Issue #7 - Learning to Plan and Planning to Learn
One Step Back ... Not Sure How Many Steps Forward
Nat Shilkret and His Orchestra - Dancing With Tears In My Eyes
In Issue #6 I talked about getting in over my head and encountering Hard Problems. I also mentioned that this wasn’t a deterrent, it just requires a bit of a course correction.
It seems obvious, but our farm isn’t going to go straight from 0 sheep to 200 sheep. It would be stupid and irresponsible to immediately jump into commercial scale production with livestock that we have little experience with, let alone trying to figure out a complicated supply chain on the fly.
Somewhat surprisingly, we see this all the time in agriculture. Indeed, it seems particularly epidemic with sheep. They look cute. They are cheaper and easier (maybe?) to raise than beef. They certainly take less space. So, I think, a lot of new (and old) farmers look at sheep as something that they can just jump into. This isn’t true of any business and seems particularly cruel when talking about businesses based on live animals.
We’ve talked to farmers and heard horrific stories of farmers jumping into sheep only to not know how to feed or care for them leading to unnecessary illness and death. We’ve heard of farmers investing their savings into sheep only to struggle for years to try to find out that commodity wool doesn’t pay, and the hobby fiber market is incredibly hard to make any money - especially without a plan for marketing and retail. We’ve heard of farmers buying too many sheep for meat only to find out that there are no processors for the number of sheep that they have.
These are all avoidable problems. Yes, it takes a little forethought and planning. Luckily, in Wisconsin (and other states), there are wonderful supporting organizations funded by the SBA, USDA, and other agencies in the form of Cooperative or Agricultural Extension programs with 4-year Universities and the SBA’s Small Business Development Centers. Both of these resources are free for farmers and value added producers to learn about farming/ranching and to work on business plans and financial models.
There are number of other great resources such as The Food Finance Institute (financial planning/modeling), and (at least here in Wisconsin) the UW Law & Entrepreneurship Clinic (legal services) and Business & Entrepreneurship Clinic (business and marketing plans). All of these resources are free1. There are scores of other technical service providers regionally and nationally.
In another post I will talk about resources for finding access to capital (money!)
Instead of just jumping headlong into making technical garments out of thel (a later-stage problem), I gave some thought to structuring what we need to know at various stages of our growth. Given how little we know about everything, it doesn’t make sense to spend our time now learning the later-stage stuff - especially without any experience. So, I created a staged learning plan that attempts to identify what kinds of knowledge we need when.
These are very broad categories as I get into each subject I will create a more detailed learning plan. This is very specific to us - for instance, we already have large barn buildings and farm infrastructure; if we didn’t, those subjects would be higher on the list. Since we are looking at “triple-threat” sheep, we need to learn meat, wool, and dairy; if we were raising a more specialized flock, we could ignore some of those.
Buy Farm (✅)
Buy 6-8 sheep
Meat
Soap
Lopi Yarn
Lambing
Shearing
30-40 sheep
Rotational Grazing
Predator evasion
Wool separation
Breeding
Commercial meat distribution
Commercial yarn production
100 sheep
Barn design
Wool storage
Feed Management
Intensive Rotational Grazing
Advanced meat distribution
Basic wool manufacturing
Breed stock Management
250+ Sheep
Supply chain management
Off-Farm Retail store
Company restructure
Unknown
I work for the UW Law & Entrepreneurship Clinic and have taught courses with Extension, SBDC, FFI, and the Business School.