The Most Profitable Jobs You Can Start With A Backyard & A Basement: Worm Farm & Aquaponics! 

It's the movies like this that my belief in mankind's only getting stronger. Keep up the good work.

I have worms but don't really farm worms for profit. I do use them for feed along with crickets. I do have a very large aquaponics system. I underestimated the success I would have with it. I did not plan on selling a lot of the food I produce but I actually have to because a lot would go to waste if I didn't. I also raise animals for meat. I have chickens, ducks, turkeys, pheasants, quail, rabbit, goat, sheep, pigs. Again I underestimated the production with the animals but the animals don't have to be killed until I need to eat them. As for the fish in my system. I have talapia, catfish, trout, and bass. I currently make about $600 a week selling my food locally but could really increase profit if I raised and sold more meat. My fruit trees will finally fruit this year and I will open a farm store then. If you do it right and invest in it. It can really pay off.

I have no idea whether this can be scaled up for a profit producing venture. What I do know is that it helps (after recouping the build cost) to reduce weekly/monthly food costs in the home (especially if you already eat a lot of fish). It is my understanding from articles and videos from others who say they have done successful aquaponics is that tilapia is easiest and most prolific fish to use but, other fish can be used if you are willing to do the research necessary to ensure feeding them properly and keeping their environment appropriate for them.

Great ideas. Now guess how many license, insurance, city, county, state, permits & other up front cost to be allowed legally just to sell. And if your selling package meats for consumer consumption it's a whole new game of permitting. Do it for yourself & for friends, family. I've been in businesses for decades & there are more licenses & IRS paperwork now than ever before. I believe whole heartedly in self sufficient means. But, not our government. Only legislating what we are doing independently.

This reminds me of my youth in the 1970's and seeing all of those little advertisements in the back of the magazines and comics saying that if you want to get rich quick send a SASE to XXXX for more information about worm farming. Having flashbacks now, lol.

i've punched the ''like' button. now my screen is broken. But, i have some vermicompost project so i can sell my tilapia in order to repair my screen. Yay!

This is awesome. Weed the garden, feed to fish. Grow duckweed in sitting water. Feed to fish. So much good info in this video. I love urban farming. Such a massively useful thing.

What you say makes sense. This is the first time I've heard anyone combine worm farming with aquaponics. You could even use plant material from your veggies to provide herbal matter to the fish, although using weeds sounds great.

My neighbors reported me for having a raised garden beds in the front yard to code enforcement, They came and looked and said that where I lived at that I could have a garden in the front yard which I already knew, The lady asked if I could build her some, told her to get the material and I would do it, I made 6 for ever 2 I make enough to build my own

Aquaponics is a lot harder to get balanced and producing than it sounds in youtube videos. For every person doing it successfully there are probably more than 5 that tried it and gave up. You could just raise fish in giant aerated pools, but there are a lot of restrictions on tilapia in the US. The fish and game commissions are terrified that they will get in the lakes and rivers and only allow them with permits in covered or indoor pools.

Alternately you could raise black soldier fly larvae. They eat anything and when they are big and plump they have an overwhelming urge to climb a plank out of their bin and fall into a bucket. You gotta love self-delivering protein!

Grain is pretty expensive compared to vermicompost. You lose a lot of weight in the process too. I get the impression that you're just working on hypotheticals here.

Very interesting. I like the way you linked the two ideas; flora and fauna if you will. Fish, vegetables and compost for the trolls. Urban farms are returning in the U.S., we even have urban fish farming(Tilapia of course).

Thank you for sharing your ideas with us, I can't wait until I can finally realize some of them. Your videos about these topics will always remain on my "to watch" list until the time is ripe! Thank you, Mr. Knight!

growing plants in his basement to get dough that guy knows whats up haha

If you have the greenthumb, the time, and can create beautiful rich soil, you can grow vegetables and raise fish.. then why bother selling it for profit to then buy food. If you begin to provide your own food, then you save money by not having to buy it at stores, which is a net profit. You can still bless your neighbors, sure. The worm thing, just like raising chickens.. If it's a small operation, it's not worth the time and expense. If it becomes bigger, then you're just a chicken farmer. So, it's less of a side project and more of a straight up business. Raising 30 chickens to eat as food is rewarding, but not going to save you much $ if any when bought.

