How to Start $350K/Year Cow Farm Business

We have probably 800 acres of pasture. $3,900 out the door right now for a whole beef. Our check was 16 cents for 2,000 pounds. People were waiting a whole year for beef from us. I'm Taylor Eaton and I am Steve Oswalt's daughter. I work at Oswalt Family Farms. I've been here for 11 years. I'm managing the store as kind of a new role the last like year or two. And then Steve is the owner with Scott and Bonnie, his brother and mother. Emily Foster, my cousin, she's here as the sheep herd manager and just helping out where she can. We both have kids, so we're both kind of, we share the time and try our best to be here helping. We offer beef and lamb that's all born and raised here on our farm in Vicksburg. We offer pork from Bailey's Meats and then chicken from Miller Poultry. So as far as the beef goes, we offer bulk and by the cut. So we sell all the different steaks and roasts and ground beef and all that by the cut. We also offer eighths, quarters, half and whole beef. I have two options with those. We offer a standard cut and then a custom cut. Same price per pound for both options. And that's just, you know, we have standard cuts on hand all, you know, all the time in our walk-in freezer. Just so that someone can stop in and walk away with an eighth or a quarter today if they wanted. And then we offer the custom cut for the customers that just aren't super thrilled with the way we get it cut. You know, they want a thicker steak or more ground beef. So we're really flexible as far as that goes. We take animals in about twice a month. So we always have availability. So our customers are very local. We do get, I mean, I get customers that drive two to three hours from, I mean, they come from Detroit, Holland, Grand Rapids, Indiana. So, I mean, we have customers all over really, but predominantly this local area, you know, Vicksburg, Menden, Schoolcraft. Vicksburg is definitely our biggest customer base. We do. Every year we sell, I don't even know how many, but we sell cattle, calves every year, probably around a hundred. From start to finish. You know, obviously they're born out on pasture. They're raised by mom until weaning in the fall, November, October, November-ish. We bring them in and then they're barned until they're about 18 months old. And that's when we start to process, you know, we don't want to do it too soon because then they're not going to be marbled like we want. We want a well-finished, well-marbled, good product. We're not producing lean meat by any means. We are not grass-fed. There's a lot of that that people ask, you know, we're not grass-fed, we're grain-fed. And that is just, not only is it the opportunity that we have with all the corn seed facilities around us. Also, it's just a preference that we have with flavor. It gives it that buttery, well-marbled, I mean, just the fat. It gives it flavor and it's great and we won't ever change it. So we'll never go to grass-fed. So, not that I'm knocking it. I don't want to sound like I'm dogging the grass-fed operations because I mean, to each their own. But this is our preference. It's what our customers like. So at 18 months, we process 18, anywhere from like 18 to 20 months or so. That's kind of our sweet spot. We process it. It goes to Byron Center to be cut on vacuum-sealed packaging. They rail that back to us. So we don't even have to go pick it up anymore. They just bring it straight to our farm. We put it in our freezer and we sell it. So yeah, it's a 18 to 20-month process from start to finish. So we raise Angus cattle and these are our replacement heifers from our herd. We retain our own heifers. We'll turn bulls in in July on heifers. We run about 300 cows in about four different groups. Our goal is to keep producing quality and sell it all through our store. We move about 100 of our calves eventually through the store a year. That's a good start towards getting vertical with our production. Our farm was established in 1893. So I'm fourth generation. Taylor is fifth generation. Pretty much family operation. Yeah, these are probably a thousand pounds right now. And then what's a heifer? Heifer is the female. Hasn't had a calf yet. Okay. Once they have a calf, they're a cow. Okay. Yeah, they're not purebreds. The tag is about our only reference on the cattle. We buy EPD, bulls, and rams. So we get expected traits out of those lines. So we want calm cattle, which these are very calm. Good mothers, good udders, good feet. And temperament means a lot. We just can't have cattle that are wild. Do they go out and graze and stuff like that? Well, the cows stay out year-round. We're calving right now. It's end of April. And they'll stay with their mothers up until October, November. And then we wean them and we bring them back into the barns where they'll stay. And the cows always are on grass. So we have to have equipment to feed because we feed out on pastures and in bunks. So we have two setups