farming business plan

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD MY $100k FARM BUSINESS PLAN TEMPLATE

In this post I am going to break down my $100k farm business plan.

A simple 7-part business plan I created for myself 5 years ago.

3 years later in 2023, God gave increase to my effort and I was able to hit and maintain cash flow at $100k annual revenue. 

Now I am operating on the basis of a 30% minimum net profit. That $100k boiling down to roughly $30k after costs.

I originally shared this business plan in December of 2020 to my then-18 youtube subscribers.

Today, I am sharing it in 2025 from the perspective of hindsight: Walking through

1. The 7 original components of my business plan and how they evolved in real-time.
2. Income streams I stacked within this agricultural startup to grow beyond that original $30K net profit goal.
3. And at the very end answering the question: would your farm business survive without youtube? Sharing exactly how much money Youtube paid me this year with over 150k+ subscribers… which will probably be the most surprising part of this whole video.

My $100k Farm Business Plan focused on answering 7 questions:

1. WHY?

The first of which was “Why do you want to be a farmer?”

This was a question coming at me right and left from those who knew me in real life, because farming was so diametrically opposed to everything I had done to that point, and proposed so much less money than a lot of the other career-paths I could have contributed my marketing skills to.

There were 2 main “whys” that have anchored my farming journey since day 1:

1. Stewardship. From a standpoint of faith, I felt compelled to make the most of the 30 acres in front of me, and to manage it in a sustainable and regenerative format.
2. The second was the statistic that the average age of the American farmer is 56 years old. Now this is concerning for obvious reasons,  BUT my business brain recognized an opportunity in that demographic. I realized that jumping into farming as a 25 year old meant that the better portion of my competitors would be retired before I even hit 40… If I could establish myself in this particular trade at a young age, and accumulate these skills, I’d have not only food security on a personal level, but also a durable income stream for a good long while.

2. Who will buy my farm goods? (Market Analysis)

The Second question is “Who will buy your farm goods?”. 

This is market analysis, and it is as simple as identifying 3-4 markets or groups of people that will buy the product you want to sell, THEN make sure you have easy access to those markets before you start to produce those products you have in mind.

At this phase in the game I constructed a list of 10 places I could sell grass fed meat at and it included:

• Friends and family.
• 3-4 farmer markets in the Dallas Metroplex
• Directories like Eatwild.com
• Building my own platforms (with what I knew of SEO), using them ultimately to build my own email newsletter list.

That last one on the list ended up taking off like a rocket, as I employed a specific strategy that I was accustomed to using in the retail apparel industry. 

It was a waitlist, live launch strategy. 

In short, I began marketing my product before it was ready to sell. 

I setup an email list as a waitlist for sheep, then (the moment I started farming) I began to show photos and videos of my regenerative sheep farming process across social media. 

I was clear on social media about what I had to sell: pasture raised Dorper sheep, and I was clear that if people were interested in buying my lambs, they could subscribe to my waitlist. 

By the time I had my first lambs ready to sell, I had about 1500 people on this email waitlist. 

AND using this strategy I have consistently sold out of my lamb every year for 5 years straight. All the other market streams I identified in this phase of my business plan are my backup, but this one sales stream has been so effective I have not needed them as yet. 

Now back to the business plan…

3. What are my resources?

The 3rd of 7 questions in the business plan is “What are my resources?”. 

This resource evaluation ties to the reality that the fastest track to profitability is converting existing resources into a marketable product.

For me, in the context of growing pasture raised meat, this Resource Evaluation process looked like taking a mental inventory of not only the size of my land base, but things like rainfall, forage density, and even the human resource I had to help with this farming startup.

In order to minimize startup costs and ongoing cost of inputs, it is important to make sure your resources closely match the product you decide to farm.

It is also very important to NOT cling to your ideals at the expense of profitability.  

4. What are you Going to Farm?

Which brings me to the 4th question in my business plan, which is “What are you going to farm?”

Notice that this is very deliberately not the first question, despite the fact that for most people it is naturally the first consideration as they start a business. 

Now as a side note, you do need to have a general idea of what you want to produce before you start your business plan: e.g. I generally knew that I wanted to raise grass fed meat. 

But you also need to be flexible with the specifics as you flesh out this plan.

Which leads to a funny story for me: because in 2020 I wanted to be a cowgirl so bad and was so sure that I wanted to raise beef cattle that I was about to invest $20k in a herd of Aberdeen Angus heifers. 

I was watching the auction and making calls to obtain this stock, but I am so grateful because the Lord really kept putting road blocks in front of me. And once I took the time to slow down and evaluate my market and my resources, I realized that sheep presented a better opportunity for me at a lower startup cost. 

For example:

After studying my markets I realized:

1. There was a lot of existing and well-established competition for grass fed beef in my area.
2. Lamb was bringing a higher price per pound, both commodity and retail, and there were not as many people producing it. 
3. Texas being a massive sheep state, I realized if I built my flock with quality genetics I could probably sell as much breeding stock as I did meat.
4. The cost of a starter flock of ewes was about 1/4 the cost of a starter herd of Aberdeen Angus heifers.

