#138: Why the Farms That Survive Control Their Own Brand
In this episode of Farming on Purpose, I’m kicking off a new season with an honest look at where our farm is three years after moving here — what worked this year, what didn’t, and why I think the gap between where we are and where we thought we would be matters.
What worked and what didn't this year
Growing their own feed crop and expanding the goat herd paid off. Feeder steers didn't break even.
What "controlling your brand" means for a farm
t isn't a logo or a cattle brand. It's the trust attached to your name, and having places in your operation where you influence the outcome.
Direct-to-consumer is an option, not a requirement
Commodity agriculture isn't going anywhere. The goal is to find the levers that fit your farm, whether that's direct sales, better commodity marketing, or a new enterprise.
Why producer control matters
Farmers get about 15.9 cents of every food dollar, and four companies process roughly 85% of U.S. beef. More options matter when markets turn.
Building options for the next generation
The return Lexi cares about most is handing her kids options, not just land.
Timestamps
00:00 Welcome back for a new season
02:00 Growing our own feed
03:00 Goats and our first kidding season
07:00 Feeder steers that didn't pay off
09:00 The gap between what we're building and where we are
12:00 What controlling your brand really means
13:00 The numbers behind producer control
14:00 Direct-to-consumer isn't the only answer
17:00 Finding the right kind of diversification
19:00 A seat back at the table
23:00 There's no one right way to farm
24:00 What the census data says about direct sales
25:00 What's coming this season
26:00 Building options for our kids
“We just want a seat back at the table.”
Other Episodes You May Enjoy:
Episode #125: Raising More Than Livestock: Building a Multi-Generation Direct-to-Consumer Farm Business A conversation with Nola and Mikaela Schultz about building Schultz Country Market and selling farm products directly to customers. This episode dives into pricing, processing challenges, marketing meat, and what it takes to grow a farm business that supports both the family and the land.
Episode #90: Current State of Farming – A Tale of Two Scales This episode breaks down one of the biggest tensions in agriculture today — the gap between small family farms and large-scale operations — and what that means for the future of the industry.
Episode #74: Capturing Profit from Heifers with Direct-to-Consumer Beef with Amanda of 2383 Farms A practical discussion around diversification, value-added agriculture, and finding ways to create more stability and profitability within a farm operation.
Transcript
Speaker: [00:00:00] Farming on Purpose, a podcast for farmers and ranchers building something that lasts. It takes grit and determination to make it in agriculture, but the operations that actually thrive aren't just the ones working hardest in the field. They're the ones willing to challenge the status quo, tell their story, and take control of how they sell what they grow.
Speaker: On this show, you'll hear from producers of every size and practice doing exactly that. I'm Lexi Wright, and this is Farming on Purpose Welcome back to Farming on Purpose. I feel a little bit like I'm giving a call to a friend who I haven't talked to in a long time, and that makes me a little bit excited, but also a little bit, like, where were we?
Speaker: When did we talk last? What did we talk about? As you guys know, I take a break from this podcast over the summer as my kids are home and we just have a lot going on during the summer months on the farm. And then it always takes me a little bit to get [00:01:00] back in the swing of things once school starts back up.
Speaker: But here we are. This is the first episode back after summer, and I've thought about starting it a dozen different ways, honestly. Every script that I outlined felt just a little bit too polished and not like I was telling the full story. So I'm gonna tell you how our summer went, where we're at on the farm right now, and then talk about why that really matters for this season and maybe what you can take away from our experience.
Speaker: I'm really excited for the season ahead. I have some great guests lined up already, and I think that as we look into the winter months and kind of that time of, of thinking ahead to what will happen next year, these conversations will be really helpful to you. So as always, thank you for being a listener.
Speaker: Thank you for being here, and I look forward to kind of virtually spending time with you guys again this year. So diving into our last couple months, we did a new thing, um, [00:02:00] where we like to try to f- do things that we think will, you know, maybe take the farm a different direction. And I feel like this year was the year that we finally were kind of rooted enough in our, at our new farm that we bought three years ago to really do that.
Speaker: Up until that point, everything kind of felt like, "Oh my gosh, we're just trying to adapt to a bigger scale than we had been doing things before." So we're three years in here this fall, and this year was one that we learned a lot, and not all in good ways. We did plant a feed crop this year, and that went really well.
