The farmer's market in a near town is run by one guy. He gets a good price, $5 for four tomatoes.

He hires high school kids via the Ag department and keeps those who will work on. They do most of the work and he runs the stand.

He dug a big pond for irrigation last year and we've been in serious drought since, but he'll be doing very well when the rains do come and we get out of La Nina.

 

I've thought about this as well. It would be awesome and a lot of hard work but I know I would love it. But, and this is kind of a jerk thing to say, I'm too smart for it. I like my creature comforts and you have to be a pretty good size farm to provide the lifestyle I want. Hence, I'm going to chiropractic college. I definitely plan on buying a place out in the sticks though and at least having a good size garden and chickens. Cows, horses, and hogs will have to wait until I'm semi-retired or really bored lol.

From a health and personal satisfaction point of view I really enjoy growing my own food. Something about working for it and it being shepherded by you until it's ready to be harvested is a pretty cool feeling. Not to mention seeing all the Ball jars filled with nature's bounty in my basement.

 

Runamok, you nailed it my friend.

...From a health and personal satisfaction point of view I really enjoy growing my own food. Something about working for it and it being shepherded by you until it's ready to be harvested is a pretty cool feeling...

Excellent synopsis. I cannot improve upon it!​

 

I'd love to quit my job and farm for a living.


I said that myself when we bought this place... I went having a boss telling what to do and working hard for a reasonable pay to.... fast forward to now..

Now I work my butt off, do not have a boss, well except the wife (which is great), I make my own hours, get a great feeling of reward and sense of accomplishment for the work I do.... but now I have to pay to work where before I got paid to work... I have to admit though I still greatly enjoy the farming and ranching over the working for a boss, though at times I do miss the money....

 

A lot of long hours and hard work, but worth it. I grew up raising all of our food. You get all of the results of your work, not someone else. After growing up that way, I always wanted my own business, and finally my wife and I started one. We started a company and works very hard, but loved ever minute of it. I would come home from a trip completly wore-out, but couldn't wait to get a good nights sleep and go again. We finally sold the company and are retired, but I miss it.
Looking back now, I wish that I hadn't wasted the time working for someone else. Pops

 

I have been farming , both full and part time , over the last 40yrs. It is in the end a is way of life. Realistically , if you don't mind a highly mortgaged form of slavery , it's all right .

 

As I've been planning and thinking about next year's garden, I'd love to just do that for a living. I'd love to setup a roadside stand and sell my produce there.

I've dreamed of that too. It was part of my plans if I ever got moved to my land in Colorado. Pretty hard to make a living that way. But as an income producing hobby, it's the top!

 

Yeah, I realize it's not as easy as just making the garden bigger...

On those hot summer days I don't mind going into an air-conditioned office, but in those nice spring/fall days that I'm out working in the garden I just wish I could do that all day long!!

Realistically, I don't think it would happen. At least not completely. I don't have enough land nor enough time to do it and make a complete living from it. There's a youtube channel I like - "My Half-Acre Homestead" and I think, wow, I have 4x that - but her husband works full time, too.

Perhaps one day I'll be able to work part time and then make up the rest by farming. My main concern is that *IF* I found a way to do this profitably, what if I have a bad crop one year? Something that needs to be taken into consideration (also why it might be best to have several crops/things). I know an area farm (about 25 minutes away, so I wouldn't be competition for them) sells packs of veggie/flower plants in the spring, veggies all summer and part of the fall, apples in the fall, Christmas trees in the winter. I'll never be that big, but it shows that you'll want to diversify.

Does anyone know about government regulations on this? If I setup a small roadside stand and sold extra tomatoes and beans, do I need licenses, etc? I might make a couple hundred $ doing that if I'm lucky, but I don't want to bother with it if fees and licensing is going to eat that all up!

One of my aunts lives a few hours south of me. They have a huge garden. She and her sons work it somewhat full time, and my uncle works a full time job and then helps when he's home. They produce a good portion of their own food.

 

Dealfinder500 - make sure you have a reliable list of buyers for your crops BEFORE you get too deep in your fantasy. If you can't sell your harvest you'll only work yourself to death (figuratively speaking) and end up broke. One or two disastrous seasons could make you wonder why you wanted to do this.

