Making Money on a Homestead | How a Hobby Farm Can Help Pay For Itself | Roots and Refuge Farm

Hey, this is all welcome back to Rates and Wrath Huge Farm, today I want to address a question I get asked a lot as a modern

farm

er and that is how do you make

money

on a small

farm

? Our farm has never been our main source. of income, this is not the way we pay our bills, however, we live on a fairly low income and if you have been researching how to own property or have tried to do so, you have probably learned pretty quickly that maintenance is expensive and maintenance It's just getting difficult. the structures in order, it all adds up very quickly, and so every time we started, it became clear very quickly that we were going to have to be very inventive about putting this all together and maintaining it.

My goal from the beginning is It's always been that any farming effort that we do could pay for

itself

that way, anything that we save for it, the food that we heat, is covered by that effort

itself

, so for me I've always needed that my farming efforts generate some type of income to be able to offset the cost of maintaining the property we have tried many different things many things have worked many of them have not and today I am just going to share with you some of our successes I will tell you about some of our failures and Also share with you some ideas that I have read and that I have heard other people do or that I plan to do at some point in the future Before we talk about how to make

money

, let's talk very briefly about how To save money now, your way of thinking has You have to change when you enter this lifestyle, unless you have a lot of resources.

There are many things you can do to save money. The mentality of using only what you need and being resourceful in getting it. It's a very basic mindset and having property, for example, anytime you have property, you're going to have certain foods that come into your kitchen, like if you had chickens and you had a lot of eggs now when you were alive. in the city and you had a regular grocery budget, you might have eaten a dozen eggs a week, you probably shopped based on what you felt like eating or cooking and then bought the eggs accordingly, however, if You come to a farm and you get a flock of 20 chickens and then you discover that you have six dozen eggs a week, many times the cleverest thing you can do is not to sell those extra eggs, but to use those extra eggs and cut that amount more. of your supermarket bill since we started working we eat six dozen eggs a week many times in our house we eat quiche in the form of omelettes we eat fried eggs on top of everything we often have eggs and toast for breakfast we eat much more more eggs than before we had a farm, but now this is what we have, so this is what we're going to use first.

Another mentality to face when starting a farm is that you are just going to buy what you need. Being resourceful and reusing materials is an important way to save money so you don't have to do as much to progress your farm. Our flower beds are made from used tin and cedar cuttings, which are the first cuts of the wood. From a sawmill we go to pick them up, a full trailer costs $75 and is a fraction of what it would have taken to build those beds if we had bought new lumber at the local hardware store. Our barn is made entirely of privacy fence pickets. fence that we tore down when we moved into this house, saved all that wood, removed the nails, which was a pain, but it saved us a lot of money and we were able to build a goat barn for next to nothing. and the goats themselves we bartered from a local family who needed a job done and were looking to reduce their herd of Nubian goats and we had the skills to do that job my husband and his brother went out and spent a few days booting We took down an old garage and We took everything from their property and they paid us in goats.

I have a large herd that I would never have been able to afford if I had to go buy those goats individually and then the goats themselves became a source of income for a farm through milk and having children and that all came from bartering and of being resourceful, so I want to explain how to make money, but the first thing you can do is evaluate yourself as a consumer and see where am I spending more so I don't have to be? What things could you make from scratch instead of spending more on things that are already pre-made?

What materials could you reuse? What skills do I have to exchange? All of these things are really important mindsets if I'm now looking for a back to basics lifestyle. Whenever I do any kind of search on Pinterest or just Google on how to make money on a farm, many times you get a very long list that gives you some pretty basic ideas, but doesn't delve into it and usually at the top of the page. ready to sell additional eggs. Now I want to go to the chicken coop and give you a little information about my experience with that as a financial endeavor.

You can make between three and six dollars a dozen farm fresh eggs, of course, this really varies depending on your region, how you sell them, where you sell them, your marketing, and how you feed your chickens, so if you're a small family and you has a small flock of chickens and you're eating as many as you can standing and you have a few dozen extra eggs each week, depending on where you live you could just put a little sign out front and say farm fresh eggs. four dollars a dozen and sell them to whoever stops by your house to buy them and with that you could make an extra fifty dollars a month and pay for your chickens, pay the cost of feed and eat all the eggs you decided to keep. that month practically free, but let's say you really want to get into the space of

making

a good profit with your chickens.

I now live in the middle of where it takes 25 minutes to drive anywhere from my house and therefore sell eggs. from my house wasn't really an option and it also didn't make financial sense for me to have multiple egg buyers that I would have to drive around delivering eggs because again the cost of gas at that time would eat up my entire profit margin, which I found The best way was to find a buyer, like a bakery or a restaurant, and sell them all my leftover eggs for the week. I made less money per dozen doing this, but what I saved in gas and time made up for it.