Speaker: That was one thing that I think we will definitely be adding to our rotation again. It provided us just a lot more flexibility in our feed setup for our cows. We had intended to graze the feed, and that didn't end up working out because of the way that the rain fell and what, when the, the timing of the growth of the feed fell.
Speaker: But we did bale [00:03:00] it, and that has provided us a lot of security in just knowing that, you know, we have feed available. For our cows, and we don't have to worry about that. And it was a much cheaper source of feed because we grew it here on our farm, and we just had to pay the price of baling it and for the seed, and that was essentially it.
Speaker: So that was, I would say, a success of this past year. The second thing that we did was we purchased goats. Now, we actually did this in May of 2025. They kidded for the first time in late December and early January of this year, and then we have since expanded our herd from what the original set that we bought over the summer, and we're looking forward to our second kidding season here literally any day now, which is exciting.
Speaker: It's fun to know that, like, you could just go outside and there's gonna be babies there. I loved kidding the goats last year. It was, it was honestly really challenging because it was good that it was over [00:04:00] the kids' winter break from school, so I didn't have to worry about, like, checking animals, getting things fed, and getting them to school on time.
Speaker: It was just, we were able to deal with the goats. But because of when they were born, it was very cold, it was snowing most of that time, or sleeting I should say, and I got a terrible cold right in the middle of it all. So we were kidding the goats. I felt like I was, like, gonna die, pass out from, like, sinus headache and just being exhausted.
Speaker: But it was so exciting overall just knowing that the kids got to witness the, the, the baby goats being born, and they were really excited about it too. We learned quite a bit about kidding this first year. We've done feeder goats before in the past, but this was our first time with nannies and, and kidding them out, and we learned a lot about what, you know, to watch for and when to jump in and, and, you know, work with maybe one that's smaller or that's a triplet or that's not doing as well as you would like.
Speaker: And so I hope that we can take that and apply that to this kidding [00:05:00] season. We had figured at one point what our percent of our goat crop was. With goats, our goal was 200% kid crop, so we were hoping that every mom had twins, or on average every mom had twins. And I think we got to about 160% by the time that we were all said and done.
Speaker: We did lose quite a few because I think we were over 200%. We would've had to have been, because we had a lot of triplets and a lot of twins and we only had one single. So we were well over 200% when we originally kidded out, but then we lost several due to weak kids that we didn't pull off soon enough, and we had one mom that I don't think had any milk, and we just didn't realize that they weren't getting enough in that first night, and they went pretty quickly.
Speaker: There might have been something wrong with them as well. Honestly, they were really small. And then we lost one to polio, which I definitely know now what to look for and how to deal with that sooner, so we would hopefully not lose any to that in the future. And then we had a few bottle babies that, you know, just for [00:06:00] whatever reason the mom wasn't claiming them, and we were trying to feed with bottles, but they did not make it, and some of those were really strange.
Speaker: So things that I think we'll learn a lot just with from experience with goat kids. Since it was so cold, there were several that we had to bring inside and wrap up in towels and, and try to get heat on them. We have a furnace that sits in our living room. It's like the Cold Morning brand, I think, or Warm Morning.
Speaker: I can't remember. Anyways, it's like a furnace that sits in our living room and just blows hot air out the top, and that actually became very helpful to us because when we had the baby goats wrapped up in towels, we could just set them right on top of that. and get them heat really quickly to get them warmed back up after they had been born out in the cold.
Speaker: Since that kidding, we purchased a new buck, and we're very excited about that because he, I think, is gonna do a lot more for us genetics-wise than the buck that came with the original herd that we had did. He just wasn't the direction that we wanted to go with our herd. And then [00:07:00] we've gotten quite a few more nannies.
Speaker: So we're at about 50 nannies and our buck now. And so this kidding season I'm hoping is really exciting. I would say that the goats have been another success. They also helped us quite a bit with weed management this summer, and that also helped keep their feed bill down, which was nice. We sold our goat kids in June, which was not ideal timing to sell them.
Speaker: It worked out okay for us though, because they honestly sold for a really good price, and it was a nice little supplement to our farm income that we were able to do. So it was a good incentive for us to expand that herd this year, and I'm excited for what that'll look like. On the other side of the coin, we had things that did not go as well.
