900 goat dairy farm

OneFineAcre

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OneFineAcre

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another factory farm?
No
A family farm trying to make a living
Google "economies of scale"
It's a fairly basic premise of microeconomics that dates back to Adam Smith
Wikipedia has a decent explanation
 
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BrownSheep

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Nope definately not a factory farm. Family dairy farms here are LARGE. To put it simply, my family has a feedlot CAFO-ed for 1000 cows an average dairy has no problem filling that with just replacement heifers.
 

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You can't expect to make a liveable profit off of a hobby farm--you need a LARGE working farm to make enough money to support your family and pay the employees to make a large farm operate smoothly.
 

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SheepGirl

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That is for produce -- but keep in mind each spouse is only making $37,500 CA ($29,000 USD). And that is direct marketing their product which takes time and marketing which I am unsure is actually included in their budgets and expenses. Is that really a liveable wage, though? Enough to pay for the mortgage, utilities, groceries, clothing, transportation, etc?

Considering I profit around $100 per year per ewe, I would need 290 sheep to make the same profit -- if that... I would need more land which means my profit per ewe would be less, meaning I would need more sheep (and more land, roughly 58 acres with 5 ewes/acre) to make that much money.
 

OneFineAcre

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That is for produce -- but keep in mind each spouse is only making $37,500 CA ($29,000 USD). And that is direct marketing their product which takes time and marketing which I am unsure is actually included in their budgets and expenses. Is that really a liveable wage, though? Enough to pay for the mortgage, utilities, groceries, clothing, transportation, etc?

Considering I profit around $100 per year per ewe, I would need 290 sheep to make the same profit -- if that... I would need more land which means my profit per ewe would be less, meaning I would need more sheep (and more land, roughly 58 acres with 5 ewes/acre) to make that much money.

x 2.
Plus a dairy is more capital intensive with the need for buildings and equipment.
 

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