4-17-21
5:18 pm Saturday
It is Saturday. I have been doing a fun day on Friday with Viggo, it is going well.
We have gone to the beach and we both are enjoying it. We have found star fish,
eels, sea cucumbers and an assortment of crabs.
Today I have been working on trying to figure out Facebook for selling chickens.
I used to use Craig’s list, but I believe the number of people I can reach through Facebook is much larger. I don’t really want to be on Facebook, I don’t want to be manipulated by it, but it seems like a very compelling way of reaching out to people, to communicate a message. I fear I am selling my soul to the devil.
I have had a minor epiphany. I am trying to do this farm as a typical business. Have a product, people buy, your business continues and the funds coming in are greater than the funds going out. You of course can have businesses that are designed to be a loss to offset other gains, but the general effect is a profit.
We have a very limited, expensive product that it hard to sell and does not cover the expense or time to produce when sold. Is this a failure and unsuccessful business, yes it is. So our farm as a business it does not work well currently.
But we still want to do it. What is it? Is it a hobby…well it is too expensive and time consuming to be a hobby. It seems much more like a passion, art, poetry….
What happens when what you do does not fit an economic model, but you are compelled to do it? I am finding that economic sense is a very slippery road.
All that is worth doing as one’s main pursuit in life has to pencil out economically.
Once you step outside of this summing where does that put you?
Most of us have concerns about housing and other costs, economics do have a real world consequence. If we can not bring money into the farm from one or two of us working off the farm, we can not continue to do it.
I have a sense that it is very troublesome to bow down so absolutely to an
economic reality. I have not found the words yet to describe what I am sensing, but
I know what we are doing on our farm matters and if it were to be evaluated on
a strictly economic scale it would not matter, that it would be a joke. There is a battle of values going on and how to insist what we are doing matters to ourselves and perhaps others. It is a much easier road when what you want to do people will pay for and help assert that it is valuable and help cover one’s expenses, but when the road you are on does not create something that people will pay for, you need to stand and still assert that it matters.
Boy what a pain that is, but that is what we are doing here to some degree. In doing so, it opens perspectives that are seemingly alien to me but also have a familiar comfort about them. I do believe also we may be able to sell more product to help cover our costs, but that is to be seen. We are not going to give up.
I am thankful for this opportunity.