Deciding On Your Small Farm Business

You’ve finally bought your dream home or land in the country. Now you want to earn a living from your land. If you are anything like us, you have hundreds of ideas to make money from your dream farm. So, how do you decide which small farm business is right for you? We took a number of factors into account when deciding what we would do on our farm. Here are some ideas.

How Long Do You Have?

This is just a nice way of saying, ‘how old are you?’ One of the key factors in the style of small farm business we chose was our age. It’s no surprise to hear Gavin and I are not young. So, a business that is going to reap rewards for us in ten years is not one we could consider. Yes, it would be nice to grow champagne grapes but to be able to live a comfortable life and work from home, we needed a business model that will bring income within the first year. We could then build on that to earn more.

This is one of the reasons we chose tours of our farm as one of our side hustles. The view is that it will become a main income earner in a year or two. If you have twenty years, think long-term.

How Much Do You Want to Work on Your Small Farm Business

The amount of time you want to spend should also factor in when you are deciding on your small farm business. We want a relaxed lifestyle. Working all the time is not part of our plan. We want to be able to leave the farm for a day or two or close down completely during winter.

The lifestyle you want to have should be an important consideration when you are deciding on your business model. Starting a farm wedding business and then discovering the weekends in the warmer months are no longer your own is not the ideal scenario if you love to visit friends or play golf on your weekend.

Do You Want to Work with People?

Having the type of business that involves direct interaction with customers might not be for you. You might prefer to keep customers away from your farm and deal with them at a stall or sell wholesale to shops. Our farm is very pretty. It would be foolish of us not to utilise this in some way. And Gavin loves to talk to people and share his hard work. This is one of the reasons we have visitors to our farm as a way to earn income.

If you don’t feel confident dealing with people in this way, choose a model that fits with what you want. Running an Air BnB on your property if you hate talking to people you don’t know isn’t a good plan.

What Do You Love to Do?

Do you love gardening or baking? Is raising chickens or growing vegetables a passion of yours? Maybe you like flower arranging or entertaining friends? All of these could easily form the basis of a small farm business. It’s better to take something you enjoy and are confident doing to begin a business with than start something for the sake of money and find you absolutely hate it.

We run school trips to our farm. As teaching has been my profession for my entire life, this is easy for me. I enjoy interacting with kids. But I know many people who think this is insane!

What Attributes Does Your Farm Have Already?

Its all very well to say you want to run long table lunches but do you have a space to do this? Is your farm character-filled and the type of place visitors would want to sit at for an afternoon?

When we moved to the farm, it was never our intention to run farm tours but as we cleared the rubbish away and brought back the beauty to our farm, we saw the potential for this. Sometimes you have to let your farm dictate what the business will be not force it to be what you’d like.