Speaker: We did some feeder steers this year, so we purchased steers that we fed, and we purchased them a little bit on the smaller side. They were under 400 pounds apiece when we got them, and then we fed them up to about 720. They did not gain great in the last couple weeks that we had them because our pasture was just [00:08:00] spent.
Speaker: We have not had a good year for rain this summer. So they had, they had pretty well taken all of the nutrients they were gonna get out of our pasture and did not gain great those last couple weeks that we had them. But we also committed to selling them on Superior, and that was probably not the best choice for this specific group of steers because we had three different colors.
Speaker: So we had some reds, some blacks, and some whites. They were pretty even mix. While we felt good about the price that we got for them on Superior, we did not break even on them, and that was a really hard pill to swallow for us. And we had very high hopes for these steers, you know, with the cattle market being what it is, that we would be able to profit off of them and invest that back into some projects on the farm, and that just wasn't the case.
Speaker: This was the first time that we had done the feeder steers and We learned a lot. We learned a lot about that. We also had lots of fun days where we went looking for them, because they were very good [00:09:00] at getting out of our fence, and that was really upsetting. Cows get out, it happens sometimes, but if you're the neighbor that has the cows out, and you're having to call around and say, "Have you seen these?"
Speaker: Or, you know, "Hey, sorry that this cow is in your field," it's just not a great feeling. It makes you feel like you are failing, and like you are causing other people problems. While none of the situations that this happened in was, like, a huge deal, it was not a fun... It was not fun to deal with this summer.
Speaker: I'm not gonna pretend like that didn't happen, because we had cows out several times. But that leads in well to where I want to talk about, what I want to talk about in this episode, and that is really the gap between what we're trying to build and what we actually have. And that has shown up repeatedly this year.
Speaker: Being three years into this, if you had asked me when we moved here where I thought we'd be by this point, it is absolutely not where we are. Like I said, we lost money on the steers that we fed this year, which set us back further [00:10:00] than I wanted it to. We've pulled from retirement savings more than once to fund things on the farm that we did not want to wait for.
Speaker: I genuinely don't know if that's going to look like a smart move five years from now or not. I think, you know, a lot of the financial advice that you hear says, "Don't you ever do that. Don't pull money out of your retirement," and that was a decision that we took really seriously. For where we are right now, it seemed like the right choice.
Speaker: Again, I, I don't know if we'll think that here in the next five years or 10 years down the road. We may be looking back and cursing ourselves. Another thing that happened this year is with our feed business. We sell feed, and the mill that we've worked with got absorbed into another operation, which left a lot of uncertainty in things for our business, because we didn't know what that was gonna look like for us.
Speaker: There was a lot that we couldn't predict, and there was a lot that we didn't really have a say in. So the reason that I'm telling you all of this instead of just skipping to the part where everything's fine, is I feel like there's so much secrecy around [00:11:00] money and farming. Everybody makes hard calls and wonders if they're the only ones who feel like they're behind, or if they're guessing wrong, or just holding it together.
Speaker: You're not the only one. I'm not the only one. I'd rather talk about that on this show, and talk about how that is a factor in farming that a lot of times we just kind of gloss over. I don't wanna pla- paint a version of our farm that looks tidier than it is, because- That is the reality. We are learning in real time with real money, and sometimes that's painful.
Speaker: And I know that every other farmer out there is doing the same. I know that every other rancher out there is experiencing the same situation. You know, we want other people to look at our farm and say, "Wow, you know, they're making smart decisions. They outsmarted the market," or, "They really marketed well," or, "They tried something that's really benefited them."
Speaker: And with each of those things that you do on your farm, there's also probably five or 10 failures that you don't want anybody to see. And that's just the reality of it. That's the [00:12:00] trial and error of trying to put together a business model that works for you and your family and the resources that you have.
Speaker: The thing that I keep coming back to, though, and it's really what I want this whole season of the podcast to be built around, is the idea of controlling your brand. I've really been focused on that the last year or so. When I say that, I don't mean, like, a cattle brand, and I don't mean, like, your logo or your color scheme.
Speaker: What I really mean is the trust in your name, and that, that is the whole idea behind a brand in the first place. The other option is being anonymous. When you sell into a commodity system like an auction barn, a co-op, or a buyer even, you are multiple steps removed from anyone who will ever eat or use or consume what you raised.
