So, after several years of shillyshallying about having a small farm, you’ve decided to do a pivot and take up farming as your hobby. Now you need to educate yourself about running a farm and know the responsibilities concomitant with it. Of course, when building a farm, you should shed your overly romanticized notions about farming and sport a realistic view of how to run it.
When starting a hobby farm, it will be best to start small because you still need to learn the basics of farming. You can read books, attend small farming seminars, and research the best crops and farm animals to raise. But all the knowledge you will get from such studies would remain theoretical unless you learn to apply it.
Essential Tips for Kickstarting Your Hobby Farm
When starting a hobby farm, you need to be realistic. Being realistic, of course, means you only work within your means and capabilities. Besides, it will be best to temper your expectations. It also means knowing the following valuable tips on how to kickstart a small hobby farm:
Know Everything You Can Learn about Hobby Farming
Many would-be farmers leap into farming without even doing thorough research about agriculture. These people, of course, are impulsive. Farming, however, entails thorough knowledge and planning to be successful. Thus, if you want a higher success rate in agriculture, you need to grab the bull by the horns and not leave anything to chance.
Farming has dramatically improved along with the rapid improvement of technology. Many huge farms, for example, have become highly scientific in their approach to farming.
It is best to run your small farms deliberately and scientifically to leave nothing to chance. You can join a hobby farming group and use it as your sounding board when making decisions about your hobby farm.
Start Small
If you have the budget needed to run a big farm, you might get tempted to buy vast farmland and start big. Yet, there is always wisdom in starting small. This way, you can shield yourself against financial loss by not investing all your chips on a big farm.
Besides, starting small will provide you with enough time to learn the rudiments of farming without incurring much financial loss. However, if you become successful in your small-scale farming, you can scale up your small farm afterward.
Figure out and Recognize Your Limitations
Your key constraint when farming includes managing your time. Another thing is that you might not have enough skills and know-how to run a small farm. Don’t be reluctant to discuss your limitations and constraint with your farm stakeholders. Benchmarking your information can provide you with the necessary supporting knowledge about running your hobby farm efficiently.
Learning Takes Time
Farming is not for the impatient. It takes time to master it. If you’ve never raised chickens before or grown tomatoes or lettuce, you might be at a loss regarding how to engage in these activities.
So, you need knowledge and apply it to corroborate if it is accurate and effective. As you become more versed in the different farming techniques, you can minimize miscues and failures.
You Need to Be Flexible
You might not be the type of person who experiments because you want to ensure that you do everything right the first time. Yet, with farming, you need to be flexible, for some factors are not within your direct control when farming.
For example, you intend to plant lettuce, but the soil and the weather are not appropriate for their growth. So, you need to adjust, be flexible, and seek those hardy plants for such a soil type and climate. Flexibility allows you to make a pivot when one course of action isn’t working for you on your farm.
The Most Recommended Hobby Farm Ideas
Once you’ve psyched yourself up and have already made up your mind to manage a hobby farm, it will be best to learn the following different hobby farm ideas that could prove helpful to you as a beginner in hobby farming:
1) Bee Farming
You might want to try bee farming as you engage in hobby farming. Bees, of course, are not ferocious creatures as many would have stereotyped them. They are easy to handle as long as you provide them with a solitary place, away from the heavy foot traffic. Bees want to be left alone.
Once you’ve started farming them, you can assure yourself of a continuous honey supply. Besides, bees are excellent pollinators that can help propagate your crops.
Beekeeping can provide you with a promising avenue for making money. You can sell the extra honey you can collect from your beehives. You can also sell beeswax-based products online. Besides, some local merchants may want to carry the products you are selling.
Hives don’t take too much space. So, beekeeping will never be taxing to your resources, especially if you have a small acreage farm.
2) Poultry Farming
Another worthy endeavor you can engage in is poultry farming. It can let you supply poultry products to the market, given the high demand for them today. Poultry raising is a good business and investment option. Yet, you need to ensure that you run your poultry well because poultry farming is strictly regulated to ensure the health and safety of your neighbors.
So, if ever you decide to run your poultry, it will be best to learn as much about the business. Select the best location likewise to set up your poultry or chicken coops. Besides, you must secure all the necessary paper works to run your small business without any legal impediment.
