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Comment by imjustsaying | Hacker News Reader

If you're retiring with a small farm, why are you concerned about the market prices of what you're producing? You're just eating it yourself / giving it to neighbors, right?

If you intend to sell it, well the differences of economy of scale of a small farm versus a large farm and the resulting cost difference alone should have been obvious. You wouldn't have been competing well in that market either, right?

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No way. You need income just to pay the ever increasing property taxes, the equiptment costs, etc.

The idea is to produce higher margin products, such as organics, honey, ir niche products.

You can grow 100% of what you need / want beside grains on less than 5 acres (really 1 acre can suffice depending on what you want to grow). Growing your own grains is quite frankly ridiculous. It will likely cost you close to 100x what you could buy them for (if you include your time), and importantly the quality in taste is minimal.

You don't need a ton of equipment to feed yourself. You might WANT some to make life easier, but even then, I'm pretty sure you don't need to pay yearly tax on a tractor in most states...

You probably aren't paying tax on the tractor, but you are paying thousands in tax on your land and house. Then you do have equipment costs of the tractor, capital expenditures, etc. So you also need to produce enough to sell to cover some costs.

Also, you can't grow more than an acre of wheat for self-use legally in the US anyways.

An acre of wheat is almost 2k pounds! What could you possibly do for personal use with more than 2k pounds of wheat?!

You're really looling at about 1000 lbs of flour per acre. I think I was mistaken about 1 acre. I think its actually 1/4 acre, which is about 250 pounds, which should be enough for most families. But still, you need to produce excess yo pay for costs and provide an income.

>Also, you can't grow more than an acre of wheat for self-use legally in the US anyways.

I find this very surprising, especially considering this should vary by state (although I know this might be the kind of thing the Commerce Clause could get up into).

I can't find any information that there's a cap on wheat production in the US. Got a source?

> You need income just to pay the ever increasing property taxes, the equiptment costs, etc.

The whole concept of retiring is that you've factored those things into your savings. If you can't afford to pay property taxes for the rest of your life you can't retire.

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