Farming on a Shoestring

“Farming on a Shoestring”
“Living on a Shoestring”
“Flying on a Shoestring”
“Gardening on a Shoestring”
Google any of these and you will likely see hundreds of hits.

Now, google some of these...
“Motorcycling on a Shoestring”
“Milking Cows on a Shoestring”
“Worm Farming on a Shoestring”
“Wine Making on a Shoestring”

Don't find many, do you? So, does that mean you can't make wine on a shoestring? You can't motorcycle on a shoestring? You can't do worm farming on a shoestring?

Ah, this is all just for fun!

Seriously, though, isn't this what being successful at farming is all about? Living on shoestrings?

I have been thinking about just how one can successfully start a farming venture on a shoestring. This morning I was tying my shoestrings and I had an idea. Starting anything with a single shoestring means that if that string breaks, you are basically screwed. Taking a page from some things I have read about investing, I though, 'I must diversify'.

Diversify on a shoestring? Absolutely. How? Shred that shoestring! Take it apart, one thread at a time. You will end up with twenty or thirty little strings. NOW, if one or two or ten of these break, the others will still likely hold.

A small farmer needs to do something similar. Farming is that one big shoestring. Small faming ventures that rely on one source of income are just asking for trouble. Relying on a single crop (in accounting terms this is called a profit center) gives any venture a huge exposure to failure.

What to do? Split that shoestring into as many threads as you can handle. Diversify the farm. Do a little of this and a little of that. Intertwine them together, not so that if one fails the others will, but rather so they will co-exist, regardless of success or failure. Like raising organic chickens, free range eggs and a nice patch of garden. There. You have three threads, or separate profit centers that inter-mesh. If one fails, you have two other.

That is a simplistic example, but one that works. Some small and new farmers may wish to grow corn or beans or wheat or raise cattle or hogs, and that is fine. Those farmers may succeed, but it is the farmer who diversifies their venture who will likely be more profitable and less prone to failure.