Page for my favorite ducks ever – muscovies!
The 2 drakes, and the 4 (maybe 3 now) hens.
Their antics!!!
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Hello, i’m Kie, just found your website and have a quick look, it’s inetitserng. just have some questions where are you running the farm actually? and how long have you been doing this, i’m curious did you get any money back from this yet. I have a piece of land for small eco-farm which is actually belong to my parent in E-Saan and wanted to start up something simply that i like after graduated, but finally have to leave home to find a job in Bangkok and now really want to get back to where i was born, running a small homestead farming would be great for me, perhaps for others too, but the question is how much can you earn from a small homestead farming without any other addition income. keep updated i will visit your website regularly.
Thanks for your kind words.
Have I made money on my farm? Well … if you count all the costs I put in, buying livestock, some cost for upgrading buildings (I haven’t spent much, since some buildings were standing and I used a lot of supplies like free tear-down fence panels and free wooden pallets, etc. and also tore down several sections of an old barn and reclaimed the wood) … still, the animals themselves, some supplies I have needed, and the feed, I probably have not actually made money yet. And I’ve been doing it for two years.
However, that’s not to say it can’t be done. But farming is not something you get into to make money, at least not here. I think this is a good topic for a full blog post, so please bear with me, and I’ll see if I can get something more put together tomorrow. I just realized that it’s 3am here now, and I’m far from getting through my comments, and the roosters will be waking up soon … some half-grown chicks put themselves up with a mama hen that has new chicks, so I have to be out there AT DAWN to let them out.
So I will expect to have a post answering your question later today, or tomorrow at latest.
Thanks for asking!
I have decided to break this into a series, because there really is so much to address on the topic. I have the first two posts written … the first can be found at http://www.organic-homestead-heart.com/homestead-making-money-small-farm/ and is a general post, and the very next post addresses building fences, housing, cages, etc. I’ll add more as quickly as I can. Please don’t be discouraged by my first response … I actually COULD make a good bit of money with the way I am set up, but my focus has been elsewhere. It really depends on so many things, and there are more details in my post. I’ll write more as soon as I can.
SassySomething I learned to do as a tenaeger, that took a lot of concentration but was so worth the end results was egg decorating’, this is something particularly good for Christmas as they can make some stunning ornaments to hang on the tree, or get a stand for the egg to have as other decorations not associated with the tree at all. They can make lovely gifts, and if they really enjoy doing it they can extend how much work they put into it creating things like jewelery boxes, etc. This type of thing can be as inexpensive or as expensive as the creator wishes. Some things I did with them (using various types/sized eggs) was to cut into the egg and remove a portion, then create a Christmas scene in the hollow egg, glitter around the cut hole’ used to view the scene and then in a nice pattern around the rest of the egg gave it a really nice sparkle. For my mother’s gift one year after I’d been doing this for some time I used an ostrich egg to create a jewelery box, lined it with silk, added the bits of hardware necessary it turned out so much better than I’d dare to hope. Good luck with whatever you find for them!
Thank you Andy for sharing, I will do as i watend for sure Do you have any problem with salty water in your area? this quite a big problem on my land, artesian well (not sure it’s the right word in Eng) with 20 meters deep water taste like sea water. we also have a normal well approx 5-6 meters deep, water taste like fluoride in the tooth-phase. so we can not use water from both sources. i will make a 40 meters deep and see what gonna be and hope it gonna be alright otherwise look for other ways. right now we just get water from our 2 small ponds but the problem is water not enough during summer time. Ps. my farm is in Yasothon and i would love to visit your farm someday.
Hi
I’m not sure if you found the right blog (I noticed you were from Facebook) … I’m afraid I don’t know an Andy, unless maybe an Andy shared my post with you. 
We have a problem of a different sort with water here. The water table is fairly high, considering we are very drought-prone. My old well is filled in, and a new one needs to be dug. As soon as I can afford to, I plan to do so. The water around here tends to be pretty good, although a bit high in minerals. At my grandmother’s it tended to smell of sulfur – hopefully it won’t here! The problem is with the municipal water group. This property is connected to them, and even if I don’t use ANY water, there is a charge of almost as much as a regular water bill. If you disconnect, there is a fee every month almost as high as a water bill. So you pay them no matter what. To top it off, I had some trouble with them last year – their meter was defective. At least they didn’t hit me with the hundreds of dollars in surcharge they threatened for water I never used, during a drought. So the problem is … affording to dig a well, while STILL having to pay for municipal water.
I will probably do it eventually anyway, just so I have my OWN water source, not subject to their rules (last year they wanted to know how many of what kinds of animals I had in order to approve me watering them) … and quite frankly I don’t think that’s the government’s business to be asking.
I actually manage to use very little water for my farm. If I was using large amounts during a drought, I could understand their concern. Most months I use about 1/3 of what a typical city dweller with a yard to water uses, and I have pastures, gardens, waterfowl, and livestock to keep up, as well as needing a few gallons a day to run a mister to cool my rabbits. I have a recycling system that puts ALL graywater to use by spraying the pasture grasses, and I usually take the used water from my waterfowl’s pools and water the garden with that. I dump buckets of water from the goats and such to water individual plants. Water can be precious here when we get little rain, so I try to always be wise in using it. Still – I’ve talked to farmers with much larger farms than mine, and even in drought years, the water table provides plenty of water for them. So I DO hope to get a well soon.
Best of luck with yours. If my water was tasting off, I’d have it tested. In fact, if there are any possible sources of pollution, I’d have it tested anyway, since some contaminants aren’t easy to identify. The cost would be worth it – your health is very valuable!
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Thanks a lot for sharing this. This is the first time I’ve heard about muscovys and they sound very interesting. We might have to look into them, sound very self-suffienct!