Yes, you can make a profit from small farm

Is it possible to make profit from a small farm? A farmer asked this question during one of our farmers’ field school training.

My response is ‘yes’ but... To achieve that goal, there are many things you must consider. The advantage of operating a smaller farm is you are able to use equipment that requires minimal capital outlay and low maintenance costs. Also, overhead is less and easily controlled.

The key success factors to profitable farming on a small farm, include low-cost startup, good business management, soil improvement, good but simple record keeping and paying attention to market.

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A profitable farm is one able to pay all the bills, maintain what you have and invest back into the farm.

To achieve this, good business management is key. Treat your farm as a business by knowing when to spend money and not when not to.

Good records will help in justifying expenses for improvements on equipment or buying equipment to make labour more efficient and crops more profitable.

Your farm business management techniques should also involve a lot of attention to detail.

Know what crops are worth spending time on. To maintain a profitable farm year in year out, stability of income is important and it can be achieved through crop diversification. In any given year, there are always a few crops that do not do well, while others do better. Diversification will ensure that you always have a crop to fall back to in cases where some crops fails.

Soil management

Soil management is a key factor on any farm. A thriving farm business depends on good crops, and healthy crops can only be derived from fertile soil. Annual soil tests and adding organic nutrients that are deficient is vital.

Mulching will increase the soil tilth and help release the nutrients which are locked up for production of high quality, high value crops such as tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, squash, parsley, and strawberries. Reliable water will be important for consistent farming. If you do not have access to water, crop production may be hampered during the dry periods. Irrigation will be essential to minimise losses due to inconsistent growing and low yields.

 Good weed control 

Good weed control also increases harvest efficiency and yields. It is enjoyable to work on a farm that everyone can be proud of in terms of organisation and visual appearance.

After harvesting a crop and before turning it under, walk up and down the rows with a bucket, looking for and removing anything that has a seed head, and then turn the crop under.

Record keeping

That’s how you get ahead of the weeds. When weeds do get ahead of you, they have chances of sprouting once the conditions become conducive.

Record keeping is valuable for running a farm business. Maintaining simple records works well in our farming system and it requires minimal time outlay.

Keep field planting records in a notebook, clearly indicating date of seeding, the field, variety, row footage and spacing. From these few numbers, the square footage of each crop grown can be calculated.

If a particular crop is not making profit, make a management decision on that crop to raise its value. Some of the decisions would include: improving your production and harvesting techniques; changing the variety; packaging or displaying it differently; increasing the price; or extending its growing season or discontinue growing the crop.

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