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Comment by snarf21 | Hacker News Reader

I've always said, the only people who think farming for a living sounds fun have obviously never farmed. It is more tenable if you have income sources so you aren't depending on farming for your dinner. If you are independent wealthy and can pay others to do all the farming for you, you aren't a farmer, you merely own a farm. It is a tough life. The best part is the half days, just pick any 12 hours you want to work!

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Homestead may not work if you depend on your own farm for all of your food needs. However, I feel off grid life with solar, storage, EV etc. combined with a remote job and hopefully cheaper Satellite Internet in the future may work for a lot of people. If I lived in a scenic country I would've at least tried this lifestyle, but may be that is because I am inherently introverted.

I think you might be missing a lot of the amenities of modern towns/cities. Let’s ignore energy and internet/cell service.

* You’ll want to live close to a grocery store.

* You’ll want to live close to doctors —- not only hospitals and ambulances but also any specialist you or someone in your family mind need.

* You’ll want access to tradesmen/craftsmen. Plumbers, auto mechanics, carpenters, electricians. Things break, can you fix everything?

* You’ll want some degree of liquidity in your property. Selling a house in a town is way easier than selling a house 50 miles from the nearest town.

This exactly. The level of austerity that comes with traditional homesteading can be shocking to most Americans.

There's a reason kids sold their parents farms to Monsanto and moved into the city.

Make a trip once a week or every other week into town (1hr drive) to pick up groceries.

Doctors, etc. - why do you need to be close? 1-2 hr drive for something so infrequent does not seem to be an issue.

You learn to fix your own stuff.

At least during the pandemic, housing outside of city centers have been in high demand as people seek more land/space.

At the very least, you will get injured doing farmwork. I don't have statistics on hand, but I'd wager the need for emergency medical support is likely far higher than a white collar office job.

You seem to be healthy with no chronic issues, which is good to hear. If you become sick or injured, and especially if you or a family member develops certain long term issues, you may need to visit a specialist multiple times a month. Sometimes these specialists are only available in major cities.

fair enough!

I can't speak to grocery stores or doctors, but the idea that you should be abele to fix everything in your home isn't that far fetched.

Perhaps the modern world has made things appear otherwise but even the most average adult has the capability to do basic vehicle maintenance, plumbing, simple electrical work, basic carpentry and so on. In fact even if you do live in an urban area you might be in for a a bit of regret not learning those skills when you call for a contractor or electrician but no one is available for months due to the ongoing labor shortage.

> but the idea that you should be abele to fix everything in your home isn't that far fetched

> basic vehicle maintenance, plumbing, simple electrical work, basic carpentry and so on

There’s a big gap between simple electrical work, basic plumbing, basic carpentry etc and the full range of issues that can go wrong with a house. At the first sign of a natural gas leak, or any electrical tasks involving high voltages I’m calling a professional.

For us, we've decided that we need to be around a fair number of university-educated people (or at least people who are able to think at that level - they don't have to have a degree). So, first, we need at least a town, not to live 40 miles from nowhere. And second, we need that town to be either a college town or the kind of town where people move there after college.

That's just us. You may be different.

The first year living here was definitely a culture shock, I must admit that people in the country do think differently than in the city. I have over time come to appreciate their points of view though and TBH if I was to show them your comment about Uni Educated people they would just smile and say bless their heart!

You make very valid points and I appreciate your input as it echo's many of my issues.

I could see myself having some land out in the country. I'd still have a day job but maybe I'd have a small vegetable garden and use the rest of the land for things like hunting, hiking, or 4x4 offroading. I doubt I'd ever want to have a real farm. I grew up with family friends that had horse farms and even though I'd help out occasionally, I knew it was hard work for marginal benefits. They'd make their money boarding horses but even taking care of their own horses and land was a full time job. You had to be good at fixing things yourself or else you'd go broke trying to hire someone to do it.

I think my ideal spot is 10 or 20 acres in the mountains and a small cabin. It would be a place only a couple of hours away from my main home. I'd be able to pack a big cooler and get away for the weekend. Somewhere I can go do my hobbies and maybe pickup a few more. Because I'm not living there constantly, I don't need luxuries like nearby grocery stores or even gigabit internet.

I have read through most of the comments regarding my question. I must admit I was amazed at the number of responses I got, so many I was nervous about reading them, but after a day I have read them and think your comment hits home to my current situation.

I would not say I am independently wealthy but I am not carrying a mortgage or any debt and do have enough squirreled away to last me another two years (Depending on inflation) at which point it will have been 5 years since beginning this venture. I would estimate between the property value, equipment and infrastructure I would have between 400K and 600K USD if I was to sell it all today.

I think part of the reason I asked the question is that I have experienced a grave loss and what used to be a shared dream that two people were working towards, now feels somewhat like an overwhelming task that I now must face alone.

I have decided that I will stick it out for another year and then reevaluate my situation, one good thing about my living situation is there is no outside pressure to change it.

Also I know you were joking about the 12 hour days but truth be told from the time I finish my coffee and get to work till the time I put the last logs on the fire and crawl into bed, it is more like 16 hours and the days only get longer from here. (The animals don't care if I'm discouraged they want their food and water and let me know it, especially the roosters which being someone who never lived on a farm, I thought they only crowed when the sun came up, not two hours before!!)

