A mealworm farm can be a nice little side business, but it can also play an important role in your food production. If you raise chickens, ducks or reptiles, you can breed mealworms to provide them with a steady, low cost supply of high protein feed. That’s how we got started in mealworms years ago, both as a way to save on feed costs and also as a a means of being self sufficient so we could provide food for our chickens even in a disaster scenario.
As it turns out, a mealworm farm is a pretty fun project, especially if you have children. They can do the regular maintenance and enjoy watching and learning about the life cycles of mealworms as they transform into beetles. Continue reading “Start Your Own Mealworm Farm”
If you don’t have a lot of space to raise out chicks but have a plentiful fertile egg supply, consider starting a chicken hatchery. The time and space involved are minimal if you can turn chicks around within a couple of days of hatching. This works particularly well if you breed harder to find and rare chicken breeds. Chickens that produce colored eggs have been and will continue to be popular as a niche market.
If you have a small farm, you likely have animals and understand how difficult it can be to get away overnight. One of the main reasons is the lack of reliable care for animals. If you have the space, especially with a kennel setup, consider offering pet boarding services to fill a very real need and bring in some extra cash. The main requirement? You’ve got to love animals to want to add other people’s to the mix.
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I still remember the Facebook comment that first opened my eyes to the possibility of growing basket willows for profit. I had no idea such potential existed, so I settled in for a binge session – avidly devouring any and all information I could find on the ins and outs of basket willows.
Selling compost is one of those unexpected benefits of raising livestock. It helps to imagine I’m walking through liquid gold when the muck of winter starts to melt. If you happen to have any to spare–we never do–it’s a great way to add an extra cash flow from something you might otherwise spend a lot of time trying to manage and move out of the way.
The growing distrust of the pharmaceutical industry is a great opportunity for the herb grower who wants to sell herbs. Monthly searches on Google for “herbal medicine” number in the tens of thousands. People want to know how to heal themselves and reduce their dependences on chemical drugs.
I love writing. From my earliest memories, I was reading and writing, spending summers in the library and developing what would be a lifelong love of words. Becoming a freelance writer was something I longed to do even as a child. We had one of those first Apple computers and I’d sit at the keys, idly tapping them without any idea what to do with them, just knowing I had a yearning that couldn’t be defined.
When we moved to our new farm two years ago, we discovered growing nettles in several patches across the property. I’d heard how wonderful nettles were, so with a pair of surgical gloves and a quest for adventure, I set about harvesting my first nettle crop.
There is something unforgettable about the feel of a rough calf tongue licking you on the hand in its quest for food. Raising bottle calves for profit is as rewarding as it is hard on the heart – bottle babies are impossible not to love.