I'm building a 21st century farm.
I'm working towards building an ag farm that nets $100,000/yr with only 8hrs/week of actual work. No clue how I'm going to get there but that's the fun stuff. Right?
I'm working towards building an ag farm that nets $100,000/yr with only 8hrs/week of actual work. No clue how I'm going to get there but that's the fun stuff. Right?
The fact that you are sharing hard figures before a method really shows that you haven't advanced your thinking very far. Plants don't need technology to grow, they grow anyway. I'm not a farmer either but I can tell you the expensive part of farming is not the growing, it's the capital acquisition, land acquisition, transportation overheads, preparation, crop selection, harvesting, getting to market, and venture risk mitigation.
The most expensive part is often harvesting. The traditional US solution is "industrial scale farming and industrial scale harvesting equipment". The problem is that monocultures really suck in terms of biological efficiency (you start to need pesticides, fertilizers, machines and fuel for their deployment, crop rotation, wind breaks, etc). Better is inter-cropping, where you have different plants together in the same field. A smarter, robotic harvesting system to effectively harvest these naturalesque "mixed" fields could really be a game changer. Then again you could just employ Mexican immigrants like everyone else...
Another option would be an automatic guerilla farming drone to avoid paying for land. You see this done manually a lot in China. Something that can identify an area, clear it, plant it, potentially monitor or water it, and harvest it semi-autonomously. You would probably need a very high value crop to make this work, security would be a problem, and only certain types of unused land would function (legally, proximity-wise, security and visibility wise).
You mentioned harvesting and this is what I'm actually looking forward to most. Immigrant labor is getting more and more expensive, costly, and risky. Entry-level farm hands will always have a place, but we're going to see a lot of growth in automation equipment. I'm planning for it in my designs and once the costs reach near parity it'll basically be my solution and catalyst for scaling.
There's quite a few people out there doing this stuff. Google "urban farming" or "urban horticulture" and see how much that stokes your curiosity.
0: http://theurbanfarmer.co/ 1: https://m.youtube.com/user/urbanfarmercstone