The real cost of farm to table

Our life on Namaste Farm has been all about raising our own food respectfully and responsibly, avoiding all the bad things about industrial food production. We grow vegetables and fruit, freezing and canning and pickling as much as possible. We also raise and process our own chickens and sheep. As you know, we have just begun raising ducks too, for both eggs and meat. Here’s a little tale of the results, which you should know when you question the price and availability of locally raised products.

First, animals don’t appear for free, even if you raise them from animals you already have. With the ducks, we purchased ducklings from a hatchery and had them shipped to us. They were only a couple of days old. From the point, we have paid to feed them, along with the cost of bedding, enclosures, and pools. Our research said that we should be able to process them at a certain point, so we processed one duck as a test run. It turned out to be below production weight, so we have continued to feed and care for the ducks as we let them grow, and our ducks gain weight slower because they are roaming free and active.

The hidden costs of ducks have been a surprise, not just in money but in time. We are not full-time farmers, so our animal care happens around the time we spend at our regular jobs. Besides the obvious feeding and cleaning, ducks require a lot of supervision when they are small, so they can swim without drowning or becoming chilled when they have no feathers. They are very messy creatures, so more time is required to keep them and their habitat clean. These chores were not unexpected, but when processing a single duck we discovered the real extra burden of duck production for a small farmer.

We have processed chickens for several years and have bought the equipment needed to defeather the chickens after they are slaughtered. Ducks, it turns out, have a layer of down feathers that requires either a dramatic amount of time or an investment in extra equipment and materials. Imagine spending two hours hand plucking a 5 pound duck. Now multiply that by a dozen. I hope you see why the food we local farmers produce costs more than what you buy at the grocery store. We produce quality food, but quality involves a lot of our time and money. In the case of ducks, we have learned from our experiment that we probably won’t process ducks anymore. There are only so many hours in each day!