Wobbly

We found one more good house before we switched direction, and it was a big one – 500 sq m (that’s about 5500 sq ft in US measurements). That’s a house with more square footage than the standard lot size in Queen Anne, Seattle. It also had a long line of barns and was in a lovely part of France.

I drove into the village and there it was, this big maison de maître with balconies and dormers. I said to myrself, ‘Holy cow, is this the house they meant?’

The house had the same basic layout as most other houses I had seen, with a central hallway and rooms off that, but had an extra set of rooms at each side. You had to walk through the inner set of rooms to get into the outer set. It had five windows across instead of the usual three, plus an extra annex on the West side. The house was so interesting I’m going to publish a few extra photos.

There was a fence made out of iron railings at the front border of the property with grand pillars either side of the gateway. The gates themselves were in the barn. There was another iron fence with another gateway enclosing a courtyard in front of the house. This place was a doctor’s house and must have been expensive to build.

This house had a lot of what we were looking for. It was a little too large, and therefore it would have been expensive to renovate, but what a huge old place! It had a hectare of land around it, and the land was good pasture land. The rooms were big. The village was pretty with the market town of Trie sur Baïse near by. Otto liked it.

One big problem the house had was water. This is common to most houses we saw. The stone walls suck up water via capillary action and it leaches out of the walls. In most old houses here you see staining and damage on the lower couple of feet. One method people used to ‘fix’ this was to patch the house with a concrete layer and put a concrete pathway around the house, like a protective apron.

The problem with using concrete on a stone and plaster house was that the concrete didn’t breathe to the extent of the old materials. So the water just kept wicking up the walls until the concrete stopped then leached out there. This concentrated the damage at the level just above the top of the concrete surface. See the following photo where the plaster has detached from the wall:

So many SW France houses went through this concreting back in the 50s. It hasn’t worked out too well. Nowadays they have gone back to the original materials.

This house had a couple of big fireplaces. This one was in the lounge. I love the inglenook made from old car seats. You can imagine the old couple drinking their Armagnac by the fire when it was the middle of winter. You can see the wealth of the occupants had dwindled since the times of the original doctor in the 1850s. Now you have car seats in the lounge room:

Whereas up in the attic was the original maid’s room:

There were several fireplaces, each with a different color of marble:

As with all the old houses, there was a well outside.

The barn had a store of tiles for when you needed a replacement. [Note: This photo became the banner image for wobbly.com.]

The upper floors of the old barns were built on huge old beams. You just can’t find lumber like this today. Unless, of course, it is recycled from an old barn.

But why didn’t we buy it? The size of the house implied a lot of work and the water issue also needed investment, but the problem that affected us the most was the lot. Originally this was a two-hectare lot with a good amount of land all around the house. Then the new generation of owners didn’t want to renovate the old house so they built a new modern, warm one beside it and cut the lot in half.

The pool of the new house is behind that hedge. If you’re going to invest in fixing up a grand old house then the land has to match. In cutting the lot in half, the owners did a fair amount of damage to the value of the house. The upstairs windows of the old house looked over the new house and its pool and garden. I get frustrated by things like this. At least the people who made the decision are paying the price. The house had been on the market for a couple of years at 240,000 euros and we weren’t going to buy it.  Still, I hope someone bought it and cleaned it up.

I wouldn’t have picked that wallpaper to go with those tiles.

I took a closer look at the farmhouse kitchen yesterday, checking out the power situation. There are a couple of 3-phase outlets there. Woo!

Why is this important? So I can run something like this:

and this:

With so many cafes closing down in France there’s a ready supply of second-hand restaurant equipment. A good, fast dishwasher is cheap but it needs 3-phase power. We can always get 3-phase wired in when we get electrical work done, but it is cool that they are already there. I don’t know if they actually work or are wired in safely, but at least the outlets look macho. Five pins!

We also got to look in the ‘Party Room’. Up until now we never had the key so we could only look through the window. Once inside, the room looked so much bigger. Beside the bar it had a kitchen that we hadn’t noticed before. (With 3-phase power!)

And at the other end was a giant fireplace. I love the crazy paving floor. The room was huge, just right for a full size snooker table.