like this so we can get chores done in a timely manner. Usually we're done by 10, 11 o'clock feeding. And then we go check calving and lambing and fencing, whatever else needs to be done. So why are those ones inside and not in the field? Well, we like to get them up to a certain age before we put them out on grass. So those ones are still young? Yep. Okay. Yeah, they're almost a year old. Okay. And then they start having the babies after that, like after a year old then? Yeah, they'll have babies when they're two years old. And then which do the cows become for me or do the bulls become? Well, the bulls, they'll be steers. They'll be bulls, but we'll, you know, band and they'll be, and heifers too. How many times do they calve? Like, is it one and done or is it multiple times? Well, we'll have cows that are 10 to 12 years old that have been calving. Okay, like really good moms or something? Yeah, well, they have to carry a calf. So, and they have to breed. And we really, with our bull quality and our cows, we have really good conception rates. We're up over, this year was 90 some percent conception rates. Wow, that's awesome. So this is our cattle feed here. It's a by-product of the seed corn companies. It's husks that they like to protect that seed in a husk when they bring it to the plant. They strip the plant off on husking beds and that's what gets brought out. It's pretty coarse. What's that pile over there? That's corn silage. That's our own. We'll plant enough acres to feed steers and finish animals out. The ewes need a higher quality feed. So that's part of what the ewes will get along with haylage and grains. How many times are they fed per day? Once a day. You know, we try and be consistent on timing on feeding. We like them to clean up everything in front of them. Do they just like graze that or do they kind of eat once a day? No, they'll, you know, lay down for a while once they've eaten. Go get some water, minerals, and they'll, whenever they feel like we do, we eat multiple times. So with lamb, people don't love the lamb process just because to be considered lamb, you have to butcher the animal under a year old. So from start to finish, it's really quick. They grow fast. It's just the way that they are, you know, they grow really fast. So they're born in the barn, raised on mom for 50 or so days. That's when we wean them. So it's a quick process, you know, I mean, they're a couple months with mom and then they're fed in the barn for another, it depends. So our light market, we take our sheep to auction typically. And it's a great market. I mean, we make good money on it. They have a good value to them. So we tend to ship them off like right after weaning. I mean, 50 to 60 pounds is really typically the market that we try to hit. Just for the dollar amount, it makes the most sense to sell them at that point. But if we're going to feed them out and keep them for locker lamb for the freezer, I would say they are here for another, I don't know, maybe six or seven months before we butcher them. So this is our lambing barn. We'll bring ewes in probably a month ahead of lambing. And we like to shear everything that lambs. That keeps it a lot cleaner. The lambs can get up to get some warmth next to the mothers. A lot easier watching rather than pasture lambing. So these are some fresh lambs here. We like them to have twins. We had a lot of, well, it depends on her genetics and the body condition. But we've had a lot of triplets, this lambing and a lot of quads. How old are these ones? A couple of days, maybe a day. I'm not real sure. So we started with 350 out of this group of lambs. And this is what's left out of the 350. When you first started, did you just start with cows or? You know, in the 70s, we fed cattle and we had a small flock of sheep. We stopped feeding cattle and converted to having cows and cow-calf type operation. That's really what we've been building on. And it's changed through the years. Cattle take a lot of space. So we've converted a lot of what was row crops, corn or soybeans to pastures. We have probably 800 acres of pasture. Most of it we own. We rent some from one of our uncles. That's enough to keep us busy. It's cheaper, a lot of work. We lamb in the spring two different times. One in March, which is what this is. And then again in May. And then we'll lamb again in September, October. And again in November, December. So we're trying to get three lambings out of a ewe in two years. So trying to be more efficient. We only have so many buildings. We couldn't lamb them all at once. How do you protect them? We used to pasture lamb. The last year we did, we lost about 100 lambs to coyotes. So 100 lambs you could start adding on the barns. And that's a pretty big loss. And then sheep are pretty susceptible to internal parasites. Stomach worms. And the lambs don't do very well when they're exposed to the stomach worms. So being in the barn lambing, the lambs stay in the barns. At 