Ask HN: Did I make a mistake jumping on the homestead bandwagon?

Folks underestimate the community aspect of church. It was also key for us in building a network. Met some wonderful friends there that have helped us and we've helped them. Same with my kid's school friends and various other things like the co-op and even the local bars.

I can’t for the life of me remember the name but there’s a site that’s kind of a Couch Surfing/Airbnb/Craigslist mashup where people can post a room or a property available in exchange for a certain amount of work each day/week/month. Some people will post a typical home for a week on the condition the occupant feeds and walks the dog while they’re away but a lot of the listings were for rooms on a farm in exchange for a few hours of work each day. I used it once in Spain with a friend and it was a ton of fun. It was really hard work even though I suspect it was “easy” work by farming standards.

Perhaps someone here knows the site and will chime in with the name because if you have a spare room or two and enjoy meeting new people it might be an affordable way to get a bit of help.

TLDR; You can have both, but going full rural homestead is hard.

I have a 2 acre tropical fruit orchard in North Florida with 80+ fruits that don't grow here natively, and I'd like to turn it into a side business eventually, but for now I work at a FAANG remotely and my wife is in management. You don't have to give up your life to dip your feet in. I do have Zillow fantasies about 50 acres in the tropics or 100s of rural acres but I temper that with the loss of quality of life. If I'm going to risk everything and start something of my own, it won't be on farming margins, it'll be chasing tech profits.

My great grandfather homesteaded in Montana and North Dakota, dances with wolves style. He had hundreds of acres and built wealth. This is completely different than Youtube homesteaders who build minifarms on 5-10 acres and open the equivalent of a petting zoo. The land and the work is bondage and you can't free yourself from it unless you hire help to do the work, generate more profit per unit of work than industrial farming, or find a profitable ancillary activity. Here are what I've seen be some of the success scenarios:

1. Market Gardens - Look at Curtis Stone or Jim Kovaleski who make pretty good money farming peoples yards. This route requires selling, entrepreneurship, hard work, lack of flexibility. Curtis now makes money from books/workshops/etc in addition to his farms which he has help for.

2. Agrotourism - Make money off the experience of visiting your farm. You will need to build an experience people will want to visit/pay for, and probably require products to sell, and require a steady supply of wealthy customers (example: https://www.congareeandpenn.com/agritourism).

3. Get Youtube Rich - Make supplementary money from Youtube/Patreon, use it to grow your farm and switch to one of the other activities.

4. Online Sales - Use your internet presence to sell plants, seeds, books, workshops, guides, Amazon affiliate money. Pete Kanaris of GreenDreams (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwgfS1k7n0c) had a homestead and market garden and edible permaculture landscaping business, but has rapidly grown into a major online nursery with tons of employees.

5. Own a Nonprofit/Educational Co-op? - Teach people to farm in exchange for their labor to give you the freedom to remove yourself occasionally. Something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmkgbS8RQ2k maybe.

Additionally, you need to be maximizing the value of every single inch of your land. How much land do you have, what type of environment is it, what growth zone, how are you currently making money, what're you growing, how many helpers do you have, what are your current future goals?

I am of the generation of "back to the landers" that did what you are you doing back in the 70s and 80s of the last century. My wife and I moved to bare land, built a house (well, in fact, we moved an old one room school house onto the property and renovated it - eventually it was a fully modern home, although it took 15 years to get the indoor plumbing installed), and have raised large gardens, kept animals, heated with wood, and over the years built and maintained all the infrastructure of a small farm. We raised and home-schooled two children on the farm as well. Since none of this paid for itself or the many things we consume that cannot be produced on the farm, let alone for things like the children's and my wife's college education, I remained employed off the farm the whole time, in a career in technology that eventually put over 2 million miles on my frequent flyer card. I retired recently from my final position as CTO of a top-ranked hospital-clinic and research organization. (I have worked at least 50% from home for the last 25 years).

I would offer you three take-aways from this experience: First, it is an incredible amount of work. I didn't, and don't, mind that, since the work I do on the farm is 95% recreation for me. Doing it with and for my family has been fulfilling and satisfying. But I did not come to this life from an urban life, nor from a one rich in pure leisure time or activity. I grew up on a primitive (for the time) farm/ranch, and did not want to leave that life. I am also an intensely introverted personality. It has been much harder for my wife, who did come to it from an urban existence. In most ways she has thrived, but she would not recommend the life to her own children, or to others.

Second, you can homestead and be engaged in an outside, even highly demanding, technical career. But those are absolutely the only two things you'll do with your life and time if you expect to do both at all well.

Third, it takes a team. I could not have done it by myself.