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

hey all this is just welcome back to rates and wrath huge farm today I want to address a question that I get asked a lot as a modern homesteader 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 how we pay our bills however we live on a pretty low income and if you have been researching having a homestead or made any attempts at it you've probably learned pretty quickly that it is expensive upkeep and the maintenance just getting the structures in order it all adds up really quickly and so for us whenever we got started it became apparent very fast that we were going to have to be really resourceful as far as putting all of this together and maintaining it my goal from the beginning has always been that any homesteading endeavor that we do could pay for itself in that way anything that we keep from it the food that we heat from it is covered by that endeavor itself so for me I always have needed my homesteading endeavors to generate some sort of income so that it could offset the cost of keeping the homestead we've tried a lot of different things a lot of things have worked a lot of them have not and today I'm just gonna share with you some of our successes tell you some of our failures and also share with you some ideas that I've read about that I've heard other people doing or that I plan to do sometime in the future before we get and talking about how to make money let's talk really briefly about how to save money now your mindsets have to change when you come into this lifestyle unless you just have a ton of resources there are a lot of things that you can do to save money the mindset of only using what you need and being resourceful in getting in it is a very basic mindset and having a homestead for instance at any point of having your homestead you're going to have certain food items that are coming into your kitchen like if you have chickens and you have a lot of eggs now when you lived in town and you had a regular grocery budget you might have eaten a dozen eggs a week you probably grocery shop based on what you felt like eating or felt like cooking and then you bought your eggs accordingly however if you get on a farm and you get a flock of 20 chickens and then you find that you've got six dozen eggs a week a lot of times the most resourceful thing for you to do is not to sell those extra eggs but to use those extra eggs and cut off that much more from your grocery bill since we started homesteading we eat six dozen eggs a week a lot of terms in our house we eat quiche being omelets we eat fried eggs on top of everything a lot of times we have eggs and toast for breakfast we eat way more eggs than we ever did before we had a farm but now it's this is what we have so this is what we're going to use first another mindset that has to be confronted when you start a homestead is that you just go buy what you need new being resourceful and reusing materials is a major way to save money so that you don't have to make as much to make progress on your farm our garden beds are made out of used tin and cedar trimmings which are the first cuts off the wood from a lumber mill we go pick those up a whole trailer cost $75 and it's a fraction what it would have taken to build those beds have we bought new lumber from the local hardware store our go barn is made entirely out of fence pickets from a privacy fence that we tore down when we moved into this house we saved all of that wood took the nails out which was a pain in the butt but it saved us a whole lot of money and we were able to build a goat barn for next to nothing and the goats themselves we got those from bartering with a local family they needed a job done and they were looking to downsize their Nubian goat herd and we had the skills to do that job my husband and his brother went out and spent a few days tearing down an old garage and hauling it all off from their property and they paid us in goats I have a great go herd that I would have never been able to afford if I had had to go buy those goats individually and then the goats themselves they became a source of resources for a farm through milk and having kids and all of that came from bartering and being resourceful so I want to get into how to make money but the very first thing you can do is to assess yourself as a consumer and see where am i spending extra that I don't have to be what things could I make from scratch instead of spending extra for them already being premade what materials could I reuse what skills do I have to barter all of these things are really important mindsets if you are seeking a back-to-basics lifestyle now anytime I have done any sort of search on like Pinterest or just Google about how to make money on a farm a lot of times you get a really long list that tells you some pretty basic ideas but doesn't go into depth with it and usually at the top of the list is sell extra eggs now I want to head out to the chicken coop and give you a little bit of information about my experience with that as a financial endeavor now you stand to make anywhere between three to six dollars a dozen on farm-fresh eggs of course this varies really based on your region how you're selling them where you're selling them your marketing and how you feed your chicken so if you are a small family and that has a small flock of chickens and you are eating as many as you can possibly standing and you have a few dozen extra eggs every 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 at your house to buy them and in that you could make an extra fifty bucks a month and pay for your chickens pay for your feed cost and you get to eat however many eggs you decided to keep that month pretty much for free but let's say you really want to step into the place of making a good profit on your chickens now I live way out in the middle of where it takes 25 minutes to drive anywhere from my house and so selling eggs out of my house wasn't really an option also it didn't make financial sense to me to have multiple egg buyers that I'd have to drive all over the place delivering eggs because again my gas cost at that point would eat up my entire profit margin what I found to be the best way was to find one buyer like a bakery or a restaurant and sell them all of my excess eggs in the week I made less money per dozen doing this but what I saved in gas and time made up for it another lucrative way for me to sell eggs was at the farmers market you have to check your state laws and everything