For me, another lucrative way to sell eggs was at the farmers market. You have to check the state laws and everything. For me, I had to carry a cooler and take washed eggs in new cartons to the farmers market. I had to spend more on cardboard. and spend more time washing the eggs, however I was able to sell my eggs there for five dollars, isn't it, while when I sold them to the bakery I only received three and a half dollars for visiting my hesitation and I counted on selling eggs for eating as a main source of income is that chickens can be a kind of sickle in your lane if it's too hot or too cold or if your flock gets a little sick, what happens is they stop laying and then you don't have eggs to sell but you have clients who wait for them many times.

I have heard of small farmers who buy eggs for their own family in the store to maintain contracts where they have customers who buy eggs to eat and to me the profit margin is just not good enough for that. I ended up

making

the decision that selling eggs to eat was not a lucrative way to make money on a farm, so we reduced our flock significantly. I now have 16 laying hens which really only provide enough for our family we are looking to expand that just a little but not sell eggs to eat if you put a little more effort and finances into the initial part of your chicken flock and develop a line of chickens that someone else would want to have.

We have either developing a beautiful line of rare heritage breeds that someone might be interested in purchasing and showing or what we do when we breed our chickens for egg color, we get really beautiful colored eggs with browns, blues and greens, so than any additional eggs. What I have from my chickens can now be sold as hatching eggs, the same dozen eggs that I used to sell for five dollars at the farmers market or for three dollars at the bakery, I can now sell them as rainbow hatching eggs for 25 dollars and the price for that can go up and up depending on how pretty your lines are, how good your eggs are, it just depends on how much you want to put into them and of course that's going to lead you to research, that's going to lead you to get good chickens. from the beginning, but you can make money selling hatching eggs and my personal opinion is that if you are looking to have chickens and want to make as much money as possible from those chickens, it is much more lucrative to spend a little more time developing a good line of birds and selling their eggs for hatching rather than keeping an average flock and selling their eggs for eating because ultimately you are feeding these hens the same either way and you can make a lot more per dozen if The eggs you sell are hatching eggs, duck eggs sell for much more than chicken eggs, especially in specialty markets and gourmet restaurants, and although there are many backyard chicken farmers, there are not as many people who have ducks because honestly, ducks are disgusting.

They are really easy to keep, they are excellent food gatherers, all you have to provide them with is some kind of shelter and clean water, and duck eggs for eating sell for almost twice as much as chicken eggs and small restaurants and grocery store bakeries, while they may already have a chicken egg supplier because there are so many chicken farmers that you may be able to get your foot in the door with duck eggs. Other poultry that can be kept for eggs are turkeys. Check out turkey hatching eggs if you invest in them. a good flock of a traditional breed and quail eggs sell a lot, either as eating eggs in the markets or as hatching eggs, and their eggs are a cool novelty because they are very small and very beautiful, well, it's something which we hope will be coming here in the next few months, but I know many people who have had great success raising quail for their eggs.

My incubator is in the storage closet right now because it is not working, we are approaching the end of summer. and we will no longer be hatching eggs for this year if you are going to keep a flock of birds for hatching eggs even if you don't if you can get some hatching eggs locally an incubator is a good source of income in the

homestead

now , this sucker was an investment, we went ahead and bought a really good incubator that took the leg work out of hatching eggs, this makes it pretty easy, we get really great incubation and I mean we spent something like $700 on this al It was a big investment for us to begin with, however, we have made good money from this incubator in the two years we have owned it.

The first year we had this, I used this incubator and hatched 80 chicks each week. All spring and early summer I made a deal with the local feed store to buy my chicks for two dollars each so they could sell them for 250 each and I sold them 80 chicks a week for almost three months, do the math . which was a pretty lucrative endeavor and paid for our incubator. Since then, I hatched our own eggs and sold colored layers on Facebook groups, so basically with this I went from taking a dozen eggs and selling them for five dollars each at farmers. market to raise chicks that would produce eggs that were good for hatching and sell those hatching eggs for twenty-five dollars each; then incubate the eggs and with the hatching rate that we obtained with this incubator, a dozen eggs generally gave us nine or ten chicks that we would sell for five to eight dollars each, so from the same dozen eggs we went from gaining five dollars to twenty-five dollars and about seventy-five dollars when hatching them and selling them as chicks while we are on the topic of selling baby animals, let's talk about goats, if you are going to have a dairy at home, you will have goats, because a goat has to go through a pregnancy and a kid to be able to start lactating, so you will not have milk without having kids and when you start raising all your goats for milk, you will soon be asked a question, oh my god, what do I do with all these kids?

