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Comment by driverdan | Hacker News Reader

I always laugh when someone who has never worked on a farm talks about buying one. Most farming is hard work, much harder than an office job. And most small farms do not make much money, especially if you don't know what you're doing.

If you're thinking about it go get a job on one first before you buy anything.

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I know some farmers and they all have one thing in common: they work around the clock, 7 days a week. No days off or vacations. Their farms might be worth millions, but it's also both their home and their job.

Also, a lot of people don't get that a farm (anything other than subsistence farming) is a business. It requires careful long term planning, crop rotation, dealing with buyers, collectives, auctions, risk mitigation and pricing. The farmers I know are all extremely proficient with spreadsheet software and most of them attended the Agricultural University two towns from here. Farmers are often regarded as a bit simplistic country boys, but the opposite is true.

I don't envy them.

I've known a lot of farmers over the years and they always struck me as some of the most hard nosed and astute businessmen I've ever met.

Edit: Having done a bit of both (and a lot of family in both areas) I'd rather be a fisherman than a farmer and I really don't want to be a fisherman!

Having done both, I'd rather be a farmer than a fisherman in my community. Imagine catching fish with your bare hands or a flimsy net - yep, that hard.

My experience was on large highly mechanised trawlers in the North Sea - sleeping for two or three hours then gutting fish for a few hours then eat and sleep and repeat for best part of 5 days....

NB The "highly mechanised" part just adds to the fear factor - winches and other heavy equipment are scary enough at the best of times, but when the sea is rough, its dark they are (for me) terrifying.

Edit: This was 30 years ago...

In Italy we have an old saying:

"La terra è bassa."

(translates to "the earth is low" implying that to get food out of it you have to kneel and bend a lot, i.e. it is hard, hard, backbreaking work)

With animals, it is (IMHO) even harder, another saying (Tuscany) goes like:

"Le bestie non conoscono feste comandate"

(translates to "animals know nothing about holidays", it is a 7 day a week (from dawn to sunset) 365 days a year job)

My grandad was a small farmer in South Italy, and my parents used to curate the land they inherited (and some land they bought on their own).

Yup, it's a full time job, the land doesn't go on vacation.

Yes it can give enormous satisfaction. Every time I'm at the store buying fruit I sigh at how much fruits our grandad used to bring home, for free, it was way better than the fruit I guy at the grocery stores, and it was the surplus from the sales...

Only the ones left in business. The rest are long gone as business savy became just as important as hard work.

I can confirm the hard work part. Up before the sun, down long after it leaves. It’s not a job, it’s a life. I worked on a farm for a summer when I was 19. I’m still ripped from it, you’ll be physically fit in no time. If you want to buy a farm for the purpose of profit, you’ll fail immediately. If you want to buy a farm to learn to farm (profits will come when you can actually grow in bulk) then dive in. There’s also “alternative” farms that maximize vertical space vs acreage. To reiterate the last sentence, go get a job on a farm for watermelon season and ask yourself if you can do that everyday for 20+ years.

(Kennedy Farms in Stony Creek, VA if you’re curious).

There's the other big that gardeners (especially home covid gardeners) forget: almost nothing you want to grow on your "coupla acres" has enough calories to sustain you. Potatoes are probably the only exception. Everything else--beans, wheat, corn--is a pain to grow and process, especially at a small scale.

I think if you're not aiming to be fully self-sustaining it makes a lot of sense to buy things like these and focus on growing fresh fruits and vegetables. From a sustainability perspective beans/wheat/corn and to some extent potatoes are fairly easy to store, making them suitable for central/slow processing. I don't have numbers on this but my sense is that a lot of the resource usage of our agricultural system is due to perishables - food that needs to be cooled, that gets thrown away if no-one buys it on time, that's easy to damage in transportation, and that has high water content (making it heavy to transport).

Can confirm - I tried growing all sorts of things in an awful north-facing garden with varied success but am now mostly focusing on two things - leaf vegetables and small fruit. Chard and raspberries are my primary outputs, and being able to go out and pick a handful of raspberries for dessert is a way superior experience to buying them - better taste, more varieties, better quality, and they store longer than store-bought. Same thing with leaf vegetables - unless I buy frozen (which I still do in winter) you can't get decent spinach or chard outside the peak of the season. They store for months on the plant though unless temperatures get too hot, so I can just pick as much as I need for a meal and not worry about spoilage.

