Aug 31, 2016
Farming... is it expensive to start, or not?
A lot of people want to get into farming, but they stall out when
it comes to the money side of things.
The common cause of that stall out is land. Land is expensive to
purchase. So most people immediately dismiss the idea of farming
because they can't afford land.
But people like Greg Judy, Joel Salatin, and us on this show, have
shown that you don't need to own land to farm.
There's a lot of land available to farm. Land you don't need to
own, and land that you can gain access to through options like
leasing..
If you can lease land either for free or inexpensively and if you
are in a market where you can move product, then the potential
upside to small scale farming is pretty attractive given the low
start up costs and low infrastructure requirements?
How low?
Very low compared to other businesses.
In his book Curtis gives an initial start-up estimate for a 1/4
acre farm at $7k to $17k.
Curtis started his farm with just $7k.
That's $7k that buys equipment and infrastructure which is portable
and resellable.
In good markets, the risk reward of small scale farming is usually
favorable because small scale market farming startup costs are very
low compared to many business out there.
Yet, despite the minimal start up costs, the costs are still
prohibitive, or at least perceived to be prohibitive by some
people.
Given that we'll dig into the farm start up numbers and see where
costs can be cut and what costs are just unavoidable.
And we'll also bring in some rationale to these numbers discussing
why certain items are worth the cost, and why others aren't.
Today we'll begin a multi-part series discussing the minimum that
you could spend to start a farm, and we will begin with the base
principles, what are the things that you need to think about before
you spend any money, that's coming up on Season Two Episode 22 of
The Urban Farmer.
Listen to past episodes at: https://www.paperpot.co/podcast
Increase farm efficiency with the Paperpot Transplanter and Other Small Farm Equipment at https://www.paperpot.co/
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