>As long as one doesn’t own land and has to rely on hired labour, there is no point in farming near a city. As a hobby, yes. Otherwise, no.
so, my understanding is that most of the farming that happens outside of CA, cereal crops and the like, is super capital intensive, but not very labor intensive. On the farm I was speaking of before that has been in my family for some time (though it has consolidated; there's one nuclear family that operates land that used to belong to a bunch of family units) - that one farm is mostly operated by one couple (and, of course, a whole bunch of equipment) mostly growing things like corn, soybeans and wheat.
Of course, the sort of vegetables you see grown in California are a lot more labor intensive.
I actually think your perception of rent vs buying land might be reversed? Land near cities is in high demand for speculation... for building houses on. So the purchase price would be higher than rural land. But if you are renting it out for agricultural use? Growing cereal crops near town isn't going to generate a whole lot more value than growing cereal crops in very rural areas, so I don't imagine the rent is that much different (though there's probably more "I can sell it to a developer" clauses in land near towns) - I mean, the thing is that a lot of places have zoning restrictions that make it really hard to convert ag land to residential use.
Again, the equation is probably different if you are farming vegetables; I don't really care if my cereal grains are shipped halfway across the country, but I'm willing to pay a significant premium for local, fresh vegetables.
On the other hand, unless you are farming fresh vegetables and charging a premium, there's no benefit to farming near a city, and even then, it's probably small. So, uh, were I able to, I'd probably delete my comment that you responded to, just 'cause the question was "would you see a bump by moving your farm to a urban area" not "could you make a decent living at farming, and would you need to be educated"