for me I had to take a refrigerator and take wash eggs in new cartons to the farmers market I had to spend more on cartons and spend more time washing the eggs however I was able to sell my eggs there for five dollars it doesn't whereas when I was selling to the bakery I was only getting three and a half dollars to visit my hesitation and counting on selling eggs for eating as a main source of your income is that chickens can be kind of sickle in their lane if it gets too hot or if it gets too cold or if your flock gets a little sick what happens is they stop laying and then you don't have any eggs to sell but you have customers who are expecting them too many times I have heard of small farmers buying eggs for their own family at the store in order to upkeep contracts where they have customers who are buying eggs for eating and to me the profit margin just isn't good enough for that I ended up making the decision that selling eggs for eating was not a lucrative way to make money on a farm so we dropped our flock significantly I now have 16 laying hens which really just provide enough for our family we are looking to expand that just a little bit but not to sell eggs for eating if you will put a little bit more effort and finances on the front end into your chicken flock and develop a line of chickens that someone else would want to have either by developing a beautiful line of rare heritage breeds that someone might be interested in purchasing and showing or what we do as we have bred our chickens for egg color we get really beautiful color eggs with browns and blues and greens and so any extra eggs that I have out of my chickens can be sold as hatching eggs now 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 sell now as rainbow hatching eggs for 25 dollars and the price for that can go up higher and higher depending on how nice your lines are how great your eggs are it just depends on how much you want to put into it and of course that's going to take you researching that's going to take you sourcing good chickens from the front end but there is money to be made in selling hatching eggs and my personal opinion is that if you are looking to keep chickens and you're wanting to make as much money as possible from those chickens it is much more lucrative to spend a little bit extra time developing a good line of birds and selling their hatching eggs rather than keeping an average flock and selling their eggs for eating because ultimately you're feeding these chickens the same either way and you can make a lot more per dozen if you sell the eggs is hatching eggs duck eggs sell for a lot more than chicken eggs do especially in specialty markets and to gourmet restaurants and whereas there are a lot of backyard chicken keepers not as many keep people keep ducks because quite honestly Ducks are nasty however they're really easy to keep they're great foragers all you have to provide them with is some sort of shelter and clean water and duck eggs for eating sell for almost twice as much as chicken eggs and those grocery stores little restaurants and bakeries whereas they might have already got a supplier for chicken eggs because there are so many chicken keepers you might be able to get your foot in the door with duck eggs other poultry that can be kept for eggs is turkeys you consult turkey hatching eggs if you invest in a good flock of a heritage breed and quail quail eggs are a big seller either as eating eggs at markets or as hatching eggs and their eggs are a really cool novelty because they're really small and very beautiful well is something that we are hoping to get into here in the next several months but I know a lot of people who have had a lot of success raising quail for their eggs my incubator is in the storage closet right now because it's not running we're coming up on the end of summer and we're not hatching eggs anymore for this year if you're going to keep a flock of birds for hatching egg for even if you're not if you can source some hatching eggs locally an incubator is a good source of income on the homestead now this sucker was an investment we went ahead and bought a really nice incubator that took the legwork out of hatching eggs this makes it pretty easy we get a really great hatch right out of it and I want to say we spent something like $700 on this on the front end which was a big investment for us however we have well earned that back with this incubator in the two years that we've had it the first year that we had this I ran this incubator and hatched 80 chicks out every week all through the spring and the early summer and 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 sold them 80 chicks a week for almost three months you do the math on that it was a pretty lucrative endeavor and it paid for our incubator since then I have hatch our own eggs and sold colorful egg layers on Facebook groups so basically with this I went from taking a dozen eggs and selling them for five dollars each at the farmers market to raising chicks that would produce eggs that were good for hatching and selling those hatching eggs for twenty-five dollars each - then hatching the eggs and with the hatch rate we were getting with this incubator a dozen eggs generally yielded us a nine or ten chicks which we would sell for five to eight dollars each so out of the same dozen eggs we went from making five dollars to twenty-five dollars to around seventy-five dollars by hatching them out and selling them as chick while we're on the subject of selling baby animals let's talk about goats [Music] if you're gonna have a home dairy you're gonna have baby goats because a goat has to go through a pregnancy and kid in order to begin lactating and so you won't have milk without having baby goats and when you start breeding all your goats in order to get them in milk soon you are going to be posed with a question oh my gosh what do I do with all these baby goats now selling your goat kids is a form of income on the farm in order to keep your goats and milk you're gonna have to breed them every year and every year they're going to have anywhere between one and four kids again just the same with the chickens how much money you're gonna get out of those baby animals it really depends on how much you put into your lines if you want to make the investment in well bred goats and do the work of having them registered and keeping up with all of that you will make more money for your kids it does vary by regions but a well bred registered goat kid here