Tip no. 1: Grow and Sell Whatever you Already have.
Make Money From Your Small Farm It’s hard for small farmers to compete with larger commercial enterprises when offering products to the market. But sometimes there are niche products that are in demand and un-catered for by larger farmers and you quite often you have them in your own back yard.
For example, on our own property, we have one large old prickly pear bush , and this year it is loaded with fruit. Now I hate to waste anything so I looked into some ideas.
The fruit is easily picked with some cooking tongs, the fruit then rolled on a barbecue to burn off the prickles then cut in half and scoop out the pulp with a spoon.
Now this might sound like hard work, but no. We then put the pulp in a blender, through a sieve to remove the pips and bag the stuff and into the freezer it goes.
I had so much in the bags I started looking for fun productive things to make with the stuff. Who doesn’t like jam? It makes an amazing jam but I don’t like that much sugar, so the next choice was wine. Yes wine. After checking online, prickly pear makes the best wine and you cannot buy it. So there you go, we can sell prickly pear wine at the local weekend markets for $15-20 a bottle, and we have plenty. This is just an example of what we do. We sell jam and wine at the local markets and we sell out every week.
That is not all we do, we have two olive trees, so we pick them and bottle in brine and sell two different varieties. Always popular, especially if you offer a bit of cheese with the olive sample at the local markets.
Now we are looking at what our neighbours have going to waste, so many ideas,,,,,
What have you done to make income from your farm? Let us know
Watch tomorrows blog for another helpful tip
