What is working for you?

[nomad7inwi]

We've been here for almost a year now. Some things are working well (eggs, rabbits, & pigs), other things not so well (goats). We would like to generate some income now that we have our feet wet. Some things we are looking into is egg selling regulations, pigs on a slightly larger scale (we butchered 4 & sold/bartered 3 last time) and a few other things.

We did a small garden, the (successful) point this year was to eat all summer from the garden. Next year I will plant enough to can. We'll see where the following year takes us.

What is generating income for you? Or totally did not work? Obviously some states make it easier than others, either because of laws or climate, but I'd like to hear about your experiences. Not afraid of hard work. And we have fairly cheap labor with our kids (we paid them 50 cents for every chicken they plucked or enviscerated, and they got to eat them too!)

Looking forward to hearing your experiences.

[michiganfarmer]

maple syrup

[anniew]

If you have a nearby farmers market or are on a road where you can sell things directly, grow more veggies to sell, plus some cut flowers like sunflowers, zinnias and a couple others. The down side is if they don't sell, you can't eat them, whereas you can with veggies.

[DocM]

Goats. Meat, milk, and registered show quality animals.

[cindy04]

I'd have to second the Registered Stock and Milk. My partner and I bought a couple of registered Jerseys with the intention of raising a couple of generations of ( bred by us) heifers for future show prospects for our now 6 year old son. He's a Clover Kid now so we have time for future prospects. First of all we keep our fingers crossed for heifers, which are worth a small fortune if we decided to sell. Do your genetics research, AI to complement your herd and end up with a bull calf and you can also do better $ wise when the time comes to sell him too. We really are not interested in selling milk, buttttt we have an overwhelming demand from local farmers and friends. Long and short of that--it pays the feed bill.
The demand by 4H, FFA, Homesteaders, etc is unbelievable for nice Dairy Cows. Supply is low and demand is very high for Family Cows. 4H and FFA --well I know I want my son to have something nice on the end of his lead rope.
Our's won't always be the best, but we'll do our best. And if we sell a show calf here and there, it will be a NICE calf and not junk.

Good luck in whatever you decide to do.
Cindy

[Siryet]

Five years here and we are successful with sheep, hogs, chickens and a large large garden.
We raise two hogs for us and a couple on order and that gives us our pork for free.
We barter lambs for hay.
We can enough and freeze enough veggies and fruit to last through the winter.
It's a win win situation for us as we have practically no food bill at all and we enjoy raising the animals.
I believe the best way is, to sell hogs on a custom order basis with appropriate deposits, that way if a customer bails you can advertise their hog and sell it to someone else without panic.

[nomad7inwi]

Thanks for sharing. Veggies will happen down the road. Maple syrup would be cool, future though as we have minimal amount of maple trees at this time. We just got a calf and we are enjoying that, so raising calves would be interesting. Actually a lot of people around here want raw milk, but it is illegal to sell.

Keep your experiences coming. Even if it won't work for us, I love hearing what works for others.

[cindy04]

If hogs are in your future, they LOVE raw milk! :1pig:

Cindy

[Just Little Me]

It might be illegal to sell the raw milk, but what about bardering for something they can do or something they have. Canned goods,labor,etc.

[nz1h]

Alot depends on where you live.
Here we sell eggs for 1.50 doz. and
had one guy say he dosen't pay more
then 1.00 doz. wife told him to hit the road. lol

alain

[highlands]

What works varies greatly with what resources you have, your skills and what you like doing. Try lots of things. We discovered that raising chickens for meat was not for us. Egg hens too. We do both for ourselves but it doesn't work on a larger scale for selling. Sheep were another miss. I like them for how they mow the pasture in concert with our other livestock but I can't make a living with them. Our land is not good for a veggie farm - although I grow more than we need for our family, I'm not good enough at that to make it pay.

For us pigs are the thing that brings home the bacon. We discovered we enjoy raising them, we're really good at doing it on pasture and we love pork - good thing because we have a lot of it. We've found a large demand for our pastured pork. Right where we live there isn't the economy for it but there is a ring all within about one hour's drive in all directions where it sells very well at health food stores, country stores and high class restaurants. They're very interested in the fact that the pigs are really raised on pasture, certified naturally grown (http://NaturallyGrown.org) and not fed commercial feeds. So that's grown to be our niche.

We also do logging, maple sugaring, my wife draws pencil portraits (http://HollyGraphicArt.com), still raise some sheep, have chickens for ourselves and someday I would like to get a milk cow and cattle. But for income it's the pigs that pay the bills.

Cheers

-Walter
Sugar Mountain Farm
in the mountains of Vermont
http://SugarMtnFarm.com/blog/
http://HollyGraphicArt.com/
http://NoNAIS.org

[nomad7inwi]

Originally Posted by highlands

What works varies greatly with what resources you have, your skills and what you like doing. Try lots of things.
.....
For us pigs are the thing that brings home the bacon. We discovered we enjoy raising them, we're really good at doing it on pasture and we love pork - good thing because we have a lot of it. We've found a large demand for our pastured pork.

Cheers

-Walter
Sugar Mountain Farm
in the mountains of Vermont
http://SugarMtnFarm.com/blog/
http://HollyGraphicArt.com/
http://NoNAIS.org

Yeah, I know what works for one might not work for another. We are just trying to see what does work for other people. Making sure we are thinking of things beyond what we already know. It may or may not work for us for a variety of reasons, but trying to be aware of some possibilities.

