Grass Run Farm is six months into the process of applying for a federal grant to help grow our business. This particular program -- aimed at helping farmers who add value to the products they sell -- seems to fit us perfectly. After all, we take local agricultural products (cattle and hogs), add value to them by processing them locally and verifying important claims about the standards to which they was raised, and sell them within our region, helping to build a system in which consumers place more and more value on the source and quality of their food.

But it's been a haul.

First of all, if you're considering applying for a federal grant, find someone in your area who has successfully applied for a similar program and wring them for details. Good persuasive writing is only the start; it pays to know how to navigate the many and specific rules for compiling the application, section by section. Even with considerable professional help, we'll hit the deadline hard.

Then, get a firmer grip on your farm's financials than you ever thought necessary. This means mapping out budgets for projected expansion for the next three to five years. It means knowing how much dept/risk you're planning to take (on) to get profitable (or more profitable, if possible). And it means knowing how to track your progress week by week, month by month so that you see any red flags before they unfurl.

I am uncomfortable with the idea of calculated debt. Or any debt at all, for that matter. I makes me feel like a failure. It makes me worry incessantly and lose sleep. I've needed to hear my husband and business partners explain our plan for assuming and mitigating debt at least 100 times as we inch closer to signing a dotted line for borrowed funding. But in the end, I understand that risk is usually the only precursor to reward.

Finally, look hard at the systems in place on your farm. You're going to need them to run nearly without a hitch so you can fulfill the plans laid out in your grant application AND do the paperwork to prove it. It's rare for state and federal grantors to release award money up front. Grant winners usually have to spend their own money, produce receipts for every breath they held while spending it, and wait to be reimbursed.

It sure is a funny way of rewarding those who have already bet their livelihood on products as contentious -- and perishable -- as food.

The trouble with building local food systems, it seems, is that each local food farmer inevitably winds up doing his/her own distribution.

We swore up and down that we wouldn't sink our scant working capital in a "reefer" truck (a pallet-ready vehicle with a refrigeration unit for the cargo hold). We borrowed neighbors' vehicles. We delivered in passenger cars crammed with coolers. We shipped product via UPS. We sent product on the tail ends of semis. We tried housing our product in an off-site warehouse and having them pull, pack and ship our orders via regional carriers.

In the end, we couldn't afford NOT to be filling and delivering our own orders. No one else seemed to care enough about our stuff to make distribution happen with the precision and quality we expect of it. After all, the small farmer's reality is that the inaccuracy of a single order can sour a customer relationship that took months to cultivate.

So we gave in and bought our very own hand-me-down truck from a neighboring producer. Our product -- meat -- is quite heavy (2,000+ lbs) when stacked on a pallet, and we needed a truck sturdy enough to carry several pallets from our USDA-inspected processor to our on-farm warehouse and additional rented warehouse space in a nearby metropolitan area.

This purchase seemed necessary, and yet such a maddeningly predictable money pit. We personally don't know anything about repairing a vehicle practically large enough to house our tractor. It makes me nervous to have to drive a truck on which I probably couldn't change a tire even if I tried. And -- best of all -- it averages 6 miles per gallon.

Yet, we can't fill the role we've carved for ourselves -- as a local meat company offering weekly or bi-weekly delivery -- without it.

The best we can do is be flexible about distribution, week by week, day by day. If the load is light, we borrow a neighbor's smaller and more efficient refrigerated vehicle. If we can fill our truck's hold backhauling product for other producers, we do. If we can pull off very small deliveries using coolers and passenger cars, we will.

Distribution -- the often-overlooked link in the local food chain -- will soon define farm networks that succeed and those that fail.

This entry might well become a theme.

I've been thinking about the basic rules of farm life that might not seem obvious.

Some involve common sense, others common courtesy. I like to think I have both, but I'll admit I learned some of these things the hard way.

And by the way, here's a quick list of essential gear:
Muck boots -- Not the cute puddle-jumping kind but the lug-soled, durable brown or green ones that hit just below the knee
Rain gear -- Keep in mind that fabrics must withstand snagging on barbwire, spray from four-wheeler tires, and other not-so-pleasant encounters
A pocket knife or retractable carpenter blade -- There's nothing worse than needing to cut wire and not having the tool to do it.
A headlamp -- Sometimes the work isn't finished when the sun goes down.
Durable pants and socks -- Shorts and capris won't protect your legs from nettles or cow shit.

Anyway, here goes:

1. Leave gates of any kind as you found them. If they're open, leave them open. If they're closed, make darn sure they're closed -- and latched the way you found them.

Here's why: Open gates allow safe passage for animals and people driving equipment. We'll leave a pasture gate open intentionally, knowing the next person through it will likely be driving a tractor with a sickle mower, for example, and won't want to stop to open a gate -- or would be surprised to find one in his/her way. It's very easy to drive over/through a gate if you expect it to be open but some unknowing person has closed it.

Likewise, we leave gates closed when we think they might play a pivotal role in moving our herd. There's nothing worse than moving animals into a field and finding them in another the next morning because a gate was left open in a far corner. Cows can and will find the narrowest of gaps in a fence; an open gate is like a four-lane on-ramp.

2. Also, learn where gates are on the farm. If you find a steer on the wrong side of a fence, you'll want to push him toward the closest gate so he can rejoin the herd. When things go wrong, it's always best to know in advance which direction to head.

3. Learn to tie decent knots, particularly a half-hitch to take up slack, keep the "tail" end of electric fence from dangling, and allow for quick and predictable untying. It's a farm-wide system: if all knots are tied in much the same way, any greenhorn can learn how to quickly release them, when, say, a frothing cow having trouble calving needs to be pushed back through several fences to the corral for veterinary care.

