35+ Tips And Strategies Showing You How To Make Money Homesteading

If you are wondering how to make money on 5, 10, or 20 acres of land. Or maybe you don’t have quite that much land. Maybe you are wanting to know how to make money homesteading on a small acreage in your backyard.

Whatever size property you have. You can make extra money homesteading on it. I am a testament to that.

Building extra income streams on your hobby farm takes work and patience, but this post will help you find the principles and skills you need to get there.

The key to success is being selective on how you go about creating extra income and being willing to test things out and see what works. You may try a new source of income and it just isn’t what you thought. And that’s ok.

Test things out, give them ENOUGH TIME to work, review the data, make your choice, and move on to the next thing.

Make Sure WANT To Make Money Homesteading

It is exciting to hear that you can make extra money on the side. It’s even better when it is something you enjoy. It’s easy to get so fired up you could bust from the inside out. You make a list of everything you need and get to work.

Once you are knee-deep in ahem… well I’ll leave it up to you to fill in the blank.

You realize that running a business doesn’t happen on its own. You feel like a parrot answering the same questions 50 times. Customers are uneducated or miss informed. You have to deal with payments and managing money… The list goes on.

Or maybe the income stream is not something you love doing. Maybe it takes more time than you thought and it’s not worth the money you get for the time it takes. I found this out the hard way when I was selling dried herbs for people to use with their rabbits. It just wasn’t worth the time I was putting in.

While you do need to consider all the angles before jumping in there are going to be things that you can’t foresee. If you find that its not for you admit it, set a budget to still keep some parts of the hobby you love and move on.

Know Your Personality And If You Are Able To Let Animals Go

If you have a bleeding heart and you know you are not going to be able to sell, harvest, or cull animals when the time comes you may need to find a different way to make a homestead income.

You may have to go the education route or make money with the products you can create like homemade candles, maple syrup, raw milk, handmade soaps, extra seeds, or develop a tree farm.

There is nothing wrong with that. Know your capabilities and work within those limitations. Because if you keep every baby that is born because you “just can’t let them go” you will burn through your income so fast you will be in the poor house before you can blink.

Raising animals is something you have to learn to put up walls between your heart and those animals that YOU KNOW aren’t staying. Sure make pets out of the ones that are staying but you can’t get emotionally attached. You will be on such an emotional roller coaster.

Is it easy? Nope. It takes time to find your footing and learn how to protect your heart. But it’s worth it to be able to see the people who are happy to get your animals and get paid to do work you love.

Make Sure There Is A Need AND People Are Willing To Pay For It

You need to make sure there are people that want (or need) what you have to offer but even more than that they have to be willing to pay for it.

Whether it is a product, livestock, or service it really doesn’t matter.

People will always need to eat. But they will not always need a highlander how simply because they are the cutest cattle breed on the planet and they make cute field ornaments.

Can you make money from them for a time? Sure, but you should always have in the back of your mind to keep a pulse on the market and be willing to shift to selling freezer beef if the market dries up.

Let me give you an example…

Horses are beautiful creatures and were in high demand for a time when they were used for work and as a means of transportation.

Now that market has dried up. Unless you have a foot in the rodeo, show, or racing world where people will pay top dollar for your breeding animals. You are going to have a very hard time selling and producing trail horses.

If you are in an area where a car or truck can’t go. They now have ATVs and four-wheelers that can sit in the garage that don’t need to be fed regardless of if they did a job that day.

See where I am going with this. There are some avenues of income that just don’t make sense to invest in.

Get Creative & Become Known

If you are set on a certain product or service and your market is saturated, then you have to get creative.

Let’s go with raising a rabbit breed that is VERY common. Ummm, let’s say Californians.

Cals are probably one of the most popular breeds around. They are also one of the breeds you could buy or hardly anything if you didn’t care about the quality.

So how could you stand out in what we would call a saturated market? You have to get creative and become more popular than the other guy. What are your competitors doing or not doing? Go do the opposite if it will help you get more eyes on your backyard farm.

You could sell rabbits to 4-H’rs, as meat rabbits, show rabbits, and sell rabbits as pets. BUT you also have to give people a reason to want them from YOU! You may not have the best confirmation in your herd. But could you be selective with the temperament of the animals you keep? Making sure that all the kits you sell are going to be friendly.

How can you market yourself better than the other guy? Can you take people behind the scenes regularly through social? Can you share why you do things and help people who follow you understand your methods?

People need to know you exist learn to trust you and develop a connection with you. That is what will make you far more successful than the other guy.

You won’t make money on your farm if people don’t know you exist. This one is hard for some people but it’s a requirement.

