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Comment by greedo | Hacker News Reader

The economics of farming (at least in the US) are brutal. Scaling up is really the only way to make a living long term. Some of this is due to equipment cost (look up how much a combine costs), and some is due to competition. It's not unusual for a farmer to be land rich and cash poor.

If you want to see a couple of guys learning how to farm from scratch, visit https://www.youtube.com/@spencerhilbert. Spencer and his brother made a bit of money off games and Youtube and have been starting out on corn, hay, as well as raising beef. It gives a pretty good insight into how pervasive tech is in farming, and how despite that, how much of farming still relies on hard, physical work.

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I'll check out Spencer's channel. For a comedy perspective, there's Clarkson's Farm or Growing Belushi. Even though they are for entertainment, there's a still a lot of info in those shows to not be written off.

However, I'm not as interested in being a farmer at that level. I'm much more interested in the homesteading aspect of farming. I'm not trying to feed the world as much as me and mine and maybe some extra. So not just farming, but also some ranching with sheep/goats/chickens/pigs. I have friends doing this that I'm keeping an eye on. They had a head start as their kids grew up in FFA and are already familiar with raising live stock, and then having them processed to make that part much less daunting.

I get that. Crop farming is so different than raising animals.

Good luck, but there’s a reason why subsistence farmers move to city slums as soon as they can.

Yes, because doing it with low tech and for money is backbraking. But doing it for fun with other sources of income is a different story.

Very offtopic, but:

> raising beef

Is that cows? English isn't my first language, so I thought beef was the word just for the meat, with all Normans eating while Saxons raising thing.

That would be a correct interpretation. Depending on how "cowboy" you want to go, there's plenty of slang. Raising hamburgers and steaks. Bacon seeds. Lamb chops. Just idiomatic sayings referring to the ultimate end products. I've heard all sorts of things to be cute.

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