Have you wanted to start a small farm? Interested in organic farming? Want to start a country Bed & Breakfast? Would you like to produce a nature-related home business income stream and make money from your garden? Any or all of these are more attainable now than ever.
Their size can range from an urban rooftop to a small town backyard to small acreage in the country. It’s wonderful to have the sunlight and birdsong be your “office surroundings,” and to tend the earth’s life force while high class restaurants, world travelers, or your local community eagerly pay premium prices for your organic, heirloom and sustainable products.
You can grow many crops: Vintage cutting or edible flowers, rare ethnic and culinary herbs, medicinal herbs, heirloom and gourmet vegetables. There’s a growing trend among those from urbanites to small town dwellers to those with small rural acreage (or in the process of buying it), who are starting sustainable home businesses that are earth and family friendly, or living the country life as real farmers again with rural traditions and the sound of birds and crickets from their porches. The huge demand for local, sustainable, and heirloom and gourmet foods, plus the growing demand for hand-made artisan foods and sustainably produced unique flowers and other unusual ornamentals is fueling this trend.
Farm examples include one who grows the crop used to make brooms, and sells hand-made ornamental or vintage brooms from his own crop. Or the spa mini-farmer who grows fresh ingredients for the facials for her local spas and estheticians, such as lavender, cucumber, and even pumpkin now proven to benefit the skin. Or the couple who raise tiny Shetland sheep that produce wool in many natural colors, and make hand-woven blankets sold for high prices online and to tourists who visit their area.
Whether you’re planning to start a small farm, begin organic farming, start a country Bed & Breakfast, or earn money from your garden, to begin making this dream come true, start with the concept of the “Micro Eco-Farm” that brings them all together. It’s the 21st century version of sustainably producing from the land in larger quantities in smaller space than anytime in history, because with technology and world travel, humans have now discovered and blended the best growing techniques that combine ancient discoveries (such as Chinese or French intensive growing methods) with cutting edge research on creating living soils and sustainable food supplies in smaller spaces than ever before understood.
To start a small farm, use micro eco-farming techniques to begin from as small as a half acre, and even stop there, or grow into a few more acres if you have the land. Start in your spare time until your business has built up enough to let you quit your office job. Micro eco-farming involves organic farming techniques, but adds beyond organics to make your mini-farm more productive than any farm in humankind’s history.
To start a country Bed & Breakfast, plan your B&B’s breakfast menus first, then design the small farm to grow the menu’s products, the organic farm that will wrap around your B&B from the information gleaned from your menu. You may want to raise laying hens, blueberries, strawberries, a few antique apple and pear trees, an herbal tea garden, and a couple dairy goats. Your B&B customers will love this small farming demonstration and setting, and it all “synergizes.” The goats and hens will provide organic fertilizer along with ingredients for breakfast omelets and yogurt, the chickens and goats can eat prunings from the plant crops, which will provide your customers with freshly baked blueberry muffins, strawberry jam and pear butter (which can also be sold as a product to your customers) and spicy apple bread and apple cider.
To make money from your garden, the possibilities are endless. You can grow a cutting garden with a flower stand out front to earn money from your garden, or sell the flower bouquets to in-town B&Bs that don’t grow their own, or to restaurants and hotels; sell high priced rare gourmet food crops to nearby five star restaurants, such as rare edible flowers or fresh ethnic food crops.
Whether you plan to start a small farm, earn money in organic farming, make money from your garden, or open a country Bed & Breakfast, your livelihood will be helping restore the planet by maintaining green life and living soil to your outdoor “office.”
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