the farmers you hear about -- in the news, in economic/politics, if they're farmers and not pickers or farmhands, are millionaires.
If not in liquid, in assets. That's the only way to really make reasonably positive money farming, enough to keep one going, rn. Unless you want to subsistence farm, which means giving up a lot of your luxuries and even then probably having issues.
I wish less people saw it as an out, if only because I'd prefer less farm animals have a shit time of it.
at least do the math. for their sake.
go if you must, but do it with open eyes.
I grew up on a farm in rural Minnesota. About 130 acres, not huge, but still enough.
What annoys me most about the cottagecore stuff I see is how it just completely glosses over how hard it is and how expensive it is.
We had our land split into four hay fields, the spot for the house, and the pasture. This was land that had been in my step father's family for a century now. We kept around 15-25 beef cattle who roamed the 70 acres of pasture, so all of the fields were hay to feed them. We also had some garden plots that grew things like corn, wild raspberries, and rhubarb. Additionally, we had bee boxes and a hive of bees.
Because the family had owned the farm for so long, we had a sense of inertia. Knowledge and buildings and tools built up over such a long time. The barn and corral weren't built by us, just maintained. The initial fence line was put up when my stepdad was a kid. The tractor had been there for a decade before my mom married him.
I mentioned that it was expensive, so here's some costs that go under the radar.
- We had hay fields sure, but in particularly cold winters or because of too dry summers, we often didn't have enough hay for our cows, so we had to buy some.
- I hope you know how to do maintenance on your machinery because otherwise you gotta bring a mechanic out to your place in the sticks to look at your tractor used for feeding your animals.
- If you don't own a truck and a cattle/horse trailer, that's another thing to rent or try to borrow if you need to move livestock to sell.
- Surprise, the small town grocery store is more expensive (and closes at 7 pm) because they can't get things as cheaply or easily as the regular chains. Hope a regional chain is in a nearby town so you don't have to drive 30 miles for groceries.
For inconveniences and unexpected work...
- if you have livestock you absolutely need to make sure your fence has as much uptime as possible. You do not want them getting into other people's property or onto a road or highway people drive on. This also means you will be going around the entirety of the fence line frequently between the middle of spring to the middle of fall, to make sure no plants have grown into it and shorted it out (if electric). Regardless of the type of fence you need to check for breaks often, especially after storms. Sometimes a wild animal will just break it and you have to fix it before the animals get out.
- If you're have livestock, you will absolutely need to check the animals frequently during birthing season. You need to be able to catch if a baby isn't feeding or if the mother is having complications so you can intervene. This can mean trying to shepherd the mother into the barn so they can be contained while birthing or to encourage the baby to drink due to proximity, or it could be helping birth the baby by repositioning it so it gets unstuck.
- if you need to bottlefeed a baby, because the mother died, isnt letting the baby feed, or became se the baby won't drink, you'll need to do that frequently as well.
- Because you're out a ways to have a farm, it's harder to get things like a plow for your driveway, a mechanic to come out, a tow if you need it, someone to jump your car, and other things that are already annoying, take even longer.
And you will be poor, if you're not wealthy from another source. Shit just costs so much that for most of the time, my stepdad had to work a job installing heating and air conditioners, and my mom worked at the school (then at a country jail's) cafeteria. So you have that on top of the farm stuff. And if you want to make a living off growing plants? Good luck competing with the industrial farmers.
It has its benefits of course. It can be very rewarding, but maaaan. I do not miss having to go out into the woods in a foot of snow to collect wood to run the wood stove so we didn't freeze. I do not miss having to get up and take an hour to get to school on the bus. I do not miss having to go past a farm that constantly smelled like pig shit (the WORST) when we went into town. I do not miss cleaning the barn on a hot summer day, because the layer of shit is so tall cows are almost hitting their head on the ceiling. I do not miss sitting in the sun hooking and unhooking the trailer so we can look at it up with 4 bales of hay, unload it, and then do it again, with thousands of hay seeds sticking to every inch of your skin.
I do not miss being unable to do shit and being more isolated from people. I do not miss having dial up Internet in 2008, and then shitty satellite Internet with it's 2GB/day download limit before speeds got throttled. I do not miss what it meant for me as a blind man to be stuck.
Farms are not kind to people with disabilities. You never know if the day you can't do something is the day something goes catastrophically wrong. There's a lot of stuff that needs to be done regularly.
During the best years, when we kept on top of things, and there were four of us pitching in, shit still went wrong.
I'm so bad at ending longer posts, but the whole cottage core shit just frustrated me. It's wanting the aesthetic with no idea of what that aesthetic actually is. Maybe there's a type of this that's just like "oh we have an acre and grow stuff for us to eat during summer and we pickle or jam these other things.". That's whatever, I don't care about that. It's the ones who are so gung ho about a farm that just rankles me.
I dunno. Maybe I just had a bad go of it given the family, farm, choices made about it, the area I lived in, and my own set of issues.
Edited to add some more details about the cattle.