Now selling your kids is a form of income. on the farm to keep your goats and your milk, you will have to raise them every year and each year they will have between one and four children again, the same with the chickens, how much money are you going to earn? getting out of those baby animals, it really depends on how much you put into your lines, if you want to invest in well bred goats and do the work of registering them and keeping up with all that, you will make more money for your kids, it varies by regions,but a registered and well-bred goat here where I live costs between two and five hundred dollars on average, we decided not to go that route, we really wanted to keep our goats just to have a home dairy and therefore we did not go through the process of registering them all , we breed them for positive traits and try to eliminate negative traits, but because we do not follow the path of literacy, but because we do not go the route of linear appraisals and keep up with the documents that our kids sell for less, still brings some money to the farm, although this year I sold all my little dough links for a hundred and fifty dollars each and my money links. for something around eighty to a hundred with six toes, joking, we got 14 goats out of that, so you can quickly figure out that that covers a lot of goat feed depending on your family's needs.

If you have excess milk, you can also sell it now. We do not currently sell goat milk. Because we have a few bottle babies that we keep and their consumption along with our family's consumption, we don't really have anything extra even though we receive two gallons of milk a day, but if you have excess of milk is quite normal. So that the course can sell five dollars for a half gallon of raw milk, another thing to consider if you have any type of ear like a herd of goats or if you have a bull or if you have a wild boar or any type of male animal is that many farms They don't have the space or ability to do so, so you can offer stud services for your animals and generate a little extra income.

Better bred animals will bring you more income, so this could be a reason to invest in a very well bred one, but as you can use him to breed your own goats and then also make some money by offering him as a stud service, now you really don't I approve of going into the puppy raising business unless you are really going to take this seriously, we have a guard dog that we got from a family that couldn't keep her anymore and she is a great dog that was raised terribly, she has joints horrible things and experiences a lot of pain because someone raised her irresponsibly. but if she makes the investment in very high quality guard dogs that is something to consider, if you are willing to do the testing and maintenance to breed them well that can be a very good source of income for your farm. money in the garden I'm the garden girl, so let's talk about how I've supplemented our income with plants.

Our greenhouse was a gift from Jeremiah's Nana a couple of years ago and we were very excited to have it because it meant we could extend our growing season and start our own plants from seeds the first year I sold started plants it was completely by accident . In fact, I overestimated how much I would need. I got excited and started with a bunch of different types and just didn't have room. plant them all, so while I was at the farmers market one day I grabbed the extra plants because I just had nothing more to do with them and ended up making a couple hundred dollars worth of extra plants without a plan to plant them.

I did that, so this year I decided I would plan for it. I intentionally started a few hundred more plants than I knew I would need and probably made something like five hundred dollars selling them. Now the key to that was to start with varieties that were not. widely available in local stores really focusing on many different traditional heirlooms. I sold a lot of tomatoes because I had a lot of varieties that people had never heard of before next year. In fact, I'm planning on signing up for every plant cell I can use a heat map to really get my plants established and I hope I can really increase the amount of income I make in the spring by selling started plants.

Now let's walk to the garden and talk about selling vegetables. that would grow, a mistake that many small farmers make is that they focus so much on selling their products that they overdo it and end up not having enough to meet the needs of their own family. I cannot emphasize enough, you are not doing that to meet the needs of your household, first of all, you are not doing the work of having a small farm of keeping chickens and milking animals and doing all the garden work so you can sell your products. . and then you have to buy food, you will get tired of that.

I don't actually sell vegetables from my garden at the moment. I get asked all the time what you do with all that food. Well, I can do it. I put it up and try to cover as many of my family's needs as possible all year round with this garden while it produces, that's what makes all this work worth it, but if you want to market your garden products, keep a few things in mind. factors. For example, if you don't have time to do a weekly market or if you don't have the scale to really offer and make that market lucrative, set up a stall in front of your house to sell just a little. a little extra and bring a little money back to your farm, maybe enough to cover your water bill, whatever extra you're using to grow your garden.

Another idea is to make a CSA style box instead of going to the market every week and just selling a little here and there advertise from your farm that you are providing a weekly box and have people pay for them in advance when you are just starting make one little spark do four weeks at a time and what it will do is each week you will give your customers a box of what your farm produces, this could be a dozen eggs, it could be whatever comes out of your garden that week and You could top it off with some homemade baked goods from your own kitchen or some canned jams or jellies, this gives you the ability to preserve them on the scale you want.

It guarantees that you will have a buyer. You can set it up to have people come pick you up or you can meet all your clients at a central location on a given day and it saves you from having to drive around and drop everything off. One thing to consider if you are going to market produce for your garden is that some vegetables are simply much more marketable than others at this time. You could go to Whole Foods and buy organic, non-GMO corn on the cob for fifty to seventy-five cents each because they are in season and therefore pretty cheap; however, it is the same store.

