As a rural dweller(15 miles from the nearest town) the whole homestead(read: (semi)off grid, no prior experience, DIY ALL THE THINGS!) movement to me seems completely stupid. It's encouraging people that have no experience or knowledge to leave the world they know, and enter a world they don't. Then, start that world on extra hard mode, and if they don't do it all they're laughed at. They also neglect to tell folks that it's manual labor, A LOT of manual labor. Not 1 hour at the gym on the treadmill at 4mph labor. Digging holes, carrying feed bags and building fences with every spare moment of the day manual labor. TikTok and youtube leave out the parts where you just got shit on by a cow, ran over by a pig but that doesn't matter the tractor is stuck so you gotta start digging or you'll have no way to get hay into the cows so they'll starve. And at the end of that day you've got to cook your own dinner from ACTUAL ingredients because hello fresh! and uber eats don't exist. It's not a life for folks that don't enjoy. If you don't, leave it, no shame.
Another thing the socials leave out is how damn isolating it is. You're alone buddy. like ALONE ALONE. ever wonder why you see folks stopped on gravel roads chatting for 2 hours? Because they haven't seen another human for a few days or even weeks. Again, living in the country isn't for everyone, and especially hard on people that didn't grow up around that environment or have a skill that helps out here(carpenter, mechanic, etc)
Homesteading and living in the country isn't about following someone else's way. It's about finding your own. Maybe living 20 miles down a gravel road, only using solar panels to heat your tent isn't for you. Maybe living a little outside the burbs, with 2-5 acres and a big garden is your jam.
Adding something to this incase folks are thinking "I can do this...I love manual labor."
You're not alone alone. In some cases you're actively disliked by towns that you'd move into. Sure the stores and such will take your money, but make no mistake you're the city folks moving out to drive up land prices. You will NOT have the network that people that have lived there forever will have. This network is really what makes living extremely rural work. Tree falls on your house? There's no one to call, and if you can get someone out it's going to be 3-5 weeks if they decide to show up. Plumbing or septic breaks? Electric doesn't work? Truck breaks down at home? I really hope you're handy, because you're waiting and paying way more than you'd expect to have someone work on it. Want to buy some cows or pigs? You're paying retail because you don't know a guy. It will take you many many years to build this network up because you didn't goto highschool there.
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.
even today where knowledge of farming and land maintenance is basically free and available to anyone with a phone, farms fail ALL THE TIME. And not just startup farms, multi-generational farms. I live around a bunch of farmers & ranchers, I don't know a single one without a side gig or 8(more towards the 8).
My personal ranch is just a money pit. It's my hobby, it makes a little bit of money but it would never be sustainable. People with much less debt than me and a whole lot more land & equipment are in the same boat.
Very much agree though I don’t think you need to be farming/ranching in all cases. At least if you’re 20-40 miles from a city/good sized town that’s a resource point.
Having said that, my family about that distance out from the city are increasingly precarious. They’re retired schoolteachers and need at home care. That is probably not the situation to be in so far from the city. One snow storm and the slightest difficulty could be a death sentence.
I hadn’t realized that homesteading was a tread. I can see the undercurrent in current culture to want more space and be outside more with being cooped up more these days (yes, we could just go outside more). Personally, 2-5 acres sounds amazing. My wood shop is threatening to outgrow the garage and a proper barn/outbuilding would be nice.
He's full of it. I do have a background in farming.
Case, and Deere go head to head in almost every market. New Holland and a couple others also play in the same markets depending on what KIND of machine you're looking to run. Tillage tractors are pretty much fendt/challenger, NH, deere, case. When you get into combines/coppers other brands also play. For the consumer and/or smaller tractor market there's all sorts of options.
Why people go deere or case is simple. It's the supply chains. You have N days to get your crop in the ground, and Y days to get your crop harvested. Deere and case have the best(and most expensive) field techs and dealer support. "A machine is only as good as your dealer support" is the phase almost everyone uses when shopping for equipment. Anyone with a significant investment of tractors(non-hobby farmers) can have a case or deere tech replace or fix damn near anything in hours or days, on site.
Farm equipment gets passed down from the big operators to the small operators through its depreciating lifetime.
