We have found that one of the most challenging parts of running a hobby farm is establishing distribution channels for our surplus produce. Since we are a very small operation, our surplus is sporadic making us an unreliable supplier on anything but the smallest scale.
This past spring, when the weather was warm and our chickens were in their most productive laying years, we often collected over two dozen eggs a day! Clearly, it is impossible (and unhealthy) for two people to consume this many eggs per day. Now that winter is coming, the day light hours are short and the weather is cold, we are collecting an average of only seven eggs per day. This is still too many for us to eat but our fridge isn't overrun with eggs anywhere near like it was in the spring.
We have one consistent egg purchaser who comes each week to buy a carton of 18 eggs and we dole out some of our surplus to family, neighbours and friends. Luckily, my pottery teacher and some of Ian's Scout leaders and parents are happy to buy the remaining surplus on an ad hoc basis.
Since starting our small apiary (currently we have one honey bee hive), we have accrued a small surplus of honey each year too. In each of the past two years, we have harvested 30 jars of surplus honey which we store in our basement fridge and sell to interested persons on an ad hoc basis. Last week, I gave a lecture on beekeeping to a class I am taking which resulted in everyone in the class (except the resident vegan) asking to purchase a jar of our honey. This is the most honey we've ever sold at one time and it almost cleared out our 2012 honey stores, though we still have lots from 2011.
We still haven't figured out a good way to sell our surplus garden produce each summer and fall. There is less of an opportunity to give the vegetables away to neighbours since they all have gardens and surplus produce too. We freeze and can a lot of it but there are some veggies that are not amenable to being stored that way. In the past we have dropped off huge veggie surpluses to the Stittsville food bank but often homegrown produce looks less perfect than what you buy in the grocery store and unless people have sought out that kind of food specifically, there is a tendency to think misshapen or unusual veggies are bad and shouldn't be eaten or else there is a lack of knowledge on how to prepare them.
We're still working on establishing vegetable distribution channels (that don't require us to spend our summer weekends sitting at a booth at a farmers' market - our weekend time is simply too valuable to do that) so if you have any thoughts or ideas, please feel free to share them in the comments section.
On the whole, it was a very "profitable" (I use this word loosely) week for the farm. Woohoo!