The sweet spot is when you have passions about products, expensive things or impractical crops to scale... We have a homestead with acreage in Hawaii. Chickens and eggs are zero effort. We don't even need to feed them, just collect the eggs. We grow heirloom tomatoes in the greenhouse because they are crazy expensive to ship from the mainland and we love them. Likewise, we also grow a lot of white pineapples because they are amazing, but not commercially viable to ship... There are lots of small scale / high margin areas to work in, you just need to explore and find them. You won't build a business empire, but you can find a lot of satisfaction.

To think if the whole community could do this you could have more sustainability and variety and setup local farmers markets to shop local-to-table. Granted in Hawaii you have finite land to work with, but remember engineering is hard at work to figure out vertical eco-friendly hydroponic farming to increase those yields per acre at the expense of up front investment in the infrastructure.

I want to emphasize the last bit though about “building an empire”. It depends on what your metric is. You can be rich and be broke. You can be poor but wealthy. The empire here would be in community and not in money. Giving back by selling your produce, locally, and helping the community. That, is satisfaction. On top of the satisfaction you have from growing your own food of course.

> To think if the whole community could do this you could have more sustainability and variety and setup local farmers markets to shop local-to-table.

I go to a farmers' market in the Bay Area. It draws farmers from a 100-150 mile radius. Being California, you get produce from a lot of different climates; some things need a cool coastal climate, some need the heat of the central valley. You also see the season of crops move. Things usually start in the south where it's a bit warmer, and the season (and vendors carrying) that crop moves north over the next few months.

The community approach can really only get you some amount of diversity in produce that does well in your area, and maybe a bit from the soil type. Talk to anyone who's grown squash will tell you there's a month where their one plant has more squash than they know what to do with. The problem is everyone in the community has the same squash surplus at the same time.

I appreciate the idea, I just think that produce production will always tent towards hobbyists and professionals because of economies of scale.

Potatoes and eggs are a reasonable project for starting. Fruits need some planification, but are also a reasonable goal at long term. Veggies, tomatoes, milk, soft fruits, any meat... even chicken meat, are more hard and need lots of planification.

Millets. And lentils. Calorie and nutrient dense.

Farming is easy money [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pDTiFkXgEE

Funny video. He didn't mention getting the land, barns and equipment for free too. Just inherit and profit!

As a friend of mine put it, the shear breadth of knowledge you need to break even is astounding. Depending on scale and focus area, they'll include:

* Accounting (cost of production, allocating overhead expenses, cash flow analysis, financing terms and outcomes)

* Efficiency calculations and cost benefit analysis for equipment comparison

* Buying and selling commodities contracts

* Marketing your product (locking in the price optimally)

* Biology for dealing with animals and anything you plant

* Ever changing government subsidies and regulations

* Maintenance, repair, and troubleshooting of equipment. This helps keep you productive when the weather is good and the vendor techs are busy. Welding is really handy.

If you mess a couple of those up to a moderate degree, you'll probably lose gobs of money. Do it too bad or for too long and you'll be visiting my dad or brother for a bankruptcy.

I don't know how things are in your jurisdiction, but here in Europe making a profit on farming just isn't possible. This sector lives and dies by subsidies.

You're going to have a cash crop or market the hell out of your product, both seem opposite to the goal of starting the farm in the first place.

Depends on which farm sector. Part of my family is into flowers. I can tell you that flowers are like gold. Almost every flower farmer in our region is loaded. Lowest tier for farming are traditional crops. You need lots of acres and good machines to get efficient en break-even. Only a few manage, but most do not. I would probably focus on farm tech. Automated greenhouses growing tomatoes, cucumbers etc is for example big business. If done right you can be 10-50 times more profitable per square feet than a outside potato field. 100k isn't enough to start something like that. More in the line of 5-10m start capital needed.

Your other comments reveal you're living in The Netherlands. The farming sector there is massively subsidized both via EU and local funds. Now during COVID-19 the state is bankrolling up to 70% of the revenue of the horticulture industry[1].

And that's before you get into all the indirect subsidies like zoning, fuel subsidies for industrial use etc. that are largely aimed at subsidizing farmers.

1. https://www.arc2020.eu/flower-power-commission-somehow-appro...

My family make more profit renting an old workers cottage on the farm as an Airbnb than they get revenue from the entire organic diary operation.

Without the dairy operation I'd suspect they'd have less land, less beauty, less reason to live where they are - the workers cottage wouldn't be so charming if it were on the edge of a lifestyle block 15 minutes from the city. Don't discount the value of their investment!

