Look at your skill sets and see how they can be used or adjusted to doing small holding . I was an electromechanical engineer with an additional qualified trade in industrial electronics servicing repair and construction . I took a city and guilds evening course at brick laying lasting 18 months before we sold up and moved to the smallholding ( It came in very useful ) Alison was a PA to the MD of a company employing 2500 people she was a full RSA quallified shorthand typist , had A level accounts and was a licentiate member if the IPD .
I offer that you are best to diversify into things that do not need a lot of your time or money in one go , keep the things as close together near where you live as possible so you don't waste time and money travelling around.
You have to be 100% organised and have had to have intensely & deeply thought through your systems of operation and committed them to paper . Everything should flow or loop back into the direction of flow.
You also need to know how to do a full financial plan for your enterprise.... leaving nothing out .
We thought we knew enough about finances and business but a six week course of three hrs. every Thursday and home work soon showed we lacked in several areas.
The course was called Option 5 b and came from the EEC because we lived in what they had decided was an unemployment black spot , it was free and had the bonus of doing a pound for pound fund matching providing a bank of their naming had seen out plans, financial forecasts and that we had attended all sessions of the course.
We joined the best bank at the time that would give us a years free banking and all sorts of free assistance , one bit of which was a free Sage accounting package . The Sage was over the top for our needs but after a few hours of messing around with it Alison tailored it for our expected needs.
I also got hold of a freebie early internet days stock breeding programme which allowed me to adjust the date periods as I chose . It was worth its weight in gold as it allowed me to programme matings so that market peak purchasing would coincide with the matured stock sales dates . ( It's no use growing turkeys and them all being ready for the chop in February when you want them off your hands at the beginning of December sort of thing is it? . Our next stage of the small holding was going to be getting a decent incubator for chook , ducks and geese for fattening up ..selling them as fatteners or points of lay over the internet thus keeping our costs down .
Try to do Ice creams and umbrellas type enterprises .. explained as ...sell one when it is nice and hot sell the other when its wet and cold .
This way you can usually spread the effort and costs over a year with income arriving to you all year round .
I grew hundreds & hundreds of laurels , Christmas trees and from cuttings ... made a set of ridges of well manured well rotovated to a fine tilth soil , covered them in 12 foot wide black poly sheet off a roll poked down spade cut slot all along the sides and ends of the beds and the same the hormone treated cuttings in cut in slits every 15 inches apart .
The poly sheet kept the weeds down .. I used Round Up in between the rows .
Did cuttings from hawthorn but found that stratified berries and seeds gave better plants as did stratified seeds from walnut ash , sycamore , oaks beeches etc and sowed them direct on well prepared soil in 4 inch deep rings of plastic 200 mm ribbed drain pipes again these were set in black poly sheets to keep the weeds down .
I used news ads to sell my pants ( eBay was not invented nor was the internet search engies or websites for home owners 0 ..
I suggest that you never sell at an auction .... I'd never ever ever again use one after the first auction I sold batch of 180 plants at.
The auctioneer was very fast and most of the lots of six plants in six inch pots sold for under a fiver .
Found later that the guy buying was related to him & a landscape gardener , it left a nasty taste in my mouth .
We both learnt how to become commercial bee keepers with 50 hives plus and 50 neuc's , used my engineering skills to make all my own national hives as well as being able to sell a few complete Hives and neuc's with bees.
OK it meant I only got 45 p paid for the honey but by the time I'd sold it in bulk instead of jarring , labelling and generally messing around I was far better off as the hives also brought in pollination fees .
For pollination duties
I made eight removable drop side & tail board trailers that would carry four hives with three supers each and a bit of space to spare . Set them up with jacking legs on platforms o f24 x 24 x 2 inch thick ply to take the weight as the bees filled the frames .
made a simple syrup pump to fill the hives which had the crown board made into a 3 " deep crown board feeder .
We also diversified into small mammals by the thousand for the big national pet shop chains . Grew them in near lab conditions in purpose made insulated steel buildings with running water full drains to a septic tank , heating and air con & light controls etc. . made all my own stainless steel cages and fittings etc.
I discovered a local engineering company with a CNC air bed punch machine & folding machines etc. did lots of template making and some simple folding . I purchased a spot welder and folded and spot welded everything else .
In our system designs I'd made provisions for a wash bay so not only did I have to get it all in place before we started things it became a godsend right from the word go . We had two big tanks ( ex 1,00 litre fruit juice paletted tanks ) from which I cut the tops off at the top rail height and filled the cut tube ends with a hard set silicone , one was 3/4 filled with caustic soda ,the other was constructed with a piped drain system to the slurry tank & fitted out with a racking , drainage system to put caustic dipped /soaked things on ready for warm water detergent power washing & draining .
I've noticed so many of my small holder friends are permanently in the muck and struggling because they never gave thought to the system of cleaning ,drainage or dry walkways or any sort of business processes well before they started their small holding enterprise.
That's like a builder putting up a roof on three stilts and trying to dig the foundations after he's just built the walls all before the roof comes tumbling down on his head .
Because the smaller an animal is the more you have to care for it , if you don't want prosecuting or to end up going out of business due to disease etc..
We only gave it all up because of a spinal injury gained at my day job when a chair collapsed under me whilst at my employers premises .
Topic: What do you do to pay the bills? (Read 8173 times)
