Second the bokashi method. As a composter in Minnesota, we stay pretty cold for quite a long time. I swapped to bokashi in my basement and ferment a ton over the winter. Once its finished, I dump it into a large container outside to freeze for the winter, and in the spring either direct bury into my garden beds that like a huge dose of fertilization, or put it into my hot pile to jumpstart for the spring (it heats up a pile sooooo fast).
I personally don’t feed bokashi to my worms because
- it stinks (normally its sealed in an air-tight bucket so you can’t smell it… feeding it to worms exposes it)
- the worms can’t eat that volume (bokashi can ferment anything, so everything goes in; meat, dairy, citrus, etc. Between my wife and I we ended the winter with over 30 gallons of very finely chopped material fermented… which was probably 100+ pounds in total)
- the worms don’t like the acidity. Bokashi is anaerobic fermentation, which produces acidic compounds, and it takes ages to adjust your worms to that PH and going slightly too heavy on a feeding can cause a mass worm escape, since the acid will absorb and distribute throughout the soil (they can’t really escape by just balling in a corner)
Are you looking for this to be passive income? Or a full time job? Clear cutting a half or full hectare and doing intensive market gardening can almost always turn a profit. But it’s a hard industry requiring lots of knowledge and tons of work/time (think 6 days a week for at least half the year).
You can utilize the rest of the forest as sustainable forestry, using the cut wood for wood chips for the farm, and interplanting critical native wildflowers to boost pollinators.
Plenty of space to do an apiary (bee keeping) for extra income selling the honey.
And on the side you can do mushrooms like the other commentor said. It can be a relatively low amount of work once you’ve mastered the technique.
And all of this can be a net benefit to the land. Losing a few trees can open up a forest to allow better long term growth, increase top soil over time (via organic no-till gardening) and support native pollinators via human-maintained wild spaces.