The big operators running new couldn't care less. They keep stuff for a year, two at the most, and off it goes to the next farm. New equipment is least likely to break and when it does it is the manufacturer's problem to fix it. Also, the first generation operators are quite likely to lease the equipment, so it is not even theirs to worry about.
The slightly smaller second generation owners are still likely under warrantee and the machines are new enough that they shouldn't be breaking down in any meaningful capacity. Especially when it comes to the electronics. While they might have a mechanic on staff, it's just as easy to contract that out to the dealer.
It's the third, fourth, fifth generation owners that are more concerned. They start to buy the equipment when it has some age on it, starting to wear out, is more likely to break and isn't under warrantee. They also are more likely to want to fix it themselves.
It's easy to say don't buy Deere, but if that's all the bigger operators bought when they were new, there won't be anything else on the used market. The other manufacturers haven't been able to carve out a market of machines that can serve those smaller farmers with new equipment.
It is all very theoretical at the moment, though. This is not a problem today. There are plenty of options on the used market, with no signs of that changing, and even if you do end up with a Deere fixing it yourself hasn't been a problem to this point. But there is worry from some that things will change in the future.
fellow small farmer(live stock only) with a day gig. The only benefit to having a small farm these days is it provides a tax shelter, and an enjoyable(yet difficult) hobby.
Even if you outright own the land, by the time you figure in maintenance and equipment on any cattle farm under 500-1000 head of cattle you simply can't turn a profit in a meaningful way. What you CAN do is use it as a tax shelter where you sorta break even if you squint and hope.
Why is all the pasture raised, permaculture, organic blah blah stuff all so expensive if it’s not profitable? If I’m paying $12 for a dozen eggs when I can get non-sustainable, conventionally raised eggs from some megacorp for $3 then where is all the money going? Any consumer paying $12 for eggs certainly wouldn’t mind $13, which could then be profit.
It is expensive precisely because it’s not profitable. Imagine if you were a builder, selling artisanal houses built without use of any power tools, only with organic manual labor, using materials prepared with organic manual labor only. You’d be building one deck in the same time it takes normal builders to build an entire house. The only way you could make a living this way would be if you charged multiples of what normal construction costs. But, even then, you’d still complain about your business not being profitable, as you’d have troubles finding people who will pay as much.
Myself, I like good eggs, but I’m not paying $1/egg.
It looks like Whole Foods charges about half that for fancy organic eggs.
However, if you sold them at the Ferry Building in San Francisco and had a good story about why your eggs were special, I think you could get $12 a dozen.
How many of us are going to balk at $1/egg after we just paid $5 for an espresso and are ogling the $50 bottles of olive oil? Especially if we've been conditioned to not eat too many eggs because "cholesterol."
The point here is that if Starbucks was buying as expensive coffee as are those organic $1 eggs, it would be $10-15 espresso. I’m happy to pay $1 for egg, if it comes with the rest of the breakfast in form of a sit down restaurant service. But paying $12 just for a carton of dozen eggs? No way.
I’m not sure that’s true. One of the cafes near me uses Strauss Milk (pastured cows, methane digesters, the works) and of course fair trade coffee. It adds maybe $1.50 to the price of a latte, for about $5.50. Commercial buyers can buy in bulk, so I imagine it’s a bit cheaper than buying retail from the kind of upscale groceries that sell sustainable foods.
Exactly, scrambled eggs or an omelette at a restaurant easily costs more than $1/egg. Obviously restaurants have all other costs. But in the grand scheme of things, if you’re living in an expensive place like NYC or SF, it doesn’t seem like that much.
I don't go to the local farmer's market because it's too political, but supermarket eggs here are often under $1.00/dz (presumably sold as a loss leader) and the most expensive "certified pasture raised" eggs are about $6/dz.
Must be nice. The main cost input to eggs is chicken feed. Assume a $15 bag will keep a dozen hens fed for a month, that's about 240 eggs (assuming 2 eggs per hen every 3 days) at a cost of $15 so about $0.06 per egg. Cost will drop significantly if chickens are kept on pasture and the labor inputs for a flock of a few dozen are minimal.
