A honeybee on a modern hive in an apiary.
Photo by Björn Appel.
Cons
Stings can be a major drawback for the would-be beekeeper. Check with your doctor first to find out if you have a hypoallergenic reaction to bee stings. Even if you are not allergic, stings can still be painful. Fortunately, most beekeepers develop immunity to the poison over time. Supplies can get expensive because you will have to invest in a hive, proper clothing, a smoker, extracting equipment, and hive supplies. Prices vary, but a single new hive may cost about $110, clothing and gear may cost about $160, and a package of new bees may run $75 to $100. Often you can find starter kits with bees, boxes, and gear for a better combined price. A lot of people lose bees because farmers or gardeners spray the flowers of crops that bees work. You might have to educate your neighbors about safe spraying and warn them not to use Sevin. There are a few honey bee diseases, the worst of which is American foulbrood. By law, you have to destroy infested colonies to keep the disease from infecting other hives. One of the biggest threats to honey bees is the varroa mite—the parasite lays its eggs in the hives and feeds on the bees during the winter. And a number of colonies starve each winter, primarily because their owners didn’t leave enough honey in the hive to last until the following spring flowers arrive, usually in April. Bee colony collapse disorder, which has received much media attention, mostly affects the bees in colonies that are moved around the U.S. to pollinate certain crops like almonds.
Bottom Line
If you’re in a good beekeeping area, and if the weather’s excellent that year, you could possibly get thirty to sixty gallons from a single hive, but that would be very unusual. Count on about fifteen to twenty gallons as a more reasonable single-hive harvest. A sixteen-ounce jar of raw honey retails for about $15, so you may have to invest in several hives to make significant profits. Consider speaking with other microfarmers and work deals to place your hives near their crops, like lavender, alfalfa, or raspberries, so that you can make a varietal honey that will be worth more. Usually, you will share the harvest with the landowner. Other value-added products with honey are honey butters, honey mustards, honey cookies or other sweets, including baklava. Don’t forget to have a consistent brand for your honey and products, including candles and other products made from beeswax.
CHICKENS
About the Crop
Although raising chickens for eggs has a nice cachet, and there are magazines and blogs devoted to urban chicken care, you would have to have a fairly large flock and a good egg marketing plan to have a microfarm based solely around chickens. Chickens are better as part of an overall diversified microfarm, such as a small dairy operation where eggs joined the other dairy products produced, like cheeses, yogurt, or ice cream. Because chickens are such excellent egg producers—each hen lays about three hundred eggs per year—your egg supply can have many uses. They can be ingredients in baked products, can be bartered for other foods that you’re currently not growing, and with proper permitting, sold along with your other microfarm crops at stands or farmers’ markets.
Pros
Raising your own microfarm flock will give you free garden fertilizer, natural insect control in your yard (they love grasshoppers and crickets) and growing areas (although chickens do eat vegetables), fresh eggs that are free from added chemicals, and when the hens are through laying in a few years, you’ll have them for the cooking pot. Caring for chickens is easier than most other pets and without a rooster in the mix, they are relatively quiet and make good household pets.
Domestic free range chickens should be part of a varied microfarm.
Photo by Aleks.
Cons
Chickens require a hen house to sleep in and lay eggs in, so you’ll have to build one or buy one. They need fresh water every day, proper bedding, and good food. They must be babied and kept quite warm until they get all their feathers, protected from all predators including the family dog and cat, and are subject to quite a few diseases and occasionally lice. You can be pecked occasionally because some chickens are ill-tempered. My friend who raises chickens (I trade her culinary herbs for eggs) had a rooster that was so mean that she had him killed and taxidermied, and he now occupies a spot of honor in her living room. And finally, chickens are messy.
Bottom Line
A small flock of chickens around your microfarm is charming and often amusing, especially if they fit into your overall plan for a microfarm. A flock of six hens will produce about 1,800 eggs per year, and that’s 150 dozen. If you sold a dozen in a carton for $3.00, your gross income would only be $450, and you would have to pay for the feed and other expenses. However, if your microfarm had other uses for the eggs, they could be transformed into more value-added products. Your challenge, if you want chickens, is to formulate that plan to incorporate them conveniently into your microfarm and not plan an entire microfarm around them.
CHILE PEPPERS
About the Crop
Chile peppers, like tomatoes, are fruits of the large Solanaceae or nightshade family, which also includes potatoes, tobacco, tomatillos, petunias, and the poisonous mandrake, belladonna, and datura, or jimsonweed. Chiles have their own “poison,” namely their active ingredient, capsaicin, which seems to have evolved to protect the seeds from consumption by mammals, whose digestive systems destroy their seeds. As a spice, chiles are second in popularity only to black pepper, and as a food, they heat up cuisines all around the world, from Mexico to India to Hungary to Thailand to China. In fact, India is the number one producer of dried chiles and China the leader in the cultivation of fresh ones. Fresh chiles of some sort are commonly available nearly everywhere all year long in the U.S. these days, so if they’re going to fit into a microfarm, you’re going to have to grow the more unusual ones.
Pros
Growing superhot chile peppers outdoors during the summer can produce valuable pods and seeds and various value-added products like powders and sauces. Although it is possible to grow chiles under artificial light or in greenhouses, the yields are usually small and these cultivation methods are not recommended. So, like tomatoes, they are a summer crop. Successful chile microfarmers focus on the superhot chiles that approach a heat level of one million Scoville Heat Units (compare the jalapeño at about 4,000 SHU), or on raising bedding plants for sale to gardeners. See the stories on Marlin Bensinger and Cross Country Nurseries in Part 2. Chiles are about as easy to grow as tomatoes, and there are culinary varieties and ornamental ones, but the microfarmer should focus on growing either the superhots or culinary varieties that are in high demand at the time. If you live in an area that produces a lot of chile peppers, like I do, it just doesn’t make any sense to grow the same varieties that the farmers with fifty acres or more are growing—they will beat you every time.
‘Bhut Jolokia’ superhot pods on the plant.
Photo by Harald Zoschke.
Cons