Heirloom tomatoes sell for something like five. dollars a pound, so in the same amount of space that I could grow corn and grow it heirloom and non-GMO I can grow heirloom tomatoes and I can make a lot more money per pound per square foot of space with that crop, consider what you are choosing to grow. If you are going to sell these things, especially in the market where people are interested in something that they can't just go buy at the supermarket now, your garden products may have a lot of value because I know what it entails, but unfortunately many people a Those who don't like growing food only have experience choosing what they want to buy at the supermarket, so if you grow Black Beauty zucchini, which are very similar to those sold in grocery stores and are on sale for 79 cents a pound, are those same customers who will look at your market and farmers table and say, well, yes, it's homegrown, but why would I pay 250 a pound for this to this farmer, but if you grow a variety of zucchini that that customer has never seen before in his life, he will not at all wonder why yours costs more and then what he will buy in the supermarket, cooking can be a great source of income for the small farmer now, most likely if he is Looking for a back-to-basics or farming lifestyle, are working on your cooking skills and whether you have them or are acquiring them, cooking from scratch is a big part of In this lifestyle, the point is that a lot of people don't cook from scratch anymore, just homemade cookies, which is really important for someone who rarely turns on their oven so they can sell homemade baked goods, makes jams and jellies, and people.

I love it, especially if you use goat's milk caramel ingredients from your farm or cakes made with farm-fresh duck eggs. Any of these things are great marketing points for these products. It's another thing you can sell from your home. You can set up a Facebook. page and just market it every week. Hey, tomorrow I'll have five fresh banana breads available on a first-come, first-served basis and you can actually sell them at a premium price and if you're willing to buy them, you know how you can do that. Take advantage of some niche markets that are very under-marketed, like in your area, is there anyone making homemade gluten-free treats?

Is there anyone making homemade paleo products? If you're willing to figure out how to do it and market those things a lot. Many times you can make a lot of extra money by marketing in a niche that is not used to having products offered to them now. If you are farming, you are acquiring certain skills, such as taking care of a farm, you can offer firm care services and simply get your name out there and give people the opportunity to leave their farms in your capable hands while they go on vacation or even provide care services. emergency so that if a local small farmer is injured or a family emergency arises, they can call you on short notice. and you can take care of their farm for a fee every day, of course you'll want to make sure you actually have the skills to do it and you'll want to look into some insurance in case something happens while you're taking on responsibility for someone else's farm, there are many things that are produced on a farm that can be sold and that might not be an independent income on their own, but could increase the overall income, for example if you have farm animals that you are going to go to. having a lot of poop to deal with rabbit poop is great for gardens, you can sell it in five gallon buckets and if you have a lot of rabbits you will have a lot of five gallon buckets of poop that you can compost. bedding from all your animals, start a really big compost pile and sell compost to other people's gardens and speaking of gardens, if you've already invested and have a cultivator or if you have a tractor at the beginning of the year, you can put up signs and advertise on Craigslist and in local farm and food stores your services as a grower preparing other people's and garden plots.

There are many people who love gardening but don't have the physical ability to go out and prepare the land. But if you're physically able and have already invested in your own garden tools, you can make extra money by providing those services to other people, and one last tip for making money on a farm is to get crafty by doing craft fairs. and making different products for those things can be a huge boon to farm income. I've seen people make bags out of old feed bags, make soap. I have made many different crafts myself, including metal stamping garden markers and journals. leather, all of these things can provide additional income and it is one of those things that you will get out of it, whatever you put into it if you are willing to put in the hard work.

The craftsmanship aspect can be a great contribution to your economy. Income alone, these ideas may not be enough, but when combined with changing your thinking to become resourceful in using secondhand things and reusing materials by using what you have and changing your family's spending habits based on what you have. that is available to you and seeing everything as an opportunity to how do I get the most out of my chicken eggs? What varieties do I need to be able to plant to get the most out of it? I just inspect everything and say, “Okay,” what do I hope to get out of this?

What needs am I looking to satisfy here? What can I do with the excess? Add it all up and you can really make money on a farm. You don't have to be a crazy entrepreneur or super business-minded to make this work. Honestly, the key to making money on your farm is. Be resourceful and really honest with yourself about what you hope to get out of it, look at each and every avenue and see what the maximum income you can make is and then cut back to where you can meet. the needs of your family and recover income and then not do excesses.

I hope this

help

s you. I hope you are inspired to expand your agricultural businesses and be able to pay for them. I bless you, thank you very much. to see until next time