Off-Farm Income

Tomorrow we are featuring a farm couple who has started a fun and successful brewery in Eastern Colorado.  I thought a look back and the opportunities surrounding hop farming would fit right in.

Below are the original show notes:

SHOW NOTES

KEY IDEAS: 

I have three themes that I want to cover this week.  All of them have to do with entrepreneurship:

Hop Farming Business Opportunities

Currently we are planting record acreage of hops in the United States and there is still a shortage for craft beer brewers.  People are planting hops in small areas all around the United States to support their craft brewing hobbies or businesses.  In order to use and grow the hops certain things need to be done.  This creates an opportunity to serve these farmers.  This is very similar to the journey that Jonathan Demcak described in episode #12.  Here are some of the things they need:

Vertical Farming

I read about vertical farming a couple of weeks ago and had to share this with you.  People are using hydroponics to turn spare bedrooms and garages into farms!  They are suppling restaurants with fresh greens and making money.  The article I am linked to here profiles a gentleman named Dan Albert from Seattle, Washington who left his day job just to run his vertical farming business.

This proves that anyone can farm.  Even if you live in an apartment in the middle of a big city!

Loneliness

This is a bigger problem than you would think in entrepreneurship.  Once you go to work for yourself a sense of isolation can creep in pretty easily.  In agriculture many of the tips and tricks to combat this will not work.  However, the effects of this can also be countered by being outside, in the sun, working with animals and receiving intrinsic rewards from your efforts.

But, this is something that I have experienced, just in missing the hustle and bustle of things going on around me.  I have tried to replicate this occasionally by doing some of my computer work at a McDonald's where people are coming and going.

Here is an article that discusses some of "loneliness pitfalls" of being and entrepreneur and how to deal with them.  Remember that we have to take this "non-agricultural" information and convert back to make sense in our world.

Forbes.com

More Places You Can Listen to Off-Farm Income And Matt Brechwald:

 

Direct download: Off_Farm_Income--Episode_1418_Replay_Of_Episode_162-COMM_23_37-031022.mp3
Category:farming -- posted at: 12:30am MDT

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