Diversifying the farm income, Farming Botswana.

Diversifying the farm income

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

as always thanks for reading please follow share with your friends or leave a comment, or question.

Why grow Swiss Chard or Spinach in Botswana

Why grow Swiss Chard or Spinach in Botswana?

We often call it Spinach however the correct name is Swiss Chard this vegetable is a really great addition to any small farm and there are three good reasons 

1. Swiss Chard is very uncomplicated to grow and really does not need much attention, if you plant and water it, it will grow.

2. It is profitable, and the reason for this is not that the profit margin is high but rather that you can sell it every week, the market hardly gets flooded as Swiss Chard has a very short shelf life. this means that if you are supplying street vendors or even large main stream shops  they will need fresh produce every week.

3.Farm space. Unlike Tomato's or Cabbages, Swiss Chard does not need a lot of space. If you plant 10 sq. meters of Swiss Chard you will find your self harvesting without much problem 30 plus bundles of Swiss Chard per week.

So to sum it up basically, Swiss Chard is what helps you as the farmer pay the day to day bills while you wait for your main crops to mature eg. Cabbages or Green Peppers. Also any extra old stock could be fed to your pigs or Sheep!

So how do you grow Swiss Chard? Well I wrote about that in 2016 so here is a link to that: How to Grow Swiss Chard?

Sheep Farming Botswana, Part One

Sheep farming Botswana, Part one

It was my brother, who the other day started talking about farming sheep, and it got me thinking....would it be worth it or viable to farm sheep in Botswana and what would be involved? When it comes to starting any enterprise the first thing that one needs to do is research. Research allows you to count the cost of an enterprise before you spend anything at all, it is of little use to start a an enterprise before counting the cost!

Counting the cost

1. Find out your Max Gross income. What does this mean? Basically you want to know how much is the max income your sheep will bring in, in one year or season before expenses. To find this answer I had to do some research, first I wanted to know how much could be got for one sheep, for this I went to Facebook and searched all the adverts of people buying and selling sheep in Ngamiland. I soon discovered that a common figure for a sheep was Bwp 1000.00 which was much higher then I imaged. The next bit of research that I did was to find out, how many lambs could a farmer expect to get from ten ewes in one year? Again I went for the max figure, that is saying that each ewe gives birth to twins and that there are no losses. This then leads us to conclude that ten ewes would give us 20 lambs that in 6 too 8 months would be sold for Bwp 1000.00 each, giving us the grand total of Bwp 20000.00.

Now this is a seriously inaccurate figure for the simple reason that its not realistic, lambs will die, you wont always get Bwp 1000.00 per sheep, not every ewe will have twins. However this is our  EMGI (Estimated Max Gross Income) this figure is important because now we know that, if we want too farm ten sheep and max 20 lambs, the seasons expenses  have to be way less then Bwp 20000.00 to make it profitable 

So how much does it cost to keep ten sheep and at max 20 lambs for one season? we will look into that in our next post, so please subscribe and if you have any thoughts or feelings drop us a comment!