When they say the goal of many a software engineer is to become a farmer, it’s quietly implied that you have to first make bank as a software engineer and then farm as a hobby while at least semi-retired rather than depending on it for survival.
I know people who are doing this and are happy. Half time spent farming, half time CEOing a software startup (not a silicon valley hustle culture 996 one though), and you get to take meetings in your own personal forest.
I’m actually on my first year of sort of doing this. I wouldn’t say I made bank, but I make enough that I could buy a house with an acre and an adjacent partially wooded lot with another acre that I’ll hopefully be able to split between crops and some livestock in the next few years. For now I’m starting small with 1/8th of an acre and just growing the same stuff we always grew in the garden but on a bigger scale plus a few rows of corn and a patch of sunflowers.
My company doesn’t care when I do my work so I can spend half the day in the field no problem and clock a couple hours at night, as long as I get something done no one bothers me.
It’s been extra cool because the house is an original farmhouse from the early 1900s with an original barn, water lines and even power running out there too so being able to fix everything up myself and bring the land back to it’s original glory has really brought something much needed back into my soul.
I will say thought it is fucking expensive even after buying the land.
Do you have any foresty bits on your acre? That’s honestly peak luxury in some ways. Person I mentioned in the previous comment has a forested knoll with a great view, but enough tree cover that you can avoid the sun.
Fixing things up on your own truly is magical. I do it with cars more than my home (because the former is often cheaper and quicker and I buy cheap-ass formerly-luxury beaters usually), but this summer I have some plans for my house as well.
Oh we do, we have a little bit of woods, but right next to us there’s about a 20 acre thick woods that’s owned by one of our neighbors and basically treated as communal. A couple of the neighbors help out to maintain a trail that they made running next to a small stream. We just found out the whole woods is filled with various flowers in the spring/summer. Right now all the daffodils are absolutely covering everything but the trail so the owners posted on Facebook inviting anyone to come walk the trail and pick as many as they want. It was really cool to see so many people from the community come to this private land that’s treated as public, maintained for free by the neighbors just for the sake of having something nice, to pick flowers for free without any expectation of anything in return. Talk about icing in the cake, we had no clue about any of this before we moved in. I assumed it was a grumpy old guy who like living in the woods so people wouldn’t bother him, instead it’s a young couple with a baby who invite strangers in for tea.
I tried fixing up cars a couple years back but it turns out that’s just not my jam. I was a framing carpenter for a few years so my expertise outside of wood and nails is pretty limited. But with the price of things nowadays I’m getting not too shabby with plumbing and electrical. Replaced a couple pipes when we first moved in and I’m working on slowly swapping out some old knob and tube with romex, although it takes me forever because I’ll check everything 20, times and redo it if it’s not absolutely perfect, electrical stuff makes me nervous.
At the end of the day, farmland is going to earn a similar basic return to whatever other capital asset, and while farming labour isn’t unskilled the amount of people raised in it means it earns like it is.
Nobody who says this is picturing manhandling half-dead chickens, and it’s usually someone white who isn’t going to move to the mountains of Ethiopia to farm subsistence crops and cocoa. That pretty much leaves something land-intensive.
I did talk to someone here who made it work with ranching, but ranching is definitely not a good earner right now, and a lot of people are leaving the industry. Modern crop farming seems a lot like a desk job on wheels. Mainly, I think people just want space and fresh air, and have no idea what rural life is actually like.
The goal I had for my first vegetable garden was to produce enough food to last a month. I was able to achieve that for under 50$ in parts. More recently I’ve been getting into fruit trees which has been a little more expensive because I’m not doing to grafting myself. You don’t have to feed the entire neighborhood yourself, and will like 30min of effort a day you can have more than enough for your own needs.
If you’re not eating anything else, but still have a year-round growing season, it takes an acre or two for modern agriculture to feed a person. That’s a lot by city standards, but not in general (it was more like 60 in pre-modern times). It’s basically what the Ethiopians mentioned are doing, plus the cocoa so they can have things that don’t grow on trees, as well.
and will like 30min of effort a day you can have more than enough for your own needs.
Mountains of human experience suggests it takes a lot more effort than that. Have you had to deal with pests, drought or disease yet?
You might still come in under 8 hours a day, but then you add in the cash crops… Again, this is something only white people generations away from subsistence farming seem to think will be easy.
I’m not saying you need to grow enough to feed a village on 30min a day. After I got everything prepared I water every other day if there’s no rain and spot weed when I feel like it. My goal was enough for like 50 meals from a small garden and anyone can easily supplement their diet without that much effort. Hobby vegetable farming and industrial agriculture are two different things and as food insecurity worsens and costs go up, it’ll be a valuable skill to have. For me it takes more work to preserve the food than it does to grow it.
