Most effective method of making money?
You should sell meals instead of raw food (it adds huge value to it). It is actually possible to sell meals to the traders or visitors from other factions who won't buy sculptures but give fair price for all kind of meals.( and frequency of space traders is reduced highly).
Just keep a high level all-time cook and make him/her cook all the time (keep a forever fine meals job if possible: market value is 25 space bucks). If you don't have a skilled cook who can cook all the time, use someone else to make nutrient paste meals, which also sells for higher value than simple meals and doesn't need high skill level.
As far as quality is concerned the meals sell at same price if not at very low hit points.
This is a screenshot of my colony with all year around growth, Look at the quantity and the wealth of fridge !
Breeding Animals - I can usually sell a small group for about 100 each and you really dont need to do anything other than have a male and female of a species and make sure foxes or panthers dont get to them. They will keep breeding on their own.
Beer - Have a large patch of field dedicated to hops. Have a brewery to transform the hops into wort. Have a large amount of barrels to ferment the wort into beer. This requires time and some effort. The hops have to grow, you have to assign someone to make wort out of the hops, and then it requires more time as the wort ferments into beer. Rinse and repeat.
Art - I usually have an artist creating the most intricate sculptures to sell. This isnt exactly renewable though, since stone is finite and you have to start depending on traders for it eventually.
From the things already said. I always make money also from selling the human meat and human leather (mostly the leather), when a tribe attacks it's always a massacre. And it's much more efficient than to burn or bury corpses.
- You need a colonist who is Psychopat (doesn't care about butchering ppl)
- You need a freezer for corpses (small is enough) - don't forget double walls, doors
- You need a big freezer for human meat - don't forget double walls, doors, you can have a quite big freezer with just 2 coolers
- Big storage for the human skins (they are ugly)
- Set-up the area around the butcher table in a way that only psychopat can butcher people (so your other conolist don't get mood debuff) //EDIT: You can now assign butcher job to exact person.
Your other colonist will get just -6 debuff that your colony butchered humanlike. So butcher them all at once, it's easy to deal with just -6 for couple of days.
The disadvangate is that it may take a while to get a trader who is willing to buy that.
Here is example of the small set-up I have in my current colony with shown area restriction:
