I'm finally days away from reaching a dream of mine I've had since I was 12 years old: to save our family farm. My mother passed away last year, and knowing I alone among the kids wanted it, gave me first right of refusal to buy it. The executor had it appraised, and the number was steep, but I've put together a plan over the last 6 months that gets me there, and I will close on it this week. Long story short, I have a house to sell yet in the Austin area, so I don't know what my cash/mortgage situation is yet. So I will only know what my full resources will be after everything shakes out. My house should be desireable and fetch good money, but we all know the housing market is jittery, so I can't bank on it until it happens.
My question is, now that I'm the proverbial dog that has caught the car, what do I do with it? Here are the variables:
Me: Work for the state of Texas. My job since the pandemic has become remote. This is huge, as it no longer ties me to living in the Austin area. My boss said as long as I've got reliable internet access and get the tasks he assigns done, I'm fine no matter where I live. My profession (mostly writing and researching) is such that if I change jobs, it is reasonable to expect similar arrangements in the future. Salary pays the bills in my current house and because of ag exemptions, the taxes on the farm are actually LESS than the taxes on my house in town. And they're covered already by the existing arrangements on the farm.
I want to do something valuable with the farm, but here's where it gets tricky. I grew up on this farm. So I have lots of old farm experience and experience with this farm in particular (I can point out the underground water lines to the surprise of my wife, even though they haven't been exposed for 30 years). But we were always part-time farmers, not full-timers and I was always splitting tasks with my siblings. So I have huge gaps in my farming knowledge. This is not too bad, because we currently have tennants who do most of the work. Unless I find a way to really transform the farm in a big way, I'll most likely leave the big sections to them and do more small, manageable agriculture (gardening, possibly raising trees, etc.) on some smaller plots. But I do want to explore options to possibly make it profitable or more so than it is now.
As for my family, my wife has no experience in farming, and my son is still a little too young to help.
The farm: 90 acres in Medina County, near Hondo. Soil is good, productive in good years, but there's no irrigation and without an Edwards well, traditional crops are hardly guaranteed. There are years like the last two, where the grass is almost non-existent. We've got a 60 acre field, plus 25 acres of pastureland. Currently, we have leases on both, with a farmer growing a crop on the field while a neighbor runs a small amount of cattle. The split on the crop in most years covers the taxes, which is fine by me unless I find something better. The cattle isn't much. In fact, my mom only charged him $1 as long as he fixed all the old fences. That deal was worth every dime for the last few years, but now the fences are all brand new and I might need a better arrangement.
The goal options:
1. Just live there, soak up the fresh air, watch the cows out my windows while all my co-workers on their zoom calls live in little suburban houses with loud neighbors playing rap. This I will happily accomplish either way provided my salary pays my bills, which is probably safe unless Biden gets re-elected and turns our economy into Zimbabwe.
2. On the other hand, I'd like to do something with the farm that's productive, valuable and fun. So option 2 is find some small, niche thing that makes a little side money without committing myself and my family to a full-time job, because well, my wife and I have real jobs and my son has this whole school thing. (I don't want to be my dad who gave us each a hoe, pointed to 40 acres of sunflowers and said, "chop them down."). I want my son to work, learn the value of it, but not suffer to no valuable point.
So in this option, I'm thinking of working on some crop that might be manageable on a small scale. We have about 60 legacy pecan trees, out of the 100 we had when I was a kid. Rehabilitating them and maybe planting some new ones we could get all the pecans we wanted but harvesting is a trick, and unless I can see ROI, I'm not investing in equipment heavier than the small tractor we already have. A shaker attachment might be a possibility. I'm also interested in planting and growing trees, anything from pecans and oaks to specialties, and then maybe selling them at least at farmer's markets or maybe to some nurseries. The question is how many can we do with 3 people. Maybe start small and work up to hiring some folks.
3. Now we get to the more ambitious options. I have dreams of getting the farm going at a large scale, and might be able to find some investors if I can find some good fits to do something out there that makes good cash. (Don't anybody say pot or anything related to it, because I ain't no ******* hippie and one of the reasons I left the city was because I was sick of smelling that **** from my neighbors. I have no interest in crops like that. I'd rather turn the place into a damn solar farm and stare at the glare all day).
What I could get interested in is a crop like, say Olives. I few years ago, when I was working at Texas Department of Ag, I toured an olive ranch with the commissioner and the soil at this place was very similar to ours. I'd probably have to do more testing to verify, but we're in the right temperature range that it could work. The reason I liked Olives is that the value per acre was relatively high, so it might be possible to plant a small test grove (knowing of course that the trees take about 7 years at least to be productive), and then use that to build on for a larger grove. Trees appeal to me, as I've said, as I want to reforest some of the land we have in the back that's not really good for anything, and maybe with more ground cover, I could even do some deer leases. Right now, the 60 acres has zero trees and the pasture only has a few, so there's only about 2 acres of forested land on the place. So building up more deer habitat was a goal and that's expanded to maybe looking at trees as a bigger thing. I also expect to hand this to my son, so if I plant trees that I'll never see become fully grown, that's not a loss to me.
We also are looking at livestock. I can run cattle, but my wife and kid are not ready for that, and I like simpler animals with fewer vet bills and other concerns. Chickens are easy, but I don't fancy doing them on a large scale. Goats are also easy, but with the drought we've had recently, I'm hesitant to put something out there that is pretty harsh on the grass we do have. Sheep I've done in the past, but never managed the sheering process. I could look at other animals. Open to anything but fad ones like Emus.
I'm not asking for some panacea, or perfect crop, because every circumstance is different. But I want to take the rudimentary knowledge of a kid who left the farm at 18 to go to A&M and study something other than ag, and rebuild my knowledge base to tackle this problem. A few ideas:
1. What does Agrilife or someone else have out there in terms of programs, training, or something to go back and learn all the stuff I never learned or learned incorrectly?
2. What are resources from other state agencies or USDA or whatever to help someone get into farming?
3. If I did find something that I thought would work and might be within a realm of possibility, could I approach a similar farmer and get their advice/encouragement without coming off as a competitor? For example, I know of an olive farm not too far away that seems to have all the pressing equipment there, so maybe if I planted and sold him the raw olives it could be a win/win. Or something similar with tree farmers. But I would hate to go in and come off like someone trying to cut into their business.
4. I have heard about farm management companies, that basically are regional companies that rent your land for a number of years and split the profits. A guy I met said they did it with his land and it was great, but I'm not sure about how that model works. In the past, we've worked with farmer Joe down the road, and though it's not a lot of money, its easy to manage and it has the benefit of helping keep other family farmers in business, as opposed to a corporation.
5. What would you recommend to someone in this situation. Doing nothing is an option, and if I was older and unable to work, I'd do that. But I can do anything I could ever do (I'm 51), so I want something that's a challenge and that could possibly evolve into something profitable. And who knows, if I get my son in on it, maybe he'll want to do that when he grows up. Or he could just do the part-time-farming like me. But I want to cast the widest possible net for ideas, because there is so much that I don't know but that could be useful.