Are you considering adding livestock to your operation, or are you merely wishing to expand that segment of your operation? Reasons for adding or expanding livestock are varied, but regardless of your reason, Ty Eschenbaum lays out five steps to follow if considering diversifying with livestock.

Eschenbaum is with A1 Development Solutions out of Sioux Falls, S.D. The firm does “site selection, land acquisition, permitting, pre-construction and ongoing operations for livestock and industrial sites,” he said. “We’ve done everything from talking to farm families about what they’d like to get into as far as diversification, picking the site, getting it permitted at the local and state level, staying on through the construction phase, and then ongoing working with farmers to get feed and get the manure nutrients out.” Eschenbaum presented during a recent webinar hosted by the North Dakota Livestock Alliance.

1. Take inventory of your current operation. The first step is maybe the most crucial. Knowing where you’re at right now seems like a logical step, but may be the most difficult to achieve by “actually getting producers to sit down, even if it’s just a legal pad and a pen, or sitting down with your family to talk through,” Eschenbaum said.

Things to consider are your land base, if it’s owned or rented, as well as the current and future labor force status. “Do you have young folks coming back joining the farm and are going to need a job?” he asked. “How many years out are mom and dad, or grandma and grandpa wanting to retire, and you won’t have their labor anymore? You’re talking about building facilities that are 30, 40, 50 years plus of useful life. … You’ve got to match that up with will you need to hire additional labor.”

2. Define overall goals. Some of this plays off of Step 1, but look deeper inward as to what you and your family truly hope to accomplish by expanding the livestock enterprise. “Is it you have a young person coming back? You want to diversify? You don’t like the ups and downs of the grain market and want to feed some of that yourself and have more control?” Eschenbaum asked.

3. Do your research. Eschenbaum said each of these five steps should meld into each other, but all too often people jump ahead to Step 3 without knowing where their operation stands or where they want it to be in the future.

Once Steps 1 and 2 are checked off, Eschenbaum recommended building a team of experts. This team can include engineers, builders, lenders, Extension experts or other educational entities, as well as organizations such as the North Dakota Livestock Alliance.

And of course, don’t forget about your fellow producers. “I also like to say that you don’t need to recreate anything,” he said. “You don’t need to go build a hog barn that no one’s ever built before. … Almost any producer is going to be ‘arms open’ to show you what they’re about and show you what they did, why they made the decisions they did, why they went to the builder they did. … Get a feel for how they’re built and learn how they’re cash-flowing, what their costs are, what some of the sticking points are, where they’re having problems.”

4. Select site. A lot more thought than what’s convenient for you needs to go into choosing the new site. Eschenbaum said other considerations are topography; proximity to nutrient and feed acres; water source (ground water vs. rural water); access to electricity; distance to market; road infrastructure, biosecurity; and the permitting process that may necessitate producers to meet local, county, and state regulatory standards.

“We are not doing anything wrong,” he told producers looking to expand their livestock enterprise. “You’re providing a means for your family; you’re building a modern facility, which is going to add to the North Dakota economy and job market. … We just need to do a better job of telling our story.”

In addition to working with regulators at every level, NDLA Executive Director Amber Boeshans reminded producers not to forget about the person the next place over and the broader community.

“The most important thing is transparency and having an open dialogue with neighbors and your community. So that is something that we’ve actually been working very hard with, we get on the front end of these projects and make sure that the farmer is going out and having conversations … to make sure that the correct information and the correct knowledge is readily available to those people who are interested in learning about it,” Boeshans said. Not everybody is used to seeing these new facilities cropping up, especially the size at which some are being proposed.

5. Have an operational plan. This final step is when all the work of the first four steps comes to fruition, from the development of the permitting plan, to securing financing, to choosing all the contractors you will be working with and finalizing contracts and timelines — and not forgetting the ongoing management. Turning the key to a new facility won’t by itself make it successful.

“There’s all kinds of studies about what it (livestock) does for job creation, tax creation, feed usage, getting manure out on your ground for soil health,” Eschenbaum said. “We believe it just makes so much sense for so many reasons.”