50 days we wean. The ewes go back to pastures and the lambs stay in the barns on feed. So we don't expose them to coyotes or parasites. That's really helped. We can sell a lamb at 60 days that weighs 50 pounds. That's whatever the market is wanting. And fortunately they want a small carcass. They want a 60 pound lamb. It really works good. Get a lot less feed into them. Lambing in the fall is kind of not the norm in the sheep industry. So we're lambing when there aren't many flocks that are lambing at that time. So the market's usually good in our fall and winter lambings. How many barns did you have? How many animals did you have in the barn from very first day to day? Well they came here. They grew up. My grandfather, great-grandfather grew up about two miles to the west of us. And in 1893 he bought this section of ground. And it wasn't for livestock production. It wasn't for corn or beans. It was mint and spearmint were the production that was making the money. So they cleared off all the what was a lake of the muck ground and raised spearmint or peppermint until World War II on our farm. They had livestock but it wasn't their focus. They were pretty fortunate. It got them through the depression and up until World War II then labor got short. A blight came through so they had to get out of the mint production and went to row crops pretty much. How much is lamb now worth in terms of retail sales? By the cut is going to be a higher value. We're geared towards bulk purchases. We give discounts the more you buy. So you get a 15 cent discount buying a whole beef from us. So $3.10 a pound on the hanging weight plus processing. It's kind of scary at first when you hear all that. You know it's like well what are you talking about? But we like to sell that way because it's very transparent. You know I give my customer a cut sheet and they can look at it and say okay this is exactly where my money went. There's no questions at all about the process. So I would say for a whole beef right now they're pretty expensive because they're really big right now. So I would say $3,500 to $3,900 out the door right now for a whole beef. It's about 900 pounds, 900-950 pounds on the hanging weight. In your freezer you're probably going to be around 600 pounds or so in your freezer. Do single families buy that? Yep absolutely. Now whole beef isn't as common but that's what we push for is the whole beef sale. We give that discount and we really encourage going in with neighbors and friends and family and splitting it. So in that sense we do get, I mean I get families that take a whole beef for themselves and use it within a year. It's amazing. And then you have the families that they buy the whole beef because they see that it makes sense and then they split it up with family and friends. What's the least expensive cut? Per pound our most expensive cut would be the tenderloin because we only get so much of that per animal. I would say per steak my most expensive would be our cowboy cut rib steak. It's my favorite. It's a rib steak. It's just got a little extra bone on it. It's beautiful. It cooks up really nice. It's just it's really good. Our least expensive I would say would be I mean I would say our ground beef. Six dollars a pound is our cheapest option. Our cheapest steaks would be you know like your skirt or flank steaks, sizzlers, sirloin. You know just kind of your not low-end steaks but just it's not really your more popular steaks. It's not super sought after you know. We have to winter cattle and not destroy our existing pastures. So we group them up into what we call our sacrifice pasture and every year you know that they're in those paddocks they they destroy a pasture. So we used to reseed and let them graze it the next year but because we need corn silage we've been planting about 100 acres of corn silage which is enough for what we need to finish cattle on to grow sheep on. The cows don't really need that quality because it's a higher quality crop. So we must be about a third of the way into our calving. So these cows range anywhere from four or five years old to 10 or 12 years old. Just depends on the on her. These calves started probably about a week ago. We started getting a few calves. They're really not supposed to start for another week but for some reason the weather or genetics has got them calving a little bit earlier. You can go for those so warm for like the last couple weeks. Yeah it could be. We select these are pretty small calves. They're not like a hundred pound calf when they're born. We like them 70 to 80 pounds so that she doesn't have a problem having a baby because if they have a struggle we'll end up having to help her and that's a lot of time away from what we could be doing. We are very Facebook driven. Facebook is our best avenue right now. I rarely do paid ads honestly. It's really just organic. People find us. They hear about us. Word of mouth is our most common. You know I get new customers