Read more about how to promote your rabbitry and hobby farm on social media here.

You Need To Make It So Easy For People To Pay You

Here is one place I see people mess up. They make it really hard for people to find prices, or contact them to buy, or they have a very clunky checkout process.

You have to make your purchase process so easy a child could do it. Most times people are distracted and not giving you their full attention. If you have 8 steps for them to go through you are going to lose 80% of your customers before they check out.

Make it OBVIUSE. And answer all the questions you can think of that someone might ask.

Choosing Your First Income Stream

You only have so much capacity to get things done in a day. You don’t need to do everything that is available to homesteaders and you certainly don’t have to turn every avenue into different sources of income.

Look for income streams that have high-profit margins AND high-profit potential. So that one or two income streams will cover everything else you want to do.

Unless you have the help you are really only going to be able to have 2-3 income streams at one time without feeling like you are going to pull your hair out. It’s best if you can find ones that are in opposite seasons of each other.

Something like having goat milk or raising backyard chickens most of the year. But then have a few extra garden beds where you can sell pumpkins in the fall.

Be strategic with the income stream you choose and make sure they are worth your time.

Things You Can Do To Make Money Homesteading

These are income ideas that you can do even if you don’t have animals or even land to raise them on.

If you like making things and are crafty but don’t want to make things that will sit in a box then selling the things you make is a great way to put your crafty skills to use.

• Make and sell cheese and homemade soaps. (Even if you can not raise a dairy goat, you could ask around and see who would be willing to sell you extra milk).
• Allergy-free beauty products.
• Allergy-free foods.
• Hand paintings.
• Home decor items.
• Baskets.
• Knit/Crocheted items.
• Jewelry –Find Supplies Here on Amazon
• Beauty Products.
• Furniture.
• Candles –Find all the supplies you need on amazon.
• Handmade decor for weddings.
• Birthday-themed baskets.
• Gift baskets.

How To Make Money Homesteading Growing Things On Your Property

Here are some ways to make money off the land that you have if you struggle with letting farm animals go like I talked about before.

• Plant extra in your garden and sell fresh produce.(especially if you are in the city and can have a patio garden-city people eat that stuff up no offense) Things like pumpkins and gords are going to be great crops that you can charge more for and get people to pay it.
• Start extra seedlings in the spring and sell them as mature plants. – Here are100 Pcs 4″ Plastic Plants Nursery Potfrom Amazon
• Split your overgrown plants and sell them. These same posts will also work well for that.100 Pcs 4″ Plastic Plants Nursery Potfrom Amazon
• Heirloom seeds at the end of the season.
• Sell your own dried herb blends, tea/tincture blends, dip mixes, teas or salves. –Food Dehydrator Machine– This one has temperature control and a timer.
• Medicinal herbs and herbal remedies. (Always share a disclaimer that you are not a vet or a doctor. If you share from your own personal experience than you are fine.)
• Sell fresh herbs.
• Fresh bread
• Fresh Flowers
• Dried Flowers
• Start A Pumpkin Patch and have the pumpkins ready to go right at the fall season.
• Vegetable Crops.
• Plant fruit trees and sell the fruit.
• Maple trees.
• Christmas tree lots.
• Have a berry patch.
• Have apple orchards

Income Ideas For Raising Poultry

If you want to raise chickens, turkeys, or any other kind of poultry this will get you started. Remember like any smart business person you need to get as many income streams for one type of animal species. Go deep before you go wide.

• Raise backyard chickens and sell the eggs
• Organic eggs – If you raise your birds in a run and get the occasional free roam time. Then they would also count as “cage-free” Enabling you to sell eggs for at least $4-6 a dozen. IF you are in the right area. Remember what I said about people WANTING what you have to sell? If you live where everyone and their brother has chickens you are going to have a hard time selling farm fresh eggs for that much.
• Raise Meat Chickens(broilers) for yourself and others.
• Sell the old chickens as stewing hens.
• If you have a rooster, fertilized eggs for hatching. (You will get more money if you are able to have pure-breed chickens) People don’t buy eggs from two different breeds to hatch out. It’s often because buying a chick of one particular breed or type of poultry costs a lot more and hatching eggs out is a more budget-friendly option.
• Raise chickens to laying age and sell them as layers. (Personally, I would start selling them at 6-12 weeks old. If you hold on to them any longer than that you will start eating into your profit very quickly).
• Sell Day Old Chicks – You will get more if you keep one breed so they are purebred.
• Raise Guinea Fowl
• Chicken manure.

