>>2328694Yes. You need to decide on what plants and/or animal products you want to sell.
There are so many things being sold that it's hard to give a concise answer. Put simply, you can either invest in a homesteading source of income, and have that meager supplement to your income build up over time until satisfactory. Otherwise, you can take out a loan, and bet on your homesteading business paying off. The first is obviously much safer.
Maple Syrup. There are many examples like it, many better and more profitable than it too, but this example is mine.
With a basic-bitch tap & bucket system, you can get like $40 or more per gallon, and a quart or more per tree. I've heard of some people making $125 per kilogram of Maple Cream. If you bottle/package the syrup individually and sell at a farmer's market or local business, you'll probably make more. But anyway at $40 per gallon and 1/4 of a gallon per tree, you'd need 1500 trees tapped to make the federal minimum wage equivalent of a full time job, ~15000. For every 1 gallon of syrup, you'd have to evaporate about 43 gallons of a typical sugar maple sap, which would require fuel and time. The more time that the sap is left unprocessed or on the heat, the darker the syrup, so you'd be able to reach the widest range of audiences by having the tech to evaporate it quickly. Also, the sap would spoil eventually, giving your syrup a much worse taste.
You'd maximize sugar production by giving the trees about a 30 foot radius of each other, which would be like 50 per acre, so you'd need about 30 acres for a gross income of the federal minimum wage, assuming you're getting a mediocre price for your syrup. You should be in the northern-ish United States or Canada or a comparable climate for the best production, because the colder the winter the more sap is stored. You'd only harvest during the spring, because that's when the sap leaks out the best, so you'd have the rest of the year to earn money in other ways.
