| Archive for Downsizer For an ethical approach to consumption |
| Penny |
Making money from a smallholdingWell covering the costs, rather than making a living.20 acres mixed pasture and woodland, what if anything could you do to make a bit of money from the land? It would be rented, so nothing permanent could be done |
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| Cho-ku-ri |
A wild flower maze, with picnic spots 
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| Penny |
That would be lovely 
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| hedgewitch |
Could you do something like a wildflower and insect trail for children? I did something like this a long time ago for little children in an arboritum. A sheet of stuff to identify as they go round. Could be good for school children and families... | ||||||
| pricey |
Good Question, have thought about this a lot.
We are not going to try and make money as such, just be able to sustain ourselves, pay the bills. Apart from the B&B as this will be our only income if Rita cannot find work. Sorry don't help much does it 
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| VSS |
How long is a piece of string?
There are so many variables, it is impossible to say without knowing more. But it is perfectly possible with careful thought and planning. Just up our street. have a look at www.viableselfsufficiency.co.uk |
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| Penny |
We just heard of something local-ish to rent on a long lease, but as we don't pay any rent at the moment, if we went somewhere like that, we'd have to make it cover the cost of the rent 
Just made me start musing on the subject really...very unlikely we'd be able to move there, too long a commute for schools 
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| Jamanda |
Bees? | ||||||
| Cho-ku-ri |
The current rent for agricultural land in my area is nil/acre. I know this, as I'm in negotiation with a neighbor for some land. Now the C.A.P. has been reformed farmers now get the payments they received previously, but now don't need to farm the land for food anymore. They are in fact capable of 'renting’ it out for free and claiming the payments legally. Only very big, brave farmers, or 'good lifers' like us can make use of the land without getting any Euro payments. If I were you I wouldn't agree to pay any rent for land nowadays if it is legible for Euro payments. The only drawback for me is the farmer wants a 50week lease per year so that I can't claim full tenancy rights, which is fair enough, but makes me nervous about shelling out for fencing etc. | ||||||
| Penny |
It's not just the land - it's a large house too
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| hedgewitch |
Do afternoon teas and an on-site t-shirt shop from the house?  
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| Cho-ku-ri |
You can't expect a house for free.
Do you get outbulidings? You could do the whole Jimmy's Farm thing? I would keep a few pet animals, but buy local produce to sell. If you go down this route, I have a 'secret' risk free solution. P.M. me and I will tell you my plan. 
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| Cathryn |
Thats interesting - I wish I could persuade the farmers round here to rent out for free. Seriously how? word of mouth? I rent land for a few months most years.
sounds a bit idylic Penny - what about keeping a few pigs? Sell them on here to cover costs? Oh - just an obvious one - rent out a bit to horseowners  Round here it's £6 per horse per week.
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| Rob R |
If I knew, I'd have some money!
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| hardworkinghippy |
I'm saying very little either....
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| Nick |
What money do you want? A little extra, as you already have a job, or will it be your whole income. That'll make a huge difference, for sure.
EDIT: Yeah, yeah. OK, so you answered that in your first sentence. How much are the costs? |
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| Penny |
£1500 a month
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| sean |
B&B? Especially if you got a few nice clean animals and targeted city-dwellers with sprogs for farmhouse mini-breaks. | ||||||
| Nick |
Turn part of it into a car park. 
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| Penny |
*snigger* | ||||||
| Nick |
Actually, that was a joke.
This is not. Is it suitable for car boot sales? You can hold, iirc, 5 per year with no planning permission. People can't get enough of them, round here, and at £5 per boot, and £2 to get in, sell concession spaces for a burger van, or similar, and an acre or three can generate a month's rent in a Sunday morning. |
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| Penny |
Now that is NOT a joke - give that man a carrot ....STEEEEVE.......
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| Nick |
You need to lay out for a couple of toilets, at £17 each per day, a handful of staff (local scout group? Help us carpark, and take 30% of the door take (make it £3, then!))
