It really depends if you are doing for yourself or want to make money at it. There was a big boom here for hobby farms and i would say more than half have moved away back closer to the cities. At least 3-4 near me thought they could buy land and it magically grows crops. I spent a lot of time helping them get gardens in and explaining soil etc. They lasted 1 year. " too hard" or “too much work”…
Great article that discusses a lot of the good and bad of living an agrarian lifestyle. Simple definitely does not necessarily mean easy, but it can be rewarding by both qualities.
Something that comes to my mind is that you can definitely live a purely agrarian lifestyle like it were the 1800s or older as long as you take the lifestyle lock, stock, and barrel with it’s benefits and hardships; people have been living this way for ages. But, I think what most people want are the benefits afforded by this lifestyle (the simplicity, feeling close to nature, working with your hand, etc) but to also enjoy the modern luxuries we’re accustomed to (like technology, healthcare, etc), but it’s really difficult to make this lifestyle support these desires.
What’s worked for me is a hybrid lifestyle. I have a small house and a little land, I raise a big garden and my wife cans, so we grow most of our own food, but it’s not a business, though we sometimes sell to a local restaurant and on Facebook when we have extra. We work really hard and try to be frugal, but we both also work part time jobs to make money, which gives a better return on investment for our time than we can get trying make it Simple living lifestyle support our modern needs. So we incorporate modern life employment to make simple living feasible and comfortable, but strive for simple living to make modern life minimized and tolerable.
Have a great day everyone!
I think the primary difference, at least in the hobby farmers I know who are young, idealistic, and just getting started, is that they aren’t expecting to scale the operation beyond some arbitrary point - beyond which, it stops being fulfilling and starts being a giant pain in the ass. Conversely, the dairy farmer I know who has the largest operation in the county is a stand up dude, who avoids cutting corners but is getting squeezed big time by small artisanal operations with street cred and big, industrial operations with margins. The middle, where there used to be a huge swath of family farms, is a bloodbath of debt and suffering.
I imagine most of these new hippies are trying to stay small.
FYI medium sized dairies are being squeezed out by the government back oligopolies in milk processesing that completely control the milk prices.
Many of them also do not have enough land base to feed their animals and manage the waste. The cost remedy this is prohibitive due to mega corporate investment firms buying up land at extremely high prices.