3) Herb Gardening
You can also start your herb garden as one of your kickstarting projects on your hobby farm. People love herbs, and they would want fresh herbs for their consumption. Thus, you can sell your excess herbs to those looking for fresh herbs.
When selecting the herbs, choose those in high demand to allow you to sell them quickly. You can sell your herb products online or use small roadside selling.
You can sell herbs like chives, basil, oregano, parsley, catnip, chamomile, and many other herbs that sell highly online. Growing herbs, of course, is fun. Besides, herbs are not that difficult to grow.
4) Aquaponics
Even the ancient people had practiced aquaponics for a long time. Yet, there has been a growing interest in aquaponics recently. Aquaponics combines both aquaculture and the cultivation of plants in water.
Plants don’t need soil to grow. They will grow even in water if they get the required nutrients. Fish poops contain the needed elements like Nitrogen for plants to grow. So, with the poops of the fish supplying these required elements, the aquaponics system works well.
Aquaponics requires less land area. Thus, you will not need a sizeable tract of land for your aquaponic system. Start small with aquaponics and scale it up once you get the hang of it.
5) Specialty Grains for Distilling and Brewing
Craft breweries and distilleries are an excellent market to cater to. These businesses use grains and malts, and you can be one of their wheat and barley malts suppliers. Some states, for example, offer tax incentives to brewers if they patronage locally grown ingredients. Thus, you can capitalize on this and gear your farm toward wheat and barley production.
6) Microgreen Farming
You can also engage in the production of microgreen vegetables that are ten to fourteen days old. Many restaurants are sourcing these small edible vegetables for their dish garnishing. Thus, these microgreens are in high demand nowadays.
You might invest in producing these young vegetables if you’re a beginner farmer. Microgreens are easy to grow. Besides, the turnaround time of these crops is high, and this business requires less investment.
Furthermore, you will not need ample space to start your microgreen garden. You can even grow these small vegetables indoors using hydroponics. So, investing in microgreens is not a bad idea, and is highly profitable.
7) Mushroom Farming
Another excellent crop to consider in your hobby farming is mushroom. Mushrooms are not difficult to cultivate. They can grow even in the wild and harshest conditions. At the onset, it will be best to determine the best mushroom strain for cultivation on your farm. Besides, you should know how to run and maximize the production of your mushroom farm to provide your prospective clients with a steady supply of mushrooms.
Some of the most sought-after mushroom variations are the shiitake and oyster. You can grow them indoors, and they can yield a large harvest. Besides, they only take about six weeks to mature fully. You can produce an average of twenty-five pounds of mushrooms per square foot, and each pound may cost around $12.
8) Organic Farming
Organic farming is an agriculture system that uses organic fertilizers instead of relying heavily on commercial fertilizers. It depends on manure, bone meal, and green manure as fertilizers. It also relies on companion and crop rotation farming.
A growing number of people are becoming health conscious. They want to eat food grown without the use of inorganic fertilizers. Moreover, they believe that vestiges or traces of these artificial fertilizer chemicals remain in the food. Thus, they get enthused to go organic with their food.
Due to the growing market demand for organic food, many restaurants and supermarkets are now selling organically grown food. Organic farming, of course, is profitable for this reason.
9) Flower Farm
Another popular and profitable business is the flower farm. Many people are enjoined to visit flower farms and flowers farmers have a ready market. Flower business, of course, is versatile and can create good revenues for you.
You can supply flower shops with the needed flowers. You can also provide event organizers with flower decorations.
Conclusion
In any endeavor, you need to invest time, effort, and money for it to prosper. Maintaining and running your small farm will not be without a challenge. In fact, it is not easy. Yet, you are the boss, and you can set your schedule according to your liking. Yet, it will help if you are meticulous and punctual with the details of running your farm. Besides, farming will require you to wake up early and go to bed a bit late.
Life as a farmer, of course, is not that glamorous. Yet, there are some perks concomitants with running a hobby farm. If you can make your farm prosper, you could hedge yourself against financial and global problems. Besides, you can assure yourself that you got a ready supply of necessary food in times of inflation and other conflagrations like a worldwide pandemic.
