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This is such an odd take to me. I’m in a rural area, and I live in 15 acres.

We have pretty much every profession in the area. Teachers, lawyers, doctors, software engineers, etc. You’re probably out of luck if you’re, say, an actuary.

The real difference is you’re not going to reacher the professional peaks that you can in a city. You can be a lawyer, but you’re not going to be able to become some hotshot partner at a big, well known firm. You also might not be able to specialize in what you want. You can be a software engineer, but maybe not one that specializes in machine learning.

Of course, nowadays we have WFH and you very well might be able to have your cake and eat it too. That’s part of the reason I’m quitting my job as a wedding photographer and moving back into the SWE space this winter.

Living on 20 acres isn't even necessarily that "rural" - anyone who wants that can live in any number of exurbs surrounding large metro areas while commuting to work in the city (price permitting). I have family with a dozen acres and they still get their overnight Amazon deliveries and opera concerts while living on a well and septic tank. All funded by a position at a scientific institute on the other side of the metro area with a one way commute time under an hour (not great, but still better than some commutes they've suffered through in LA).

Rural is when you have to drive to get to your nearest neighbor. I think the vast majority of people who live in rural areas only do so out of generational inertia. The entire rural population can very easily be fit into the exurbs around metros if that's what they wanted

"Living on twenty acres sounds great until you realize you'd like TVs, internet, toilet paper, a car, and education for your kids. Turns out those things cost money because there's only so much of them - how are you gonna make an income living in the middle of nowhere to pay people to send it all your way?"

With a remote tech job, like I've been doing for over a decade while living on a rural four acre lot. I started with crappy satellite internet and now have decent satellite internet. And also toilet paper, etc.

I love it out here and can hardly imagine wanting to live in a city anymore.

>Remote work affects all of this but even then it's a dangerous proposition - if the winds change you're done for, and your network is still going to be shot.

I also moved out of the major metros - some things are worth the risk :)

Apart from farming, there is an obvious source of income - tourism services for urban people who want to relax in a more peaceful environment. Lots of old and small farms in my country have moved to that after farming wasn't profitable anymore.

Also, there's something beetween between big city suburbs and middle of nowhere. Smaller towns can offer a healthy amount of jobs and services, especially ones that are within commute distance from larger ones. Moving from a village/town of 4000 people to one of 140 000 didn't really change my daily life much, apart from having more variety of food in supermarket, and much more expensive and worse housing.

If you could afford 20 acres you can certainly afford to figure out how to make money with it.With 20 acres you can certainly be cost competitive with seasonal crops. But that is an insane level of work. The problem is getting the 20 acres. The other poster that says people aren't moving out of cities couldn't be more wrong. The price of rural land has skyrocketed in comparison on city and suburban housing. My home in the city has gone up about 50% since ~2019 and is up to about 2.5x the 2014 purchase price. My rural home has gone up nearly 4x from the 2018 price, but it is a bit more unique as it's a vacation property. The surrounding homes are all up nearly 2x since COVID but had languished prior. The crazy thing though is that the empty land is up at least 5x from ~2018. The medium size tracts that I was hoping to buy have all been sold for anywhere to 5-20x. Very large tracts are 5-10x up and these are actual sold listings.

I know a couple that made a nice profit raising cattle and chickens on 5 acres. It was all about land management.

My family raised cattle on significantly more acreage. I would characterize it as supplementary income, less income than from my dad's menial day job. Also very inconsistent with prices of cattle and crops fluctuating wildly and rain and pest fluctuations greatly affecting their production. Where I'm from we'd periodically have farmers committing suicide when their crops didn't keep up with expenses for long periods of time.