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So you want to buy a farm?

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Re: So you want to buy a farm?

#151

Post by pvaldes »

mgiampapa wrote: post #57
dehrmann wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's the other big that gardeners (especially home covid gardeners) forget: almost nothing you want to grow on your "coupla acres" has enough calories to sustain you. Potatoes are probably the only exception. Everything else--beans, wheat, corn--is a pain to grow and process, especially at a small scale.

The sweet spot is when you have passions about products, expensive things or impractical crops to scale... We have a homestead with acreage in Hawaii. Chickens and eggs are zero effort. We don't even need to feed them, just collect the eggs. We grow heirloom tomatoes in the greenhouse because they are crazy expensive to ship from the mainland and we love them. Likewise, we also grow a lot of white pineapples because…

Potatoes and eggs are a reasonable project for starting. Fruits need some planification, but are also a reasonable goal at long term. Veggies, tomatoes, milk, soft fruits, any meat... even chicken meat, are more hard and need lots of planification.

Re: So you want to buy a farm?

#152

Post by autumn_unlaces »

selfinvariant wrote: post #46

I know that the motivation behind the question is outside of the blog post, but I'm really curious, and would love to ask folks here, what is so exciting about living on a farm? Is it about independence? Or radical self reliance? As a person who lived my whole life in cities, I have a very hard time to find an appeal in a lifestyle like the one described in an article.Can someone share what they like / appreciate abo…

From a US perspective I imagine people read Walden and want to have a life in the woods.

Re: So you want to buy a farm?

#153

Post by emilecantin »

LunaSea wrote: post #94
exolymph wrote: post #38

My friend Travis Corcoran recently ran a very successful Kickstarter — $95k+ raised — for a book called Escape the City which is a practical guide to the non-fantasy version of this dream. > Seven years ago I moved from the city to a farm where I taught myself to garden, raise animals & cook "farm to table". I show you how. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tjic/escape-the-city-a-... If you're interested there's a…

Why would someone need 90K to write a book while already having a profession? Interviewing three people is also apparently worth 5K. And the book's photos are black & white ...

The kickstarter was for 2K, which seems like a reasonable "minimum sales" target to start a printing run. The fact that 90K was raised seems to prove there is demand for that kind of book.

Re: So you want to buy a farm?

#154

Post by Frost1x »

imglorp wrote: post #137
nicbou wrote: post #127

People vastly underestimate how much work "simple" lifestyles are. It's the same with van life. It sounds great in practice, but simple things like showering, defecating and preserving food become very difficult. I suspect that with farming or homesteading, you forego things like financial safety and the ability to take vacations. I value those things a lot. In my opinion, the best way out is a lifestyle business, or…

> you forego things like financial safety and the ability to take vacations. This sounds like there's a need for some kind of part-time deal. * farm work share - maybe also called a kibbutz or commune - you can take vacations and share the ownership, work, and benefit * farm-b-and-b - there's a regular owner keeping things on the rails but you can stay a week, eat fresh eggs and clean the barns, and then go home at t…

As labor markets reduce financial safety through job instability and push for hypercompetitiveness, I'm not sure farming is any different than most peoples' jobs in terms of leisure time or financial stability.

My grandparents and relatives farmed quite a bit and I helped during summers. It's not glamorous but its less stressful than most positions I've recently worked in and has more opportunity to take necessary breaks.

Re: So you want to buy a farm?

#155

Post by at_a_remove »

person22 wrote: post #123
raptorraver wrote: post #40

I'm starting to sell my city apartment this week and we are going to move to the country side to start a small scale farm! I've worked in the farm all my youth and this summer we lived on the place and did some small scale gardening. I don't have any (at least many) false thoughts about how cool and romantic it will be. It will be hard and frustrating at times but waay more fulfilling than the current tech job. We're…

I work full time (now remotely) and live on 32 acres of woods and fields. It used to be farmed but hadn't been for a while when I bought it 12 years ago. My initial idea was to grow produce to sell but it didn't work out. Here are some of the problems I encountered: 1.) Deer - we are overrun with white tail deer. If I don't surround anything I grow with 6ft welded wire fence, it doesn't last a week. I have set up ele…

Couple of questions on behalf of some friends who are dabbling with produce on their property:

1) I have heard about how tremendously troublesome deer are, but have also heard good things about the "impossible to purchase in quantities less than a ton" Dippel's Oil ... has that worked at all for you?