Speaker: You are renting your outcome from a market that you have no influence over. Someone else sets the price. Someone else decides if your work was worth anything this year. And, you know, you don't even have a voice in [00:13:00] that conversation most of the time. Now, the brand itself or the idea of having a brand didn't necessarily impact our success this year or in some cases our failure this year.
Speaker: But I do think the idea of this independence or the ability to kind of stand on your own two feet and separate yourself from the market is what we're pursuing. It's kind of where we're going. So I wanna bring in some numbers here, and I, I want to make sure you don't think I'm just being dramatic about a hard year.
Speaker: I wanna talk about the numbers behind this on a bigger scale. Farmers and ranchers receive only about 15.9 cents of every dollar that a consumer spends on food. The rest goes to processing, marketing, distribution, and retail. That is not a new number to most of us. We know that. That's just the current shape of the system that most of us are selling into.
Speaker: So we only get 15% of every dollar. When you look at where the squeeze comes from, especially for cattle, I, I focus on that primarily because that is where our operation [00:14:00] focuses, is it's not abstract. You know, four companies process roughly 85% of the beef in the country, and that number has grown a lot over this last several decades.
Speaker: When there's a handful of buyers for something that you can't exactly hold onto, you know, when your steers are ready, when your cattle are ready, you can't always wait for a better offer. That... The time is now. With live cattle, you have to move. You don't really have a negotiation. You have a price that you get based on, you know, some factors that you have control over, but a lot that you don't, and that is a structural issue.
Speaker: And I think that's why direct to consumer is growing in popularity. And when you think about direct to consumer, that's a big piece of where this brand discussion comes in. The only answer is not direct to consumer. The commodity side of ag is always going to exist, and that's something that we all have to navigate about learning how we time the market differently next time, how you would make a different decision to differentiate your product in the commodity [00:15:00] market to find better buyer relationships.
Speaker: We're not talking about abandoning commodity marketing, but it's a different relationship with that system than just taking whatever number shows up when we talk about having a brand, when we talk about selling direct to consumer. So when I talk about controlling your brand, I don't mean picking a lane, direct to consumer or commodity, and going all in.
Speaker: I mean paying attention on purpose to where you actually have leverage, where you have something to increase the value, and building towards that deliberately. And that shows up, you know, as a customer who knows your name. It's, uh, getting good enough at commodity marketing that you're not just a passenger in that system either.
Speaker: It's deciding what lever that you have the ability to pull and pulling it For us, you know, we're not going all in on direct sales either. We are very much in the commodity side of the business, and then we are dabbling in these other things that give us some levers to pull, like the goats, the milk that I sell from [00:16:00] my dairy herd.
Speaker: We're growing it slowly, and we're growing it alongside other things that carry bigger stakes for us and help us move faster. So for us, direct-to-consumer is probably a long game, and it's one that we chose largely because of my own preferences and my own beliefs. It's the piece of this operation where I get to put my own heart into something every single day, but it's not necessarily the piece with the fastest return for us right now, and there's a lot of factors that go into it.
Speaker: That may not be the case for you. It could be a faster lever for you. What we're actually looking for across all of it in our operation is the right balance for us. How efficient can we be with our inputs? How much our time actually costs versus what it returns. And whether we're using the infrastructure that we have or building toward infrastructure that makes sense for us instead of just chasing every opportunity that crosses our path or every idea that we are like, "Oh, it'd be really cool to do that."
Speaker: So having these different aspects of your [00:17:00] business, I think, is the name of the game right now in farming. You know, everybody's been told to diversify, diversify, diversify, and that means different things for different operations, but this is how we are implementing it on our operation. So overall, in a year where a lot of things are outside of our control, where the cattle market can change very quickly because of posts on social media, what we are thinking about and considering, one is how do we understand the commodity market better so that we can make better decisions there?
Speaker: But it's also about how do we build these things long-term where we have more independence from that system? Not total independence, but more independence. And I think that that is all about building that brand. It's all about having people that would buy from you regardless of what the market was tomorrow.
Speaker: It's a reputation that is strong enough that people choose you over a cheaper option. They choose you over an [00:18:00] easier option sometimes. And it's about not being fully dependent on one buyer or one processor or one mill, because when they change, you are forced to change with them, and that can completely change your business.