Got a T-shirt stall there, too. Bet that's 5/12 month's rent paid. |
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| gingerwelly |
my brother sells dried flowers ..... he planted loads of flower seeds 2 yrs ago ... he picks them by hand.... the WI paid him 300.00 last year for flowers for the church , and the local shop sells loads for him ..he makes about £2000 a year ..hes only 14 yrs old , and the land he used was the base from the old cow shed. | ||||||
| Rob R |
 What am I messing about with cattle, sheep & pigs for
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| Nick |
There's no harm in what you're doing. However, I suggest you could keep all your existing animals in about 1/4 of the space. That way, you'd be able to run car boots, wild flower meadows and still churn out meat. This time next year, Rodney.... | ||||||
| sean |
'Cos Nick Howe's too manly to ferry flowers round the country for you? | ||||||
| Nick |
I'd run daffs for Rob, if he asked. Nothing's too girly for me. | ||||||
| jocorless |
We've thought about this long and hard and have a number of ideas based on what we've seen working well on here
1) B& B - this is the obvious one 2) Small scale animal rearing - This would mainly be to supply ourselves and the B&B with our own meat but has the potential to grow if it goes OK 3) Paint balling range - Paint balling is massive around here with only a couple of places doing it - I know it requires a suitably fenced off area and lots of H&S considerations but its a profitable business 4) Hiring out outbuildings to local craftsman - Obviously they would have to have heating,lighting and power so maybe one for an owned smallholding rather than renting 5) Camp site /Camping barn - Alison obviously knows lots more about this than I do but it would be interesting to see what could be done |
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| Nick |
I thought about paint balling, too. I dismissed it because of the ton of strings and issues attached to it. However, subletting a couple of acres of woodland to someone else to do it would be a top idea. | ||||||
| Welsh Girls Allotment |
When we holiday in Burnham we take our daughter to the Animal Farm, she love it so much that we have taken an annual membership, I would love to do something like this, a little bit of everything and paying punters to top up your income, as with any business there are overheads, insurances etc but if you have a limited area for the public you would still be able to have a private few acres for other projects. http://www.animal-farm.co.uk/
You could also have a farm shop where you sell your own produce and locally produced and sourced items craft and edibles - ooh I'm giving away all my plans here
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| AnneandMike |
Find a reasonable house that borders your land that is up for sale. PM me the info. I'll buy it and rent a couple of acres off you at, say £1000 per acre per year. Bingo. | ||||||
| hedgehogpie |
You guys forgot bushcrafting. There is a real need for campsites that don't have flashy facilities, and which could/would allow well controlled campfires & the use of hammocks, bashas or tarps.
The kind of place where as long as there's water available and a tree to sling a hammock from your bushcrafter would be very happy indeed. Likewise, places where they can practise their hobby in peace, doing anything from learning to make debris shelters to foraging are few and far between. You could easily rent out a plain unaltered woodland to a local group and they are very likely to treat the place with a good deal more repect than paintballers. Might not make you rich, but it could be a useful bit of income for the barest minmum of outlay - and as such places as few and far between, you could find yourself being very popular once word gets round. |
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| RichardW |
i would snap your hand off for an offfer like that. Only trouble is there are no house near my land & no way to get PP for a new one.
justme |
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| Cho-ku-ri |
You can buy an acre for £4000.
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| tahir |
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| k9mike |
cho kuri
where's the land ill be there tomorrow crap land this way at to mo is fetching 10k would have thought double that your way point me in the direction ill come buy some |
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| tahir |
I agree with you, and if your requirement is just a couple of acres you can double or trebble that quite easily. |
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| Cho-ku-ri |
http://www.uklanddirectory.org.uk/land-price-boom.htm
This is the price for top quality fen land. I don't understand why a group of likeminded downsizers don't group together and buy a farm. that is by far the cheapest way for anybody to buy land. Hey you would even be entitled to E.U. payments also.
