Wanting to start small hobby farm

I would highly suggest buying and reading the book, You Can Farm, by Joel Salatin. I have been reading it and it is the best information on starting a farming enterprise I have ever read. Everything from the small scale hobby farm to major enterprises. I paid $35 for it at the bookstore, but it is well worth the money. Fabulous ideas and instruction. I myself have chickens (for eggs), gourds and vegetables and am starting small from my home. The gourds are already going wonderfully.
Good luck!!

A slighlty differnet approach, one I am following, is growing fruit trees. The turnaround time is much longer, but it should work great on a small scale. I am planting apples, peach and cherry initially. I plan to add pear, plum, grapes and blackberries over the next year or two. I am not going for volume on any one type of fruit, but rather a good mix of fruits ripening throughout the summer months. There are several orchards in the area, but my plan is to grow the varieties that they are not growing. I know I won't get rich, but I have two small boys (ages 5 and 6) this should provide a way for them to make a little money during their teen years and hopefully teach them a lesson in life also. Once everything is producing (probably 5-6 years from now) we will have crops June through October, starting with the cherries and ending with the apples.

We could also add veegies, pumpkins, watermelons, the list is endless. Just depends on how ambitious my boys turn out to be!

Dug

About 20, 25 years ago there was a book "How to make $100,000 a year on an acre." What it suggested was to create a subscription truck garden. You promised each subscriber a week's worth of salads and veges, the mix depending on what was growing that week. You may give subscribers a discount if they helped harvest. I hear it works for some people and some places.

Gerald J.

Livestock requires, at the very least, a twice-a-day, 7 days-a-week committment. If you're up for that, and you have a Middle Eastern or other Moslem community near you, "kosher" lambs (I know, that's a Jewish term, don't know what the Moslems call it) can be quite profitable.

Organic veggies for the restaurants, pick-your-own and consumer-supported gardens have done well in the proper circumstances.

It all comes down to research.

One of the reasons the country is in the jam it's in is because everyone wants to make money by shuffling money, not by working and actually producing something useful.

If farming was easy, everybody'd do it...

Livestock wise, the goat market is really hot right now, as mentioned before most of it goes into the ethnic market. Hogs will actually be a better ROI and quicker turn on your investment, but when the price goes down it can be a real cash drain.

Like fawteen said, if it was easy everyone would do it.