Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

I’m still in tech and absolutely still love AI / ML research.

That said, I’ve started a farm. Mostly because:

(a) I enjoy being independent and growing the majority of my own food enables that

(b) its very satisfying to provide for yourself and family

(C) there’s a very real possibility that AGI takes away many jobs; having land, your own resources, etc is real wealth

(D) I can work 100% remote and hire someone where I’m at to do much of the farm work ($20k out here is a good part-time job).

I’m into growing niche items (working on getting a registered highland cattle herd), organic honey, ginseng root, expensive flowers like snap dragons, etc - haven’t made a profit quite yet, but farms are tax deductible. So, if you’re still working, you can write off the losses. Once it’s up and running you then pay taxes, but you have a profit. Takes typically 3-7 years to make a profit though

Most profitably small farms focus on niche stuff. One of the neighbors runs a co-op selling raw milk at $15/gal and specialty pig meat.

I don’t think it’s super profitable by any means. That said my property value has doubled in the last few years and cows reproduce (literally growing in wealth).

Thank you for sharing your experience, I'm really interested in this! I daydream daily of going rural while still building technology, also I agree with you that real wealth like land is essential for the future given current trends for jobs (Adam Smith spoke in his time about the real wealth of owning land), I suspect but not sure completely that starting a family in a farm will be advantageous since most education could potentially be descentralized. Also interested in different economic communities for different scales (co-ops and such), I happen to have read several localist advocates.

That being said, do you have any resource material or references on this? I'm on the verge on making the move and I will be starting soon.

I don’t have any particular material on this subject. I effectively just listed objectives, what I needed, searched for the correct land and started.

For instance, I was never particularly interested in high profit (that requires scale). I instead targeted minimal work and small income.

My one suggestion is to buy land with a house already on it. My land is not near my house, I planned on building a house on the land but it’s is a huge pain as it’s off grid. I’m slowly completing the necessary pieces.

I think you’d be best off scaling out slowly. Depending on what you want to do, you can often lease land. I found several farms already leasing their land and attempted to purchase (they fell through). When you try to start yourself there’s a lot of startup costs (hundreds of thousands). To mitigate that you can get 100 acres, lease 95 of it (someone else will farm it) and start small.

What I did required me to put all the money upfront and learn in real time. Much harder and imo not for the faint of heart.

Biggest thing that helped me was getting to know all the neighbors and meeting them ahead of time. Find a good community that’ll help (obviously you have to help back).

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