Small Scale Farming on the Cheap - What's the least you could spend to start a farm? - Part 1 - The Base Principles - The Urban Farmer - S2W22 (FSFS61)

Farming... is it expensive to start, or not? A lot of people want to get into farming, but they stall out when it comes to the money side of things. The common cause of that stall out is land. Land is expensive to purchase. So most people immediately dismiss the idea of farming because they can't afford land. But people like Greg Judy, Joel Salatin, and us on this show, have shown that you don't need to own land to farm. There's a lot of land available to farm. Land you don't need to own, and land that you can gain access to through options like leasing.. If you can lease land either for free or inexpensively and if you are in a market where you can move product, then the potential upside to small scale farming is pretty attractive given the low start up costs and low infrastructure requirements? How low? Very low compared to other businesses. In his book Curtis gives an initial start-up estimate for a 1/4 acre farm at $7k to $17k. Curtis started his farm with just $7k. That's $7k that buys equipment and infrastructure which is portable and resellable. In good markets, the risk reward of small scale farming is usually favorable because small scale market farming startup costs are very low compared to many business out there. Yet, despite the minimal start up costs, the costs are still prohibitive, or at least perceived to be prohibitive by some people. Given that we'll dig into the farm start up numbers and see where costs can be cut and what costs are just unavoidable. And we'll also bring in some rationale to these numbers discussing why certain items are worth the cost, and why others aren't. Today we'll begin a multi-part series discussing the minimum that you could spend to start a farm, and we will begin with the base principles, what are the things that you need to think about before you spend any money, that's coming up on Season Two Episode 22 of The Urban Farmer.

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