Best video ever. Faith in humanity restored.

Everything I'm about to say is hypothetical coming from someone with no experience but a reasonably sound ability to think about the technical side of things, if I am in error on any of the points I'm making please let me know. I am assuming you would be having your worms either in a basement or preferably outside in a raised bed of dirt. Also what I am about to describe sounds like more work than it really is because the purpose of this setup is to save you time and effort in the long run . Something to keep in mind regarding vermicompost is that you can easily collect a significant amount of food for your worms just by going for a walk out in nature with the intention of cleaning out some of the weeds or dead foliage and other plant litter and taking a bag or two home with you every time you go out for a walk. This is in addition to what you might acquire by helping other people out with weeding their Gardens or any other number of ways you can help others at no cost other than going home with a bag of food for your worms. As for labor it's actually pretty easy if you understand how to make things easier on yourself what you want to do is have some screening placed down as your bottom layer preferably 3 layers of window screen or whatever comparable screening is cheapest and on top of the three layers of screen you probably want to have chicken wire fencing or something comparable for allowing you to screen out large pieces of material should that ever be something you need to do you can have 2 offset layers of the chicken fence and this completes your basic setup for screening out material but you also need to have some gardeners plastic sheeting lining a drainage ditch around the perimeter of your worm bed or just at one end of your warm bed and have the entire worm bed on a gentle slope towards that end in such a way that the drainage ditch drains out into a collection pit and you just have some wood chips or other appropriate material lining the drainage ditch as a filter material to catch any large pieces that might get washed down out of your worm bed. Now at this point in the project two things will have been accomplished which will simplify some of the otherwise more time and labor intensive tasks you will be capable of flipping and rotating your worms and their bedding simply by grabbing one side of your screening material and lifting it up and over allowing you to then place the fresh material you are adding down and then easily flip and rotate your worms and their bedding over back over on top of that fresh material for them to feed on eliminating the need for you to ever go digging around in the soil or fussing around with hauling multiple buckets around when you can instead with just yourself and one other person quickly turn over an entire several yard area of worms with what I would expect to be greater speed and efficiency then dealing with the buckets. The second area of making things easier on yourself is that instead of you having to go digging around or using other more labor-intensive methods of extracting the processed vermicompost you can simply generously water and hose down your worm beds and have the worm compost get washed out of them along the drainage ditch in to your collection area since it is a fine grain substance easily transported by water and as long as you have something in the drainage ditch to filter out anything larger than the worm compost that's the only thing you'll end up having in your collection area and you can just put old worn out wood chips into your worm bed once it's time to change that out. I am going to be reposting this comment as its own comment on the video since I feel like I've either made some good points here or brought up some erroneous ways of thinking that needs to be addressed. Maybe I'm Wrong here but I feel like once the initial setup has been completed this would actually be easier then growing fruits and vegetables and you should be able to acquire most of the resources required for the process just by getting actively involved in the community and helping people out.

taking you to task on this video!!! Im working to build a farm in my basement an yard!!! thanks for this video!!!

This seems great in concept but my neighbor does this. Don't do it inside, it really stinks. Better than I expected but it will be hard to sell the house. Same with aquaculture. The humity rots wood pretty aggressively...and breeds mold and mildew.

THIS IS MY STARTUP OMG !!!!!!!!!

not a bad idea only thing i would add would be depending on your climate zone you may use different fish in my area i'm looking at catfish because it gets to cold and would cost a lot to keep it in acceptable temps.

That seedling growing out of the worm compost looked like a cannabis seedling.

Great video, thank you for the information.

When feeding Tilapia, do meal worms work if you don't have night crawlers?

*Worms + fish would be a good combo.* The fish prices did increase, since the fish are more scarce in the ocean :-(

Just a heads up with tilapia, they're are an invasive species (in Australia) and they're one of the only fish in Australia with no minimum length for capture meaning if you're in Australia it's catch them for free. About the eating though I wouldn't, they taste like boiled boot without a kilogram of butter and salt. Just a heads up, if you want to start this up in Australia like my friends grow barramundi, fast growing, good meat, easy to take care of in Queensland and north New South Wales and they're not endangered, you do need a permit to sell fish o vegetables in Aus but for the compost it's perfectly legal and is how I made pocket money in the early 2000's Cheers -Aussie Knight

Cool I'll see if my mom is on board with this

compost actually isn't fertilizer and isn't that powerful compared to manure, you just need a lot of free or dirt cheap organic material to make it. You could grow tilapia but they are actually are not primarily meat eaters and eat more algae and water plants, you can't just give them weeds and worms and expect them to thrive.

