Suggestions-self sufficient mini farm?

Question

We're thinking about starting a mini-farm. We've already got chickens...the easy animals. Next, we plan on getting a milk cow, meat cows, and maybe a pig or two. Am I missing an animal that provides staples (ex. milk, meat, ???). I feel like I'm missing something major.

Also, we've got the vegetable garden and fruit orchard going...but just learning about grains. We live in Southeastern U.S. Any suggestions on type of corn/wheat/soy etc. for milling?

Answer 1

How many acres is you mini farm?

Are you raising the animals for your own table, or to sell?

Check your states laws VERY carefully.  In North Carolina, it is illegal to sell an animal to someone else for them to butcher, and North Carolina does NOT make exceptions for religious differences (like Muslims who can only eat the flesh of an animal who's had it's throat slit).

I have raised meat goats and rabbits for 20 years.  I do all of my sales dirrectly from my farm (my customers come to me, and slaughter at my farm).  It is legal to do so in my state.

In the Southern part of the U.S. you are going to have MANY more parisite problems.  Worms and blood sucking insects are a big deal, and you will have to have a plan in place to deal with them.

Do research before adding anymore livestock.  You cannot read, nor do enough research.  Visit farmers in your area who are raising livestock the same way you wish to do it, and are doing so SUCCESSFULLY.  

If you are rasing and selling meat goats, your ethinic customers will also be happy to buy a few rabbits.  Rabbits have very little fat, and are very easy to butcher.  Concider them for your own table also.

Organic food always do well.  Concider fruit trees, nut trees, berries, and vegtables.  People are also always willing to buy flowers.

Since you are talking about a mini farm, it is highly unlikely you will be able to produce your grains below the cost you can purchase them for.

Instead of growing grains, concider looking into making your own bio-fuel to power your trucks, cars, and tractors.  That is much more effecient and money saving.

Pigs are a good animal to raise.  Decide if you want to buy weanling pigs and raise them to market size, or if you want to buy a sow and breed her.  Remember a sow will get big, and can be a dangerous animal.

Goat meat has less fat than skinless breast of chicken.  It has more iron than beef.  It's a very healthy meat, and tastes good.  We eat it all the time.

A milking animal is a SERRIOUS comitment.  That means EVERY day, TWICE a day without fail, no matter the weather going out to milk her.  Unless your family is very large, a cow is problably going to produce much more milk than you can possibly use.  Despite what others have posted goat milk tastes just fine.  Just don't let the goat nibble on things (like evergreens) which will taint the taste of her milk, and cool the milk immediatly and properly.

I use to raise sheep.  They are the stupisted creature ever.  Their meat is good.  Their wool has little to no value for the work of shearing.  Concider getting a hair breed instead of a wool breed if you get sheep.

Worms are another item which you may do very well on selling to fishermen, and other gardners.  Worm bins are supper easy to do under rabbit hutches.

Rabbit & goat manure may be put dirrectly on gardens.  Horse, cow, & pig manure must be composted for a year.

Visit your local farmers markets.  Check out what items sell well, or what you might wish to grow for your own family.  Read books, do research, and subscribe to Countryside Small Stock Journal.

~Garnet

Homesteading/farming raising our own food for over 20 years.

Answer 2

Sounds like you have most of the important things covered. What you didn't mention is a greenhouse. It is a perfect season extender allowing you to do salad items and special produce well into the winter, or even all threw the winter. It also will get your garden seedlings started early and save the huge cost that one pays for flats of veggies in the spring. A good sized greenhouse will, if properly constructed, eliminate any heating bills for your house especially given that your in the SE US. You may not need much house heat at all, but it would be there and available if you co-locate the greenhouse with your residence. As a greenhouse may need some minor heating even where you are, a carefully located wood stove with a blower would probably be enough down there. I used one way up north here in Massachusetts, with a propane back-up and managed OK, but there you are better situated. Propane is an easy thing if money isn't too much an issue, I just liked the self sufficiency of wood. A really great and cost effective greenhouse is the double polyethylene hoop houses. Inexpensive, huge floorspace, not too ugly, easy to put up (don't try to cover it in the wind though), and incredibly versatile and adaptable to any needs. The double poly is a great insulator. I managed a 32' X 100' easily alone.

