Emac asks: What do i have to do to be a backyard farmer?!?
I really want to start farming in my backyard, it is a fair size just inside the city limits. i can get vegetable and fruit seeds for cheep, but what i want to know is what i have to do to make a profit, like who do i sell them too and such, if you have any info that could help me. it would be greatly appreciated 🙂
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Answer by Been There
This is the trend … to buy one’s produce from local suppliers. The 100-mile Diet is becoming very big.
It is not hard to make back one’s investment over the growing season, and you will likely make some sort of profit. The more you can grow, the more profit you can make. But you are limited to how much you can grow by the size of your back yard (you don’t have 120 acres for a backyard, I’m guessing). So the best way to maximize your profit is to grow 100% organic … no artificial fertilizers, and no pesticides, because organic costs more. And you MUST grow that way if that is how you market your produce. How much do you charge? Go to a local farmer’s market and see what they are charging for their produce … that’s the going rate.
How much can you make from your backyard? If all you grew was cauliflower, I bought one at the farmer’s market yesterday for $ 3.00 … and cauliflower takes 4 sq.ft. (2’x2′) to grow one head … not including room for walkways in the garden, and the price not including costs (seed, water, compost, rototiller and fuel.) So a very rough estimate would be about $ 0.50 a square foot before costs.
As for marketing, there are several avenues to look at:
1. Specialty supermarkets that cater to the elite tastes (although this one is difficult to procure)
2. Farmer’s markets (renting a stall and selling your own produce)
3. Garden “shares” … my employer has purchased a share in a garden (for us employees) and every week someone goes and picks up a box of our share of vegetables .. whatever is ripe and has been picked by the gardeners, so it’s a “grab bag”. The only trick with this is that you MUST know for sure that you can successfully garden, and that you know what the limit is on how many shares you can sell and still meet your side of the contact terms … otherwise you have to return their money. So you can approach any group of people or individuals to sell shares to. This gives you a guaranteed sale and saves you the time of spending all day selling at the farmer’s market. We have an on-line organization here in town that sells online, posting what’s available, and you place your order on-line and they deliver it to your house.
What do you think? Answer below!
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You can make a small profit by growing things like sweet corn, tomatoes, potatoes, beans, cukes, pumpkins. These things are easy to grow. You can set up a produce stand by the road at harvest times. There is alot of local demand for fresh produce since homegrown is healthier than store bought. You can even make the stand self service if you don’t have time to attend to it. We do this and make several thousand dollars per year on produce sales.
you could sell them at a farmers market
i raise chickens but i doubt you can do that in city limits… but you could grow sweet corn tomatoes potatoes and sell them at the local farmers market… i believe if you try to sell them to kroger (i doubt wal mart are there stuff is grown and bought as cheap as possible) but kroger advertises “locally grown vegetable but you would have to have A LOT of crops to sell to them… also you probably have to have you feilds inspected or sometin by the health department idk to make sure they arent carrying some disease or sometin idk