.  As you can see these projects really add up and put a tremendous strain on the budget as we go along in the spring.  It would be nice to not have that strain on the finances as we are getting started for the year.   Value of this goal= $2,700++.

Let's go through them one by one and see how we did.

#1 Bless others.  We were able to share a lot of garden produce and other farm goodies this year.  We managed to put together only a couple boxes of food for the food pantry, I wish we'd have been more regular with this.  There is so much more we could have done.   We do hope we were able to offer others useful advice, humor, skills, and things they needed.  We enjoyed fellowship with others and sharing in the experiences together.  We were even blessed to hear several of the friends we asked to come care for the animals for us while we were gone were happy to come do chores and get a taste of country life as well.  As hard as it is to ask someone to come here and do chores for us it is nice to hear when they enjoy it!

We did have plenty of pork to supply the meat for Mr Wonderful's sister's wedding reception.  It seemed to be a big hit with the wedding guests and we were happy to do that as our gift to the happy couple.  We ended up with a total of 3 hogs this year to keep for ourselves. I think it was a good thing, it sets us up to be able to be more generous or to feed a work crew some awesome pulled pork when we go to start spring projects around here!

We've really tried to share the bounty that has been provided to us and I think we did accomplish this goal this year, BUT in all honestly I think we could have done SO MUCH MORE.

#2  Put food in the freezer/pantry at low or no cost.  We nailed this one many times over!  Our freezer is so packed, we even bought another large upright freezer and that one is full too!  We put up a lot of food this year from the garden and we were pleased that we were able to draw several tags for hunting which did a lot for the freezer filling process!   Our only regret was not keeping more of those tasty pastured chickens for ourselves.   We kept the 3 hogs, 30 or 40 chickens, 2 large turkeys, about 60 quart bags of frozen broccoli, 10 bags of cauliflower, shredded zucchini, 30+ quarts of green beans (had some left over from last year too), canned corn, frozen strawberries and so much more!  One crop failure we had was tomatoes....we hoped to can all kinds of salsa and diced tomatoes and while the vines were loaded with green tomatoes they never ripened well and the ones we tried to ripen inside didn't taste very good and we never had enough to preserve.  Overall though, it was a great year and we are very blessed in the food department!  

#3  Earn enough from the farm to pay property taxes and home owner's insurance.   We did managed to meet this goal, barely.   Boarding the horses here brings in the bulk of the taxes and the profit from the meat chickens brought in the rest.  I really like that the place is somewhat self supporting at least in some small way.  At least it helps to make some of those unexpected expenses a little less frustrating.

#4  Have enough $ in the farm account from all of 2013 farm projects to cover the start-up of 2014 farm projects.  This one is a little tougher to swallow.  I had grand plans of a nice plump savings account by this time that we'd be able to cruise into spring with.  That has not happened.  While there is some in the farm savings account it won't be enough for most of the goals I had set for this category.  We could say we partially met this goal.  We had several expensive learning curves as we finished out this year....#1 we had to feed the hogs longer than expected (with expensive commercial feeds because we ran out of the cheaper feed sources we had earlier in the summer)....and because I was naive and didn't think to schedule the butcher!  What was I thinking?  Anyway that mistake alone cost us several hundred dollars!  We also had to use some of the farm money just to play catch up from some of the months that we were shelling out serious cash to feed 100+ meat chickens!  We'd ignored some expenses while we focused on getting those birds raised and I needed to replenish some of the sinking funds (earmarked savings categories for things like bulk foods when we go buy several hundred pounds of fruits to can for winter etc).   So while most of the projects did pretty well for themselves this year profit-wise we needed the funds for basic things and we don't have those balances in the farm account where we hoped to have them...however we do have a nice full pantry so I say it was worth it!

We have to look at our goals and finances for 2014 and decide how to move forward.  Will we charge a deposit when we take orders for meat chickens?  Will we do a deposit and monthly payment system for the hogs we raise so there won't be so much longer term upfront costs to raising them (this idea might make it easier for people to purchase a whole hog too)?  Will we use some of the tax returns to buy feed and order chicks?  These are all things we will need to decide.  I think there are all kinds of ways to accomplish our goals and provide these products to those who want them.

Miss Maggie dog and Dolly in the background.

It has been an amazingly blessed year.  In looking back, I do admit we took on a little too much for one year.  When we made many of these goals we didn't know that Mr. Wonderful would be working away from home during the work week for 7 months and that our time together and time available to work on projects would be severely limited.  I have to say, I've overdone it some, especially with Mr. Wonderful gone so much.  I find myself in a bit of "recovery" mode these past few months.  Taking a breath to step back from commitments, chores and "busy"ness has been important.  I am going to keep this feeling in mind as we work on a plan for 2014 farm projects for sure!

Thanks to everyone who followed along with us on this adventure this year!  It has been a blast and I can't wait for next year......after a long winter's nap that is.