Selling what you grow is both personally rewarding and potentially profitable. There’s high demand for fresh farm goods, value-added products such as soaps and jams, and agritourism (visiting local farms).
Data shows there’s money in making direct sales to consumers—as opposed to relying on wholesale distribution channels. The 2022 Census of Agriculture (released in February 2024) reported that farms sold $17.5 billion in food products through direct marketing channels—a 25% increase since 2017.
If you’re looking for ways to make money from a farm business or even a hobby farm, here are some ideas, with examples from Shopify businesses—a number of whom even earn money from farming after the growing season.
10 ways to make money farming
- Value-added products
- Farmers markets
- Community-supported agriculture
- Farm stays
- Classes and field trips
- Beekeeping
- Flowers
- Curated butcher boxes
- Sheep
- Skin care
Here are 10 ways to make money from farming to inspire your new farm business or help you expand your revenue sources to increase your farm income.
1. Value-added products
Ever visited a farm stand to buy fruit or vegetables and seen freshly baked bread, pickled items, or nut butter for sale? These value-added products are a great idea for any farm already selling goods in the wholesale agriculturemarket, because you act as your own processor and retailer. Value-added products help you increase profitability because they can “bring in a higher consumer price than the raw product alone, which helps farmers and ranchers improve their bottom lines,” according to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, an organization that advocates for small and mid-size farms.
For example, Terre Bleu, an organic lavender farm run by Ian and Isabelle Baird near Milton, Ontario, began selling lavender-infused jams, body butters, and snacks to support the farm during the offseason.
“We can now sell products through the winter,’’ Ian said in a 2019 interview for Shopify’s Founder Stories series. “We even participated in Black Friday last year, and it worked really well for us.”
2. Farmers markets
Instead of selling to wholesalers who then mark up your products for resale, you can keep the markup for yourself by selling at farmers markets. Consumers who shop at farmers markets are typically seeking fresh, locally grown farm-to-table products, so it’s a win-win for both you and your customers.
One way you can set yourself apart at a farmers market is by focusing on specialty crops or niche markets, (think hand-milled oat flour or gluten-free granola), or specific farming methods like grass-fed beef. Mushrooms, which you can cultivate on a small farm, are one possibility, as are edible flowers and microgreens. All can command premium prices, helping you earn enough money to sustain your farm business.
If your farm is near a metropolitan area, you can use your stand to cater to local restaurants and work out co-branding agreements: Your farm might be touted on restaurant menus, while you cite restaurants that use your products in your marketing materials.
3. Community-supported agriculture
Community-supported agriculture (CSA) is like a crowd-sourced business model. It’s a useful way to fund your first market garden (a small, direct-to-consumer farm) if you don’t have enough money to start your own farm. In a CSA model, members sponsor a farm’s costs, usually in the form of a subscription, entitling them to a fraction of the harvest. A CSA box is the share of produce each sponsor receives after the growing season.
You can focus your CSA program on meat, vegetables, fruit, or a mix. Many CSA subscription programs include the option to add on the farm’s value-added products, such as pantry items, processed oils, or dried fruit. For example, Frog Hollow Farm in Brentwood, California, offers a fresh fruits CSA subscription with local pickup or mail order. It also has an online store selling a wide array of value-added products.
4. Farm stays
Farm stays, or making your property a destination for relaxation, entertainment, and/or education, fall under the umbrella category of agritourism. You can rent out cottages or campsites to your farm visitors or run a small bed and breakfast on your property.
If you’re offering other agritourism activities like u-pick (where visitors pick their own produce), events, or retreats, having accommodations increases your income and gives visitors the opportunity to take in daily life at the farm.
Airbnb even has a “farm stay” category filter. According to a 2022 Airbnb report, more than 7,000 farm stays were booked in the US in 2021, a 40% increase from 2019. The typical farm stay host in the US earned $10,300 in 2021, according to the report. There’s real demand for farm stays, and they can be a great way to boost your farm’s income if you have the space and interest in hosting.
