Monday, January 21, 2013

The true cost of going organic Part 1

I just visited my favorite dairy farmer here in the Land of Lincoln, http://midlifefarmwife.blogspot.com/ , who just went viral with her cost of producing organic milk. http://thebovine.wordpress.com/ So why am I here you may ask, for better or worse, one half of this farming pair inspired me to start a blog, which has been hit and miss since I started.  Good thing it doesn't have a subscription price, otherwise my readers would feel cheated and worse yet this becomes a job.  Back to the inspiration part for this blog, I have been meaning to answer the many questions from friends and neighbors of how we can afford to buy organic in our household.  Once again with the unsolicited help of my favorite blogger http://midlifefarmwife.blogspot.com/ writing about the cost of producing organic milk, I was inspired to complete this task and share it here.  It's more cost effective to buy organic direct from the farm(ers) than buying form the store. 

So here goes the first installment of the true cost of producing dairy products in your home.  I load up the car, some people call it half a car, it's a sub-compact, with my reusable three gallon plastic jugs. These can be found at many of the local grocery store's water dispensing machines. The cost of these per gallon goes down with each trip I make, but my current cost guess is about 50 cents per gallon, Here is a picture of the one I use.

 I have three of these and buy 9 gallons of fresh raw organic milk from http://www.south-pork-ranch.com/ at the incredible low price of $6.00 per gallon each trip.   How do I know this? When I run out of fresh raw organic milk I have to go to the grocery store to buy milk.  The milk we buy is $4.99 a half gallon.  The math is fairly simple, $4.99 x 2 = $9.98/gallon.  $6.00 sounds pretty good, but you may ask, what about the transportation costs?  As I mentioned before I drive a small car which gets 31 mpg.  A round trip road trip to South Pork is 195 miles/31mpg or 6.29 gallons of gas.  I paid $3.15/gallon in Chatsworth or $19.81.  9 gallons of milk $54.00+transportation $19.81 + jug cost of $4.50  equals $78.31 or $8.70 per gallon, still better than the $10 per gallon at the store and this doesn't include all the other products I will make with those 9 gallons I purchased.  I'll go through those another day.  Then people ask me about the value of my time.  All I can say is that when my favorite dairy farmer in Illinois asks me how my wife and family are doing beyond just being cordial I respond with...priceless!

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