that walk into our store. This is the store is very new for us. We've always been by the by appointment and someone's already purchased from us. They're just picking up. So now we've got store hours so we get walk-ins. So how did you hear about us you know and well I heard about you from my neighbor my friend or I just moved to the area and I made a post on Facebook and you were recommended. That's really mostly what we get through our store. So word of mouth is ideal. It's perfect. It's great. They've bought the meat before. They enjoyed it and now they're telling their friends and family. So we have one restaurant that we provide to. It's Scott's Cafe in Richland and they carry our ground beef. Other than that we have meat at the doghouse in Vicksburg. Scott and Cheryl Oswald own that. They've started carrying our product in their freezer. Other than that it's all just you got to come here to to get it. Do you offer like would you ship frozen meat? We don't right now. We do not offer any shipping. It just is not cost effective and people want to buy eighths and quarters from us. And so you know in that sense I mean it's it's really expensive to ship it. So and we haven't found so my husband and I he's getting ready to come to the farm soon and my husband and I have decided we do want to ship and offer like just a certain radius and offer a like a subscription box you know like a monthly like that way we know exactly ahead of time what we need to ship out how many boxes you know because it's all going to be an email based like you're going to be on a list and so it'll be dependable and we'll know you know and I think in that sense we'll be able to make it work because then you can show the shipping companies hey I'm going to move this much at a time give me a price break and they will. So it makes a lot of sense to do it in that manner. But to get an order for like two or three steaks and ship it it's complicated. So do you breed for smaller? Yep our bulls their their genetics are supposed to throw a you know 75 to 85 pound calf. We'll get a big calf once in a while but most of them are this size. Do you guys have your bulls on site or is this something you're shipping or how do you guys do that? Most of our breeding is done with bulls. We have done some artificial breeding before but we don't do our own so we hire it out and if we have a group of heifers we know we're going to sell. They're a lot more appealing to somebody if they're AI'd and it's a predictable window on calves. So we're still feeding this group. It's more to keep an eye on cows and calves. They're just about ready to go to another pasture. So our watering area is where the red gates are down in the middle and the pastures kind of fan out from there. So where the pond is in the back that's one pasture to the left. There's another pasture that goes up to the new barn there. There's this pasture we're in and then there's this pasture. So usually we have some pretty good grass ahead of them and it's really it's work. The cows get used to us. They know when it's time to move. They'll start grouping up when they know we're going to be back and they'll flush through. It's our time to look them over good. We'll spray for flies. At that point if we need to treat something it'd be at that point. So there's just over 100 cows in this group. We tend to have big cows. They're a 1600 to 1700 pound animal. A lot of capacity. So they shouldn't have a problem giving birth to a 80 pound calf. A 100 pound calf that's a little different. How often are you guys like out here when they're calving checking on that? Well the pasture is small enough and the grass is low enough when we're feeding. We'll bring the tractor right out here and when we're done feeding we'll do a little cruise around. And you can see a lot from the road too if someone's having a problem. Yeah we have a bull breeder in Iowa that we bought a lot of bulls from. And I would say his females his cows are pretty much we have pretty much in line with what he has. Just because we've been buying his bulls. So you get his cow genetics and his whatever bull line he's been using. How many bulls do you have? We have a dozen. Is the breeding done naturally then? Yep yep. We'll put probably four or five bulls in this group just to make sure we have adequate coverage. And is there a way to know? Like do you know how many you're gonna get? Well when we pull bulls off say after 60, 70 days. After we pull bulls we'll wait 45 days and then we'll preg check them. So anything that isn't bred in the spring. The last four or five years we've been giving them a second chance because we have a fall calving too. So we push them into our fall calving. And that was more due to the store so that we could extend our marketing out. Have more cattle at different stages of production to meet what the store eventually is going to need. We'll have 50 cows in that fall calving this year. I'd like to have 100. That would