Having tea with prices and costs

I wrote last week about some of my fears and how I often feel blinded by them. I have been practicing noticing when I feel stuck and blind, and I mean the literal sensations of clenched shoulders, furrowed brow and sudden impulse to do something else. When I feel those things I stop, stand up and experiment with doing something different with my body until my shoulders and brow soften. As I stood to do so I noticed that it was snowing very hard outside. Have you ever tried to take a picture of heavy snowfall? Impossible! The camera barely captures the whiteout. You can see one big snowflake above the rock in the field near the center of the photo. Did I get distracted? I returned to the task at hand.

One such task has been taking a look at our costs. This is challenging in two ways: it is a complex equation to calculate the cost of a given product on our farm and there are numbers that cut at so many fears. One of my greatest fears is that it is simply too expensive to raise food the way we believe it should be raised, for the health of the humans, animals and the ecosystem supporting us all. So I decided to reframe my investigation into our costs. Instead of something akin to a legal inquiry I brewed a pot of warm mint and nettle tea from our farm and invited my spreadsheets to tea.

Cost and Price are the best of friends and great guests for tea. Like siblings that depend on one another they also do not always get along. Nevertheless we had a lovely chat and Cost let me know how things had changed, sometimes dramatically in ways I did not expect. All the while Price kept good notes and followed along. What a change from our arguments of the past, we all agreed tea was a much better venue than the accusations of the courtroom.

To all our customers, thank you for supporting our farm, and the land and ecosystem that produces our food by purchasing that food. I also want to let you know that the results of our cost conversations are that our prices will be going up as of March 1st, 2023. I encourage you to stock up now while our prices are lower.

What is causing our prices to change?

I plan to have a detailed report on this in weeks to come. The short answer is…everything costs way more now. The three big players in our cost equations are: Organic Grain for chickens and pigs, processing/butchering costs and labor. Organic Grain prices continue to rise, as they should, since costs have gone up in their industry as well. Labor and processing are linked and we have found that the labor market has also increased. I have also begun to factor in my own labor, which up until this point I had neglected to include as a cost.

If you have any questions about our prices or anything about the farm or our food please do not hesitate to email me: nathan@reberrockfarm.com

I have updated the following boxes to make it even easier to stock up in the next few weeks: Best of Beef Box and Best of Pork Box

I’ve also updated the 1/4 Pork 35 lb box for those who want to stock up on our delicious Pasture Raised Pork, which is fed only Organic Grain. For beef lovers we also have our 1/8 Beef 35 lb box and 1/4 Beef 70 lb box.