Yeah, the Adam Smith, purely financially motivated thing to do would be to sell the cows and charming old barns, move out of the ancient manor farmhouse and make a fortune from renting that out as well.

But the life satisifaction of being a hotelier compared to someone who works the land and raises livestock would not be nearly the same.

It might depend on which crop to grow. I remember in KING CORN (2007), farmer can't make a profit without government subsidy.

Farmers can make a profit without subsidies. However you might not want to live in that world: with less farmers food prices will go up - particularly in a bad year when large numbers of people in your city need to starve to death because farmers tried to raise only as much food as needed, and guessed wrong because of the bad weather the previous season.

Ironic that it came out during the largest Ag boom in the last century. Huge fortunes were made during that time. Sadly those tunes have ended, but this year is going to be good for some.

I think it's pretty much the same in the US, even though it's sometimes less apparent. Look up the Reclamation Act of 1902: most of the West would not be cultivated without the huge public investment in irrigation which have never made any economic or ecological sense (growing alfalfa in the Colorado highlands for example).

What they're probably thinking of is buying land, which you can lease or pay to have tended. Getting into this market is understandably more difficult; if it was easy free money everybody'd be doing it.

Or I see this a lot from people who live in an apartment with no yard or balcony who really just want a small garden.

A lot of land within a few hours of the Bay Area is pretty expensive because it's very productive, it's often bought with Bay Area money, and people pay a premium so they can "have some land." Oh, and you're competing with people with low taxes because of Prop. 13.

With land priced like that, especially when you lease it out, it's even harder to make money. If there's a house on the property and it's halfway close to a town, you might make more leasing the house than the property.

At least when people get into buying apartment buildings they're not competing with someone who will pay a premium so they have room for a horse and can watch the sunset over their field.

So true.

However...

... all my grandparents were spry into their 80s and lived to their 90s. There was a an article awhile back that the most longed lived or healthy groups were New Jersey Asian females and South Dakota male farmers.

I’ve been at a desk for 20 years and I’m almost crippled.

The difference is the variety of work. Fix fence in the morning, do the manual stuff before it gets too hot. In the afternoon get in the ACed tractor (if you’re lucky). Get back in the house at 10pm. Maybe not till age midnight if the combine breaks, etc.

Lots of physical activity, lots of fresh veggies and a bit of fruit seems to be the recipe for a long healthy life. Wealth not likely or guaranteed.

For better or worse that life is economically impossible now.

It's up there with buying a restaurant as poor business decisions go.

I dunno about that, I'm in agriculture and I'm doing just fine

Exactly this. Been there, done that. I always joke that the only people who want to buy a farm are people who've never worked on one. I also joke to people that farming is really just a part-time job. Everyday you get to pick which 12 hours you are going to work!

“[I work part time.] There are huge chunks of time.. at night.. where I’m just asleep. For hours. It’s ridiculous.”

My way was to buy 80 acres and rent out half. The local farmer gets to amortize his equipment over a larger crop; I pay the property tax with the income (when there is any income).

Certainly it is a lot of work - bu if you're growing food for yourself and spend your days outside, why do you need to make much money?

Food in itself cost relatively in USA too. So with $400 a month you can eat all you want and spend your days outside doing nothing. But you need more than $400 a month, right? Same with farmers and people living in villages.

In the US, you need decent cashflow to pay for healthcare. You probably also need to save for natural disasters or injuries that disable you. And if you have kids to support, even more costs.

You need those cashflows to pay for healthcare anywhere. In Europe you get more subsidies if you can't pay your own, but modern healthcare is expensive and only possible in societies where the average person has a large cashflow. (Yes healthcare is more expensive in the US than similar levels of care in Europe, but it isn't the order of magnitude more that most people think)

I've been making roughly $10k a year for the last 4 years (so in fact below the tax free threshold), and I've got perfectly good healthcare in Canada. Same in Australia.

You have good healthcare because someone else is subsidizing your healthcare. If you were contributing your fair share to society you would have to earn more than that to live.

There are many reasons that a society may choose to subsidize someone who isn't contributing their fair share. I agree with some of those reasons, not others.

A friend had a farm and we plucked an onion out of the ground for a salad. That onion was so good, I could have eaten it like an apple.

Your body rewards you for eating fresh food and I think it's because it is really really good for you. Same with fresh air and a little sunshine.

So there's something to be said for growing food and spending time outside. I think it's what our bodies were designed for.

remember to marry eva gabor before you purchase.

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