“FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.”
Can you get two pennies if you don't have one?
I have a friend, Bruce Fires who spends his days teaching students and his "off" time with his family at Crossing Rivers Farms. He reminds me that it is the pennies that make the dollars.
Bruce is making his cattle operation flex while being hours from "the market" and in an area where you drive for hours and might not see a calf. He measures his chore time. He measures and accounts for every expense. Bruce finds pennies in a livestock desert flooded with commodity production.
Greg Judy told me, "Without management, everything collapses." In talking with Mr. Judy, he also measures time. He measures it with the daily planner in his shirt pocket and by designing efficient systems. Mr. Judy was the guy that slept in his truck and cooked on his tailgate in order to attend the grazing and forage workshops that Jim Gerrish put on in Missouri.
When studying, he applies Franklin's frugality in various ways. He knows what costs him the most per hour and what the most profitable use of his time is. He sees value add opportunities on all properties he is managing. Recycling logs for lumber, growing shiitakes, and cutting firewood. Value-adding through sharing knowledge, VRBO rentals, and other speaking events. Mr. Judy knows frugality.
He learned it when he only had $8 in his pocket. If you look around Green Pastures Farm, you see stockpiled FREE resources that were gleaned from others' waste or from time spent working the land.
It really does take pennies to make dollars. Value is all around you. You have to find the pennies left behind... thrown out in plain sight. Left to waste because they were old fashioned, inefficient, cornered by nostalgic ideology, or depreciated. The thing is, those nostalgic ideas tend to do one of two things. Die as a part of history, no longer functional, or those skills and knowledge go up the corner in value.
Can you cycle that resource one more time before it is lost?
Mr. Franklin made his pennies by shaking hands with the butcher. He gathered cattle waste in order for his father to render tallow. In his frugality, he skimped to simple meals that would someday compound and would allow him to stand with kings.
Commentaires