This month, I sat down with Erika Flanay, the owner of Shelterbelt Farms and a member of Cornell’s Small Farms Project, to discuss her thoughts on owning a business and working in the community. Some segments have been edited for clarity.
How would you describe your job?
I run Shelterbelt Farm, which predominantly produces grass-fed lamb for local consumers. I’ve run this business for thirteen years, and it has changed a lot in that time. When we started, we were raising chickens, turkeys, and pigs, and then overtime fazed those things out. The way I describe my job… It’s orchestrating lots of different pieces because everything has to come together… Most of the things that we raise have a six to twelve-month horizon, so you have to be thinking ahead and working backward. I do a lot of planning in the non-growing season, thinking about every enterprise, market, breeding animals, slaughterhouse dates, help on the farm, and the regular monthly tasks of bookkeeping… If you’re going to run a business, it’s not just about the service or product that you sell, there has to be all of that back-office stuff too.
What does a typical day look like for you?
It changes throughout the year for me. Every day is farm chores, anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes in the morning, as early as I can get out there, and it gets earlier as the days get longer. I’m out basically as soon as the sun is up, moving fences, setting up water, cleaning up old fences, dealing with livestock minerals, and treating any health issues that come up. I also work off the farm now [at the Small Farms Program]: we had grown the farm to the point where it could support me full time, but I am risk averse, and so I didn’t want to put all my eggs in the farm basket… So, what I do really depends on the day. If it’s a rainy day, I’ll do a lot of office work. Other days, if it’s a nice day or something pressing is happening at the farm, I’ll do all farm projects—and there’s always something to do.
How has your work as a business owner changed your relationship with the community and other business owners?
Well, part of my job at the Small Farms Program is providing training and technical assistance to other
armers. It definitely gives me more credibility to know intimately what’s involved [in it all], because from the outside… most people have a pretty simple view. I’ve heard people say things like, “What’s to know about raising pigs? Don’t you just put up a fence, throw out some feed, and collect them a few months later? What’s the big deal?” They don’t have any idea of how complex farming is. So I have a really deep respect, having made so many mistakes and having gone through so much trial and error, learning hard lessons, and basically investing blood, sweat, and lots of money into starting our own business. When I’m interacting with other farmers, I’m able to have a deeper understanding of what they’re going through.
Outside of my Cornell Small Farms work, being a business owner has given me more visibility in the community…I used to put out a monthly newsletter, and I would always put something where I would talk about my own experience or try to educate people about farming, so [I was] using my newsletter, not just as a marketing tool, but to help educate and connect. And then I used to write in the Brookton Dale newsletter, called the Old Mill. I figured that there are all of these people that live here, rurally, but most of them still have no connection to farming. Even if they’re driving past and see cows grazing or seeing a farmer harvesting hay, they don’t really know what they’re seeing. They know it looks bucolic, but that’s why people romanticize farming. I wanted to help people understand, so that brought a different level of visibility.
As students are thinking about life after high school, some are contemplating starting their own business. Do you have any advice for them?
I think the main one is [if you want to start your own] business and support yourself that way, you’re going to have to do all of the marketing, branding, financial management, and all of that stuff, so don’t neglect that. That’s critical if you want to stay in business. Or, if you really hate something, you can farm it out to somebody else, but you need to set up the systems to do that.
What made you choose to start your own business, your own farm? How did that come to be?
I’m pretty sure that people who knew me growing up would be shocked to know it. I didn’t even eat vegetables until I was twenty-one!… I guess maybe I fell in love with food first. I was a student at Cornell at the time, and I ended up helping to manage the student farm, and that was my first hands-on farming experience. I fell in love with getting my hands dirty, and physical work, and harvest, and eating the harvest. There’s something about it for me—I really love people, and communities, and building connections between people, and ecology and nature, and farming is just really viscerally the intersection of people and nature. Something about that really appealed to me. When my husband and I moved back here in 2005, I still didn’t know that I wanted to have a farm, I just started gardening, and then the garden kept growing, and then we were basically producing all of our own meat and vegetables, like subsistence farming basically—selling some, but it wasn’t a business. And now when I teach beginning farmers, I talk about how that’s actually a really terrible way to start a farm business! Because you think it makes sense, that you just keep scaling up and that at some point you have a farm instead of a garden, but the reality is that there are so many things that you don’t have to think about if you’re not trying to have a business. The marketing side, branding, pricing, and the financial aspect all of that you don’t have to worry about. My very first project was helping to create this farmer program because there wasn’t really anything statewide to help beginning farmers, and there was a lot of interest. And something about that, by osmosis or whatever, got into my blood… We decided to give actual farming a try.
So, how was the decision to start and own your own business changed your relationship to work?
There’s not a lot of division between work and not work. I think for most people, if you’re going to be an entrepreneur and start your own business, it better be something you really like, because it becomes more of a lifestyle. I almost never leave work! There’s always something to do. I could set up a hammock outside and think, “I’m going to relax now, I’m off work.” But nine times out of ten, I’ll see something out of the corner of my eye and think, “Right, I never weeded that,” or “Oh I needed to plant those trees,” or whatever. Some people are better at it than I am…
[When I was working in] a mindless office job, that was 8:00-4:00, or whatever, I remember thinking, “Wow, this is amazing! I can go home and leave my work behind! I can hang out with my friends!” At least in the first few years of starting a business, I think that’s really hard to do.
Alright, last question, and I’m really curious about this. Where did the name of your farm come from?
We had just bought the property in 2010, and we wanted to take a whole year to observe before we did anything, but we could tell already that we were going to want to plant some trees because there’s a lot of strong wind that sweeps through here. And as I was reading, I started coming across the term “shelterbelts,” as in bands of shrubbery or trees that help shelter from the wind. I liked the bigger metaphor of this farm being our shelter from the wind. The final piece was that shelterbelt.com was available because I didn’t want to be, like, shelterbelt.net or shelterbeltithaca.net, or whatever. *laughs*