5. Classes and field trips
Educational workshops, field trips for local schools, and farm tours are all in-person engagements that fall under agritourism. Alpine Village School & Farms has made education the centerpiece of its farm in Hayden, Idaho, with a nature-based school for kids and a forest-based school for families. It makes additional income by selling organic, pasture-raised eggs (locally only), branded clothing, and holding paid workshops teaching skills like raw dairy processing, candle and soap making, and fermentation.
6. Beekeeping
Cultivating an apiary is a way to get into farming or expand your farm’s capabilities. You can sell your raw product, honey, in wholesale markets, at local farmers markets, or through your own ecommerce store. You can also make value-added, farm-to-table goods, like beeswax candles, body lotions, and specialty food products like hot honey.
Tique Chandler of Chandler Honey grew up beekeeping on her family’s nearly 100-year-old honey farm. She focuses on consumers who are now “willing to pay more for honey and invest in their local beekeepers,” she says on an episode of Shopify Masters. She sources all of the honey for her products from her family’s honey farm in Alberta, Canada, and adds value by infusing her honey with various ingredients like orange zest or vanilla bean.
7. Flowers
Sales of domestic cut flowers amounted to $763 million in 2022, a $90 million increase from 2017, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Flowers are a scalable crop you can start as a side project and expand as you learn what varieties of flowers grow best where you live and what your local florists want. Flowers also are a candidate for CSA-style subscription boxes you can sell directly to consumers or through local shops. Along with its produce crop subscription boxes, Siena Farms in Sudbury, Massachusetts, also offers flower CSA shares in its local markets.
If you become a florist as well as a flower farmer, you also can sell your flowers at a higher retail markup. Think arranging and selling flowers from your own farm to supply events, or even expanding into agritourism for special events and weddings where visitors can experience the farm where the flowers were grown.
8. Curated butcher boxes
Curated meat boxes, sometimes called butcher boxes, are like a CSA box for meat, usually produced with a method like grass-fed, regenerative, antibiotic-free, or organic farming. Some even offer ways to order a share of a whole animal, which gives customers access to farm-fresh, high-quality meat, and helps farmers keep more of the profit instead of letting the retail markup go to grocery stores.
Ballerina Farm and Source Farms both sell curated meat boxes through their ecommerce stores. Ballerina Farm is primarily a ranch and dairy farm based in northern Utah that sells subscription boxes, curated “readymade” boxes, and “build a box” options you can customize. Source Farms is a ranch based in the Willamette Valley in Oregon, focused on regenerative farming methods and offering curated boxes and local meat shares.
9. Sheep
If you’d rather not cultivate crops, you can get your hands dirty raising sheep, and then create value-added products like sheepsmilk cheeses, sheepsmilk soap, sheepskins, and wool yarn. You can either sell these to distributors and wholesalers or sell them on your own at a higher profit (though perhaps lower volume). Inviting visitors to watch the yarn-making process, or even teaching the process, is a way to incorporate agritourism into your business.
10. Skin care
Value-added skin care products are part of the clean beauty and farm-to-shelf movements, where goods are made with non-toxic, natural ingredients sourced at the farm. If you have farm products like beeswax, honey, tallow, olive oil, herbs, and other botanicals, you have some of the key ingredients for the growing market in farm-made skin care.
At Summer Solace Tallow in Oakland, California, owner Megan Bre Camp started a tallow-based skin care line, hand rendering suet from a nearby cattle ranch into tallow to make her skin care products. She’s expanded into candles, body products, sunscreens, and even naturally tanned sheepskins.
How to make money farming FAQ
Which farming activities are the most profitable?
Direct-to-consumer sales are one of the most profitable income streams for a farm business. For example, making and selling food products from raw ingredients, offering agritourism experiences at your farm, or selling your crops directly to consumers at a farmers market all have higher profit margins than selling your goods wholesale.
How can you make money on 20 acres?
If you have a hobby farm of 20 acres, that’s enough space to develop a market garden to sell produce at a farmers market or supply your own community-supported agriculture (CSA) program, raise a small herd of sheep for wool production, and offer agritourism such as private events, farm stays, and classes.
Can only large farms be profitable?
How much land you have doesn’t define how profitable you can be, but your business plan does. Supplementing your produce sales with agritourism, value-added products, and online sales can help a small farm succeed.