where I live goes anywhere between you know two and five hundred dollars on average we decided not to go that route we really wanted to keep our goats just for the sake of having a home dairy and therefore we don't go through the process of registering all of them we do breed them for positive traits and we try to breed out the negative traits but because we don't go the route of literate but because we don't go the route of linear appraisals and keeping up with papers our goat kids do sell for less it still does bring some money back onto the farm though this year I sold all of my little dough links for one hundred and fifty dollars each and my buck links for something around eighty to a hundred with six toes kidding we got 14 kids out of that so you can figure out pretty quickly that that covers a lot of goat feed depending on your family's needs if you have excess milk you can sell that as well now we are currently not selling goat's milk because we do have a few bottle babies that we kept and their consumption along with our family's consumption we actually don't have any extra even though we're getting two gallons of milk a day but if you do have excess milk it is pretty par for the course to be able to sell five dollars for a half gallon raw milk another thing to consider if you do have any sort of heard like a goat herd or if you keep a bull or if you keep a boar any sort of male animals is that a lot of farms don't have the space or the ability to do that so you can offer stud services of your animals and bring in a little extra income better bred animals are going to bring you more incomes so this might be a reason to invest in a really well bred but because you can use him to breed your own goats but then also earn some money back on him by offering him out for stud services now I really don't condone getting into the business of puppy breeding unless you are going to really take it seriously we have a guardian dog that we got from a family it was no longer able to keep her and she is a great dog that was bred terribly she has horrible joints and she experiences so much pain because someone bred her irresponsibly but if you do make the investment on really high quality Guardian dogs that is something to consider if you're willing to do the testing and upkeep in order to breed them well that can be a really good source of income for your farm what about making money in the garden I am the garden girl so let's talk about how I have supplement our income with plants our greenhouse was a gift from Jeremiah's Nana a couple of years ago and we were super excited to have it because it meant that we could extend our growing season and start our own plants from seeds the first year that I sold started plants it was completely by accident I actually just really overestimated how much I would need I got excited and started a whole bunch of different kinds and just didn't have room to plant all of them so while I was doing the farmers market I took the extra plants one day because I just didn't have anything else to do with them and ended up making a couple hundred dollars on extra plant starts completely without a plan to do that so this year I decided I would plan on it I intentionally started a few hundred more plants than I knew I was going to need and I probably made something like five hundred dollars selling those now the key to that was starting varieties that were not widely available at local stores really focusing on a lot of different heirlooms I sold a lot of tomato starts because I had a lot of varieties that people had never even heard of before next year I'm actually planning on signing up for every plant cell that I can using a heat map to get my plants really established and I'm hoping to be able to really increase the amount of income that I make in the spring by selling started plants now let's walk down to the garden and talk about selling the vegetables that you'd grow one mistake a lot of small farmers make is that they become so focused on selling their goods that they get in a little over their head and they end up not having enough to meet their own family's needs I can't stress you enough don't do that meet the needs of your household first and foremost you are not doing the work of having a small farm of taking care of chickens and milking animals and doing all of the work of a garden in order to sell your goods and then have to buy food for yourself you will burn out on that I actually don't sell vegetables out of my garden right now I get asked all the time what do you do with all that food well I can it I put it up and I try to cover as much of my family's needs for the whole year as possible out of this garden while it's producing to me that's what makes all this work worth it but if you do want to market your garden goods take a few factors into consideration for instance if you don't have the time to do a weekly market or if you don't have the scale in order to really provide and make that market a lucrative thing set up a stand out in front of your house to just sell a little bit of extra and bring a little bit of money back into your farm perhaps enough to cover your water bill whatever your extra you're using in order to make your garden grow another idea is to do a CSA style box instead of going to 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 upfront when you're just getting started do a small spark do four weeks worth at once and what you'll do is every week you will provide your customers with a box of what your farm produces this could be a dozen eggs it could be whatever is coming out of your garden that week and you might round it out with some home baked goods from your own kitchen or some canned jams or jellies this gives you the ability to keep it at whatever scale you want it guarantees that you're going to have a buyer you can either set up for people to come pick it up or you can meet all your customers in a central location on a certain day and it saves you having to drive around everywhere and drop everything off one thing to consider if you're going to be marketing the goods for your garden is that some vegetables are simply way more marketable than others right now I could go to Whole Foods and buy organic non-gmo ears of corn for fifty to seventy-five cents each because they're in season and and therefore they're pretty cheap however it's a very same store heirloom tomatoes are going 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 in per square foot of space with that