MOFGA: The Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association puts out a price report monthly during the growing season. Here is the
June 2012 Price Report.
Reasonable prices?
Your prices look to be in the ranges they show. Your $5/pound for beef looks to be a bargain.
Increasing the numbers?
Think bigger.
This is the
Dervaes Family Homestead in Pasadena, CA. I understand they pull in $30k/year and produce most of their own food and energy. They do all this on 1/10th of an acre in the city.
It can be done. Looking down the road at replacing one's primary income source can be a daunting challenge. Think of it as how one eats an elephant: one bite at a time. You won't be throwing your doors open to a parade of people who can't get rid of their money fast enough. A little at a time is all you need. While flushing that FT job is a fine goal (it's at the TOP of my list), it may be more reasonable to get your farm going simply at first, bringing things online as you go. This is what weekends are made for. Picking up a hundred bucks on a Saturday is a fine start. This could be a Pick Your Own Berry operation or a booth at a farmers market. Do it again come Sunday, now its $200 for the weekend. For your zone, this is possible. Already this is $10k/yr, a quarter of your stated expectation. From there it's a matter of keeping on going.
If you are doing farmers markets or a farm stand, there will always be those products that have not sold. Perhaps you picked too many tomatoes, or you have a bunch of peppers with little spots. Using these as ingredients for value added goods can have a huge impact, not only on your bottom line, but on the line of products you have to offer. $5/pound for all-natural tomatoes is a fine achievement, but if you can turned unsold
fruit into all-natural tomato sauce, juice, paste, you'll command a premium price to be sure. Have too much tomato sauce on the shelf? Get the word out to your customers that you are having a customer appreciation spaghetti feast on the farm this Saturday at 2PM, feed them the sauce, and a salad made with some of those fresh greens you have growing. While they are there, they can pick a basket of fresh produce to take home, and its only $3/pound.
There's a million ways to make a few bucks with a farm in your back pocket. For $40k, I look at the top 20, and I want to earn $2-3k/year from each of these projects.
1 tomato
2 strawberries
3 eggs
4 goats
5 mushrooms
6 sheep
7 pigs
8 beef
9 jams
10 jellies
11 soap
12 ...
$2-3k/year from just the tomatoes is entirely doable. What do I need? 50 plants/week and some time to make a few batches of sauce.
$2-3k/year from strawberries is nothing.
$2-3k/yr from eggs...I just need chickens and people who eat eggs
If you are growing vegetables, in a wide variety, serving the needs of a family for a week is not so big an issue. If a customer spends $25-30/week and you can offer fresh vegetables every week of the year, thats $1000/year per customer. Now you're only talking about 40 customers. If you have an advertising project that gets you an extra customer every month, you'll be where you want to be in less than 4 years. Another couple of years and you'll add tree fruits to the equation. Perhaps adding another dozen trees each year is in order.