For three days she considered cutting the ration enough to stretch what remained. She read online discussions in which other growers argued about cheaper ingredients and improvised feed, and she searched for the version of the answer that would let her spend less without making a new problem. Finally she called Roy and told him what she was thinking. The silence on the other end made her dread his reply.
"Don't save today's dollars by borrowing trouble from next spring," he said. "You can adjust a feeding program as conditions change. You can't starve fish into becoming a profitable crop." He asked for her water temperatures, sampled weights, and estimated feed conversions, then helped her see that she had been treating every group as though it required the same ration. Some were young and growing rapidly. Others needed a different schedule, and unused feed was becoming waste in certain corners of the ponds.
Delaney spent a day building feeding plans for groups rather than entire ponds. She weighed sample fish with help, recorded the distribution, and separated a manageable portion of the slower growers into an area prepared for them. The work was unpleasant, wet, and physically exhausting. Several times she stopped to straighten her back and wondered how a person could spend so many hours doing things that looked like nothing was happening.
Roy suggested approaching a smaller regional supplier whose delivery routes passed Larkspur anyway. Delaney called and spoke to a man named Samuel Pritchard, who had spent fifteen years competing with national feed distributors by serving smaller farms that the larger companies found inconvenient. He would not match the old price, but he offered a seasonal volume agreement with more predictable deliveries. It meant committing herself to purchases months ahead, even if the fish grew more slowly than she hoped.
She asked for two days to decide and spent them calculating several scenarios. In one, growth remained strong and she sold enough stock to carry the feed obligation comfortably. In another, the fish grew slowly and she would be paying for feed while waiting another season for cash. A third scenario assumed disease or equipment failure, and the numbers were unpleasant enough that she almost closed the notebook.
When she brought the pages to Roy, he read them carefully. "This one frightens you," he said, tapping the worst case. "Yes," Delaney admitted.
"Good. It should. But you planned what you'd do if it happened. That's more useful than pretending bad weather follows optimistic people around and spares them."
She signed a smaller contract than Samuel had first proposed, with staged deliveries and a review point. It was not the cheapest arrangement on paper, but it was one she could manage without gambling everything on one perfect harvest. For the first time she understood why Henry had kept cash tucked in jars during the good peach seasons. A farm could look healthy while being dangerously short of money.