Speaker: It's the difference between being a name that people trust and just being a number in the system. And I think that when we focus on growth in the system today, we have to have at least a portion, at least a portion of our operation that brings that kind of control. That is honestly the only thing that is going to create change in our industry, is when we see more of that control back at the producer level, back at the level of production, and opening those opportunities for buying between producer and consumer helps to do that.
Speaker: Now, this doesn't mean that farms that control their brand don't have bad years too. You know, they do. It's just about having options when those bad years hit. It's about being able [00:19:00] to make a change instead of being locked into a contract with the one buyer that you have access to, or about being able to, you know, look down the road two weeks and say, "I've got a product coming to market, and the market has changed.
Speaker: What can I do?" And, and having the freedom to even have that decision or have that conversation. I think the farms that really survive and that continue to grow over time aren't just the ones that really figure out how to dodge a bad year, they're the ones who had something of their own when the bad year hit.
Speaker: They're the ones that were able to find a way around it, and to do it again and again. I heard something recently that it wasn't even about farming, it was about relationships, and about the k- the kind where one person gives so little for so long that the other person forgets what enough even looks like.
Speaker: You know, they, they get a small crumb of effort, of reciprocity, and it feels like, "Oh my [00:20:00] gosh, I've been starving, and I've been surviving on crumbs for, for years." But if you stepped back and looked at it, that small crumb that you got was barely anything, but it just felt like a lot because you'd been surviving on nothing.
Speaker: And I can't stop thinking about how much that describes agriculture's relationships with the markets that we sell into. You know, we've- we get crumbs. We're handed 15 cents on the dollar, and it's called fair when a handful of buyers are deciding what our work is worth, and the interference in the system is what keeps those decisions out of our hands.
Speaker: Then when we get a little bit more control, just a little bit more voice in what happens to what we raised, it feels like abundance. It's honestly not abundance. It's still a fraction of what it could be. It's a f- it's a, like, a tiny glimpse of what a food production system that is thriving and connected could look like.
Speaker: But it feels like a feast because [00:21:00] we've gotten so used to crumbs that we forget what a real seat at the table even looks like. I think that that's what owning a piece of your brand actually gives you. It's not overnight wealth, it just gives you a seat at the table that you forgot you even were able to have, that you forgot you even had a chair there, and that is really what I think in agriculture right now we're all really pursuing.
Speaker: We just want a seat back at the table. Now, one thing I want to say really clearly here is that it's, it's not a personal failing on anyone's part that we have this system. The consolidated system that most of us sell into now didn't happen by accident You know, there's been decades and decades of ag policy that has pushed hard towards bigger operations and centralized buyers, and there is honestly no clearer proof of what that cost than the farm crisis of the 1980s.
Speaker: Thousands of farms were told to expand exactly like they were encouraged to do. They did that, and then went under almost [00:22:00] overnight because interest rates and land values turned against them. That's not ancient history to a lot of families. Some of you listening had relatives who lost land in exactly that time period.
Speaker: So when I talk about the gap between where we are and where we want to be, I'm not talking about a, a personal shortcoming or a shortcoming of producers. I'm talking about operating inside a system that was shaped by decisions that most of us had no say in. You know, most of us, we didn't choose that, and if we did choose it, we didn't know the reality of what we were choosing.
Speaker: Now, this system, this consolidated system that we have, you know, there are definite upsides to it. There are definite arguments that you could make to say, "Well, this way was better," or, "This was the way that we pushed, and this is why." From a standpoint of a safe s- food supply that is abundant and accessible, there's an argument to be made there.
Speaker: But in my opinion, there are two sides to that story, and we have to consider the side that is doing the production. Because if it is [00:23:00] not sustainable for the producer, even if we're making a safe, abundant, accessible food supply, the structure that we're creating is not sustainable because it's based on a producer who is locked into a system that he can't control, and that is detrimental to the industry.
Speaker: But none of that changes the other half of what I wanna say. There's nothing wrong with running a commodity operation. Most of agriculture does for very real reasons, whether it's, you know, scale or specialization. Not everybody wants to add customer relationships and trucking and marketing responsibilities on top of production.
