Chris, I've been peapatching on a small farm since 1976. I've tried a lot of different ways to have a cash income but the best was growing a market garden. If you live within 10 miles of a town or busy highway, you'll be surprised at how people will come to your place to buy good quality vegetables. The secret is building a loyal customer base, this means making friends with your customers. I had a lot of elderly customers who loved to come to the farm, this was a real enjoyable experience for them. I tried growing a lot of different vegetables but the money is in tomatoes, grow a good tasting backyard varity and sell under supermarket prices and they will go like hotcakes once people know where you are. I sold to some fruit stands and supermarkets during my biggest years and could easily make from $20,000.00 to $30,000.00 a year, the majority of the wholesale tomatoes sold for about .40 cents a pound and retail was .65 cents a pound with small and cull selling for .30 cents a pound. This is an easy way to make a living, you need at least two people to make it work (one selling tomatoes and the other picking), you can average from 2.00 to 20.00 total sales per plant depending on a lot of variables. If you pay attention to detail and spend the time with this that you would with a regular joy, the income can be substantial. Let me know if I can help you.chris 77 said:anybody got any fresh ideas for self employment or farm income
I'll second that! Ken was kind enough to send me a copy and it is chock full of really good ideas!Don Armstrong said:A few of you are relatively new so I'll mention that Ken Scharabok (that's his name, that's the name he uses here too) will provide an electronic version of a book on earning money at home, for free. He's about the most prolific contributor Countryside Magazine has. It's an MS-word document, although there's a possibility you can read it with Word-Pad.
PM or email him with a polite request for his e-book on earning money from home, give him your email address, and he'll be happy to send it to you. Note that Hotmail won't do. Hotmail won't allow attachments as big as this book which is (from memory) something around one and a half megabytes.
chris 77 said:anybody got any fresh ideas for self employment or farm income
Kirby Greene said:Chris,
I have recently discovered a comfortable way for me to add another income stream to our family's finances. It'd be perfect for extra retirement income, or just to put a few hundred dollars a month back into the budget.
Chris 77, I once had an instructor who raised specialty items like blue potatoes and sold them to the fancy restaurants. She said that she made quite a bit of money, doing that. You have to prove that you can provide on a regular basis to them, but they do love fresh veggies. Good luck and do check out the state and local regulations. It just doesn't pay to raise tomatoes in Texas. Judi :yeeha:chris 77 said:anybody got any fresh ideas for self employment or farm income