crop consider in what you're choosing to grow if you are going to be selling these things especially in market that people are interested in something that they can't just go buy at the grocery store now you might hold a lot of value on your garden goods because you know what went into it but unfortunately a lot of people that aren't into growing food they're only experienced with picking what they want to buy is the grocery store so if you grow Black Beauty zucchini which is very similar to what is sold in grocery stores and they're on sale for 79 cents a pound they're those same customers are going to look at your farmers market and table and say well yeah 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 even seen before in their life they're not going to question at all why yours costs more and then what they're gonna get at the grocery store the kitchen can be a great source of income for the small farmer now chances are if you are seeking out a homesteading or back-to-basics lifestyle you are working on your kitchen skills and whether you've already got them or you are acquiring them cooking from scratch is a big part of this lifestyle the thing is is that a lot of people don't cook from scratch anymore just homemade cookies a really big deal to somebody who rarely ever turns on their oven so you can sell homemade baked goods he'll make jams and jellies and people love it especially if you use the ingredients from your farm goats milk caramel or cakes made with farm-fresh duck eggs any of these things are huge marketing points on these goods it's another thing that you can sell from your house you can set up a Facebook page and just market it every week hey I'm going to have fresh banana bread five loaves available tomorrow first-come first-serve and you can sell these really at a premium and if you're willing to pursue them know how you can really tap into some niche markets that are very under marketed like in your area is there anyone that's making gluten-free homemade goodies is there anyone that's making paleo homemade getting's if you're willing to figure out how to do that and market those things a lot of times you can make a lot of extra money marketing to a niche that is not used to having products offered to them now if you're farming you are acquiring certain skills like taking care of a farm can offer firm sitting services and just get your name out there and provide people with the opportunity to leave their farms in your capable hands while they go on vacation or even provide emergency services so that if a local small farmer gets injured or has a family emergency come up they can call you on short notice and you can take care of their farm for a fee every day of course you're going to want to make sure that you actually have the skills to do that and you would want to look into some insurance just in case anything happens while you are taking responsibility for someone else's farm there are a lot of things that are produced on a farm that you could sell that might not be a standalone income on their own but they could add to the income overall for instance if you have farm animals you are going to have a lot of poop to deal with rabbit poop is fantastic for gardens you can sell it by the five the gallon bucket and if you have very many rabbits at all you're gonna have a lot of five gallon buckets poop you can compost the bedding from all of your animals start a really large compost pile and sell compost to other people's garden and speaking of Gardens if you've already invested and a tiller 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 stores and feed stores your services as a tiller getting other people's and gardening plots ready there are a lot of people who love to garden but they don't have the physical capacity to go out and prepare their ground for it but if you have the physical capacity and you've already invested in the tools on your own garden you can go make extra money by providing those services to other people and one last suggestion on making money on a homestead is get crafty doing craft fairs and making different products for those things can be a huge asset to a homesteading income I've seen people make totes out of old feed bags make soap I myself have made a lot of different crafts including doing garden markers with metal stamping and making journals out of leather all of these things can provide extra income and it's one of those things that you're going to get out of it what you put into it if you're willing to really hustle the crafting aspect can be a big input to your homesteading income by themselves these ideas might not be enough but when partnered with changing your mindset to become resourceful using things secondhand and repurposing materials using what you have and changing your family's consumption habits based on what's available to you and seeing everything as an opportunity down to how do I make the most out of my chicken eggs what varieties do I need to be able to plant in order to make the most just surveying everything and say okay what am i hoping to get out of this what needs am i looking to meet here and what can I do with the excess when add it all together you actually can make money on a farm you don't have to be some crazy entrepreneur or super business minded in order to make this work honestly the key to making money on your homestead is being resourceful and being really honest with yourself about what you're hoping to get out of it looking at each and every Avenue and seeing what is the maximum income that you can make and then cutting back right to the point of where where you can meet the needs of your family and make the income back and then not doing excess over that I hope this helps you guys I hope that you feel inspired to be able to expand your homesteading ventures and be able to afford them I bless you so much thank you for watching until next time [Music]

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Views: 612,242

Rating: 4.9508371 out of 5

Keywords: small farm, hobby farm, making money homesteading, how to afford homesteading, how to make money farm, money farm, homestead money, homesteading income, homesteading vlog, homesteading family, sustainability, ways to make money homestead, ways to make money farm, hobby farming, backyard farm, growing food, how to grow food, how to farm, goat keeping, chicken keeping, how to sell eggs

Id: G1q6fcgwjgY

Length: 26min 3sec (1563 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 23 2018