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Ask HN: What are profitable things to do with fallow land?

1 points by aneeqdhk ↗ HN
I live in an urban area in India, in one of the major cities. I see that there's a lot of fallow land towards the outskirts, with decent proximity to the city-center.

These lands are no longer used by farmers due to degradation of quality and also better economic opportunities for them elsewhere.

What are some things one can do with these lands profitably, with minimal capital investment?

5 comments

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anenefan
I've seen the same around larger towns my way, but in my instance, I dare say that ground is not farmed as it has been purchased by developers as a buffer or merely the remainder of a larger parcel of land they needed to buy to complete their project. Also depending on regulations might be dumping excess materials from footings of buildings as well as bulk dirt from dressing or cleaning up a building site.

From time to time some people do try to utilise ground that is right beside their own property even if it's just becomes a larger garden ... from what I see of it, a lot of the time it doesn't work out.

Unless you can buy this land cheap or rent it at a fixed rate long term five years minimum, ten is better, I think you'd be wasting your time. The #1 problem people who might do this on the hand shake of the land owner / company director(s) would run into is realisation. Realisation occurs when your efforts prove there is or look like money to be made, and attitudes shifts to where the land owner would like a bigger cut or simply insist it was only for a year or two and you should leave.

If you can secure the land via a rent agreement, then they next challenge is matching a crop with the climate ... then with the soil quality.

aneeqdhk
Thanks for the response! I'm looking at it more from a business POV. I'm assuming I can get the land for decent rates. I don't want to use it for farming, because of lack of expertise, plus longer turnaround time.

The usual stuff comes to mind: paintball arena, minimal restaurant, storage yard etc. but wanted to know if there's something innovative that I haven't thought of as yet.

anenefan
Right the fallow description pushed me towards agriculture was what you had in mind.

Vacant land if you can acquire suitable agreement over three or more years could have many minimal business activities.

I've been watching someone convert a former paddock into what I'd guess is a motorbike track with jumps. They've been slowly working at it for a couple of years.

With a wide area and plenty of room it'd also be ideal for a training area for those who wanted to start learning up on getting skills to operate different machinery. Even trucks and tipping so someone can get some experience. I got a fork lift ticket when I was back from dropping out of uni, from a guy who could certify fork lift driving tickets. All he had were a couple of forklifts (may have simply borrowed them for the weekend) and offering training while having an agreement with owners of the large garage to train on the weekends, less than 20 years later, he had expanded to many other machines (coal mines are in my area,) a number of training points, a large full time successful business.

aneeqdhk
Ah right! I think I'll post this again, with `vacant` as the keyword. My bad!

Thanks for the tip on forklift & similar training tools - super useful, has got some juices flowing.