$$ per acre

C Kain

Member
Farmers; Any advice on the best use of 10 to 15 acres, in 'for profit' adventure ? Such as hay, corn, vegetables, animals ? Thank you.
 
Really there is no 'magic money making crop'. Buy the time you buy equipment or pay custom fees;pay seed,fert......;'endure' a learning curve, and any other curveball that will get thrown at you.....;You will probably loose your butt.But to have some fun/"adventure",go for it,any thing that suits your fancy. Good luck!
 
Put up a 10 stall horse barn, fence it all in. Boarding for a month around here is usually $350-450 per horse. Get 10 boarders, and you can make a few bucks.
 
Yep, got me thinking about those who are claiming that the marijuana industry will be big for years and years. I think they should study up on mass produced crops to see that as JD Seller likes to say "can be produced to the point of being worthless" as it has happened with corn and other commodities in the not too far past and most likely near future. The retail end will be dominated by a WalMart-type seller that will put a squeeze on what wholesalers can charge plus squeeze employees for hours plus salary. Utopia? Not!
 
I should have mentioned; it is in Mi, west of Allegan, sandy soil. I thought Christmas trees !

I Thank you for the replys.
 
Do you have time to keep the ground mowed around the Christmas trees? Will someones dam goats get into your field and destroy them? They love to eat Christmas trees. How thick are the deer in Your area? Just making some suggestions.
 
All depends on what you want to invest in buildings, equipment and time. If you like feeding animals there is good money in feeding baby calves to a couple hundred pounds about six weeks. There is a few around here that will put calves in and pay you to feed them. My grandson has two farms that he is putting 260 each every six months. He and my Son in law missed Thanksgiving meal to unload and deliver 600 baby calves yesterday to several farmers that are set up to feed milk in bottles.

PicturesfromOct17download035-vi.jpg
 
We had a lot of little guys get into alpacas 10-12 years ago. I sold some hay to a couple. It's big in Europe but never really caught on here. The way I saw it: You don't eat 'em or ride 'em so there's no end market. Now they're left with some very expensive pets.
 
It's like the emu craze about 20 yrs ago. People selling breeding stock on the front end made money selling the "next big thing". The rest went down the toilet after 2 or 3 years.
 
Mike,you CAN eat alpaca!We have several times.A friend raises em.Shears the wool,butchers some others. Most went to a Peruvian restraunt.Some went for 'private' use. Alpaca burgers ans steaks,YUM!
 
(quoted from post at 17:07:18 11/28/14) We had a lot of little guys get into alpacas 10-12 years ago. I sold some hay to a couple. It's big in Europe but never really caught on here. The way I saw it: You don't eat 'em or ride 'em so there's no end market. Now they're left with some very expensive pets.

I bought some used equipment from a local alpaca rancher last spring. He sold out a few years back...at the right time. He had wanted to hit a million in sales per year, but the closest he got was $991,000....still not bad LOL! He said the money was in breeding fees and shows. They had their own lab in a barn.
He was in his mid 50's and retiring, had the ranch for sale for around $800,000...and was practically giving away his equipment!
 
As with tobacco, Alcohol and gasoline various branches of government will make the most profit off of marijuana, I read the taxes are already 25% of the price in Colorado.
 
(quoted from post at 13:56:36 11/28/14) Farmers; Any advice on the best use of 10 to 15 acres, in 'for profit' adventure ? Such as hay, corn, vegetables, animals ? Thank you.

Actually with the new immigration policy you might want to go with veggies...$10,000 per acre possible if you have a market, should be plenty of cheap labor available now!
 
I'm sorry but that looks about like the least enjoyable ag enterprise I've ever seen. How many dead calves do you drag out of a setup like that on a monthly basis? Seems to me like disease would run through a setup like that like wildfire.
 
I never said [b:8dc80fa738][i:8dc80fa738][u:8dc80fa738]I[/u:8dc80fa738][/i:8dc80fa738][/b:8dc80fa738] was going to board horses! Although, I do know some big boarding operations around here. The best one I know of has some great practices to keep the bad ones out.

1. overpriced -keeps the cheapskates away.

2. highly involved with a law firm, and each boarder must sign contracts that are notarized with plenty of legal recourse for failure to pay.

3. They use sugarcreek as a weapon, and every boarder is well aware that failure to pay results in their beloved pet going to a horse butcher auction.

4. every boarder is contractually obligated to work, or pay for contracted workers to do their minimum work hours. That way, if they don't comply, they have the option of paying more... and of course, failure to pay, reverts back to #3. Ever see a bunch of crazy horse ladies crying? Load up a horse going to the butcher auction in front of them! [/u][/i]
 
Not very many. All are tested before loading and rejected if not healthy and free of the scours bug. They are retested in the pens and kept separated.

What did you think happened to all those baby calves that came from the cows that supply the milk sold in the milk jugs you buy? Maybe the question should be how would you suggest the thousands of baby calves be cared for to keep them more healthy? If you just put the calves together in a larger area how would you spot a calf that needed extra attention to keep them from infecting the rest? You know every milk cow has a baby calf every year or they will not produce milk?
Honestly, I didn't think people on this site would be unaware of how the largest amount of baby dairy calves were cared for.
 
Thanks Dick, but I fully understand how the dairy business works. I've started hundreds of calves in group pens using large self feeders and never had trouble spotting a calf having troubles, so you can ease up on the condescending tone. The self feeders make the calf work for the feed more and the increased sucking action stimulates the bacteria in their gut, decreasing the amount of scours I saw.
Sick calves and poor doers are separated out and treated accordingly.
I made a snap comment to your pic, perhaps I should have kept my thoughts to myself, but if I ever went back to starting calves, I would never have calves in individual pens with individual buckets that need filled twice a day.
 
Smaller starting calf operations around here have the individual pen doghouses rowed up outside. Weather some times have the whole operation mud and wet. This is a 400 calf barn with controlled air flow. Feeding done with a hose from a mixing tank. Feeding does not take as long as a person would think for two to four people each with a hose to walk down an isle. I should say it was a 400 calf starting barn. It has been converted to a 200 to 300 second stage feeding barn without pens. Second stage is done with bulk feeders. That would be another good operation to get into as it pays about the same per head. You just cant hold as many head in the same space. About 50 dollars a head for six weeks of feeding either way without buying the now very high priced calves.
 

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