PS: They might say be operating a stall at a locally grown market, but it's the stall not the farm that's generating income.
It's not easy to make a decent living of a tiny farm, but some people have done it. Most of them target higher-end products and direct-to-customer sales. For example, Eliot Coleman had a 5-acre farm on the coast of Maine that apparently did fairly well selling fresh local vegetables during the fall and spring for many years. His book is excellent and fascinating: https://www.amazon.com/Four-Season-Harvest-Organic-Vegetable... One of his big staple crops was really good carrots during fall months, because frost makes carrots sweeter, and if you don't use machines to harvest them, it's possible to grow tastier varieties.
There are also some very tiny Vermont farms that produce gourmet cheese. This obviously adds a huge amount of value to their milk production.
So in general, you're right. But it actually possible to make a living selling luxury products to foodies. The stereotypical farmer in this market is somebody who retired young from Wall Street, and who has fairly impressive business and marketing skills.
If you buy from 1 farmer and then sell wholesale to 1 customer your not going to make significant money. If you buy from 1 farmer and then sell at a stall to 1,000 people you can make meaningful profit.
If the stall sells products coming from the farm, the difference is lost on me.
It's like saying "it's the Sales department that generate income, while Engineering is just a cost".
The suggestion is that the customer knowledge/access is what is providing value, not the farming.
The farms next to me (I live rural) are 20-30 acres and are farmed by professional subcontractors that employ dozens of (immigrant seasonal) labour for picking etc. and use heavy machinery that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and are shared between multiple farms.
Likely if your old boss operated a 'micro' farm it was only using a fraction of that acreage.
Also 3 acres is not a "garden", it's a very labour intensive high production "market garden" and could in fact be called a farm of a type. That's 360x360 feet, and maybe you can't visualize that, but it's large. It would require machinery and hired labour to manage. No single individual could plant weed and cultivate that single-handedly. My garden on my acreage is 100x100 and if I could actually keep up with it would easily produce enough for 5 or 6 families.
I'm not saying it's a profitable farm, but it's a kind of farming. You could easily produce $10-$20k of revenue out of intensively market gardening something of that size.
But even more if you were to do cut flowers or something higher profit. My neighbour is very profitable with lavender and has about 3 acres of it and makes quite a bit of money off just that. But he is connected deeply to the flower business, so knows the game well.
A 3 acre high quality vineyard could produce $10k in revenue just selling the grapes where I am. If you made that into wine (capital intensive and regulatory hassle and not allowed on that small of acreage, but still) you could actually make many multiples of that and make a good living once you covered your upfront costs.
So yes, it's possible to 'farm' on small acreages and make an 'ok' living if you don't mind busting your ass. Just not the stereotype of what people think of as farming (coy/sorn/wheat/sorghum cash cropping, etc.)
Myself I have a bad back now, so no thanks on the pay cut, I'll keep these things as a hobby :-)
At those scales you want machinery, but you can use a Garden Tiller instead of a disk plow behind a tractor etc. Their are actually a lot of moderately expensive tools that scale up to ~80 acres without hitting the very high costs of an actual farm. Also often possible to find an actual farmer willing to lend you equipment for a large cut. ~2,000 hours of effort is a significant hobby, but less than many WoW players as a direct comparison.
10k in revenue before expenses is not much and is easy for that to end up negative after expenses and even in the best case your likely paying yourself well below minimum wage. As to wine, again that's something you can do completely independent of a farm by just buying grapes.
Another thing I was going to point out is that farms smaller than 10 acres are actually the norm in many parts of the world. High intensity plots using walk-behind tractors and hand labour are common in Asia and in some parts of Europe. Much of Europe's vegetable production happens on 2-3 hectare properties.
So I'm just objecting to you characterizing these small operations as "not farms" -- IMHO they're farms. But they don't conform to the typical NA cash crop / livestock farm that's common here.
Look at what Chinese small farmers farm with -- small nimble walk behind tractors. Now try to get yourself one of these in North America. A BCS or Grillo walk behind fully equipped (rototiller/rotary plow, decent sized engine, cultivator attachment, etc.) ends up being at least $10,000 worth of an investment. Chinese farms are using similar equipment at a fraction of the price (just look on Ali Baba for example. But of course you can't import that without huge tariffs, shipping costs, and regulatory hurdles). On top of that they can get small equipment we can't get here: balers and combines that fit on small tractors or walk behinds and cost little. And they get access to markets as small growers that you can't get here.
Let's say I wanted to get into hazelnut production here. Or buckwheat. Something unorthodox like that that is not soy or corn. I'd be on the hook to not only grow the crop and harvest it and etc. there'd be no market that would take my small amount of crop and pay me for it and process it. To make it worth my while I'd need to grow hundreds of acres and get my own processing equipment and become a large agri corp. And so assume a huge amount of risk.
In places that have vibrant agrarian economies (most of NA does not) and high populations and a diversity of things grown there are more options for processing, etc. A place like Burgundy for example has a huge amount of small wine growers and makers and they form cooperatives and work together to process and market their grapes among a large number of businesses. But the model in North America is far more capital intensive.
Not sure how you can call that 'micro'...
That is more than the median surface area of farms in my country, and that was the average surface area 20 years ago before some capitalistic movement to build big 'company' farms that skew the mean. It can support a family. And I am not talking about a developing country, but about the country with probably the highest agricultural productivity in the world.
130 acres in the UK, compared to 430 in the USA. Just 7 in Romania, and as small as 3 acres in India.
They might say be operating a stall at a locally grown market, but it's the stall not the farm that's generating income.
That's an argument to pretend to be a farmer, while also buying from a 3rd party. Another benefit is as a tax doge.
Remember, specialization increases efficiency. As long as what was sold is the same thing as what's being described aka Local / Organic / whatever I don't see this as fraud.
The trick on those is to sell farm fresh, lifestyle, good feels along with the food.
There are plenty of people who will pay multiples to get great food and great feelings about that great food.
Service is the another piece. Delivery, open markets on X day of the week, etc...
Micro branding helps too. The good vibes and food are a finite thing. When this becomes social / status, part of other lifestyles, it can all work just fine.