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Comment by zdragnar | Hacker News Reader

A 2.5 acre farm in the US is a hobby farm. You might get a bit of income from canning or selling exotic meat, but I cannot imagine 2.5 acres of anything being enough for a basic income to cover land taxes, equipment, and basic essentials for the family.

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Except for market garden operations, which can produce a decent quantity of garden vegetables out of an acre or two. You could probably get $20k, $30k.

But labour costs and capital costs are very high. It's not a really profitable operation. Labour of love really.

Most organic market garden type places are only a couple acres.

2.5 of premium wine grapes with on-site winery could also be profitable except around here and in most places regulations explicitly forbid wineries that have acreage that small. Around here it's a 5 acre minimum and then most townships have much more stringent regulations on top of that yet.

In general anything "value added" (jams, wines, bread, butchered/prepared meat, whatever) can be used to turn a a pure small "farm" into a more profitable operation. But again, costs.

(I have a 6 acre property, with about a 3/4 acre of grapes for my own use).

Yeah you are right. One of the most profitable crops is cherry tomatoes and you can make $1400 per acre on a good year, $900 on average. Saffron, with optimal yields at the most expensive prices per lb, will get you $125k from 2.5 acres.

My dream is to have a farm with enough crops to cover my food & maybe sell a little extra. Out of interest does anyone know a good place in Europe where that's possible for a good price?

Land prices in Portugal (away from the coast and from bigger cities) are pretty cheap for western European standards. It's getting noticed though - a quick YouTube search will show you plenty of examples of expats jumping on the opportunity.

IMO making a profit would be the hard part - the internal market is small and in general produce prices are low.

I'd be content with a small loss to be honest, I'd still be working as a remote engineer. I just would like more nature in my life!

I am curious, but surely the $900-$1400 an acre is based on rows configured for tractor-based tilling/plowing, fertilizing, herbicide etc.? As I understand it, the nice thing about a smallholding is that you don't have to mechanize near as aggressively, and therefore can plant much more densely than a tractor-based farm would.

Perhaps? This was based on google top-link data which may not be reliable for a small farm but I assume it's within an order of magnitude!

While hand grown can be denser it’s not an order of magnitude denser. The main advantage is being able to combine/layer different crops.

Look at machine farmed fields just before harvest; the fully grown plants will often be quite close together.

If you have a scroll through the episodes of Country Calendar (https://www.tvnz.co.nz/shows/country-calendar) you'll find examples of small farms definitely produce enough to make a good living.

Maybe in NZ, but some of those crops would be illegal here (mussels in particular are a protected species, and farming either native or non-native species would be extremely illegal), and the others are really commonplace. Apples, flowers, cows, we've got it all but kiwi and sheep, and there's not really much of a market for either.

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