Farm Diversity - Why Diversify Into Storage?

FARMDIVERSITY

WHY DIVERSIFY INTO STORAGE?

The benefits of diversifying into providing storage solutions

Farmers and rural land owners are in unique possession of a highly sought after commodity - space

As people’s lives are becoming busier and more cluttered, they are increasingly looking for storage solutions for the bits and pieces in their lives that they simply don’t have room for at home. Farmers are ideally located to take advantage of that high demand for storage space, by utilising surplus farm buildings, or secure yard areas to bring in an additional income stream to their farming enterprises.

If you are considering diversifying your farm and are looking for a venture which is relatively low cost to start up, low maintenance, and in high demand, you could do far worse than considering diversifying into providing storage solutions.

There are numerous reasons self-storage offers a real benefit to many people. Moving home, transitioning after a divorce, needing to store bulky seasonal items (for example such as large Christmas ornaments), storing business supplies, or sometimes people simply don’t have room at home for bulky items such as bikes, lawn mowers, caravans, or even boats. There is growing demand too, from businesses for self storage solutions to fit their needs. Businesses, especially those based online, are able to take advantage of the flexibility that self-storage offers- with no business rates to pay and the ability to rent exactly the amount of space that they need. The boom in online deliveries has also led to a surge in demand for more rural and semirural warehouse space from companies looking to improve their rural logistics.

What facilities you have, available space, and access to your farm, will all affect what sort of items you want to/ are able to store. You might simply want to utilise an area of hard standing, or a disused farm building.

You might want to take advantage of your unique location and offer storage tailored to your local area (for example, if you live near the coast, there is high demand for winter storage of boats, yachts, jet skis, dinghies and the like). Either way, there are many opportunities for land owners to take advantage of the growing market for both short and long term storage solutions.

Whilst items such as vehicles, boats, trailers etc are perfectly able to be stored outdoors, undercover and/ or weatherproof storage will always demand a premium price. Shipping containers don’t require a huge amount of space, and are a relatively inexpensive outlay, which can quickly pay for themselves. As well as being easily scalable, they offer the benefit of

being able to provide immediate, secure, dry storage space, whilst only requiring a minimum of a level site.

With the demand for accessible storage space for both business and personal use increasing, farmers and rural landowners are in the ideal position to take advantage of the possibilities that offering storage solutions could bring to their farm.

The Business Barn is the leading free to use diversification website, dedicated to providing ideas, inspiration and rural business advice to diversifying farmers and rural landowners, as well as connecting them to businesses who can provide advice, products and services for all their diversification needs.

Storage On Site

Storage on Site is a family run and industry leading, nationwide supplier of shipping containers and on-site accommodation, with reputable experience spanning nearly 6 decades.

With a wide range of sizes and colours always ready to ship, our high quality containers are built to the highest specifications and perfect for numerous projects, large and small, and are especially suited to diversity projects such as self storage centres. If you require something unique, we have on-site modification facilities at our head office in Southampton.

Ordering is an extremely simple process, offering very competitive pricing and always with a customer-first, personal and friendly service, and with no hidden extras ever, the price you are quoted is the price you pay.

Storage on Site owns outright its large fleet of crane-assisted delivery and aftersales vehicles, meaning that from your order right through to delivery, you’re

always talking to the same team, often with just one point of contact. This also ensures you get the fastest response times from your initial point of enquiry. We also offer added value with our free of charge site visits, to help assess, plan and advise how to best manage the accessibility, location and setup for your project.