It was at least their third or fourth attempt at making money that I can recall. My father ended up with a successful side business that he ran with a veterinarian business partner. Many of us have taken on some sort of financial venture to make money and the attempt falls flat at best. Be willing to expand and try different things until you find something that sells well and you enjoy producing. Do fund your homestead using multiple income streams.Ĭhances are that on a homestead there will no one single item that will fund your homestead. Homesteading and the associated artisan crafts can have a hefty learning curve. On the flip side, do not let a few failures to dissuade you from learning a craft. Don’t let those words discourage you, but you just need to be aware. You still need to know that making soap is an artisan craft and failure will eventually happen to a batch. If you start making soap, really enjoy it, and are quite successful at it then you can consider it as a way to fund your homestead. However, if you have never made a bar of soap in your life you probably do not want to buy a homestead and try to fund it based on selling soap. Homemade soap is an item that can possibly fund homesteads. Don’t try to fund your homestead based on an artisan craft you don’t know how to do yet. Doesn’t pastured Hazelnut finished pork for a holiday sound that a wonderful idea? I bet there is a lot potential customers who would agree with that. Pastured Hazelnut finished pork, homemade hazelnut butter, and hazelnut brittle are examples of products a homesteader can produce and be competitive with. Value-added products is when you take a raw commodity and add to it. But what a homesteader in this area can do is take the popularity of hazelnuts and turn it into something you can compete with. How do you compete with that? Quite simply, you can’t. New orchards are appearing every time I look around. Suddenly fields that used to be grass seed, hay, or winter wheat were changed over to being planted in Hazelnuts. When the Hazelnut crop failed in Turkey, the price of Hazelnuts skyrocketed and producers were selling their nuts for a cent each. Filberts grow well in only two areas in the world, this little part of Oregon and Turkey. This was back in the day when they were called Filberts and you were a secret insider if you knew a Hazelnut and Filbert were the same thing. Filberts used to be a cute cottage crop around my area. I almost guarantee that they are doing other things to fund their homestead. The problem though is some homesteaders, even prominent ones, tell you to sell eggs. Selling eggs are a great way to recoup feed costs for your chickens but not such a great way to fund mortgages. Quite honestly, depending on your local supermarket prices and competition you may not be able to make $2 of profit for each dozen. The price you need to sell the eggs to produce $2 profit a dozen depends on your input costs. This is based on profit and not the price you sell the eggs. That my friends is real chicken math and homesteaders giving out business advice should not pretend otherwise. 545 chickens (rounded down, it really is 545.46).įive Hundred and forty-five chickens are needed to make $2,000 a month on eggs at the profit of $2 a dozen. If you divide your monthly total of 12,000 eggs by 22 eggs per chicken you get…. If each chicken can reliably lay 5 eggs a week for a monthly total of about 22 eggs a month for one chicken. That’s 12,000 eggs people! That’s a lot of eggs. To make $2000 profit you need to sell 1,000 dozen of eggs. That is a profit accounting for feed and care, infrastructure, and time. Let’s say you can make $2 profit from each dozen sold. With inflation as it is, that is such a small amount. Let’s say you want to make $2000 a month. Let’s look at the real math behind chickens. I am going to repeat it, eggs do not wholly fund homesteads. They are great to sell to attract customers to your farm stand to sell your other more profitable products. They are great to sell if you need to fund a small flock. Eggs are a great item to sell if you have extra eggs and want a few bucks for coffee.
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