And look, Michael Williams snuck in to the photo. He distracts from the atrocious wagon wheel light fittings.

Sometime in Fall last year I stepped out of the car and looked around at a farmhouse and its surrounding paddocks. There was a barn with its metal roof partially torn off by a recent storm. There were gentle hills all around. There was a big lake and plenty of forest. And there were cows.

‘”How big is this place?” I asked Chris.

“A hundred and forty hectares,” he said.

The previous week I had been looking at properties with 3000 sq m of land. This time I was looking at a property with 140ha – that’s 1 400 000 sq m. I went from looking at village houses to looking at farms. I thought then, and I still think now: How did I get here?

How did I get to looking at farms? I will attempt to explain over the next few posts.

As an aside, these photos are of the first big farm we saw out in Montesqieu-Volvestre in the Haute-Garonne. We didn’t buy it, although it could be a great farm for someone who doesn’t mind the wind. It had so many things going for it: a house that could be extended to fit us. Farmland that was all pasture. It had great subsidies. It was only 45 minutes from Toulouse. For us, part of the reason we moved to the country was that we wanted outdoor kids. This farm was subject to so much wind that everyone would stay indoors on cooler days. And the wind was strong enough to blow the roof off the barn.

As we’ve been farm hunting, I’ve been checking out how people here farm cows for beef. I’ve collected a few of the basics that are common among local farmers.

A cow a hectare is the standard limit

In general they have about a mother cow per hectare (about two and a half acres). Under the terms of the CAP (the EU farm subsidy program), cow farmers get an allowance per mother up to a limit. The government sets the limit on the number of cows subsidies: some technician looks at the farm and says, ‘Your 30 hectares can support 30 mothers.’ This subsidy limit has nearly always been a cow a hectare.

Subsidies are important

Each farmer always goes up to the limit to get full subsidy value. A cow subsidy is about 280 euros per cow per year and when you add in extra subsidies for land productivity and other special zones (e.g. Mountain or Natura 2000) the subsidies can quickly add up. Several farms we looked at had subsidies running at 40-55k euros a year. At that point the farming doesn’t need to be very profitable since the subsidies pay for a very good lifestyle.

[Note: The farm we’re targeting to buy does not make a subsidy anywhere near that. Our plan has been to farm and make business decisions under the assumption the CAP is going to disappear imminently. Subsidy values are factored into the sales price anyway.]

Farmers always make hay or silage

To keep fields under control in spring and to provide for winter feed they always make hay or silage. Hay seems to dominate, maybe because farmers have equipment for that without hiring outsiders. There is some trading in hay bales, a big round ball of about 200 kg going for about 20 euros.

The most extreme case of this I have seen is a 96 hectare farm where 90 cows have 16 hectares to run around and the other 80 hectares are used to make grains and hay for cow feeding and sales. This farm makes a lot of revenue but spends a lot in fertilizer, fungicides and herbicides. I think it is degrading its soils.

There’s a lot of weak pasture

Farms seem to have been grazed too low to the ground leaving a lot of bare earth exposed.

This limits the sun-capturing abilities of the pasture and slows regrowth. I wonder if the reliance on hay or silage means they can take less care of the pasture? 

Prices are in Francs

This threw me at first: cow sales are in Francs, hay sales are in Francs. Euros change hands, but farmers and dealers do all their calculations in Francs and then convert to euros at the end.

Cows stay in barns for the winter

Most farms have housing for cows in Winter. This isn’t universal, but is true for the larger farms in the majority of cases I have seen. This goes hand in hand with hay and silage making because Winter barn feeding needs dried food, either grains or hay. Half the barns have open areas for the cows to wander around. Half have cows chained up. I find the idea of cows being chained up for five months of the year totally inumane.

I’ve seen straw and shit accumulating on the floor of barns over the winter. This is part of the manure-making process, and it gives off heat for the cows but the cows get messy on their legs. As more straw is blown in and more shit is dumped the layer builds up in height. In spring the manure gets taken off and either dumped directly on the fields or stored in a pile to make better manure to get dumped later. Other cowsheds have a ‘chain’ which drags the straw/shit mix out each day and dumps it on a pile outside. There are some gains in manure quality to this system as keeping the manure pile makes some of the nutrients more fixed and less liable to leach than cow pats that have been laid on pasture in winter. I have seen large silage mounds being fed in one place outside through the winter but the area becomes a muddy pool of shit and urine very fast.

