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.
homesteaders were also very often fleeing debt or working conditions in colonial cities, and would end up going out west & either squatting on land they didn't legally own or borrowing a bunch of money to set up in whatever territory the government wanted to settle. they'd be there for a few years until their finances collapsed again or colonial development caught up with them, and then often they'd pack up and move to wherever the government was trying to settle next. not only was homesteading used as a tool of land occupation by settler governments, it often just straight up did not work out on a logistical level for the people doing it, because isolated homestead farms worked by a single family are not a model that actually works. that's not how real agriculture has ever been done in history
also i wanna underscore something about the op here- not only are those people millionaires, the ones who are actually running successful farming businesses today (as opposed to lifestyle farmers with wealth from other sources) are largely doing so with the labor of large numbers of underpaid and mistreated seasonal laborers, often migrant workers & occasionally also prison labor. there are (relatively rare) exceptions, but those are usually small operations run by people who really seriously do this for a living, and even they have to hire out somewhat (and have to have quite a bit of money to start up their operations anyways). this is the case for the US, I'm less informed about agriculture operations in other countries
