Funding your farm start-up

You have dreams of owning a farm, big or small. You desire a deeper connection with your food that only growing it yourself will bring.

BUT, as you dig into the weeds of purchasing and operating your farm you’re left feeling: overwhelmed, defeated, and a little sticker shocked. Yep, I feel you. I felt all of those things (and some) when I set out to start a farm, from scratch, right after graduating college (HELLO COLLEGE DEBT).

So, today I want to share with you a few resources I’ve used to help me bring my farm dreams to reality. My hope is a few of these might work to help bring your farm dreams to life.

Leasing Land

Land is the biggest hurdle to starting a farm, hands down. It doesn’t seem to matter if you’re looking for 5, or 50 acres to start, land doesn’t come cheap and is a big leap to take especially if you’re young. I was twenty-three, fresh out of college with a mound of student debt, a brand new mortgage and had just spent my savings on a wedding. So, when I decided it was now, or never, that I started my farm I had to get very creative on accessing land I just simply couldn’t afford.

In my case, I was able to lease ten acres of land from my parents. Thanks to them I was able to do this step a bit easier than it might be for you. HOWEVER, leasing land is more popular than you might think. It is certainly more popular that I ever dreamed it was. I was under the impression that farmers ‘always’ owned their land. WRONG.

My parents (like many people do) were leasing their tillable land (corn/soybean) to a crop farmer who was running thousands of acres. Their farmer happened to own 500 acres of the 10,000 ACRES he cropped. He isn’t alone in the leasing world. Much like many crop farmers lease, many livestock producers are also seeing the benefits of leasing land. Here’s a list of pros vs. cons. I see in leasing land.

So, maybe you aren’t starting with the same financial burden as I was. Maybe you have the ability to purchase your own land. If that’s you, YIPPEE! My experience when we purchased our farm is that funding is trickier than purchasing a single family home. Even a single-family home in the country. SO, if you’re looking at a larger farm (not a homestead you’re looking to do on a piece of land in the country), you’ll need to talk to the right banker. IF, you’re local Compeer Financial has lending programs for farm purchases. My farm is actually purchased under a business loan vs a home mortgage. So, be sure to do your research.

If you’re looking at leasing land, reach out to your local Extension office, your USDA office. Agencies like this are a good place to start when trying to find a farmer looking to lease. If you know someone with crop land, or pasture land, that you know isn’t using it themselves, a simple stop-by to ask might be a good option for you. I know farmers that even 10+ years in lease their land. It is a very econimical way to get started, and can lead to beautiful relationships for future purchase of the land.

NRCS Funding

This one has been the biggest game-changer for me. As a grazer I wanted to take tillable acerage and turn it into productive pastures that would last, well forever. The EQUIP program through Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) helped me do just that, and more.

On my farm I had 20 acres of tillable (once corn and soybean rotation) that I wanted to graze. Through the EQUIP program I was able to fund seeding the pasture AND putting in a perimeter fence. This funding was able to jump-start my farm in a big way. Again, I was starting with a mound of student debt and now a brand new (larger) mortgage. This funding put me 5+ years ahead of the schedule I would have been in if I had to save and pay cash.

This funding is NOT exclusive to OWNING your land either. Yep, with a lease contract you can get your hands on some funding as well. That is AWESOME news.

The best way to find out what programs work for you, for leased or owned land, is to contact your local office. Your county likely has it’s own office, if you’re really rural you might have a group of counties under the same NRCS office. Just a simple Google search will get you there.

Auctions, USED and Craigslist

In my first 3+ years I didn’t own a single thing for my farm that was new other than my barbwire fence. The t-posts, stock tanks, gates, buckets and so on I’d picked up second hand. Let’s be honest here, ALL of these things are perfect items to find used and will save you loads of money in start-up. I’ve lost track of my beginning numbers (#savethisforfuturereference) but to my best guess I saved 75% of the start-up costs for my farm just by buying used items. THAT’S a lot of savings for items that still had a lot of life left in them. After purchasing our forever farm (instead of leasing) I invested in some newer items because our goal was to have a ‘polished’ look. BUT, if your goal is simply to raise good food yourself, you might NEVER need to purchase a new gate/post/pitchfork.

As you get started and don’t have a market yet for your product (if this is your end-goal) I strongly urge you to look for used items. You can always make all your gates match someday if you’d like. But those $20 gates I started with brand new were $180 EACh, so, if you’re looking for a way to cut costs used is going to be a game-changer.

where there’s a will, there’s a way

Honestly this is what it is going to come down to. If you want to farm, you’ll find a way to do it. Leased, owned, big or small. I believe that we’ll do things we never dreamed we would just by deciding. When I started with two steers, 10 acres and not more than $500 to my farming name, with no customers (no idea really) I found a way to do it because it’s all I wanted. It wasn’t as glamorous as I’d imagined, but it was a step in the right direction. Maybe you’re like me with big dreams of a lush, beautiful farm that you can host events at. You have to start somewhere, somewhere scrappy, somewhere scary, somewhere ‘less than’ you wanted it to be.

But, the beauty is that by taking a single step you’re already headed in the right direction.

So, think outside the box, call your grandpa about leasing land. Reach out to people in your community to see if they know someone who’d lease to you. We all start somewhere, just start.