It may not be enough to live on but for a hobby, it's pretty much free money. Although I assume the market charges a stall fee that will eat into profits, but still...
In the US, the tax shelter plan only works if you are profitable 3 out of any given sequence of 5 years. Otherwise, the IRS prohibits deductions from "hobby farms". Be sure you check with an accountant, unless you have been showing a clear profit from your farming activities.
In my experience, a small farmer basically needs to cook their books to appear profitable. Profit is not realistic if you include all of the actual costs.
Here's the problem with driving on the weekends. Unless you get hooked up with a company and they're ok with paying your insurance the answer is no. The TLDR here is that if you're and employee or contractor for a trucking company, you'll be paying insurance rates based on driving the legal DOT(in the states) limit.
If you want to see what this looks like, google around for "hot shot trucking". It doesn't require a CDL under, I believe, 24k lbs. BUT it does require a special insurance since you're no longer a person, but a company.
Each individual state may have more stringent CDL licensing requirements. However, every state must follow federal requirements as a baseline. One element in federal CDL operator requirements is a vehicle’s GVWR. The federal requirement specifies that, when a vehicle has a GVWR of 26,000 pounds or less, the operator does not need a CDL. However, this does not mean the truck GVW can be loaded above the GVWR of 26,000 pounds and operated by a non-CDL driver. Federal requirements state the GVW must, in addition, be 26,000 pounds or less. CDL requirements become more confusing when the vehicle is towing a trailer.
I live on >100 acres and maintain a software job. Spend all day in front of a computer and all night in the dirt. Only thing we grow is a 1/2 acre garden. We stick to live stock. I much prefer watching pigs, chickens and cows grow. Feels so much more real.
right on. im actually trying to start a small boutique web development business as well. there arent many people doing that here. i moved from the bay area to idaho.
id like to write software in the winter and farm in the summer.
I live in an extremely rural area. The Deere integrations are a huge reason.
Another that's not talked about is Deere field service. It's just DAMN GOOD. If you're running a serious tractor(7-9 series ) and it's the middle of planting/harvest hours can be the difference between red and black margins. Deere will roll out a team with 30ft trailer of parts out in hours if you have an issue. CaseIH will sorta match this, kubota and New Holand will simply not.
Exactly, and at the moment in time you don't care about "right to repair" - you need to get back up and running now. Which has led me to believe "right to repair" is a ruse, but for what?
Right to repair tractors has become talking point because it is a use case that cannot be easily dismissed as "unimportant to real Americans" since many Americans value individualism, hard work, and their countries reputation for food production - all of which are idealized in the concept of the independent American farmer.
> Which has led me to believe "right to repair" is a ruse, but for what?
You what? Being able to repair and control your hardware is good in itself. It doesn't need to be justified, except as a means to counteract the much stronger lobby that is trying to destroy it.
Your point about this maybe being a ruse is like the one that maybe climate change is a ruse: so what if it is? The measures we introduced to combat the (perceived?) threat will result in a net benefit to society, the environment and individual freedoms. Boo, hoo I'm living in a better world unnecessarily. Very tragic.
In one of my other comments I noted that disabling emissions controls would probably be top priority for most of the farmers complaining about not being able to modify how their tractors work.
I'd go so far as to say Intellij and eclipse are one of the biggest reasons for Java and python's success. Those two languages came about during an IDE revolution and it made them so much more accessible.
On a bet a couple years ago someone gave me a week to compile and stand up most of the core hadoop services distributed by horton. 4 days in I lost my shit and desk flipped.
Another thing the socials leave out is how damn isolating it is. You're alone buddy. like ALONE ALONE. ever wonder why you see folks stopped on gravel roads chatting for 2 hours? Because they haven't seen another human for a few days or even weeks. Again, living in the country isn't for everyone, and especially hard on people that didn't grow up around that environment or have a skill that helps out here(carpenter, mechanic, etc)
Homesteading and living in the country isn't about following someone else's way. It's about finding your own. Maybe living 20 miles down a gravel road, only using solar panels to heat your tent isn't for you. Maybe living a little outside the burbs, with 2-5 acres and a big garden is your jam.