The only way I could see this working out for you with a tiny garden/farm like you describe would be to go 100% certified and registered organic. You can charge about 30% more and you may have good buyers.

Go for it. Good luck and please keep us up to date on your progress.

 

Why not WWOOF for a holiday? I think the WWOOFing circuit extends to the US and it would be a good way to find out about the work.

www.WWOOF.org.uk - Willing Workers On Organic Farms - you sign up, get a list and email the farms direct, usually you will be picked up from stations or airports etc. but to get the most out of an area it would be better to have some transport.

You are not paid, your hours of work are short, and you are housed and fed. We are not on the list at the moment but we have had some really interesting people, doctors on sabatical, artists etc.

 

Amazon.com: The Winter Harvest Handbook: Year Round Vegetable Production Using Deep Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses (9781603580816): Eliot Coleman: Books

This book goes into surprising detail on the subject, it's one book I highly recommend. He makes around $120,000 per acre / year with 60 hour weeks, and he explains everything from fertilizer rates to seed spacing etc, etc. The book is so in depth that you will get loads of information out of it regardless of where you plan to farm, his marketing strategy and farm design is second to none imo.

 

why not try small and expand. say at the begining you get total self sufficiant for your own food requirements and then from there on any thing you have try a honesty table by the gate with the surplus or the local market, and only sell whats in season rather than strawberries in january and as the customers start to come back why not try selling them a weekly box of seasonal veg/fruits in that way we now have a loyal and regular income, keep going with the market stall as its the best and cheapest way to meet new customers

 

You should check out One Acre & Security by Bradford Angier. basically tells you many ways to support a family of four from oine acre. Anything from growing all your own veggies to having a side business of growing cooking herbs, packaging them in little $.99 cent packeges and wholesaling the little packeges (about 30k worth per acre). Or rasing rabbits for food (mine are pet/show rabbits), catching the droppings underneath to raise woms and then selling the worms.

It also covers things like raising bees, frogs, turtles, fish , pigs, goats, sheep, cows and more... all from the POV that one has about an acre. it then gets into a little about hunting, hiking. Even gives the basics on building a log cabin.

 

A farmer is the only business man that pays retail and sells wholesale. As a business model it won't work. Family farms going bust for years now. It's a good hobby that has its rewards, my advice is "don't quit your day job".

 

Our farm is surrounded by farms, every farmer I know has a regular job and farms on the side. Most of the farmers I know here own and operate logging companies or construction enterprises for their source of income. They would many of them probably stop farming all together except that can cost you a fortune in taxes when you have a lot of land. Now that logging seems to be fading a bit here so are many of the farmers, kind of sad to see.

 

The value of a dream is the direction in which it leads you. Plus, purple potatoes are just cool.

 

Two guys were talking one day. The first guy says "what do you do for a living?"
The second guy says "I work for the government."
The first guy says "What branch?"
The second guy says " I'm a farmer."

And I'll end that true story with a couple of canard's.

You know how to make a small fortune farming? Start with a big fortune.

Aaaand. Behind every successful farmer is a wife with a good job in town.:thumb:

 

If you have a job that pays you, keep it and keep enjoying your farm. Or, if you have enough money to live on if all you do on the farm goes to S**T all year or for two years
or for three years.
Really, I would not go in debt to have a truck patch.

 

I read an interesting statistic, somewhere, but don't remember where. It stated that every farmer feeds 155 families on average.

 

For Dealfinder500

I read the words ditch and "creek" in one of your posts.

There is a word for small stream or ditch; sike

English as so many words I thought I'd put that one out there.

P.S. The definition of a farmer
A man outstanding in his field

Good luck with next year's garden.

 

Interesting. You learn something new every day! Thanks!

 

Go for it

You know you won't be happy 'till you do.

I know I'm never happy.

 

When I was growing up my family always had a garden. When my dad lost his job one year, we put in a huge garden, the size of more than one city lot and bought chicken and geese. I think we had more than 120 tomato plants, and four long rows of pole beans. Add to it sweet corn, cabbage, broccoli, lettuce, carrots, zucchini, egg plant, squash and more. Once the garden started producing in late spring, we started getting just about all of our food from that garden and by late summer, we were giving away extra food. If it didn't come from the garden, we didn't eat it. In the fall, we went out foraging for walnuts, we'd find apple trees in yards that people didn't care about and get apples, my brother and I would go out on our bikes and pick blackberries all day long.....we sold extra door to door. That along with flowers from my mom's flower garden. we made up tons of blackberry jam. We had jars and jars of apple sauce, tomato sauce, relish, green beans, the list goes on and on. We fed our geese and ducks extra stuff from the garden and from a grain patch and that was our meat source. When there wasn't work to be done in the garden then us kids would go out and work for other people, yard work, etc.

