I have decided to do more blogging since Facebook is killing off business pages by trying to force us to monetize our ads, else we get seen by less than 1% of our fans. We don’t have a big marketing budget, but we do want to share farm knowledge and stories with our customers. So a blog on our own website is perhaps the next best option. Here is some knowledge mixed with a story for your entertainment and edification.

We’re back at market again on Saturdays. Some farmers refuse to do farmers markets because of the ups and downs of “speculative sales,” but not us. Going to market is ton of work, I will admit, and it requires rising at a rather unpleasant hour to start a very full day of work. But we enjoy going to market for many reasons: we can supply our regular customers with a convenient place to buy our products without having to pre-order; we can do our own locally-grown grocery shopping; and it’s a great place to meet new customers and add to public knowledge about locally- and naturally-raised meats and eggs.

But some of the folks we meet aren’t terribly keen on buying local—they’re perhaps just shopping for a cheaper option than supermarket. And occasionally we are met with outright hostility over our prices. (But I’ll let you in on a little secret—we’re not here to be the cheapest. Nor are we here to be the most expensive. We’re here because we want to be the healthiest meats and eggs you can get from a sustainable operation. And you can’t call yourself sustainable if you’re not profitable. And profitable doesn’t mean we’re greedy—it means we’re able to make a reasonable living! More on that some other time…)

For example, a lady came up to our market booth to inquire about our turkeys (which, by the way, are already all spoken for!). We are still taking some standby names, so I explained to her how pricing works this year. Large turkeys are 19 lb and over and cost $4.25/lb. Mediums are 16-18 lb and cost $4.50/lb. Smalls are 15 lb and under and cost $4.75/lb. Her eyes grew wide and her mouth frowned out the words, “So the smallest are the MOST expensive?” Then she walked off, offended at our outrageous prices.

She wasn’t exactly correct. It would still take more dollars to buy a big turkey than a little turkey, but the little ones are more expensive per pound. Now, this article isn’t about justifying our turkey prices. Instead, it is to explain a concept that perhaps many folks don’t understand—why the smallest are the most expensive per pound.

It’s called overhead. You see, each turkey will consume feed at pretty much the same rate per pound of bodyweight. But feed is just a tiny component of the final turkey price, and probably the only factor that varies by weight.  There are a bunch of fixed costs that are constant no matter how big or small the bird is. To name a few, there is the cost of the poults (baby turkey chicks), the brooder electricity, the pasture pen, the feeder, the waterer, the transportation to processing, and, perhaps the biggest single overhead cost, the processing fee. It’s a flat rate per turkey. Even if all the turkeys we raise end up at 10 lb each, it still costs us the same to process them as if they were 20 lb.

All of the overhead costs are per bird, not per pound, and so the smaller birds end up costing us more per pound to produce. That’s why the little’uns are more pricey than the big’uns per pound.

So now you are a turkey-pricing expert. Happy farming!