spread out the calving. So this is our bullpen. They're pretty calm. Yep they're all EPD bulls. We bought them from breeders. So the outcome of the calf is pretty well predicted by doing that. Size and traits and stuff. They get along pretty well with each other. They get along until you start moving them. Because they know they're probably this time of year they know they're going to be going with cows. And then they have a, like chickens do, they have a pecking order. So they have to re-establish that when they get back together. So we've had some pretty good battles. You just got to leave them alone and they'll sort it out. We've had someone on the farm, namely my dad, that thought he could break up bull fights. But that didn't work out very well. Did they seriously injure each other? Yeah we've had some broken shoulders. Even during the breeding season they'll end up with a problem if they get shoved around. They'll compete for cows. The breeders we use won't sell a bull that's aggressive. Yeah they're pretty careful on that. You know like this big one here, he'll probably weigh over 2,000 pounds. The biggest expenses right now would be feed for all the animals. It's a lot of mouths to feed. And then labor. Labor is, it's hard to pay what is deserved on a farm. I mean it's hard work. So we try to pay good and it's a lot, you know, it's expensive. We have about seven. Now only three full-time. I'm technically part-time. I work from home a lot and then I'm here for the store. And then Emily is part-time. And then Josiah is our, the guy that was out bedding the barn. He's our younger barn help. We've got great help. Everyone shows up when they're supposed to. So I think we're pretty fortunate that we've got good help. Well we've kind of gotten rid of our biggest struggle. And that would be to rely solely on a market. We've kind of taken that, like the gamble out of farming by having the store. I mean we have a reliable, consistent income as far as the store goes. And that's definitely our future. We're gearing towards really pushing the store. And it's really just changed, you know, our future a lot. It's changed fast. I mean it's a lot different than it used to be right now. I would say that that would have been our biggest, I guess, negative factor in farming is to rely on a market. And a lot of farms do rely on a market. And you have highs and then you have lows that last way too long. And then you come back out. And it's just really, it's hard. It's a hard life. It's a hard job. But it's well worth it if you can make it work. Currently something that would be negative? I mean there's always work to do. So I guess in that sense downtime is a factor, you know. It's busy. And with our farm, it's always busy. It's never not busy. So we're either calving or lambing or, you know, we've got the store that's running. And maintaining this much ground is, it's busy. But it's worth it, so. So to put it into perspective, when I would say about seven years ago, we were selling 10 animals a year, 10 beef. Limited customers. I'd have to call my customers and try to get them to buy when it was time for the animals to be slaughtered. And now I don't call anyone. Everyone comes to me. We sell about 100 cattle through our store now. It's changed immensely. And I would say 2020 COVID was really when things changed for us. I don't know what happened. I don't know if it was, if it was just like panic that stores were running out of stock of things. And they were like, well, it's by bulk. Or, I mean, there was a huge farm to table push. Is still a big push for that. And supporting local. So I think it was just kind of a perfect storm. People tried our product and they really enjoyed it. And they just keep coming back. So, I mean, and then on top of that, you get the word of mouth. And, but yeah, before this, you would pick up your quarters, halves. That's really all we did. We didn't really do buy the cut. You'd have to go to the butcher to pick it up. We did a little bit out of our farm office. It wasn't a store at that point. Yeah, it's changed a lot in the last like year. So how many acres do you guys have? The farm is 850 acres. We have one field we'll rent out. It's irrigated for seed corn. And then we rent, my uncle's retired, just retired. He's 85, but he just retired from farming and he had sheep. So we're utilizing his pastures and we'll have cattle on his place. And have you added more acres to that? No, my mom and dad added quite a bit of ground to the operation. We've rented more ground. It's really expensive to go buy property. So for a cow-calf operation, you have to hope you have some close property you can rent and not have to go buy property. How does the renting process work? Well, they have to provide the grass. We'll fence it if we need to. Water, if you need a water supply. So we've added water wells on a couple different farms to supply water. We don't like them drinking out of ponds. It's just as they