Our Opening Gambit
2Feel free to share this widely.
2015_NamiMoonFarmStory_FinalDraft
I apologize for not typing the entire document out here. You’re going to have to click, one. more. time. After a month of writing, editing, asking people to read and re-read and then editing again…I was wary of trying to keep my work all up-to-date and accurate on our website. So, I wrote everything off-line on MSWord. Below, is a PDF document that shows our farm’s financials over the first five years of our farm’s existence. I have also included some stories and explanations to contextualize the numbers.
I hope that this can be an informative piece for other (beginning) farmers, consumers and the organizations who work with these groups and beyond. I also hope that it inspires more conversations, particularly about the financial realities that come with starting a farm or just farming in general. I won’t write too much here, because the document is nearly 28 pages long. I know there is a lot more that I can say about everything you’ll soon read about too, but I had to stop somewhere. Feel free to inquire about anything you’d like to hear more about. I do have plans to continue writing about our story. This is a good start.
Wow – thank you so much for this detailed piece. The narrative really helps the financial story “stick” in the mind. Sharing this with a colleague who teaches accounting to beginning farmers (far and wide).
Hi Katy,
Thanks for your thoughts and for passing it along. We certainly hope that our ongoing story can be helpful or at least illustrative—good, bad and ugly—for other farmers or people looking to get into farming. We think that a lot of problems people run into can be avoided if they’d be willing to be more open about financials and other topics that are sometimes hard to talk about for one reason or another.
Cheers,
Chris