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.
like, land grants as late as the early 80s I think? caught a lot of the back-to-nature dirt hippies. my family didn't get in on that, but a family friend had and my mother moved us up onto their land in '86. my 4th grade year was spent completely off-grid with chickens and a dairy cow and acres of gardening. wood for heat and cooking but everything local was quick-burning pine so good firewood was a cost. electronics were already a hard thing to separate from, so gas for the generator was a thing too. so yeah, everyone still wound up needing "town jobs" which then meant hour+ commutes because we were way out on dirt roads.
I was 10 and watching all of this (and resenting my own hour+ trip to and from school) and let me tell you how deeply it made me appreciate the benefits of urban living,