If your orchard is new, freshly planted by you, evaluate it for earliest production and then long term production. If you did not plant any full dwarf early production varieties and went with all full size trees, you may want to rethink and mix them up. Having dwarfs, semi-dwarfs, and full sized varieties will allow you earliest production with long term production. Also evaluate disease issues in your location now so you are ready; call your County Agricultural Extension Agent (town hall offices?) and ask what to expect. One thing to make sure of is to go after anything that harbors cedar apple rust. Junipers, crab apples, and any relations need to be hauled and totally eradicated. That will keep your apple trees from getting spotty and weakened. Think now about your orchard strategy as they will need end of season maintenance and cleanup as well as dormant sprays. Make a calendar.

Make a calender; write down everything you do and everything you are suppose to do and then keep it and add to it yearly. It is the single best tool you will have. At a glance you will know when to start the peas, and if you found that was early or late last year then you can plan accordingly because you have that info saved. When you have an issue with the milk cow you have something right at your fingertips to refer back to, what was done on this day and that day so you can put things together and sort out a problem. You'll always know when to do dormant oil on the orchard and when you fertilized or should fertilize, and when to start looking for a specific garden pest because this is when you found it last year and it ruined the cabbage.

Re-evaluate what you shop for to fill your needs as close as possible and be prepared to freeze or can or dry. By looking at what you use you can figure what you will need and plan accordingly. See what people need around you and trade or sell to buy staples you can't produce. It is a wonderful game to see how well you can live and how little you spend with the "Barter Strategy Game". As you get along you can even incorporate things like using heat from the greenhouse in the cold months, using your manure to make bio-gas for your gas appliances before you use it on your fields as fertilizer (a great way to compost and get bio-gas too). Do you have wind and water to make a bit of electricity? How self sufficient you can truly be! And while on the subject of water, be sure to research it's availability and then be doubly sure that you will not have a supply interruption. Town water? Well water? Quality and interruptions to service? Should you have a bigger well or a second well? Historically what has happened. Remember, if something goes wrong with that one thing, all you worked for is in ruin. Have more than one source. If you have a well and town water, you don't have to use much of the town supply to keep $$ down, just enough to keep the pipes clear and clean. Use town water in the house and well on the fields.

And last, see who does what in the area. A neighbor might be a great butcher for you and will do your meat for a portion as payment. Does anyone have a mill to grind your grain, at the same deal as the butcher? If you have a bulk of something and farm b has a bulk of another thing, and farm c has something else, you all need to get together. Knowing ahead of time who is doing what can put all you together and plan so that everyone ends up better off; you can't do everything sometimes. You may have a glut of apples and trade some for hay bales.

Get periodicals like Mother Earth News and Farmers Almanac. Great ideas, calenders, etc.

Answer 3

Miniature cows. They've got both dairy and meat varieties.  They're smaller and easier to keep. Goats are cool for dairy and actually clearing land though I'm not sure if you're want to use the same goat for both (milk taste).

Answer 4

Just how mini is your mini farm?  The chickens are good.  If your space is very limited you might go with milk goats instead of a cow.  Fattening out a calf for your table is alright, you should not need more than one a year for that and you should look to buy an orphan calf or a bull dairy calf to raise on a bottle.  Much easier and cheaper than trying to keep your own cows.  Raising meat goats is a very good business for a small farm.  Your thing with the vegetable garden and orchard is good.  Instead of trying to raise the corn, wheat, or soy, unless you have a lot of ground, I would suggest that you specialize in something that will bring in some money.  Look into raising mushrooms, a big business for a mini farm.  Christmas trees are a good business for a few acres, or maybe strawberries. Just a few suggestions.