After taking inventory of my resource I realized: 

5. I could turn about 400% more cash worth of sheep on 30 acres than beef.
6. Physically the size of sheep was more manageable for me as a lady, who was primarily leaning on the help of her two younger sisters as human resource.

So this is a real-time look at the importance of slowing down and evaluating your market and resources before making a final decision on the product you are going to develop and sell.

5. How much do I need to sell? (Aiming for $100k)

Question #5 on the Business PLan is “How many units of this one product do you need to sell to reach my gross revenue goals?” 

From the beginning, it was my intention to diversify to reach $100k, but I wanted to make sure that if I needed to make it on the sales from any one enterprise at my farm, that the numbers did not look too unrealistic. 

So I penciled it out and found that I would need to direct-sell about 230 lambs per year to earn $100k, which felt achievable based on all of the information I had gathered to that point.

Now I realize I just said “felt”. And I generally don’t like relying on feelings for much of anything. 

BUT, there is something to be said for intuition.

When you get to this point and something in your gut says “I don’t think this will work at all” pay attention to that – and pray the Lord gives you wisdom. 

When I was contemplating pulling the $20k trigger for that beef herd, my gut was gnawing at me. 

But when I wrote the $11,000 check for sheep, there was total peace and enthusiasm.

It’s not science-y, but sometimes you gotta go with your gut. 

I knew that going from 0-230 lambs per year was not going to happen overnight, in fact I did not want it to. I wanted to grow my flock incrementally in tandem with my markets.

Which brings me to question 6 in the business plan: 

6. How long are you going to investing your business plan before expecting it to arrive at full scale?

For me, I said I wanted to give it 7 years before expecting good, bad, or otherwise out of it.  

It has been said that the average person overestimates what he can do in 1 year, but underestimates what he can do in 5 years. 

This long-term commitment before expectation of results is so antithetical to what we are being taught in this instant gratification generation, but making commitments and setting long-term goals and not quitting or expecting overnight success is so important.

I often think of the analogy of mushroom vs an oak tree:

A mushroom blooms and matures overnight, but it withers and is gone as fast as it came.

An oak tree takes 20 years to reach maturity, but has an average lifespan of 600 years.

So I always keep this in mind when things are growing slower than I want them to… and encourage myself that that’s not necessarily a bad sign – in fact, growing too fast often is.

7. Where are you going to get the money?

Now the 7th and final question in this business plan is practical and that is “Where are you going to get the money?”

Once you decide on how long you are going to give your business plan to mature, you have to tally the costs of year over year operations and figure out where you are going to get the money to subsidize your efforts during the growth phase.

Now if you have done a good job of starting small and staying lean, expenses should be manageable.

For me, I still had my regular job that was paying the bills… and I used my savings to cover the startup costs.

Now a major blessing and something I give the Lord credit for is that once in year 3 I hit cashflow. Not profitability in year 3, but I hit and have been able to maintain $100k annual revenue within the farm business.  

For 4 years straight my sheep have sold at the price I needed them to, and my waitlist for the sheep continues to grow. 

Because I am using email newsletter marketing I have a close relationship with my customer base that enabled me to sell a variety of value-added products on the side, which further contributes to revenue.

Adding Additional Income Streams: 

Now this brings me to the second topic which is additional income streams on my farm.  I have built about 10 different income streams into my farm enterprise, using much of my previous experience in marketing. 

Now to give some back story to my thought process going into farming, my goal was $30k net profit from my farm business. At this, I knew that I’d probably keep my job in retail and marketing to subsidize an additional $20k worth of income for myself. 

However the Lord has opened up doors for me to shove all of my gifts in marketing and content creation into the direction of enriching and expanding the regenerative agriculture sphere. 

Instead of splitting my time between farming and the retail apparel industry: I am 100% devoted to my farm and to providing resources that enable beginners to enter the realms of regenerative agriculture successfully, and resources that teach established farmers how they can modernize their marketing to be more profitable.

Each of these 10 income streams has contributed to my overall income and enabled me to focus entirely on agriculture. And yes, youtube ad revenue is one of them. 

Which brings me to the 3rd topic and that is a question I often receive: 

Does your Farm business plan rely on Youtube ad-revenue?

The answer is no. 

In fact in the past year, with 158K subscribers and 3.5 million views, Youtube has only paid me $12,000. 

Now I am thankful for that money, but in relation to the amount of time it takes me to make these videos, it’s not a lot (NAPOLEON $1 an hour). 

AND, if youtube stopped paying me tomorrow I wouldn’t notice it much.

And that is because I have never made Youtube videos to earn ad-revenue. I have always made Youtube videos with the specific goal of adding subscribers to my email Newsletter list. 

At present, through various strategies, I am able to convert Youtube Subscribers to my email newsletter list at a rate of 20% – which is the real gold and the real source of revenue for my business.

And once you are part of my newsletter community, I focus on treating you really really well. 

In fact, that email list is one of the closest connections that anyone has to me on the internet.

Once you are on my newsletter list you get all kinds of free resources, I send monthly behind the scenes updates from my farm, I host free exclusive livestreams with special guests, and more… 

“In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand: for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good.”

Ecclesiastes 11:6