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.
In the US in particular there is this fantasy of homesteaders who just went to some random ahem "unoccupied" land just minecraft-style chopped down some trees and built a house and started a farm that they lived off of.
But that shit never actually happened. All of the homesteaders settling the Louisiana Purchase and beyond were heavily subsidized by the federal government. It was a government program to promote white ownership of newly conquered territory stolen from indigenous nations that were being actively genocided. Nobody was actually able to sustainbly live as a self-sufficient homesteader it just did not happen.
Long story, but you know that old scam "This is the deed to the brooklyn bridge"? We did that, but with plots of land in Texas. Texas wasn't exactly populated by Mexico, and decisions like the famous Mason-Dixon line had made it clear that a new state for the slave-owning South needed to enter the Union. Naturally, this lended itself towards a strategy of uh... democracy by force. So people were "sold" tracts of land in Texas and took themselves and their possessions there (slaves included) and then basically got into intentional disputes with the at-the-time Federal forces of Mexico.
Texan Independence is a lot less sexy with this in mind, not that it was particularly palatable in the first place. The Gadsden Purchase was a lot more legal by comparison, just to give you an idea of how fucking incorrect the seizure of Texas was. The Federal Government of the U.S. kinda just shrugged and went "go off king" to the people buying illegal land and settling illegally in Texas, and then eventually when the independence movement there took off, you guessed it, the U.S. swooped in to provide additional force and resources in the form of various measures to 'protect American interests'.
Where things get out of the way wrong as fuck is how force and displacement of Mexicans living in Texas was employed by Whites who'd moved into the territory. Everything by the way is happening between the 1810's and the 1850's, so Texas becomes part of the U.S. basically through theft and one of the UN's definitions of genocide (forced displacement) and then we fight a war and bend Mexico's arm behind its back while slamming their neck with a steel chair WWE style. The Gadsden Purchase is effectively a coercive piece of legislation signed by Mexico's government under duress, so many modern observers in Mexico or of Latin-American descent or discipline consider it also to be theft.
All of this is to say, the practice of Homesteading was alive and well, and it rationalized the adoption of the South West into the U.S., where we'd proceed to continue much of the strategy for years and years later until it become a creation myth for the secessionists in Texas who insist that they're not living on stolen land, and have full permission to shoot brown people on sight based on if or if not they speak spanish.