Blonde d’Aquitaine, Gasconne or Limousin?

Most herds are Blondes. They make the most money at sale and they are sweet natured and reliable. There is a strong market for Blondes all over France. The one successful direct sales operation we saw used Blondes. They are big cows.

Gasconnes are less common but are an older breed and one of the races that was mixed to make up the Blondes last century. They are from the Pyrenees so are good for outdoor wintering. They are smaller than Blondes.

Limousins are very hardy but a lot grumpier. They are an ancient cow type that are also good for outdoor wintering.

[Note: we’re thinking Blondes because they have the market strength. You can winter them outside, but they aren’t as tough as the other two races.]

Nobody does daily cattle moves

I read about this a lot in the USA articles, but no beef producers seems to move their cows often at all. Maybe the dairy herds do.

Cows are born early in the year

I’ve seen farms plan for births as early as December, but mostly in late winter and spring. If they are wintering inside a building it doesn’t make a big difference. I’m yet to hear of a June birth plan although I’m sure some folk do that, especially ones that put cows on pasture year-long.

Male calves sell off at 4-5 months to feedlots

Farms sell off their male calves to agents for feedlots. Most of the time these feedlots are in Italy but I have also heard of Spanish ones.

I wonder if they can then sell them back to the French market as ‘origine France’?

Heifers sell as yearlings

The market for heifer calves is weaker since feedlots prefer steers – they put on more weight faster. But there is a market for yearling heifers. Several farms use this option for their female calves.

Few people finish

I’ve seen only one farm do finishing, and that was the direct sale one. The others sell their calves or yearling to feedlots for finishing.

My Thoughts

We want to reduce our risk by copying a lot of what the local farmers do, but still do things in line with what we believe. Our ideal farming system with direct sales is years away, but we need to start somewhere. The backbone of the farm will be a beef cow operation. We will keep some of the common elements of the local farmers but vary in a couple of ways. We also need to start the direct sale side. The current plan is to have a couple of cows for direct sale and as we grow that side of the business switch the focus more in that area.

So we’re thinking of this for our starting model:

• Blonde d’Aquitaine cows
• About a cow a hectare until we learn how the farm handles that
• Pastured with daily moves (more often if the ground gets too soggy)
• Pastured year round (cow moves, grass stays still)
• New electric fences
• Sell male calves and female yearlings
• Finish a couple of cows for direct sale at the end of summer – one Blonde steer and one steer of another breed to see what sells. Perhaps an Angus or a Galloway (if I can find one)?

There are still plenty of open questions. The biggest early one is whether we make hay as a supplement to winter pasture (expensive in terms of machinery depreciation) or buy hay if there’s enough available and work to minimize the demand for hay by improving our winter pasture stockpile. If we want to minimize costs then we should move towards having less capital tied up in equipment.

Do we fence the farm well enough to contain sheep as a supplemental source of income? Do we start direct sales with chickens before we’ve figured out the cow operation? Do we go organic? Do we allow hunting on our land? What farm will we end up with?

Driving down a back road near my house I saw this place with ‘A VENDRE’ written on the gate. There were a lot of buildings and four hectares of land, so I checked it out. The house had been renovated to fill a lot of the barn space with extra bedrooms, giving it ten in all. The owner suggested I could convert the attic if I needed more space.

The main house had been divided to build a standalone apartment for the Mother of the house. As I walked around it I kept searching for something good. The house was aligned north-south, which isn’t good. The main spaces of the house had been divided, lowering its value. The extra bedrooms had been renovated with an eye to spending minimal money, so there was nothing there either. Ten awful bedrooms and nothing of quality. Even the land wasn’t much use, despite its size. Several piggery buildings broke up the main field and the rest was distributed in smaller patches.

The boiler was in the kitchen, performing double duty as a TV stand. I hate TVs in kitchens, I hate boilers in kitchens and this was just my nightmare come true.