Speaker: Owning a piece of your own brand is a lever. It's one option. It is not a mandate. It gives you more control if you want it and if it fits your operation, but it's not a judgment on anyone who isn't doing it. The point isn't, you know, everyone should be doing direct to consumer. The point is that when some piece of your operation is actually yours, it changes what options you have.
Speaker: The question is not, is direct to consumer the right choice? [00:24:00] for agriculture. The question is, is direct to consumer a good choice for your farm? The most recent census of ag data from 2022 shows that producers sold 17.5 billion in food through direct and local marketing channels. That's a 25% increase over five years when you adjust for inflation.
Speaker: That's real growth. It's not nothing. I'm gonna be honest with you, though, because I don't want to oversell this. A lot of that growth came through farms selling to retailers, schools, and food hubs, not necessarily straight to individual customers, and that is selling into a structure as well. The number of farms doing pure direct to consumer sales actually dropped a little bit over that same period, and that is an important distinction to make.
Speaker: This isn't, like, an easy trend where everybody's doing it and getting rich, or everybody's doing it and they can pay off the farm. It's a trend. It's real, but it's also still genuinely hard, and it, it's kind of trading your hard. It takes a specific kind of farm to make it work, and that is kind of the [00:25:00] concept that this whole season is going to dig into, not just in theory with episodes like these, but also through actual people who've deliberately built a system for this.
Speaker: You're gonna hear from operations that figured out how to own their name, specifically in the market that they were already selling into, or who have made a name for themselves through direct sales. Some of these are gonna be farms that have reputation built over decades, and some are just now starting that shift and seeing what's possible.
Speaker: At the end of every conversation this year, I'm going to ask each of my guests the same question: Why do you farm on purpose? I think that farms that answer that clearly are the same ones who end up controlling their own story instead of having it decided for them, and that's really what we're focusing on here on the podcast.
Speaker: Given everything I just told you about being three years in and still not where we wanna be and considering these different options that we have and what it means in this economy, none of this is really about our cash flow this year. [00:26:00] It's about what we want to hand our kids. It's about having a bigger focus.
Speaker: I spent years of my life in FFA believing in the next generation of agriculture, and now I've got four kids of my own watching every decision we make on this place. And sometimes I don't think they pay any attention at all, but they definitely surprise us with what they glean. And what I want them to inherit isn't just the land that we've purchased here or, or even just a profitable operation.
Speaker: I, I hope that that is something that we can set up for them and give them a head start in. But I want them to inherit options and the knowledge that they have options out there. They can build options for themselves. They can take the options that we've built for them. But I don't want them to think that they have to just take whatever the market decided to hand them just because they wanted to be farmers or ranchers.
Speaker: That's a different kind of return, I think, than what shows up on your statements that you take to the bank. I think it might be the one that matters most. Long after, you know, we forget what went [00:27:00] well this year or what didn't go well, or what the margin or the kid crop was, you know, all of those things feel so big when you're in the middle of trying new things, and you want them to succeed, and you wanna see that profit, and see the opportunity to change in your operation.
Speaker: But that's not really the thing that we're all doing this for. It's, it's an important part. It has to be there for the other thing to be possible, but the real thing that we're trying to create for our kids is options. So that's where we're starting this season. You're gonna hear from people with real operations, and I think that the ones that we've selected to interview this year have some really cool stories and some really cool things that they're trying that I honestly would never have thought of, and they're very inspiring.
Speaker: So they're figuring it out in real time right alongside all of us. Thank you for being here for this first episode of the new season. It's probably not the pretty story that I wish I could have written or that I would have written three years ago about what our life looked like and what our day-to-day life looked like on [00:28:00] the farm.
Speaker: It's a lot more stressful than I imagined, but it is the, the true one, and I'd rather give that to you than anything else. So thank you for being here. If you enjoyed this episode, if you enjoy this podcast, please take a moment to share on social media or with a friend. That's how podcasts like mine grow and how we expand the conversation that we're having in agriculture with other people.
Speaker: If you've enjoyed spending time with us today, I hope it gave you something to carry back to the operation. Keep looking for tables that help you grow, and if you look around yours and aren't inspired by the people there, it's time to find a new seat. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.
About the Host of Farming On Purpose, Lexi Wright:
I’m your host, Lexi Wright. I started the Farming on Purpose Podcast from a passion for sharing the future of production agriculture.
