Reddit mentions of The Market Gardener: A Successful Grower's Handbook for Small-Scale Organic Farming

The first thing I encourage you to do is differentiate homesteading from farm business.

 

Homesteading means different things to everyone, but in my opinion what it really comes down to is increasing your self-sufficiency.

Farm-business on the other-hand is about making profit from your land and resources.

 

Therefore, if you want to monetize your land you need to put on your farmer hat and put aside your homesteading hat.

To your questions - first of all I haven't purchased my property yet, therefore I don't have any yet. However, I do intend to make it a business when I do.

As for the biggest return - it is the enterprise that will provide you the greatest difference between sales and costs. Everyone's answer to this will differ however due to market demand. This is a good thing however. It is near impossible to compete on the conventional farm market. You can compete on the local market.

 

To determine what will have the greatest return, determine what your local market demands and is not being adequately supplied. For example, demand for local food (within X miles) is growing in many parts of North America and perhaps your region does not have many local producers outside the conventional space. If this is the case you can begin producing local produce. Then determine the best way to sell it (CSA, farmer's market, or farm-gate).

 

The above sounds easy, but finding your niche is especially difficult. Do your research, visit farmer's markets, and most importantly talk to your prospective customers.

 

As for your last question, what is the next best thing? No clue, and I doubt anyone else knows either. In my opinion, I think local and organic agriculture will continue to grow. In addition, I think consumers want to know more about how their food is produced and build a relationship with the parties producing it. Conventional farmers are getting older and their is little interest from the younger demographic to take over as the business is high risk / low return. This I think will be the opportunity local small-scale growers can take advantage of.

 

Finally, I encourage you to take a look at what Jean Martin-Fortier has accomplished (I think this is the third time I mentioned him in this subreddit, I may be a fan...). There is a youtube series about his work and he also wrote a book.


But he is a farmer, not a homesteader.

Ok first off what do you want to do?

Here is one for a general garden.
http://gardenplanner.almanac.com/

It also has an app for it.

If your looking at high production stuff or maybe some different ways of doing things. I highly recommend you get this book.

http://www.amazon.com/Market-Gardener-Successful-Handbook-Small-scale-ebook/dp/B00I2FYZJC/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1425851563&sr=1-1&keywords=market+gardener

Its about making high production beds for growing. It is about making a profit but it shows you the easiest things to grow. I like how he explains things. He does most of his gardening with low cost and simple methods. Now the down side is the immense amount of resources it takes for this style of system to work. The cool thing is you can scale systems to your needs.

I would highly recommend you look into Spin Farming methods. I will try to post some links later.

-Don't think you have to have 500 acres to turn a profit. People make a good living on 100, 40, 10, 2 acres...the extra money you make on such a humongous tract will likely go right back into the humongous equipment expenses required to keep it up. Don't be afraid to go smaller, especially since organic crops carry additional value.
-Look for niche crops in your area--once you've chosen one--by going to the nice restaurants and taking notes on the fancy vegetables they serve. Those are the ones you can get a premium for.
-Consider farming intensively rather than expansively...A guy named Jean-Martin Fortier up in Quebec grosses 100,000/year on 1 1/2 acres with no tractor (and a shorter growing season than the U.S.)
-For certification, check out this site: Help With Certification and scroll to the links at the bottom. Edit: formatting