It is known that small perturbations of a Fredholm operator L have nulls of dimension not larger than dirnN(L). In this paper for any given positive integer κ≤ dimN(L)we prove that there is a perturbation of L which has an exactlyκ-dimensional null. Actually,our proof gives a construction of the perturbation. We further apply our result to concrete examples of differential equations with degenerate homoclinic orbits, showing how many independent homoclinic orbits can be bifurcated from a perturbation.