3 Mistakes That Will Kill Your Farming Business Before It Grows

3 Mistakes That Will Kill Your Farming Business Before It Grows Starting your own farm is a big decision and there are a lot of challenges to face along the way, but there is also a lot of government assistance available to help you get it started. It’s also a very good industry to get into if you’re fed up with the business world. If you can build a sustainable farm, you can make a decent living from it fairly easily. Everybody needs to eat after all. However, farming is a skill that you have to learn and there are a lot of things that you can get wrong in those first few months and years. If you’re considering starting your own farm, make sure that you avoid these basic mistakes. Buying The Wrong Farm Choosing a farm to buy is the first step and if you get it wrong, you’re never going to get anywhere. Finding somewhere that has a good amount of land and a decent property (if you plan to live there) is the bare minimum. What a lot of people don’t realize is that they need to find out what they’re actually going to be able to grow there. You can’t assume that every farm is fertile because it might not be. Before you agree to anything, you need to have soil testing carried out on the farm. That will tell you which crops are going to thrive on your farm, if any. Then you need to look at the markets for those crops and make sure that you can actually build a business on them. If you just blindly buy a farm without checking the soil, you might end up with a very expensive plot of land that you can’t do anything with. Location is important too because you need to think about how you’re going to distribute your product once you’ve grown it. It’s always a good idea to find a farm that has a town or city fairly close so you’ve got a local market for your produce. Disease Prevention If you’re farming livestock, you need to be aware that they’re prone to disease. Outbreaks of disease are one of the biggest causes of financial disaster in the farming industry so you need to know how to prevent it. Usually, it comes down to how you manage your livestock; keeping them indoors is a more cost effective way of farming but it does increase the chances of disease outbreaks. Spreading Yourself Too Thin You might think that it’s a good idea to start planting 3 different crops and farming cows at the same time. For an experienced farmer, that’s manageable, but for a beginner it’s going to be tough. In most cases, if you spread yourself too thin like that, you’re not going to end up with a good end product. Start slowly with one simple crop for the first season or two and then gradually build it up as you become more confident. Any one of these mistakes could kill your farming business before you even get it off the ground so make sure that you avoid them.