2) So the rodents are burrowing under the raised beds and up to get to the roots? I didn't realize they would go that far down. How far down are the "walls" of the raised beds?

Re: So you want to buy a farm?

#156

Post by carapace »

selfinvariant wrote: post #46

I know that the motivation behind the question is outside of the blog post, but I'm really curious, and would love to ask folks here, what is so exciting about living on a farm? Is it about independence? Or radical self reliance? As a person who lived my whole life in cities, I have a very hard time to find an appeal in a lifestyle like the one described in an article.Can someone share what they like / appreciate abo…

It's really fun.

A long time ago a friend of mine was trying to convince me to try surfing. He finally got me in the water when he said, "Dude, when was the last time your were tired out from having fun?"

(It didn't go well. At one point I managed to actually land on his back, surfboard and all. But that's beside the point.)

Re: So you want to buy a farm?

#157

Post by zenxblr »

bluGill wrote: post #131

Missing from the above is step one: go to your local university and learn how to farm. Every area is different so what is smart in one area is bad in another. This is why you need to find a local university: researchers there know what works in your area. this article repeats a lot of common "sustainable farming" and "save the soil" type phases, but what most people think is sustainable is in fact harmful in the long…

What the univs around here have been teaching have killed soils and the ecosystem to near collapse levels :/ There's a need for those who can afford to be patient for 4-5 years to try regenerative methods. And many farms have gotten there, esp given the tropical climate and monsoons that we have.

Re: So you want to buy a farm?

#158

Post by telesilla »

adwww wrote: post #81
brnt wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how things are in your jurisdiction, but here in Europe making a profit on farming just isn't possible. This sector lives and dies by subsidies. You're going to have a cash crop or market the hell out of your product, both seem opposite to the goal of starting the farm in the first place.

My family make more profit renting an old workers cottage on the farm as an Airbnb than they get revenue from the entire organic diary operation.

Without the dairy operation I'd suspect they'd have less land, less beauty, less reason to live where they are - the workers cottage wouldn't be so charming if it were on the edge of a lifestyle block 15 minutes from the city. Don't discount the value of their investment!

Re: So you want to buy a farm?

#159

Post by vram22 »

yalogin wrote: post #2

Is there a similar article for farms in the US? This is a unique perspective from India and appreciate learning about it.

Yes, somewhat at least. Gabe Brown's Dirt To Soil book (haven't read it, but seen some of his videos (~1 and 2 hours length), and my guess is the main points of the book should be roughly the same as the videos. You can see them too, on YouTube). I have mentioned his work a few times in HN comments linked below[1].

Others have, too. Search for those comments by searching for his name in the search box at the bottom of HN thread pages, powered by Algolia, or directly do it at hn.algolia.com.

[1]:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24996445

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24827234

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24669509

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24669458

Make sure to watch some of his videos too, not missing Treating The Farm as an Ecosystem", a 3-part series by Living Web Farms on YouTube.

As a related aside, Living Web has other good videos too, including one called "Ferment Everything" (or "Anything") or such name, by Meredith Leigh.

Re: So you want to buy a farm?

#160

Post by vram22 »

vram22 wrote: post #159
yalogin wrote: post #2

Is there a similar article for farms in the US? This is a unique perspective from India and appreciate learning about it.

Yes, somewhat at least. Gabe Brown's Dirt To Soil book (haven't read it, but seen some of his videos (~1 and 2 hours length), and my guess is the main points of the book should be roughly the same as the videos. You can see them too, on YouTube). I have mentioned his work a few times in HN comments linked below[1]. Others have, too. Search for those comments by searching for his name in the search box at the bottom o…

I think I read somewhere that he (Gabe Brown) is one of the 25 most influential farmers in the US (at least in the regen ag field, if not overall). Edit: Googled "Gabe Brown 25 influential".

First hit:

https://www.no-tillfarmer.com/authors/379-gabe-brown#:~:text....

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