If you find
Starting from scratch with no blueprint to follow can be difficult or confusing
OR
You want to bypass any avoidable mistakes and snags as you develop a new enterprise
Then,
The easiest and most effective way to do it is often to pick up an enterprise template or enterprise model from someone else and modify it to suit your circumstances.
This allows you to stand on the shoulders of giants, people who have succeeded at what you are about to attempt.
It saves you from having to re-invent the wheel or at least it saves you from having to re-invent the enterprise.
Some well known enterprise models include:
- Joel Salatin and family’s mixed broadacre grazing of various livestock combined with value adding. A good starting point is his introductory book, You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Start & Succeed in a Farming Enterprise by Joel Salatin
- the market garden run by Joyce Wilkie and Michael Plane in a very cold part of Australia (yes it gets cold in parts of Down under) and in particular the CD-ROM Growing Annual Vegetables by Joyce Wilkie and Michael Plane showing the tools and techniques they use every day. This is the garden Joyce started to feed the family. It still does and it feeds many other families and supplies some of the best restaurants in the nation’s capital, Canberra.
- Eliot Coleman also farms in a very cold area and, like Joyce, most of his model can be applied in almost any climate. Eliot Coleman’s excellent resource: The New Organic Grower
is a classic. It is a manual of tools and techniques for the home and market gardener and you can just copy so much of what he does and modify some of the rest.
- There are plenty of rotations that you can follow in broadacre cropping. they are specific for each cropping system and location, so talk to your local advisor or find a farmer who is succeeding with one.
- And there is Joel Salatin’s classic that was a major force in reviving the chicken tractor for broadacre farming, Pastured Poultry Profits.
I spotted this book after I started my poultry farming — I started organic chickens on broadacre in 1992. Some friends of mine built a very successful business on it. Truly inspirational.
- and in ricegrowing Tom Randall and his son Peter Randall. I will put up a page on that soon.
So, if you are trying something new, check to see whether there is an existing enterprise model or enterprise template that you can modify to suit your circumstances.