Income Ideas Raising Animals

• Raise rabbits and sell the rabbit poop.
• Compost worms.
• Raise Dairy animals for other people to buy their livestock from you.
• Raise chickens for meat that could be dual purpose.

Places To Sell Your Own Products

It can be overwhelming to figure out how to sell your products.

I don’t want to overwhelm you so here are a few places to get your creative juices flowing. I have put them in order of least amount of effort as far as ease of listing and lack of spam.

• Etsy (.20 per listing for 4 months)
• Mercari
• Facebook market place
• Craigslist – Easy to list but depending on what you list. Spam bots are pretty rampant on CL
• Your own site

Affiliate Income For Your Hobby Farm

So you may not have any idea what being an “affiliate” is. So let me tell ya.

Being a part of an affiliate program means that IF someone buys something through a link giving especially to you so the seller knows where that buyer came from. You will get a percentage of that sale.

You can share the products you love with your followers, readers, or repeat buyers and make an income.

That is one of the easiest ways to “sell” something and make a little extra cash.

While it may not be as much as if you would have sold a product of your own, selling someone else’s product is far less stressful and easier to do early on while your audience is small.

There are many different programs out there. Rather than signing up for 30 different programs before you even get started, think about the top 5 things you will use all the time. Just type in google, the affiliate program for x to see if there is one.

Here is a post to help you learn more about affiliate income.

Teach Others How To Do What You’re Good At

Don’t be so quick to dismiss the online world because you make products or you live in the country and want to teach about the animals you raise or the skills you have.

There is so much you can do to make money from home. You just have to get creative with it.

Don’t be afraid to try things out and give them time to work. Start a blog and make money selling online. Start an email list and create a relationship with those people who will eventually buy your products.

Set up a class that people will pay for through PayHip ( personally use them and love it because you can use them without paying a monthly fee. They do take 5% of whatever you sell the product for so make sure to calculate that into your price.)

Just like you would teach someone how to do something you start at the very beginning and move forward.

• Teach people how to care for the animal you own. Even if you have 1 horse you can teach people how to ride.
• Have a dog you have trained? Teach people how to train their dogs.
• Teach them how to make bread, can food, or garden. There are so many skills that people just don’t know how to do.

What Makes You Different?

This is something I tell my students often. You have to find a way to be different if you want to raise something that there is already a lot of. You have to stand out in a saturated market.

Build a community around what you do.

The good thing is that homesteaders, farmers, hobbyists, and livestock raisers are pretty far behind the online business world.

Simple things like setting up a Facebook page or having an up-to-date website will help you stand out lightyears above the rest. Be quick to respond to messages. Have your line-in-the-sand points of view and share them often.

Find ways to do things differently and better than others do it. Even if it might seem weird to them at first. Things like automating how they can get in touch with you and get answers to their questions quickly will make you seem better than the next person.

Research Your Area

Whether you are just starting out or are considering adding a new species of livestock to your urban farm or homestead. Take the time to research what is common in your area.

• Look through breed lists and find three to five different breeds that interest you. Also, list the ways that the animal can be useful (jobs it could do or something it could produce) and this will help you come up with different income ideas.

For example. The angora rabbit could be for show, pet, wool, or meat. Yes, even meat. But you get the idea lots of income streams for one animal.

• Research your local area. Go to Craig’s list or Facebook marketplace and pick 2 cities close to you and type in the product or species of animal you are wanting to get into THEN do it AGAIN for the breeds you are thinking about in a completely new search. Note how much they are selling for and the quality of the animal that animal.

Do this again but on google. The only difference is, to check to make sure the website is up to date. Some breeders will have sold out but rarely close down their websites if they are made on a free platform.

If you want to raise a certain species of livestock, consider finding a breed that is a little harder to find but also something that a lot of people would want. You can use tools like Keywords Everywhere chrome extension or Ubersuggess to tell you how many times a month that keyword is searched.

Research Possible Income Streams For ONE Skill Or Speaces

Let’s use the example of starting to breed German shepherds.

There are many options for “marketing” this breed. They are great for home protection and also make great family dogs (if trained right). German shepherds are also herding dogs, you would be able to appeal to the herdsman in your area if you have them.

Side income options are things like getting the best quality you can afford so you could appeal to the show circuit. Or you could have the option of starting the basic training for the puppies bought from you for an extra fee.

The idea is to go deep with what you have and don’t stretch yourself so thin doing too much. I see this ALL THE TIME and the people who try to do too much don’t last more than a few years because they just get tired. And that is completely understandable.

It is going to take time to get the income coming in. You have to be patient and persistent. But it will come.