Forget the well-paid 8-to-5 job, two bedroom house and the other trappings of material wealth. Sure, it’s nice to have them, but we farmers know that real wealth is clean air, clear water and healthy nutritious food, not piling up stuff and then dying with it.

We want to spend our days outside, tending our gardens and food forests, spending more time with our families. We want the freedom and security of a farm and take care of our needs, bring abundant vitality back to the landscape, and earn a living wage from our efforts to “make the Earth great again”.

It’s a modest dream, isn’t it? In a world of greedy banking elites, deceitful and self-serving politicians and daily environmental destruction, it’s a simple ideal that deserves to come true, and yet you can’t help but wonde..Can this dream come true for you?

Do you really have what it takes to be a farmer, or that’s just an escapist fantasy? Is it realistic to expect that you can make a living wage from your farm and quit your job, or is it just the pipe dream that everyone ‘normal’, including your spouse, thinks it is?

Well, we are here to tell you that it doesn’t have to be just a dream. Actually, in contrast to what you might have been told, it’s quite a reasonable expectation.

There is a way to turn your dream into a productive reality, but the truth is you’ll have to be strategic about it and learn a little bit about business and entrepreneurship.

Having a hobby vs. running a business

The moment you decide to use your land to generate some income for you, you’re no longer just a hobby farmer playing. At that moment, you also become an entrepreneur, and your farm becomes a small business. Farming today is essentially entrepreneurship and this means that you’ll be putting extra hours to make this work. I’ve never seen anyone starting a sustainable and profitable farm business without the time investment. Also, there’s the chance of failure, almost at every step of the way. You can invest all that time and money, try and fail miserably because you made a fatal mistake.

In other words, it’s exactly like starting a business. Exactly. Can you succeed as a farmer entrepreneur? Sure, there are many people doing it, some of them crushing it and that’s why many people are attracted to making a living from the farm, because it can be done. But you can also waste all that time for nothing and lose everything you invested in.

Process for Starting A Successful Farm Business

 Know Yourself and Identify Your Strengths, Passions And Interests

Most people are not evenly gifted, even as farmers within producing plants or animals, that’s why you tend to see farms that gravitate towards plants and farms that gravitate towards animals. And that’s why generally you don’t see expertness on both of those things even among the farmers.

Think about this for a second, what kind of person are you; are you an animal, plant, technical or people person? Not everything will come naturally to you, and not all elements of permaculture will interest you to the same extent, nor will you have the same levels of skills and strengths in all areas of your new professional life.

You might be a people person, with teaching and education as your thing, or you might be a technical person who just loves earthworks and can’t stop talking about machinery – you get the picture, right? Whatever it’s, discover your natural inclinations and your unique skill-set.

Select Your “Industry” Based on Your Strengths And Passions

Now, based on your initial assessment, decide what would be the best path for you. Not everything in farming has the same appeal to everyone, and not everything comes down to being simply a farmer, you have many options from which to choose.

To sum up, in essence you can choose to be a farmer (the most obvious option), a secondary producer of value-added products , do marketing and distribution (basically selling the fresh produce or value added products), provide services related to your farm or farming (ecotourism, basic healthcare…), develop a nursery, i.e. plant propagation and animal breeding (everyone needs plants), teaching and education on the site (and online as well), or consulting – designing and implementing designs.

As this suggests, there are many ways to win at this permaculture game and, once you now know what interests you, comes naturally to you, and what your strengths are, you’ve definitely minimized the chances of doing something that, ultimately, won’t work out for you.

Research Your Local Market and Identify What People Want

When you’re starting a farm business, ideally you want to find something that is at the intersection of your passion/strengths and what people want to buy. Once you’ve determined the first part of that equation, your next step should be to research your local market to learn more about your potential customers and their needs/desires.

I’m going to simplify the process here and say that the market research in this stage boils down to analyzing what type of people live in your local area (demographics – young students, retirees, or…), what the culture of the area is like (what do people value – local artisan products, nutritious food or perhaps they couldn’t care less), what is their purchasing power (is the local economy booming and people have the extra income to spend on quality produce, products and services?) and their purchasing habits.

This research doesn’t have to be complex or extensive, in the beginning just develop the habit of putting your market research hat on when you visit different places (especially your competitors) and looking at who are the customers, what’s the demand like for certain products, what sells well and why, how are they marketing and selling their produce/product/service.