can pick up some parasites out of the water. What does like a day-to-day look like for you? Well, we start with chores in the morning. We try and get going by 7. And if we run two feed carts, we can be done by 10 o'clock. And then we'll start going back, just double checking calving. There's a lot of in-barn work that gets done too, bedding and feeding. And then it depends on the time of year. But right now we've got pastures that we need to check perimeters on and make sure our electric fence is working. Getting ready to put more cattle out on the pastures. Do you guys have the capacity to sell more? Yes, there's always room for growth, right? That's our goal because it'd be ideal to have as many cows as calves that we would need for the store. I'm not saying I'm going to sell 300 through the store, but it'd be nice to dial back a little bit and not rely on a market at all and to provide only for our own personal use. So I would say our hang-up would be our freezer space. That would be, I mean, we would need more customers to grow, which that's happening. You know, I get new customers every week. We have new people buying, which is awesome. Eventually we'll have to expand. I could see eventually if the store really takes off and does really well, I could see putting a new building up. I'm not saying that's like in the plans yet. That's like way down the road. But yeah, ideally we would like to grow, get more customers and put a new walk-in freezer in. That'd be great. I mean, we had a wait list that was a year long. People were waiting a whole year for beef from us. You know, and now we're finally ahead of it. We're to a point where, you know, you can call today and pick up a custom cut in two to three weeks. So anything vacuum sealed is good indefinitely. This is per USDA. Now ground, anything ground is recommended six months. And as far as freshness goes, a year is about, you know, you might start to see some deterioration of packaging, some ice formation, freezer burn. But I mean, being that I eat the meat that's from my own farm, I will eat anything that comes out of my freezer. It can be four years old. I will throw it on the grill and eat it. And I've never been sick from it. So it is technically good. And definitely as long as you're thawing it out properly and, you know, cooking it properly, you're good to go. Well, that's a good question. I've never really thought about that. I'd say we could probably fit like six whole animals in there at a time, probably maybe even more. 3,600 pounds to 4,000 probably. But yeah, we fit a lot in there and we've got pretty much everything. I've got lamb in there. I've got chicken, pork, a lot of beef. It's nice to have it. It's changed a lot for us. We usually just rely on a co-op to sell our wool for us. The wool market has been down probably for three years now. So this year our co-op has gone out of business. So we're fortunate that we know enough people in the sheep industry that we found another buyer for the wool. It's in Canada. They're the actual processor of the wool. So that should help us. And they're paying something for it. Last year we sold 2,000 pounds. We had more to sell, but we didn't. Our check was 16 cents for 2,000 pounds. Yeah, if that tells you anything. It's all because China is not buying wool right now. And ours is a low grade wool. If you had merino or a higher quality wool, it's still worth quite a bit. But ours is not. It's what they call a medium staple. This is our next group. So this is our ram pen. We keep a lot of rams to try and get them bred back for fall. That's kind of the opposite of like deer fawn in the spring. Cattle are sheep on a breed for spring. You have to encourage them. And that's how we encourage is competition with rams. So these are all young ewes in here that'll lamb in about two weeks. It's a huge risk, but it's worth it. If you can handle the long hours and the hard work, it's worth it. I have an owner mindset, you know, because this is my family. This has been in our family for 140 years. I mean, it's a part of my life. I've done it for 11 years. This is just what I breathe now, you know. I'm very invested into it. So yeah, I would say if you love it, then do it. So there's a lot to say about coming to a farm store and seeing cattle right next to you. You can bring your kids, say hi to the cows, come in, buy a couple of steaks and leave. When you come out here, it's like I said, we're transparent. We'll walk you through barns. We got nothing to hide, you know. It's on the farm. I mean, how many stores can you go to where you literally go to the farm and see the operation and leave with a couple of steaks? And it's quality. I mean, there's high quality behind our product. We care. I believe in our product. I'm not going to say that you have to buy, but the people that do come by from us, they come back. So this says a lot about our product. When you get people that want to come back, they want to see you again.