4. Don't scream at the animals unless they're endangering you or themselves. You'll break their trust. And there are other ways to communicate your intentions.

5. Think ahead. Imagine what could possibly go wrong and be prepared to improvise, both mentally and physically. One extra 20-foot section of temporary fence could guide the herd straight into the corral -- instead of leaving open the possibility of squeezing around the barn, where the garden sits waiting to be trampled. 

6. No tutorial would be complete without this one: If you can help it, avoid sorting or loading animals with your partner or spouse. Especially pigs (which have no "herd mentality"), but also calves and stubborn cows. If you MUST work together in the corral without a third person to mitigate baggage and enforce courtesy, outline your goals in detail (cows sorted first; keep the bulls separate; calves all together in the last load), decide who's running the gate and who's pushing the animals, and make sure everyone knows how to use necessary equipment, such as temporary gates, chute latches, and trailer doors. I've seen the most methodical, cow-whispery person I know lose it over calves that wouldn't load. And he's not even married.

7. Learn how to operate equipment. And how to repair equipment. Or know precisely who to call. On a Sunday morning. In the rain. This includes chainsaws, four-wheelers, passenger vehicles and trucks, water tank valves, hose clamps, weed eaters, tractors and implements, tillers, skid loaders, electric fencers, etc.... I'll admit I hate our chainsaw in particular. But I could probably get it going if I needed to. After about an hour of expletives.

8. Put stuff back. If your tools aren't kept in some kind of order, devise one and stick to it. No exceptions. Chances are good that you'll soon need to find a particular tool in a hurry to avert some kind of crisis.

9. Start early. This one is a struggle for me, since I'm most productive after dinner, between 9 and midnight. But it helps your cumulative sanity to roll out of bed with the sun and feel great about the number of things you got done before 9 a.m. Also, this habit wins points with older neighbors who have never known a different schedule.

10. Take time for lunch and dinner around the table. Or dinner and supper, as some folks call the noon and evening meals. These are valuable opportunities to check in with family or co-workers and be sure you're all eating the fruits of your labor.

I wouldn't be surprised if my electric cooperative put us on some kind of watch list last month when our electrical needs leaped abruptly to the level required to air-condition a McMansion.....in Death Valley.

Cooperative employees (many of whom are neighbors) know full well that our barn/house is hardly a McMansion (we live in about 1,800 square feet on the second floor), and we're not really air-conditioned people anyway, having driven cars with six digits on the odometer and lacking freon all our adult lives.

And, of course, there's the matter of our being sort of crunchy certified organic types, out here at the end of a road, more than two miles from a highway. It's no big secret that we have no conventional farming experience, and we have a few friends with dreadlocks and eclectic taste in music and philosophy.

The rumor does make sense, I'll admit.

But no.

The jump in kilowattage marked the installation of our pallet-ready walk-in cooler, which hums along at 36 degrees. Our state-inspected on-farm warehouse facility houses the refrigerator and a smaller walk-in freezer. We bring our USDA-inspected meats back from the butcher and house them for USDA-specified lengths of time in refrigeration; product not sold in those windows of time gets frozen.

I think the disconnect occurs not because folks assume we're growing pot. I think it's still just fundamentally inconceivable to many people that we even try to do what we do: raise, process, transport, market and distribute the products of our farm -- and the farms of our two additional member/owners and a handful of other small, sustainable family farms in our corner of Iowa.

"But," I can almost hear folks wondering as they pass our Grass Run Farm mailbox just off the highway, "how do they make money?"

It's true there isn't much of a margin, and we're certainly not making minimum wage for the numbers of hours worked. The learning curve remains steep as we build a respected brand for our faithfully local, grass-fed, family-farmed products.

But we're making it happen, however slowly and painfully. We knew we were getting something right when a group of local Amishmen, represented by one member who took it upon himself to commute to a telephone, called us to see if we were interested in marketing their grass-fed cattle. And two weeks ago a contributing reporter for CNN spent three hours at our dinner table (grass-fed ribeye roast, homemade bread and garden-fresh salad) encouraging us to foretell the future of local foods in our corner of the world.

It was an unexpected but refreshing opportunity to recognize that we've come from somewhere and that we're going someplace real -- no "enhancers" required.
 

I might as well start with the rigor of our daily life. We're not the only people who work hard, day after day, but it sure does feel like it sometimes.

The alarm goes off anywhere between 4:15 a.m. and 6 a.m., depending on the day. On 4:15 days, we get up and load refrigerated or frozen boxes of our USDA-inspected meats onto our refrigerated delivery truck. Each box has been invoiced manually -- we pull it from a pallet of other meat cuts processed on the same butcher date, write down the weight of its contents, label it with a sticker identifying the customer, and stack it on a pallet organized by the number of stops the driver will make. Big cases (holding 40-60 lbs) go on the bottom. Lighter cases (10-30 lbs) go nearer the top.

I am not focused and motivated in the morning. I know I will make mistakes if I try to pack and invoice orders just before the truck leaves, so I do everything possible the night before. Even if that makes it an 18-hour day.

But that's enough whining. Basically, we manage production, processing, and distribution of our 100% grass-fed beef and that of our partner farmers (who also run organic farms). The work is maddeningly diverse and usually exhausting. But every now and then someone tells us he/she saw our products in a store, tossed some in his/her cart AND encouraged another shopper to try them, too.

It's nice that trust is such an important measure of value in our business.

There's something a little cliche and romantic about feeding calves milk by bottle. It's an activity popular with children and other visitors to the farm....the rubber nipple, easily the length of a five-year-old's hand, is quite a memorable thing when slippery with warm calf slobber.