Full Time

Anyone on here trap full time "primary source of income during winter" non adc? Any advice?

Prayer?

Can you trap and finish 500 plus Dakota coyotes? If so your getting close, but what will you do when the coyote market tanks

Stay single.

Save every penny you can from your other work and you may only have to borrow a little to get yourself to the end of trapping season.

Stay single and no kids, get a good seasonal job and collect unemployment in the winter.

There is a couple guys I know from SD that work road construction during the warm months. They get laid off come freeze up and they work traps from then until the thaw. I would like to try this also.

Put as much effort and heart into a career as you do trapping, and you'll climb the corporate ladder so fast that pretty soon you can take a month or two off to trap every year.

Leisure trap, on paid vacation, stress free, and give your fur to the kid down the street.




Hindsight is 20/20

Consider health insurance and retirement plans for fulltime trappers.

Get a Sugar Momma.. One that brings home the Bacon and Cooks it too!

Consider all of the above!

If you live in a small town with cheap housing and had very little fixed costs or debts AND were an extremely prolific trapper, you might be able to make comparable money (after your trapping expenses) to do it during the fall and winter. Someone mentioned health insurance and in a lot of rural SD, its hard to find such without working for a larger, more capitalized company. Families can get on Medicaid but its almost impossible for a single guy to get on it-- not that I'm endorsing welfare health insurance just stating what's out there. If you're a single guy, you could forego paying for health insurance and roll the dice that nothing happens to you. Not that I'm recommending that but lots of young guys have rolled that dice for a long time. Sometimes the gamble worked out, sometimes not. As for putting away for retirement, there are some very successful and most likely frugal people on this forum that have built up nice retirement nest eggs without high paying jobs. It takes sustained discipline to live modestly and save up but it can be done.

A couple of stories of "making a living from trapping"

I have a cousin who's husband was a trapper during the season--mostly mrats and mink, don't really know if he upland critter trapped-- and did steel "junking" during the warm season. She didn't work at that time, being a full-time mom of about 5 kid-- this was the mid-1970s through probably early 1990s. They lived in a very small town. I never asked about their finances but I suspect they didn't have much. Her parents were farming at the time and this family probably got meat for cheap from the family. My counsin's husband died at a young age (early 50s). She could surely skin mrats fast!!

Another story happened when I was selling some finished mrat skins to a "local" buyer back when rats were high. This buyer is located outside of a small town that doesn't have much but a handful of jobs and about 20+ miles from a larger town that actually had jobs. Before the buyer looked at my hides, he was sorting through a bunch of carcass rats that had been brought in by a local younger guy. Of course, carcass rats were only bringing about half of what finished rats were so this young guy was probably getting somewhere between $2-2.50 on average for his critters. During the banter going on, the young guy stated that he had just been laid-off from a job in the larger ("larger" is relative term here) town and now he could rat trap full-time for the rest of the winter. When I asked him why he wasn't finishing his rats, the young guy said, he "wanted to spend more time with his very young children". I thought to myself, if I was in his position, I'd surely be finishing rats but maybe living in this small town, between catching 2-3 dozen rats a day through the ice and collecting x number of weeks of unemployment, and maybe his family on Title 19 for health care, he really "didn't need the money". Don't know the whole situation or the outcome. I sure hope he got re-hired come the spring because I'm sure there wasn't any cushion in the family income to go much longer than 3-4 months without daddy having a larger and more dependent pay check. Then again, perhaps I was just judging him too quickly.

Everybody has their own choices to make...

That sounds to me like a situation that would have resolved itself in the future if given enough time.

Buy a ice cream Tasty Freeze and close it in the winter and go trapping but trapping alone would be hard to make ends meet.

Back in the 70s it was a different story as EVERYTHING had a good value to it so a guy had a LOT of options to make a few bucks and even the off season work was there in the supply end.

Not unless you are independently wealthy...in this market anyway.

collect unemployment so you can trap? that's despicable.

I haven't bought it yet but does anyone have a review on the book "Fur Profit"?

stay single and your pockets will jingle

OP, full time trapper nowadays is a kin to saying your applying for a 35mm film developer position. It's a thing of the past, imo.

Pass thru, many on this site do so.