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| alison |
I wouldn't think that is for single acres though. The more you buy the cheaper the price per acre. | ||||||
| Cho-ku-ri |
As I have stated earlier, I have the offer of agricultural land rent free for ten acres. That is the current value up here as long as the farmer still gets the E.U. payments. So Anneandmikes's offer to rent at £1000/acre seems 
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| crofter |
You should haggle for a small payment to keep the land in Good Agricultural & Environmental Condition (GAEC) This is one of the conditions to receive the Single Farm Payment and it can be argued that you are doing the landowner a favour by keeping the land eligible. |
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| Rob R |
It's the same here, though I can't see a chance of haggling payment
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| crofter |
Why not? A farmer will lose money if he has to go to the trouble of keeping a flock of sheep or herd of cows to keep the grass down, it makes sense to pay somebody else a bit less than the likely loss on a livestock enterprise and simply sit back and bank the SFP.
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| Rob R |
It may be for nothing, but there's still competition. | ||||||
| crofter |
True. But in a year or two I won't be surprised to see people offering a grazing "service" to comply with GAEC. |
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| Cho-ku-ri |
In a year or two I'm hoping farmers will be paid a fair price to produce food to feed our non self sufficient population on local food again. | ||||||
| crofter |
British farmers can never compete against south american beef or grain from Kazakstan. Supermarkets will continue to ruthlessly drive down the prices they pay to suppliers. I can only see a future for very large and very small producers, large because they can benefit from economies of scale and small because they can target niche markets. |
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| Nick |
Now? No they can't. With a government that said, you know what, being more reliant on homegrown stuff is more important than cheap food, and we'll tax Latin cattle and US Wheat and New Zealand lamb, they can compete. Do we, the public, want that? It'd mean better security, worse relations with other bits of the world, and much larger food bills. |
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| crofter |
The public wants cheap food. Most people don't even know what they are eating or care where it comes from. Everybody shops in a supermarket, even a lot of downsizers. Government will never tax imports, even if a government was elected which *wanted* to do so, the WTO would consider it illegal. It probably doesn't matter what the public wants, globalisation is more powerful than public opinion. |
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| RichardW |
Er nearly all imports have some sort of duty / tax (ok some are very low) just not on food. You try importing stuff from abroad & wait for the duty / tax bill & its not just VAT. The gove had a huge database of products with diff code for diff rates of duty. Looked at doing some importing a few years back when I owned a PC parts distro & we checked outr all the codes. If we used one code the tax was huge but another code had almost no duty 7 both descriptions fitted fine. Justme |
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| Rob R |
It's attitudes like that which I faced ten years ago going into the industry- it can't be done. Well I stick two fingers up at them, supermarkets, 'commercial' meat buyers & the lot. I've heard lots of ideas from 'experts' that there is one particular way to do things (grain feeding etc.)- there is never only one solution. If we didn't have half the rubbish brought about by improper practises, then 'real' food wouldn't have the added cost that it does. See the Superfarms topic for my thoughts on Mr Hawkins & his ideas. Decent food is what man has always eaten, modern pseudo-food is a tiny blip in human dietary evolution, IMHO. I'm sure it's not a niche, but industry structure is set up to try & make it so. And as long as the average age of producers is pushed up, where will new ideas come from? |
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| crofter |
Last year I imported a container load of plastic pipes. It had to sit in Immingham docks for 24 hours until my VAT payment cleared but there was no other duty to pay. I should perhaps have been more clear and said something like "Government will never impose punitive import taxes on food" |
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| crofter |
I read your superfarms thread, Rob and I agree with what you write. I am not saying "it can't be done" just that global economics will force farming in this country to change, some will adapt quickly enough to survive, others will not. | ||||||
| Rob R |
You said British farmers will never compete... That is a line I have heard a lot. I know the implication was perhaps that 'we will never compete on a price basis as long as the economic & legislative imbalance occurs', but I think it worth adding to that; I don't think that British farmers should be looking to compete at all. There will always be rubbish coming in, but if we chose to compete with such people by producing something even more rubbish, then we deserve to go out of business.
