Making money while farming can have its own challenges, for example imagine if you are a cabbage farmer and a hail storm destroys your crops a month before harvest! How will you pay the bills? And so if you look at successful farmers you will find that they diversify in other words they don't put all their eggs in one basket. So as a farmer you must ask yourself, if my main crop fails will I still be able to pull through. Will I be able to pay the bills?
How to Diversify?
Well lets say you are Cabbage farmer, every month you plant out 2000 cabbages, this is your main source of income, in addition you decide to plant 5000 heads of Garlic, since garlic will take around 90 days or more to harvest and in Botswana you will only be able to get one set in, in a year. Hence your 5000 garlic is just a low maintenance back up. Of course you will still want to diversify even more. Can you get a few Pigs? or maybe some Chickens? At the same time you need to remember that as a farmer you only have so much time and most of your time will be spent on farming your cabbages, so look for things that your farm can do or produce that's not time consuming that will supplement the farm income.
One way many farmers in South Africa do this is by setting up guest accommodations on their farms, I highly recommend that every farmer attempts to do this, it does not have to be fancy accommodation It just has to be clean. Even if you built a traditional mud hut put a nice clean bed in it and built a simple outdoor shower and toilet you can earn an additional income. You may wonder how to market such an investment, well you have to use technology. One of the most common ways of marketing a small guest room or campsite these days is to use an online App called Airbnb you can signup for it here for free: Sign up here, to host your guest room or campsite on Airbnb many people use this app when traveling these days because its affordable and there are many benefit's and perks that come with using it. Of course if you just want to use the Airbnb app For traveling You Can sign up here, if you do use my link you will get almost five hundred pula travel credit on your new account, that you can use when you book your next trip. I personally use this app and I absolutely love it.
In todays world as farmers we must diversify in order to be successful farmers, remember you not just a farmer! you are also a business man/woman.
Here are some other ideas.
Farm Watermelons
Farm Sheep
Make money online in Botswana
Grow Carrots
Grow Cabbages
Grow Green Peppers
Grow Swiss Chard
Farm Garlic
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