For us pigs were not bad, and the first thing we have turned a profit on. Fencing was a huge issue, but I think I have that figured out. Now we are looking for a new batch of feeder pigs. We are even considering getting a sow & boar so we can breed our own too.

We have been selling eggs at $2 a dozen for about 1 month. We currently are selling 5-8 dozen a week. We just found out regulations so we are going to start letting more people know we have eggs. We will probably be increasing price to $2.50 because of feed costs.

We already have 4 people who have requested our beef when we send our 1 month old calf to butcher in 2 years. I think we should get more calves.

We were contemplating doing horse boarding because we have the pasture and we can board up to 9 horses on our homeowners insurance with an insurance fee increase of $11 per year per horse. We don't know much about horses and it would only be rough boarding. So we don't know if that will be a good fit.

Thanks again everyone.

[cathleenc]

Nomad, where are you in Wisconsin? We just moved to a new farm in western Dane County.

Cathy

[Alice In TX/MO]

What has worked:

milk goat for home use milk, cheese, yogurt
most of the garden

What didn't work:

chickens - coons got them all
sweet corn - didn't make ears at all

[Up North]

I'll have to second raising pigs. We just moved from northern WI. There's just nobody willing to farrow out sows. Lots of of people selling pork direct but they just want to buy feeder pigs. I have found a lot of these people don't want to deal with animals in the winter and some are just intimidated by farrowing. We had just begun to scratch the surface of what was possible in our area before we moved. Huge feeder pig demand and there was a huge demand for roaster hogs as well.

Raising turkeys for Thanksgiving is usually a good money maker too.

My flop this year was goats. We bought two and one bottle baby was given to us. We didn't expect to make any money with them though. We wanted to see how well they would clean up weeds in the cow pasture. They did an awesome job at eating weeds. Only problem is that when all the weeds were gone I couldn't keep them in my fence. No more goats until new fencing is done.

Heather

[Vashti]

Our flop this year was bottle calves. We didn't know anything about cows, but met a nice woman who offered to give us a third of her babies born in their feed lot if we bottle fed the lot of them. She ended up bringing us about 30 of them, and we had to buy the milk replacer. She said that in the past, the replacer was about $35 - $40 per bag. Well, it was $75 per bag when we went to buy them! We fed them all, and lost a few to various problems that they brought from the feed lot. In the end, we ended up with 7 heifers, and just sold them yesterday for exactly what we put into the whole deal. We didn't make any money, and the labor was extensive...not to mention the worry we had all the time that we'd loose more to illness.

In my area, goats work well. We have several friends that make a living with their meat goats (mostly boers) and so, we're taking the money we have from the sale of our heifers and using it to buy goats. We're going to get a couple of dairy goats for our family, and then hopefully do well with the boers. Here's to crossing our fingers!

We also are just now at the point where our chickens are making way more eggs than we need. So, we're giving a few dozen away tomorrow via our local freecycle and then we'll begin selling the extra's at $1.50 per dozen. Not enough to pay the bills though, and it will be awhile before we're able to turn a profit with our goats. So, hubby's going back to work for awhile until we're able to make a living with our homestead.

Oh, and our garden didn't do as well as it could have this year. We had a horrid time with those grasshoppers!!!

[Vicki McGaugh TX Nubians]

For myself it's being diviersified. Goats (show, breeding stock, family milkers)....milk, cheese, soap, herbs for sale and for in the cheese and soap, hens for eggs $3 a dozen for milk customers. I no longer do meat with most of our bucklings going for breeding stock, and I no longer have export. With this you could easily sell any produce, fruit etc, grown...one stop shopping.

Although we easily raised 3 pigs a year, 1 for us and 2 for friends which gave us free pork...going larger with our own sows and hog was a bust, fun but a bust, there simply wasn't that big of interest in pork. Same with sheep, there was little interest in lamb meat.

With BARF so popular now, rabbits sold butchered and in little sacks for the feeding of dogs would defiently be a good market.

We are lucky that we live within an hours drive of Houston...location location location. Vicki

[brosil]

I don't operate at much of a profit yet but I'm not set up that way. I can say that the most profitable so far are sheep and honey. They give me good money with relatively little work. The Arabs come to the farm and butcher on site. They leave little waste to dispose of. I will say that registered stock has never made me a dime. I've dropped registration this year. Unless you can take time to travel around and show your stock, you can't develope a market.

[hotzcatz]

Mostly the garden is for providing us with food and the pigs we eat are feral so we don't have to raise them. For that matter most of the bananas and avocados are "feral" too, but are still tasty nonetheless. The local health food store buys excess vegetables from us occasionally but the only stuff that sells for real money is exotic plants sold through eBay. Since we live in Hawaii, these "exotic" plants are just things from the yard although I've started some specific varieties of bananas which sell real well. They don't propagate all that fast, though, so it is difficult to get very many of them to sell.

[hmsteader71]

Our garden helped us some this year. I'm not sure yet whether I'm going to do one next summer or let the ground have a rest. Also, cooking everything (or most everything) from scratch, making our bread, heating with wood, trying to conserve water is about all we can do right now. We live in town and don't have a whole lot of room to work with.
But I am always trying to learn new things.