For example, if you want to start a nursery, make sure you visit one and see what people are buying. If a certain type of tree is selling like crazy, then this is a good indicator that there is a demand for more than what’s being produced. You could be potentially filling that hole, (see what I did there?), so dig deeper.

Read: I Have Been a Good Farmer Why Aren’t I Successful Yet?

Produce A Minimum Viable Product and Learn About Business

Once your research has shown that there is a need for a certain produce, product or service, it’s now time to test the waters and produce something of your own.

At this stage, I suggest you hang on to your old job and start something small on the side. I really don’t recommend simply handing in your notice and figuring it out later; you wouldn’t want to jump off a cliff without a parachute and then try to figure out how to make one on the way down. Instead, use your secure job and security to learn new skills and start to develop something on the side.

You don’t have to worry about all the details of running a successful business just yet, diving in too deep when starting out can result in analysis paralysis and, as a budding entrepreneur, momentum is important. So, start small and as a sideline – this can be one nursery bed, one garden bed, one room to rent, one value-added product…

The point is that all these small activities will require some prior learning and, most importantly, are scaleable, think about them as small modules or small business units.

Read: I don’t have capital to start my agribusiness venture how do I start from scratch?

Develop Deep Domain Expertise and Scale Up

Okay, so let’s recap what you’ve done thus far: you’ve found your permaculture career path based on your passions, interests and strengths, you’ve done the market research that’s helped you pinpoint exactly what people want and like to buy (a produce, product or a service) and you’ve successfully created your first MVP, which proved that people will want to buy from you.

You haven’t invested that much time and/or money, yet in the process you’ve learned about business and what it means to be entrepreneurial.

As you can see, you don’t have to wait for that perfect, day when you’ll suddenly have more space, land and time to start that big business that will replace your day job and you’ll live happily ever after. You want to test the waters first and take a few calculated risks. Being risk-averse is a good thing, especially if you’re the breadwinner in your family.

Now you can start to take that one small test module that has produced your MVP and scale it up. For our nursery example, this could be to two, four, six or eight buckets, a further nursery bed, or to a more professional setup. You’re not attempting anything new, rather you’re simply doing more of the same, just on a bigger scale.

As you scale up and produce more products or provide more services they become better with every new iteration as you start to learn more about the entire business cycle.

Because you now know that you’re onto something, you have extra confidence to put in the time and effort to develop the necessary expertise in your domain.

Stack Other Enterprises and Develop Multiple Income Streams

Once you’ve mastered that first initial business unit or enterprise and it generates some continuous profit, you can start thinking about all the other business opportunities on your farm. First, you need to focus on just that one aspect and getting it off the ground, but once you have it running efficiently, you can use the profits to expand your field of operations and stack other enterprises.

If you’ve have had a close look at the sources of incomes of successful permaculture farms, you can clearly see that every single one of them has multiple income streams. That’s because it’s hard to make a living by doing one thing; the reality is that in today’s world no one venture alone can keep the farm afloat.

You should always ensure multiple income streams. In this way you become more resilient and, if one falls apart, each business unit will prop up the others (some years one unit will carry the others, while at other times, other units will be successful). Eventually, all of these will help keep you securely anchored to the land, close to your family and the abundance you’ve created.

Look for other business opportunities on your farm and use existing profits to start developing and stacking other enterprises.

Whatever Your Dream Is, Get Started Now

Starting a successful permaculture farm business is not easy, and realistically there is a high chance you’ll fail, but here’s the deal… If you really want to come closer to living off the land, you must be willing to actively get yourself in the game, making mistakes, learning from them and then moving on, wiser and stronger.

Whatever your dream is – get started now. Don’t wait for that perfect, never to be seen, moment when you’ll have more land, the optimal financial situation, more experience. As we’ve learned, you can start small, on the side, with just one small module and, if it works, then scale up. You can start your journey as a hobby, but to be able to make a living from something, it has to be more than just that. You can start out that way, but ultimately you’ve got to turn it into something more.

Read: How youth you can succeed in farming

As with everything you try for the first time, at first it’s going to be a bad version of what you want to be. Accept this, because, in the beginning, the right mentality and momentum are more important than perfection. That imperfect and modest version of what you is still better than where you’re currently at if your life feels drab, soulless and unfulfilling.