Just stick with the garden that is plenty of work, homesteads are highly overrated..

I'm not disagreeing, but having worked for 20+ years now as a web dev, and also on and off on farms (parents, relations, neighbours, friends, and 30 acres behind my house), I'd move to a farming job that offered the same income in a heartbeat, no questions asked.

There is something much more comforting about having worked yourself to physical tiredness and a feeling of having accomplished "something useful" instead of having fried your brain yet again over some bizarre node.js ritual for the benefit of some capitalist ecommerce overlord.

I'm willing to admit that there are fulfilling jobs in software development that aren't directly feeding the capitalist beast, but they seem to be few and far between.

where are you going to get a farming job that pays the same as tech without also feeding the corporate beast?

They exist. I know several small farmers who are HNWIs in the low 8 digits, not counting their real property. I'd say that's comparable to what you'd expect someone in tech to accumulate over around a 30 year career. They achieved that through a combination of savvy, connections, and growing relatively high margin niche crops instead of trying to compete with corporate gigafarms.

But it's extremely hard work, and depending on what one grows, one can expect to have maybe 2 weeks off a year. Nature is a boss that doesn't accept excuses.

This can absolutely be done. But it's hard work and you have to be very self-sufficient. I've done quite well for myself with my farm as a side project but I can weld, program, do HVAC, mechanic work on out machines, pluming and building upkeep. Then you also have to be able to farm, and to top that off, you have to be ready to work when it's time, which is not unlike tech but you also won't have a backup for your oncall rotation.

I spent Christmas afternoon in the snow digging drainage ditches around a new field after a water retention pond burm broke and started washing seed out of the field. Because it was so wet, we couldn't move any machines into the field so myself and father in law dug the basics by hand with shovels around the whole field.

It's not just something you do cause you watched a YouTube video. It takes a certain type of person. It's not unlike bootstraping any other startup.

This is a fair comment and some days I admit I feel the same way.

Tell me though haven't you questioned your choices? When you were repairing the broken machines or digging that ditch on Xmas, doubt never crept in?

I am at the point where I am wondering if the doubtful times are outweighing the joyful ones these days.

But I will admit, I posed the question at a particularly "Whoa Es Me" time, still I understand what your getting at, When the going gets tough...right!?

I wouldn't say that I question my choices. Before going into tech about 10 years ago, I spent 15 years in construction, farming and mechanic type work.

I love welding, (I went to welding school out of high school but decided it would be a better hobby than job).

I love the crops we make. The whole thing started when we couldn't buy what we wanted in the quantity and quality we wanted.

My whole family lives around the farm so while I didn't enjoy digging a ditch on Christmas, I did do it with my father in law, and then we went in and had Christmas dinner and a stiff whisky with the whole family. It's not something I'm doing alone, and lots of it is stuff I love doing.

I'll often stay up till 2AM+ on the weekends just building random shit in the shop and listening to music. I'm working on soil moisture and temperature sensors to put into the fields to target watering and start collecting some data. I'm working on turning one of the old 70s fords into a battery motor, I've got the old tractors all tuned up and running and to me this is my idea of taking a break from my desk.

I'm not sure what to tell you. Have you done farming and gardening and other types of manual labor before? If you wanna hit me up and chat a bit about this I'd love to understand a little more and maybe I have tips or perspective that can help out here.

I think the point here was about preferring one type of work over another, not actually about the income.

perhaps if agriculture and food generation was priced more in line with its value to humanity, rather than along the lines of cheapest product wins, there would be more feasible careers in homesteading, simpler lives and farming.

but in a world where NFT based companies are claiming to be worth billions what hope is there of that? :)

The same could probably be said for software.

You can't make any money homesteading software either. Get a half rack 22 u servers, install the os (set up a pxe boot server and golden images plus a bootstrap script). Build out your storage, app server database server, load balancer, write your app, get customers, do support, fix bugs, release features.

You could probably break even with a well targeted market and not hire anyone else (maybe keep it in the immediate family) but you're constantly competing against products whose costs are built on economies of scale. Even if your not up against a giant corp, your up against someone with funding that's probably using giant corp tech.

Even if you do use giant corp tech (which isn't a thing you can do with physical land so I didn't factor that in) bootstrapping a boutique software company has some long odds and long hours. Bits tough work to know and do everything. That's why people specialize and companies hire specialists.

I get your point (i think), but people don't need software. Software is great to have and enhances life to no end, but you could live without it. They do need food though.

Why does working to make software pay so much? Yet working to make food pays so little?

Honestly? Because anyone with a strong back can make food but it takes time and education of some sore to make software.

The same could be said with medicine. Everyone needs medicine as much as food but one makes significantly more money.

NFTs backed by real fungible property. Own not only the picture of the zucchini, but the zucchini itself, which can be transferred or used independently as an asset.

I am joking of course, but stranger things have happened. You can own a farm, but have conveyable mineral rights, and land use rights, that render the whole of the property unusable by the owner.

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