A growing number of young Americans are leaving desk jobs to farm

The branch manager at a previous job ran a hobby farm that I'm not sure made a profit but seemed to make him pretty happy to run. During the various harvests, it was also a nice benefit for us since he'd bring in generous amounts of produce to give away. I did get some odd looks in the afternoon getting on the bus while balancing three watermelons. Not a bad problem to have.

Only in the land of North American industrial mega-corp agriculture would 80 acres be "micro" anything.

The farms next to me (I live rural) are 20-30 acres and are farmed by professional subcontractors that employ dozens of (immigrant seasonal) labour for picking etc. and use heavy machinery that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and are shared between multiple farms.

Likely if your old boss operated a 'micro' farm it was only using a fraction of that acreage.

Also 3 acres is not a "garden", it's a very labour intensive high production "market garden" and could in fact be called a farm of a type. That's 360x360 feet, and maybe you can't visualize that, but it's large. It would require machinery and hired labour to manage. No single individual could plant weed and cultivate that single-handedly. My garden on my acreage is 100x100 and if I could actually keep up with it would easily produce enough for 5 or 6 families.

I'm not saying it's a profitable farm, but it's a kind of farming. You could easily produce $10-$20k of revenue out of intensively market gardening something of that size.

But even more if you were to do cut flowers or something higher profit. My neighbour is very profitable with lavender and has about 3 acres of it and makes quite a bit of money off just that. But he is connected deeply to the flower business, so knows the game well.

A 3 acre high quality vineyard could produce $10k in revenue just selling the grapes where I am. If you made that into wine (capital intensive and regulatory hassle and not allowed on that small of acreage, but still) you could actually make many multiples of that and make a good living once you covered your upfront costs.

So yes, it's possible to 'farm' on small acreages and make an 'ok' living if you don't mind busting your ass. Just not the stereotype of what people think of as farming (coy/sorn/wheat/sorghum cash cropping, etc.)

Myself I have a bad back now, so no thanks on the pay cut, I'll keep these things as a hobby :-)

I spent some time working and living on a farm run by someone under 35.

I'm not sure how much their personality and lack of managerial skills ultimately contributed to their inability to turn a profit, as they certainly had cashflow, but it also occurred to me while I was working there that the kind of farm we had (10 - 20 acre, general organic produce) was a nice thought but without extensive community support (something they never bothered to foster) they aren't likely to survive. It costs a lot to maintain farm equipment and pay salary.

Niche, high-efficiency, high-automation, vertical farms are something worth exploring, and I have read about the success of others doing things this way. It's something I continue to think about.

One way to engender a thriving locally run community of farmers would be to establish autonomous chapters of a larger organization that provides consistent expectations among the communities they operate in.

The farms would offer membership plans, which would be actively solicited and advertised. The membership plan would include discount access up to a certain weight in produce / meat / dairy each month, in exchange for a small fee and a few hours a month of unpaid labor, such as indoor/outdoor farming, planting, solicitation and selling goods at local markets.

Importantly, the organization would be nonprofit and all proceeds would go back into the farms. Market research needs to be done to establish the optimal ratio of acreage to service radius, but I think it is an idea worth exploring.

Put it this way - if you bought your apples from the grocery store and sold them in your stall, it would probably sell just as well. It's the experience of going to a market and buying from a stall that people like, NOT the produce.

What do you mean by quality? Fruits and vegetables in the US tend to have much higher visual quality than elsewhere.