Answer 5

You don't need much equipment for corn for a mini-farm. Farmers are getting bigger and bigger equipment, so a four-row planter is pretty cheap. What's more, you probably have a neighbor who has small equipment who will custom plant and/or harvest for you. You won't need to turn much corn into meal for your kitchen. Most of it will go into feed for your livestock - and you'll find that you can feed ear corn. The animals know how to get at the kernels.

There are basically two types of wheat. Spring wheat is grown on the great plains. It's an annual, and it produces a high-gluten flour, good for bread. Winter wheat is planted in late summer, dies down over the winter, and is ready to cut in early summer. It's low-gluten flour, good for cookies and cakes. I'm thinking you won't want to bother with wheat.

Soybeans are hard to deal with. It's hard to extract the oil and purify it, and the soy meal contains a trypsin inhibitor, meaning that you need to toast it in order to make it suitable for feed.

Cows are hard to justify on a mini-farm. Something like a Holstein will produce upwards of 8 gallons a day. What are you going to do with it? Something like a Jersey produces considerably less milk, but you're talking about 5.5% butterfat or richer. If the Georgia laws allow you to make cheese and sell it, then it makes more sense. But still, you dry up the cow when she's pregnant, and you have NO milk, and then she delivers and comes fresh, and you're drowning in it. And you have a hard time getting a whole beef in one deep-freeze, and you're not allowed to sell the meat to anyone else unless a licensed abbatoir slaughters it under USDA inspection. Sometimes steers get broken legs, or get electrocuted. Good meat, but use it or lose it, because you can't sell it.

You might want to buy some deacon calves each spring and raise your own veal. Deacon calves are awfully cheap, and if you don't care whether the meat is white or not, you can move them from powdered milk to grass fairly soon.

Goats produce less milk, but they are *extremely* difficult to milk, and the milk doesn't taste right. Rabbit meat has little fat, but I don't know anyone who has made much raising wabbit bunnies. My brother was going to make a fortune raising Chinchilla, but PeTA's taken the fun and profit out of raising fur.

Pigs, on the other hand, are wonderful. They aren't called "mortgage-lifters" for nothing. Dangerous - pigs will eat people - but that's usually only a problem for confinement operations. They're intelligent, and if you treat them with affection, they will respond to it - unless you get inbetween a sow and her litter. Pigs grow to market weight in six months, and they're smaller than cows, so you CAN put a whole hog in your deep freeze.

And it's not uncommon for farm families to develop a deep affection for their neighbors. Joe's cow breaks a leg, and after he slaughters it, it makes a gift of some beef to Sam. Sam, reciprocates with a gift of bacon, pork chops, and a couple of salt-cured hams. (Did I mention that salt-cured hams don't require space in the deepfreeze?) It's not commerce, it's just friendly gifts, so the meat doesn't have to be USDA inspected at the abbatoir's.

You might want to consider a few sheep. They can live on the grass in the orchard, saving the cost of mowing it quite so often, and a few lambs every spring provide some nice eating. You won't make anything on the wool, unless your wife wants to spin it and turn it into something she can sell.

They say it takes 1 man for every 5 acres of u-pick strawberries. If you are going to pick them yourself (which may be necessary if you are in a remote area or if there are a bunch of other u-pick farms nearby), you need to line up a REALLY good supply of labor, because when they need picked, they won't wait.

Paying attention to the Food Network, I suspect it would make sense to raise an acre of herbs. Flat leaf italian parsley, rosemary, etc.  You could probably do well, supplying restaurants and groceries with your own herbs, in season.

Or statice. Back in the 1980s, Mother Earth News said you can raise $50,000 worth of dried flowers per acre, which is about what an acre of u-pick strawberries was worth back then, except that strawberries go bad in no time flat, and dried flowers last forever.

But that cheese thing looks awfully interesting. If you call the state university, I bet they could tell you exactly what you need to do in order to raise cows and sell the milk as cheese.

Answer 6

the grains, harvesting them will be the problem.  also milling it.  the machinery to do it is just too expensive and complicated ,unless you have  huge acreage.  it is cheaper to buy your own flour and meal than to produce it yourself (on a small scale).

Answer 7

Also try peas, beans and pulses.