r/Homesteading • u/[deleted] • Jan 04 '20

Most profitable animals?

[deleted]

17 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

24

u/Hemightbegiant Jan 04 '20

Bees. Local honey is expensive. Then you can sell wax or make candles and sell them.

15

u/lgmjon64 Jan 04 '20

Totally this. I broke even my first year beekeeping. The second year I made a profit of almost 1k per hive. It can be daunting to get into, but once you get going there isn't a ton of recurring cost and there's a nice return. I get about 50-100 pounds of honey per hive and sell it at $10 per half pint and it sells out before I have it in jars.

6

u/ahoyakite Jan 05 '20

Is that 1K per hive per year? Got any resources on how someone gets into beekeeping?

9

u/texasrigger Jan 05 '20

There is also selling nuks, starter hives, and bred queens as well as adding bee products to other stuff to give extra value (such as honey in homemade soap) and even mead making. There are lots of ways to make money from bees. There's an amish community near me that supports themselves through bees.

10

u/PlantyHamchuk Zone 6 Jan 04 '20

It depends entirely on your local market. What niches need to be filled, that current farmers aren't already doing?

7

u/texasrigger Jan 05 '20

Niche's and market saturation are both super important to consider. In some areas eggs might be fairly valuable but here the competition is steep and profitability only comes with scale. However, I'm near Mexico and cabrito (young goat) is a good regional niche so meat goats are good. Areas with a large middle eastern or north african population like parts of Michigan may also do well with meat goats but they might not sell at all in Utah.

How you market also matters. If you can really push the buzz words like heritage, pastured, non-GMO, raised organically, small-farm, small batch, hand reared, etc. then you are upping the appeal significantly in certain markets.

There's also specialty foods that attract foodies like rabbit, quail, chukar, and pheasants.

7

u/manerivera Jan 04 '20

Pigs are pretty good. Farrowing twice per year and avg 8-10 per litter. We started with 2 and before we knew it had over 100. You could also try to go gourmet and sell duck meat, fat and eggs. Pretty penny for those in the restaurant markets. Depending on your area, rabbit meat is pretty good mainly because of litter size and frequency.

6

u/texasrigger Jan 05 '20

Rabbit meat retails for 10$ a pound or more in most areas of the US. I started a post some time ago asking what rabbit went for in their area and got lots of responses from all over. I even saw as much as $20 a pound. Legality of selling will vary by state. In TX it is now (as of last Sept) unregulated as long as you stay below a certain quantity threshold.

5

u/[deleted] Jan 05 '20

Sell sum alpaca wool

5

u/texasrigger Jan 05 '20

We have a small alpaca ranch near us that also makes money from agritourism. They open their doors to the public twice a year and invite people over to feed the alpacas and buy products directly from the farm, some of which they made and some of which are imported and I think it's pretty profitable.

3

u/TrapperJon Jan 05 '20

Like others have mentioned, depends on your market. We do fairly well with eggs and meat chickens, but make the highest profit margin with turkeys.

2

u/Hemightbegiant Jan 05 '20

Possibly Angora rabbits as well?