One of the great lies I've been told is that if you accumulate a little wealth, you should invest it, and if you get 10% returns you should be proud of yourself.
This is utterly ridiculous.
Here I am watching my animals reproduce. The sheep give an average of 2.25 lambs per year, while the cows are giving me almost 100% reproduction rate. If I kept all the calves and lambs, I would have literally thousands of sheep and hundreds of cows in 5 years. The only limiting factor is how much sunlight, rain, and carbon dioxide I can access in the form of grass, and rotational grazing techniques combined with regenerational agriculture means I should be able to double if not quadruple the free forage on my acreage.
The amazing thing is that if I take the profit from the animals and save it, I can easily expand my acreage. On the one hand, being so profitable land is pretty cheap for me. It's just a matter of time. On the other hand, there are lots of older people who want to keep their tax exemption and won't charge very much in rent fees if I lease their property. Really, the limiting factor is going to be how many animals I can sort and load into trucks to bring them to the sale barn. And that's not even trying to market my products, which would all qualify as grass-fed, organic, whatever you want to label it, as I don't use any chemicals or herbicides or pesticides.
The key to all of this is understanding exponential growth. When you have something that can compound on itself, and that thing grows at a certain rate, over a certain period of time it will double. In the same amount of time more, it will quadruple. In another time period of the same length, it will be 8x, then 16x, then 32x. After 10 doubling periods, it will be 1,024x!
The doubling period can be easily calculated by just taking the percent growth and dividing by 70. This isn't exact, but it is close enough. 10% growth is a doubling period of 7 years.
When you invest your money in the market, you are allowing someone else to profit off of your investments, and you are getting back only a fraction of the growth. Someone else is taking their profits in the middle.
Not so with agriculture. When that baby calf drops, you've just earned a significant chunk of change. Keep that calf, and in 2 years she'll be dropping her own calves, and so on and so on. The only middle man is disease and death, two factors you get to control more or less. If you want to do a breeding program, you cull the bottom 1%-5%, or more if you want to be aggressive, and you keep doing this over a period of years and years, and you'll have animals with top genetics.
Or maybe you want to grow crops. If you do it the traditional way, after a few hours of work you have sown a certain amount of seed. If you tend that little garden plot, in a few months you should be looking at a harvest many times greater than what you put in the ground.
Where they "get you" with agriculture is the "middle men". Someone wants to sell you drugs and poisons to put on your land and in your animals. They say you "HAVE TO DO IT!" or else your animals will die and your crops will spoil. They say that nothing will grow unless you subscribe to their philosophy of chemical warfare on the natural world. BALDERDASH!
Please look into Gabe Brown, Greg Judy, Joel Salatin and other regenerational farmers. Every year they go back out to their fields to see what "damage" has been done, and every year they see more and better returns, all without waging war on nature.
This is the future. No other industry will feed your children.
This is utterly ridiculous.
Here I am watching my animals reproduce. The sheep give an average of 2.25 lambs per year, while the cows are giving me almost 100% reproduction rate. If I kept all the calves and lambs, I would have literally thousands of sheep and hundreds of cows in 5 years. The only limiting factor is how much sunlight, rain, and carbon dioxide I can access in the form of grass, and rotational grazing techniques combined with regenerational agriculture means I should be able to double if not quadruple the free forage on my acreage.
The amazing thing is that if I take the profit from the animals and save it, I can easily expand my acreage. On the one hand, being so profitable land is pretty cheap for me. It's just a matter of time. On the other hand, there are lots of older people who want to keep their tax exemption and won't charge very much in rent fees if I lease their property. Really, the limiting factor is going to be how many animals I can sort and load into trucks to bring them to the sale barn. And that's not even trying to market my products, which would all qualify as grass-fed, organic, whatever you want to label it, as I don't use any chemicals or herbicides or pesticides.
The key to all of this is understanding exponential growth. When you have something that can compound on itself, and that thing grows at a certain rate, over a certain period of time it will double. In the same amount of time more, it will quadruple. In another time period of the same length, it will be 8x, then 16x, then 32x. After 10 doubling periods, it will be 1,024x!
The doubling period can be easily calculated by just taking the percent growth and dividing by 70. This isn't exact, but it is close enough. 10% growth is a doubling period of 7 years.
When you invest your money in the market, you are allowing someone else to profit off of your investments, and you are getting back only a fraction of the growth. Someone else is taking their profits in the middle.
Not so with agriculture. When that baby calf drops, you've just earned a significant chunk of change. Keep that calf, and in 2 years she'll be dropping her own calves, and so on and so on. The only middle man is disease and death, two factors you get to control more or less. If you want to do a breeding program, you cull the bottom 1%-5%, or more if you want to be aggressive, and you keep doing this over a period of years and years, and you'll have animals with top genetics.
Or maybe you want to grow crops. If you do it the traditional way, after a few hours of work you have sown a certain amount of seed. If you tend that little garden plot, in a few months you should be looking at a harvest many times greater than what you put in the ground.
Where they "get you" with agriculture is the "middle men". Someone wants to sell you drugs and poisons to put on your land and in your animals. They say you "HAVE TO DO IT!" or else your animals will die and your crops will spoil. They say that nothing will grow unless you subscribe to their philosophy of chemical warfare on the natural world. BALDERDASH!
Please look into Gabe Brown, Greg Judy, Joel Salatin and other regenerational farmers. Every year they go back out to their fields to see what "damage" has been done, and every year they see more and better returns, all without waging war on nature.
This is the future. No other industry will feed your children.