There is also a point to be made that global forces would have encouraged change much earlier, rather than forcing it later on, had the UK industry not been set against it with quotas, subsidies and other barriers to change that have held us back all these years. |
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| tahir |
Back you 100% on this. There's no earthly way we can compete with prairie cattle or other commodity products. We have to accept that and move on. |
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| tahir |
Not sure that it's as small a blip as you'd expect, but yes there are no structures in place to help younger people to enter the industry, most are designed to perpetuate the status quo (or in some extreme cases Phil Collins). We need more younger people coming into the industry but with the ag tie system and the amazing land prices that leisure activities and housing offer it's not exactly an easy market to enter. There's a 117 acre residential farm down the road from me £1.5m with an ag tie, how could you make it work? I think I know, but I couldn't buy it cos of the ag tie..... The ag tie system is complete and total b*ll**ks and needs to be replaced by something that actually encourages new farmers into the industry. |
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| wellington womble |
I think when people say british farmers can't compete, they ought to specify on price Of course that's how most people judge food, but comparing Rob's beef Tesco's is like comparing a ford fiesta to a Ferrari. Totally differnt product - I bet no-one buys both on an interchangable basis.
Agree about the ag tag system, too, andhave found myself in a simililar position. |
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| Nick |
Many people do, actually. You need a Ferrari for going to the golf club, for long trips, for when you want to show off. You need a Fiesta for popping to the shops and parking in town. People buy better food when they want to show off, or have the bank manager round for dinner (Jesus, I've slipped into an episode of George and Mildred...). Tuesday tea time? Instant mince is just the ticket! |
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| tahir |
That's true, a lot of people see organic etc labelling as a status thing | ||||||
| VSS |
Having read the Farmer's Guardian while eating breakfast, i see that David Milliband is saying that reducing farming's environmental footprint is more important than fod security.
While i agree that minimising environmental impact is important, throwing caution to the wind and relying on imports is just crazy. We live on an island. It wouldn't be hard to have our food supply routes disrupted or cut. We just have to abmit that we will get no help from the powers that be. At least we won't starve! www.viableselfsufficiency.co.uk |
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| crofter |
No. What we get is a mountain of paperwork and regulations, over-zealous inspectors and less freedom to farm with each passing year. Government will sacrifice farming to meet environmental targets, (nitrates, livestock methane etc) |
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| Cho-ku-ri |
Agriculture is Britain's last industry to export. Farmers, thanks to the subsidies the French and Germans fought for, are so much more resilient than textile or manufacturing businessmen that have long since relocated. The difference is, if agriculture is relocated abroad, what is to become of our manicured landscape? Are we really all prepared to watch it revert to non-productive scrub? | ||||||
| Rob R |
The difference is though that a Ferrari & a Fiesta have a huge price differential. My beef price is based upon an average retail price. Which makes the point that decent food doesn't need to be expensive, it just often is to make people buy it, for the reasons Nick states. |
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| Rob R |
This is a common misconception that subsidies have helped British farmers. Yes, short term, they improved the viability of some farming enterprises but they, along with the regulations & stipulations that go with them, have held the industry back, resistant to change. Some sectors didn't have the subs,such as pigs & poultry, which meant that to compete with the subsidised sectors they had to go more intensive to be viable. If we hadn't had the subs, I can't see there would have been as much intensive farming as has developed. |
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| Lorrainelovesplants |
ANYWAY To get back to the point of making money from a smallholding... Weve been trying to do the same thing now for over a year. Its been hard, but we do B&B supplemented by plant sales supplemented by part time lecturing. The tourist thing is where the money is. Any animals will just drain money away (even though we love them). Our 'business' allows us to keep the animals, otherwise it wouldnt be cost effective. Ideas for you - country cream teas camping/caravanning making and selling chicken huts/rabbit hutches. secure Boat storage Growing herbs to sell to local restaurants/fruit/veg shops Farm/grow turf for the landscape industry install Fish lakes AND I totally agree that the ag tie system is bo**ocks! Trying to 'farm' one acre has proved a joke. And what agricultural worker could ever afford an ag tie property in Cornwall!! 
Lorraine |