The problem with farming that is unique is that you can't get out. You can't get out without making horrendous choices about animals that you probably love. You're probably struggling mightily and so the farm has taken on a significant amount of degradation that is hard to explain to the future buyers. Things are probably broken all over the place, things are in desperate need of repair and you live with them because you have to, you have nothing. A farm is not like a poor person's house being in disrepair, a farm is a massive property that is constantly depreciating with no funds to stave off issues. How do you invite people in to even begin to solve the problem. You don't own the farm, the farm owns you
It is currently an outlier, but my goal with the farm is to be riding the currently-growing wave of small farms directly marketing to consumers, who care deeply about their land, the local ecology, and the welfare of their animals.
Our customers are so passionate about our product, it's quite shocking (this is Season 1 for us). As we get towards winter, we're going to start building a platform upon which we can foster competition--that's right, we want to have more and more small farms compete with us on pasture-raised, quality animal proteins.
Over time, we want to be part of the vanguard that leads to Americans spending double on their diets and half on their healthcare.
What's that quote about a small group of dedicated people?
Farming, small farming in particular, is becoming trendy. Our product is in higher demand than we can produce. We've turned away customers. So we need to scale up a little bit, but more importantly, grow the numbers of our competitors and, year after year, eat the meat business. Healthcare premiums go down, slowly slowly, as people get healthier.
It's a sad day when Farmville can become a billion dollar business and Werner can't feed his kids. I'm curious if he's truly living on ~$20k/year. That seems ridiculously low for life in Germany. Or if he's got other sources of income to bolster that.
Either way, what really needs to happen is companies that build programs off his work need to make a concerted effort to donate to the project. Heck, set aside a small percentage of revenue and consider it a cost of business.
"In total, I did this with about 40 different farms. There was a time when there were several new ones every day. For a while it was pretty much a 24/7 job as maximizing apy required constantly jumping to some new hype."
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