Making Money on the Homestead...

I would like to talk about making money on the homestead. First I want to talk about small businesses on your homestead. An example of this for me is my composting worm business.

I breed several types of composting worms and I don't produce just one item to sell but several. Their are the worms themselves, the castings or worm poo, the cocoons or eggs and the aerated worm tea that we brew from the castings. I will get into more detail in another article about my worm teas. Spoiler I only use around 1/3rd worm castings in my brews and use other things I will talk about later.

That is four items for sale produced from my composting worm farm and if you want to add in bait worms and fatten some up that is also an extra. I also do mealworms and superworms. This produces the worms themselves, the adult beetles or pupa and the frass or insect poo for sale. That is 3 items for sale and the frass is fantastic for growing plants with. I will get more into frass later also. Mealworms and superworms like composting worms can also be sold for fishing bait, pet food for most any exotic pet like birds, reptiles, fish and even small mammals.

I try to only bring new things into the homestead that I get multiple uses from. That can be anything from producing products to sell, feeding other livestock and even fertilizing my gardens. For example my rabbits produce quality meat for my family, hides and babies to sell along with fertilizer for my compost or worm bins.

This same concept will work on lots of things from black solider fly larva that would produce feed stock for your other livestock, BSFL to sell and quality frass for worms bins or compost in general. Anything like crickets to cattle can have the same effect as long as you can find a personal use or use for the homestead and something produced to sell for a small income. It really is not that hard to find these uses for example I like goats for meat, hides and horns to sell along with young goats and dairy production that even if you don't want to drink it or make cheese can be used for soaps.

Honey bees is another we are going to get started on this year along with get my king crop fodder system back up and running. This is one I had to get creative with but at over 200 lbs of fodder a day at around 2/3rd a bag of seed I only have around $10 a day in the fodder. Great quality production of cheap feed for my livestock but also I have many horse people around me and I will be looking at selling one of the four 60 lb rolls of fodder every day for around $12. This gives them good quality fresh feed stock even in the winter time when pastures are barren while at the same time gives me my other 3 rolls for my livestock everyday for free. This is the ultimate goal at lest for me. If my worm farm only makes enough money to cover cost and provides me with 100 lbs to 200 lbs a week of free worm castings for my plants then I might not make money on the worms but I can make money selling what I grow since I am growing at such a low cost. Same with mealworms also. If I only sell enough to pay for the cost of my mealworm farm and feed my chickens for free then I may not make money on the mealworms but I can make money selling chicken eggs with almost zero cost from feeding from my mealworms. I also would still have the frass production for selling or growing as well. If the fodder sells enough for me to grow for free then I may not make money on the fodder but I can make a nice amount of money selling hog, goat or cattle shares to people since my feed cost will be very low.

The point I am getting at is every part of the homestead is a business and if ran that way, trying to find all the angles that work for you and your area, you can cut your cost low enough that anything you do in turn will actually make money instead of cost money. Instead of focusing on one or two things to make money like a commercial farm would you can make small amounts of money from many different things. This is were I prefer to be since only having one or two items in production can end up being seasonal or have gaps in high and low times of income but if you have many things and one or two don't do so well it does not hurt as bad financially and you have different things in production threw the different times of the year always producing a constant income.

I hope that some of this information can be helpful to anyone fellow homesteaders or people thinking of starting a homestead.