Real Advice... go buy the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

Build some cash flow assets like he talks about in that book. To be a full time trapper, you’re going to need income outside of it and in my opinion the best way is passive income. This is what my wife and I are doing at a young age to open up the rest of our lives in which I plan on full time trapping whenever I want and for however long I want.

If you can dream it, it can happen. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.

I wrote it, and no it won't help you make a full time living trapping I would take Cody13's advice, build assets and passive income sources that will allow you the freedom to trap during season regardless of the market.

Rich Dad Poor Dad is a great book and that is awesome that your getting into passive income! Its awesome trust me. I was looking more on the lines of people that find more value then market fur. i.e. selling skulls , tanned fur selling, garment selling or anything I haven't thought of to make more with the line.

jwood what happened to the podcast!

LOL! I wish you well.

Find places that will pay you to trap. Then you make money while you’re making money. Of course you probably need to be retired already or single with no future of romance or stability.

Need to start with two million dollars so when you retire you will have a million.

He probably won't find many of those types of situations if he wants to stay solely in South Dakota. Maybe there are a few large farm or ranch operations that will pay people to trap but I think its few and far between. There's a "big" farmer in the western side of my county who was the state Sec of Ag at one time. Some of his land borders my brother's rural place so I sent this a guy a letter one year asking him if I could trap some of his pasture. He e-mailed me back and thanked me for asking but said, "I have a couple of hired hands who love to trap" so the answer was no. Do you think this guy paid his "boys" extra cash to trap his place...? Highly doubtful, and in fact he may have reduced their wages by giving them the option to trap his land. Land onwership here is way different than a lot of the timberland in Georgia or elsewhere in the Southeast.

New episode every week, haven't missed one yet. Goes up Saturday or Sunday. If it's not updating on your feed, you can listen straight from the website, ep 58 went up last night.

When I started out trapping I had nothing,,now many years later lucky for me I still have most of that left.

If you're willing to work hard travel to different areas/states and not live in a nice big new house on 40 acres I think it's possible. Seems this post stirred up the most negative comments and advice. Being single definitely helps finances but a wife/family can also provide the motivation to get up early everyday to check traps, put up fur, or set more traps to create more money.

Just do it

X2

Trapping is like logging if your going to do it full time,you gotta want it.

Agreed
There are those that make things happen, the 1%ers. And those that don’t.

Whenever you follow and unconventional path be prepared for the ugly critics, often the ones too afraid to try, too narrow minded to get creative or failures at a similar endeavor.

It likely won’t be easy cause if it was they’d encourage ya!

you need to buy some acres in a state with a variety of furbearers and winter weather. not to much winter though. you need to raise a garden and grow a few acres of hay and field corn. raise a few hogs and steers. do your own butchering and canning. harvest your corn by hand too. buy an old corn sheller and a mill for cracking to feed hogs, chickens, and feeder cattle. sell or trade a hog or two or steer ready to butcher for a little cash. put your hay up with a scythe and fork. heat with wood. electric lights are cheaper than lanterns unless you use the old style with a wick rather than coleman lanterns. if you get electricity don't use it for anything but lights and maybe a well pump if you want running water. cure and can the meat you butcher and heat with wood.

or get you a job for wages. lots easier. put money back to subsidize your trapping in the winter. you will make less than you do working for wages most years but you can break if your careful even in bad years. need to be adaptable. you need to be able to switch from coyotes to beaver for example as things change. when coons are hitting a lick catch coons.

vehicle will be a problem. the days of selling 100 coyotes and buying a top of the line 4wd pickup are gone. at the end of WW!! a lot of surplus jeeps were used as tractors. they were cheap and could be made to work. I think one of the small 4wd pickups could be used the same way for plowing your garden and corn field. you could build yourself a wooden boat for water trapping.

your going to need to be a hard worker, inventive , and mechanically inclined


or go to Hollywood. marry Jennifer Lawrence, let her pay all the bills and the rest of us will be jealous

I do every winter like others have said good seasonal job helps. This season concrete season has not stopped and were working full time still but I've managed to still have a great season. It takes line management long hours and very very hard work ethic most will fail that attempt it. You have to be well rounded example this season coyotes and grey fox are my targeted species some season muskrats and beaver and some seasons even red fox when prices favor red fox. An understanding wife or girlfriend is also important if you choose the non single route