There's gold in them thar hills!

Well, that's what my ex-wife jokingly said about an outting her and some friends are attending. They will be driving off to the Arizona desert to search for gold. Don't laugh too loudly there. A member of the local prospecting club has been able to find more than five pounds of gold in the last four years.

So I started thinking of finding green gold. The little nuggets on the farm or out in the country that really pay off. Maybe, just maybe, that is one of many keys to a small farm's financial sustainability.

Those little green gold nuggets. Those ideas that are like gold. Sure, individually they may be cute and somewhat profitable. Put them together in a bucket and you have a nice little unique pile of money making green gold.

I read of a woman who years ago bought goats to sell the milk. She didn't research enough and discovered selling her goat's milk simply couldn't happen, given the local laws. What did she do? She learned how to make soap and created her own line of natural goat's milk soap.

One year on the the farm as a teenager, my dad was short on cash. He found a person who bought scrap iron. We spent a month stripping apart old, irreparable farm equipment scattered here and there. My dad made a little cash that way, but he happened onto an idea. He started offering a service to haul away old inoperable farm implements. We would strip and sell the metal as scrap and use the things we could.

It wasn't gold mine, but a nice little nugget. I only wish we had a cutting torch then. Busting apart an old corn picker with wrenches, hammers and cold chisels can be a rather physical activity!