It takes cows to make cows
Are you a consumer or a producer?
A consumer consumes; he buys things. A producer produces; he produces things, or at the very least, doesn’t use up what is available.
I’ve always considered myself to be a producer. I don’t like shopping no matter what it’s for. Clothes shopping, stuff for the house shopping—I just don’t like it. When I was a young mom, I enjoyed grocery shopping, but I think that was more for the time alone than anything. I mean, how much fun is it to decide which ten boxes of cereal you’re going to buy? This is not an exaggeration, but with five children in eight years it’s a necessity.
Ben is also a producer. He prefers to be working and accomplishing something. He is definitely not a shopper, unless it’s for the farm. But here’s what I’ve learned from him because he has said it at least a hundred or a thousand times:
It takes money to make money.
When we were a young family enlisted in the Navy and dirt poor and didn’t have the money it took to make more of it, I used to raise my eyebrows and inwardly roll my eyes at this statement. Mostly because we had to use the credit card as the money it took to make money, and I am what you would call “credit averse.”
I would say my background in accounting and finance made me this way, but really it was my daddy. He is the only public school teacher I know to wind up with literal millions and it’s because he was careful to the penny. He told us stories of when he was in college at Purdue University in the 1950s and his food budget was figured down to how many slices of bread were in a loaf. I am not making this up. One of his roommates once ate an extra slice and Daddy came unglued. So if you ever feel like “what’s one more slice of bread (or pair of shoes or fancy coffee)?” remember how it worked for my daddy. Little decisions over a long period of time are what make you rich—unless you win the lottery but the odds of that happening are not in your favor.
Daddy also once found an old, handwritten family budget where the phone bill was $6. For the month. We did not make any long-distance calls.
One time when Ben and I were still young and poor with a house full of children, our stove was down to two working burners (the small ones, of course) and an oven that was off by 75 degrees. My parents got wind of this and bought us a new stove. It wasn’t the stove I was going to buy—it was nice. It had “features” and I had never cooked with features before. I was elated. It was so nice we moved it with us to four different houses for twenty years before we finally left it behind.
Anyway, Daddy and I were walking across the yard when they came to visit and I was thanking him profusely for blessing us with this beautiful new stove. He said, “Honey, we have a magic checking account. Money just shows up in it every month from four different places!”
I was smart enough to know it wasn’t magic; it was meticulous planning for many years when my parents lived on his salary and banked my mother’s. I may not have had a lot of fancy things when I was a child, but I had a beautiful new stove in my early 30s when I needed it, and that was the result of his financial acumen. That’s where I learned to be a producer instead of a consumer.
This whole line of thinking came up this week because, as many of you know, we are farmers, and if there’s one thing you need to know about farming, it’s that it takes money to make money. In agricultural terms, it takes cows to make cows.
We raise our cows specifically as beef animals, so while we need females we can breed, we hope to get a lot of bull calves. Unfortunately, we don’t always get what we want. Thank you, Mick Jagger, for that piece of enduring wisdom. Sometimes you get a whole season’s worth of heifers and that leaves you with no actual beef to raise and sell.
When those times happen, we have to find a source of grass-fed steers (castrated bull calves) that we can raise and finish and process for our customers. We want steers rather than heifers because they typically have more meat on them. And that’s where we currently find ourselves—in need of four, 800–1000 pound steers for our next processing date in February.
Ben does the searching and phone-calling because I am the person who looks at my phone when it rings and does not answer unless it’s my mother. I hate talking on the phone. Ben is great at it and has almost lost his voice at the end of every day from vocal-cord overuse. Anyway, the other day he had a few leads and was going to go look at a couple of animals he’d found.
He left home with the stock trailer and checkbook. Looking back, that was probably not the best decision.
When he arrived back at the farm $2,220 lighter, he had a cow (that’s a female used for breeding), one steer, and a bottle calf—that’s a calf that has to be fed twice a day with a bottle of specially formulated milk replacer. This calf is a heifer. Meet Sugar-pie.
He also came home with a promise to purchase a cow/calf pair for another $1300.
In case you lost track, that’s five animals, ONE of which is what we need, for $3,520. In farming, it takes more money than the amount you hope to make to make the amount of money that will allow you to break even. My degree in finance did not cover this kind of math.
When it comes to cattle, Ben the producer is decidedly a consumer, and not just of steaks and hamburgers. Nothing brings him more joy than hauling home some new cows. But he is a happy farmer and I enjoy the cows when it’s 70° and sunny and his day job covers it, so it’s all good.
Wanna buy some beef?