[music intro]
Richard Brzozowski: Hi, I'm Richard Brzozowski
with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension
and I'm here to talk about enterprises, farm
enterprises, and the differences between enterprises.
Most family farms are made up of more than
one enterprise. A farm business might have
several, such as a dairy farm, might have
the cows. So they're selling the milk every
day. They might sell hay. They might have
maple.
So all those three things, maple, hay, and
dairy, are all different enterprises. And
so farmers need to measure each one to see
how profitable or if they're losing money
in that enterprise and make adjustments accordingly.
So today I want to talk a little bit about
production cycles and enterprises. Before
we get to production cycles, the enterprises
could be animal-based like that dairy farm,
or plant-based like that maple, or maybe you're
growing cut flowers or vegetables or melons
or something like that.
Or, it could be service-based, where your
farm might do rototilling or welding or trucking
or something else that's not really attached
to the land, so to speak. But it's your knowledge
and skills and equipment that's taken on and
earning money with that service.
In any of these, you can add value. For instance,
if you had a plant-based enterprise of apples,
you could be making apple pies or apple dumplings.
So you're processing that product into something
else, adding value to it, and hopefully making
more money.
Because busheled apples might cost $20, but
an apple pie might cost $10, and there's only
maybe six or eight apples in an apple pie.
So when you think about what you can do with
adding value is really important.
On production cycles, what you're thinking
about is time. Everything that you grow is
going to take time. Some crops or some products
only take a month long. For instance, if you
grow radishes from seed to harvest, it's like
30 days for when you're harvesting that crop
and getting money on return. Other crops may
take longer.
For instance, summer squash would take two
months, so you plant on Memorial Day and harvest
sometime late in July, so two months. Winter
squash, on the other hand, is going to take
four months from seed to harvest, or turkeys
might take four-and-a-half months from the
day you get them on the farm to the day you
slaughter them or have them slaughtered. Broilers,
two months.
And other species, like beef cattle, will
take up to 20 months from production cycle.
From the day of birth to the day that steer
goes to slaughter, it's a long time, so you've
got to think about that in your own farming
enterprise. And how long, how much time do
I have? Do I have the space and time and energy
to carry through to the production cycle?
Any enterprise you have is going to take some
inputs, whether it's fertilizer, feed, time,
labor, those kinds of things, or equipment.
And so, most farmers think, "I got input and
I'm going to have output." So it's even, even,
even. That doesn't always happen.
Sometimes you'll have way too much inputs,
time and energy, and very little output. Where
other times, what you're really trying to
reach is to minimize your inputs, minimize
all those things that you're putting into
that business, and maximizing or optimizing
the outputs that you have at the end because
that's really what you're trying to gain - is
efficiency in production and in profit.
[music outro]