We were broke cash wise, but we always had enough to eat for the year.

 

The more and more I work in my garden and on my land, the more I'd just love to quit my job and work here full time.

Right now my garden is 3,500 square feet. I could easily make it around 10,000 square feet if I had more time. All total I have about 2 acres. About 1/2 acre of that is my house, driveway, yard, etc, and about 1 acre would need a lot of work before you could turn that into a garden (sloped, trees, etc), but there's a good 1/2 acre that's just about flat (where I have my present garden). I'd love to try growing a lot of the "wierd" heirlooms - like red carrots, blue potatoes, brown tomatoes, etc. I bet people would pay a small premium for those.

As I've been planning and thinking about next year's garden, I'd love to just do that for a living. I'd love to setup a roadside stand and sell my produce there.

Maybe someday. Not this year. Probably not next year or the next. But maybe someday.

Anyone else done that? I'd love to hear your stories, what you did right, where you messed up, etc.

You and many others would like the same thing. It is called retirement for most folks. I have a friend that is a full time farmer and he has a bumper sticker that reads "If you think crime doesn't pay try farming". The point is it is a hard life for little money according to him. You carry a mountain of debt and one bad season could wipe you out forever.

Having given that cheerful report on full time farming let me suggest this...

Maybe you are asking the wrong question. Maybe it isn't how can I work on my land gardening and support myself but rather what can I do on my land or near it that would support myself. Notice the key point of my statement, ask is not "how" but "what".

I have been self employed in a home based business for many years. I do exactly what I want most days and make the income I need to survive. I learned a while back that if you put several profit centers together any one of them may be small and not produce a ton of income, but put a lot of them together and it suddenly becomes a living.

I recommend the following books...

1. Ragnar's Guide to the Underground Economy by Ragnar Benson
2. Reviving the American Dream by Adam Starchild
3. 555 Ways to Earn Extra Money by Jay Conrad Levinson
4. Earning Money Without a Job by Jay Conrad Levinson
5. Discovered 505 Odd Enterprises by George Haylings
6. Making a Living Without a Job by Barbara Winter

I have used all of the above as well as many not mentioned that are specific to my cash flow methods to create what I think is an enviable lifestyle without bosses and A LOT of personal freedom.

I think one of the worst lies ever perpetrated on most people is the one that you must work a full time job for a company, earning a paycheck every two weeks with at least 1/3 to 1/2 of being eaten up by taxes to make a living that will pay your bills. I don't live in that world and never will again.

 

You carry a mountain of debt and one bad season could wipe you out forever.

That's why it's mostly just a dream

I recommend the following books...

1. Ragnar's Guide to the Underground Economy by Ragnar Benson
2. Reviving the American Dream by Adam Starchild
3. 555 Ways to Earn Extra Money by Jay Conrad Levinson
4. Earning Money Without a Job by Jay Conrad Levinson
5. Discovered 505 Odd Enterprises by George Haylings
6. Making a Living Without a Job by Barbara Winter

Thanks! I ordered two of them off of Amazon. I'll see if my library has the rest.

 

if your property is paid for, it's fairly easy to get by financially on a small garden. my wife worked a part-time job and i had about a 3/4 acre garden that i worked by hand. i had more money in my pocket each week than i did working 3 part-time jobs, and I hardly ever had to leave home! we ate VERY well, too. i traded my excess "cash crops" like tomatoes and potatoes for goods like meat and dairy, so we always ate a well-balanced diet consisting of 100% organic and local food, and i had more money in the bank than when i was working 100 hours a week at ****ty jobs i hated. i wish we still lived there...

 

Thanks! I ordered two of them off of Amazon. I'll see if my library has the rest.

Yes, forgot to mention most of them are unfortunately out of print, but you should still be able to locate them on Amazon in the used area. Good luck.