Idaho Rancher Grows His Operation by Stacking Enterprises

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

What does it take to grow a business in production agriculture in today’s farm economy? One strategy is to build vertically, capturing more value of what you produce. That’s the approach Glenn Elzinga took with Alderspring Ranch in Idaho. He says it’s all about stacking agricultural enterprises.

Elzinga… “ When most people in agriculture say, Hey kid, I'd really like to expand. And offer you an opportunity to stay, but we can't afford another ranch, or we can't afford another farm. We can't go horizontal and spread our acreage influence out. But instead, I would submit to your listeners to say, Hey, how can we stack enterprises here? How can we get this land to be more productive in a way that's kind of a regenerative production so that we can stack new enterprises on top of each other, you know, so that yes, we can have the hay, we can have the grazing, but we can also have a direct market.  So what did we do to become price makers instead of takers? And it was just building relationships with one person at a time.  It was a lot of work, but it was a slow drip drip progression to give us complete market control. And now every one of our animals, we run about 250 mama calves and every one of those calves we take to grass fed finish and we sell online.”

You can see how Glenn is marketing online at his website: www.alderspring.com.