I think it is much easier to get out of farming with no money, than to get into it. In the US, policy has punished rural communities and farmers for a long time:
https://www.amazon.com/Harvest-Rage-Oklahoma-City-Beginning/...
https://www.amazon.com/Harvest-Rage-Oklahoma-City-Beginning/...
2. Enforcing compliance with basic laws hurts farmers. It's not clear to me that it's currently possible to operate an American farm both legally, and profitably. Laws that farmers are likely breaking have to do with employment, immigration, animal cruelty, and pollution. Compliance with all of this will drive your expenses up, and you out of business. This is a classic case of a prisoner's dillema - your competitors, who break the law, will undercut you, if you comply with it.
3. Larger farms with better access to capital are often better suited to take advantage of government subsidies.
4. Farming is incredibly risky. Your margins are razor-thin, and your yields and revenues are entirely at the mercy of the weather, and the capriciousness of your incredibly expensive equipment. Large, well-capitalized mega-farms are better suited to weather runs of bad luck, then smaller, family-ran ones.[1]
[1] Not to mention that many family farms rely on family members to operate. And if uncle Bill ruins his back on the job, in June, he's not going to be in shape to work at harvest time...
Governmental help comes in the form of lacklustre subsidies, or too small and too delayed financial aid, while at the same time providing massive grants to companies that are in the agri business system.
One example is the legislation of allocating "water rights" to the main river systems here, all of which has caused farms to go bankrupt, the middle men to get rich and we now have increased rice (!! Rice in Australia) production.
You'll notice that families who've been cobblers for generations can't compete with Nike on price, either. Economies of scale and international wage arbitrage really matter.
For example, the accounting and bookkeeping manpower and expense consumes many full percentage points of a small businesses’ gross revenue, while virtually none of a large businesses’ revenue (fractions of a percent).
Of course, large enterprises can - and have - lobbied the government to pass “think of the children” laws against all manner of evil, which they themselves can trivially absorb with their full time legal and accounting staff. The slobs on the family farm - not so much.
Until government compliance is priced at a percentage of gross revenue, nothing will change, and small competitors will be extinguished - to the delight of the conglomerates.
Most farmers where I grew up—even smaller farms hired temporary workers and gave them bunkhouses. At the end of the season they went off and brought the money back to their families—money not worth much here but worth a lot back home.
The advice about seeing value in redefining objects for their other potentials is great though. One I grew up with. Maybe something quite valuable to the high (read: even higher) consuming culture of the present.
Interesting read.
In effect the author is talking about a by gone era when a single family would do or could do all the work on a farm. Since then average farm sizes have gone up. Wages have gone down, and work is done by either by machines, chemicals, or low skilled hired hands.
Also new in the past five years has been extreme appreciation on the value of farm land. Farm land is now getting treated like forest land was a decade or so ago where a bunch of university funds and PE speculated. Now is not a good time to try low scale farming.
The impression I got from the author was more of a single family dwelling.