I like how you're thinking. Please make more such videos.

Thanks For The Information

This was a nice video! Thank you! I am going to do Aquaponics now!

This was so well put together! Thank you!!!

Are earthworm castings different? I’m pretty sure castings are lighter in nutrients. I use it in compost and a mixture with a little perlite for seedlings. Castings are also good for the earthworms from what I remember. It never burned my cannabis seedlings, and they loved it until they out grew their container. There’s a LOT of beneficial microbes in good organic Earthworm castings and the nutrient (major) are fairly low, like 1:0:0.5.... ithink. It’s been a few years sine my cannabis experiment. Very successful, LED grow 300W Platinum (2 P150’s) and I was around an ounce and a half shy of a pound. Lol I vegged until she was a good 4+ feet so maybe 1 and a half moths veg. And 100% ORGANIC, LOTS of mycos, and I did a batch of my own supersoil prior to my 20 or 30 gal transplant. It was a white widow strain but I still can not get over the trichomes produced.... normally organic you suffer in certain areas, but I guess genetics were key. Don’t bother with feminized seeds... to expensive and higher rate of last ditch effort to reproduce. Unless there’s a new method to produce them. Sorry for the rant, it just ok me back a few years ago. I love growing plant. Cannabis is truly the best tho so far.

I have multiple compost piles Three worm bed and just put over eighty large Talopia in my pond Next spring we are going to crank this place up lol

Great video, I`d love to do something like this.

Ehhh.... I wouldn't go with grain. Even with grain being cheap, it's got other uses that constitute better uses. Spent mushroom logs, rotting straw, news paper, and boiled grass clippings are better food sources for worms. As far as that goes though, it really depends on what you want out of your vermiculture. I prefer wood lice as a feed for animals (both poultry and fish). So if an end goal is to be used a food source, i'd probably go with that. Worms are better at decomposing plant matter, in general, but they're more vulnerable to environmental conditions, reproduce more slowly than wood lice, and can be hosts for some parasites (flatworms mostly). Again, it really depends on what your end goal is for your vermiculture.

great idea. very interested. but I am in Ontario Canada. the weather is a little cold. Im not sure if I would be able to do aquaponics in my back yard.

Excellent video. Very informative. Looking forward to doing this !

After the cost if hydroton, ibc's, pumps, valves, timers, building the auto fill valves. it gets expensive fast. I think $1000 would get you a about 20 sqfeet of growing space and maybe 100 fish. Not to mention getting tilapia to reproduce requires a whole different set up.

How can commercial farmers adept? I believe that any change in production can only be achieved by arguing that the profit will increase. So here I am thinking about soil fertilization, increase the quality of each given item you might harvest, not dumping African markets with cheap as European chicken meat, not breeding some hyper-immune close to immortal bacteria, not cutting down amazon rain forest to grow Soja to feed German pigs (58 million slaughtered a year)... guess those are the most important once. Personal note: Many farmers in dry or semi-dry areas use groundwater to water their crops, these water resources (guess what) are not unlimited and are getting emptied since pumping>recharge. Great channel, thanks for your thoughts, cheers

A dozen worms are like $2-3. Id think selling worms would be more of a profit maker than selling tilapia.

Thank you very much sir. this is a great video full of no-nonsense information. thanks

Awesome ideas....... Great for begginer

Great ideas.I like it.

three corrections: 1.) "fish excretion as only fertilizer" in AP - not true, you will run into (at least) iron deficiancy and will have to add chilated iron. 2.) "fish to chose: tilapia", only if you live in warm climate. otherwise you have to heat the water, wich will send your energy bill through the roof and is not at all sustainable. 3.) "worms are the perfect fish food", not true, for many fish worms are not a healthy diet.

Very good information

Plain and simple

3:04 hello clif high 😂😂😂

1:10 red wigglers are the only worms I recommend since they live in dense populations instead of spread out needing their own territory like other worms.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts...

Incredibly optimistic.

vermicompost doesnt burn plants, also you can mix lime stone powder and human hair with the soil

I don't have a basement. I knew I was fucked when I got this house. Damn.

you can grow duck weed also that the fish eat right in the auqaponics system

I was thinking about opening a Brothel. 😀

Thank you for sharing...can you provide details on setting up a backyard aquaponics farm? Equipment specs etc

Those are prize winning size worms, what is you favorite grains to feed them? I feed mine coffee grounds, eggshells and banana peels. They are not as big as yours, good job!

Thank you for sharing your very informative article about farming!!!!

thanks for sharing video

I love the "talk ... into" part... :D

Thanks for the piece of information.How i wish i would get a printout.

Awesome one bro !!

Excellente!

Great idea! Gratitude dude!🤘😎🤘

Thank you for sharing your cool ideas with us. :)

Do you actually do these yourself? I'm highly interested your walnut tree/mushroom/ginseng idea and was wondering if you have tried this or know someone who is doing this method. I'd like to contact you via email or something for some advice. I'd happily make a donation if it's useful!

One major thing to note is that tilapia need warm water. They cannot survive in cooler waters.

Low heat stirling cycle engine water pumps that operates off solar vacuum tube hot water heaters during the day then stored hot water in heat sinks during the night for hydroponic gardens without the use of electricity. 😊

thank you this info was VERY helpful

Have you run an aquaponics system b4 ?? I have and i can guarantee you plants needs more than just fish poop to grow to its full potential. Unless low feeding plants.

thank you so much awesome video I really learned a lot

Awesome idea

Not sure if the viewers are aware, but these are general ideas to start a business. He is not telling you exactly all the ins and outs and specific details. This is an ides to research and delve into. He is the light bulb that flashes on and your brain and fingers are the researchers. Obviously we have laws and regulations, obviously there is trial and error, obviously there are great details and balances within the systems. This isn't a how to video. It is a "good job idea to start at home". Btw.... I love these videos. I would love to see your personal mead making videos while in action

Yeah, and nobody tell you that one system at family level takes 2 years at least to break even. btw I don't buy that 4 times faster.

Excellent video!

Eh man you are Dope AF, I was looking at creating Vermicompost but was a bit sceptical thanks to your video, ama go for it.

*QUADROOOOOOOOPPAAHHLLIINNGGGG YOUR GORROWING SPACE!!!*

have you tried any of this or are you just making up stuff????

That would be fun.

this video is amazing. thanks

Ok, everything is alright, just one problem: I don't have a backyard or basement...

I know what my life will be now, thank you

There must be an understanding of this self sufficient opportunity is a 2 fold approach. Determine if u want 1) self sufficient means of feeding the family & reducing food cost or 2) becoming large enough to become a profitable business. The first is $1500 for a reasonable sized aquaculture & small veggie farm. The latter could cost several thousand & still not make a livable income or even close & in fact can cost u monthly income. No what you want to achieve & stay focused. Work or volunteer for others already doing what your interest are in achieving going forward. Best way to save disappointment & cash.

I love your videos you're a smart guy

great job of connecting the dots. I was looking into this. what about safety certifications/ business license , etc ? any research on that?

Κατάλαβα αμέσως ότι είσαι Έλληνας από την προφορά σου έκανα sub γιατί βρίσκω το περιεχόμενο ενδιαφέρον. Σου εύχομαι τα καλύτερα και καλή συνέχεια!

Grow ginsing and mushrooms. Ginsing takes up to two years but very profitable, mushrooms only take a few weeks to two months and is profitable, just not like ginsing.

The most profitable job you can do in your back yard is literally, Making meth.

You can use goldfish and guppies as well

Haha nice pot plant at 3:30

What type of worm to feed the tilapias?

Great video what about parasites in worm them in fish?

I have a friend he started growing mushrooms apparently he is living off the income. Make a video on that thanks

Awesome, best of the best tech 😘😘😘

That shop in your links below is closed as of August 31 2021

Great ideas

legal parabéns

Yeah, that's what I am going to do when I buy my pit on land, it'll be fenced in and I'll have small green house and I'll be checking the land every single day for a year and eventually it'll be self sustainable and as the fish grow the plants grow and as the plants grow the worms grow... and so forth... and it'll be a free money making machine that can feed me and give me earth to grow more food

thx for sharing this one.