Yup. My extended family is farmers. They got out of livestock decades ago because there was no profit at the scale they were willing to do it in and animals smell terrible at (abusive) scale. Corn and soybeans, they had a contract with a major company for sweetcorn last I heard.
I love the idea of an air conditioned tractor cab that’s mostly run by GPS and lets me sit around and listen to podcasts while babysitting the tractor, but I don’t want to live in Bumfuck Iowa so I didn’t go into farming.
It’s always a balance of what you can afford, what you want to do, and what your market can bare. You may love raising chickens, but eggs will almost never pay off. I love hot peppers. But I can’t get by growing just that. It is skilled and complicated for sure.
I’m in Japan. It’s not worth it on my scale to even try. I do plan to get chickens for our eggs (and bonus bug eating and compost helping), but otherwise I’m just in the veg business. I have full English support and website which helps me find my market
Farming is only fun if you already have enough money that you don’t actually have to farm if you didn’t want to.
Otherwise it’s hard work for low pay that is very hard to buy yourself into if you weren’t born with some land.
When they say the goal of many a software engineer is to become a farmer, it’s quietly implied that you have to first make bank as a software engineer and then farm as a hobby while at least semi-retired rather than depending on it for survival.
I know people who are doing this and are happy. Half time spent farming, half time CEOing a software startup (not a silicon valley hustle culture 996 one though), and you get to take meetings in your own personal forest.
I’m actually on my first year of sort of doing this. I wouldn’t say I made bank, but I make enough that I could buy a house with an acre and an adjacent partially wooded lot with another acre that I’ll hopefully be able to split between crops and some livestock in the next few years. For now I’m starting small with 1/8th of an acre and just growing the same stuff we always grew in the garden but on a bigger scale plus a few rows of corn and a patch of sunflowers.
My company doesn’t care when I do my work so I can spend half the day in the field no problem and clock a couple hours at night, as long as I get something done no one bothers me.
It’s been extra cool because the house is an original farmhouse from the early 1900s with an original barn, water lines and even power running out there too so being able to fix everything up myself and bring the land back to it’s original glory has really brought something much needed back into my soul.
I will say thought it is fucking expensive even after buying the land.
Do you have any foresty bits on your acre? That’s honestly peak luxury in some ways. Person I mentioned in the previous comment has a forested knoll with a great view, but enough tree cover that you can avoid the sun.
Fixing things up on your own truly is magical. I do it with cars more than my home (because the former is often cheaper and quicker and I buy cheap-ass formerly-luxury beaters usually), but this summer I have some plans for my house as well.
Oh we do, we have a little bit of woods, but right next to us there’s about a 20 acre thick woods that’s owned by one of our neighbors and basically treated as communal. A couple of the neighbors help out to maintain a trail that they made running next to a small stream. We just found out the whole woods is filled with various flowers in the spring/summer. Right now all the daffodils are absolutely covering everything but the trail so the owners posted on Facebook inviting anyone to come walk the trail and pick as many as they want. It was really cool to see so many people from the community come to this private land that’s treated as public, maintained for free by the neighbors just for the sake of having something nice, to pick flowers for free without any expectation of anything in return. Talk about icing in the cake, we had no clue about any of this before we moved in. I assumed it was a grumpy old guy who like living in the woods so people wouldn’t bother him, instead it’s a young couple with a baby who invite strangers in for tea.
I tried fixing up cars a couple years back but it turns out that’s just not my jam. I was a framing carpenter for a few years so my expertise outside of wood and nails is pretty limited. But with the price of things nowadays I’m getting not too shabby with plumbing and electrical. Replaced a couple pipes when we first moved in and I’m working on slowly swapping out some old knob and tube with romex, although it takes me forever because I’ll check everything 20, times and redo it if it’s not absolutely perfect, electrical stuff makes me nervous.
This Lemming rural-s.
It’s certainly hard work and low pay (compared to software engineering) in many cases, but it is rewarding.
As for the land, that really depends on the scale and the country.
At the end of the day, farmland is going to earn a similar basic return to whatever other capital asset, and while farming labour isn’t unskilled the amount of people raised in it means it earns like it is.
Nobody who says this is picturing manhandling half-dead chickens, and it’s usually someone white who isn’t going to move to the mountains of Ethiopia to farm subsistence crops and cocoa. That pretty much leaves something land-intensive.
I did talk to someone here who made it work with ranching, but ranching is definitely not a good earner right now, and a lot of people are leaving the industry. Modern crop farming seems a lot like a desk job on wheels. Mainly, I think people just want space and fresh air, and have no idea what rural life is actually like.
The goal I had for my first vegetable garden was to produce enough food to last a month. I was able to achieve that for under 50$ in parts. More recently I’ve been getting into fruit trees which has been a little more expensive because I’m not doing to grafting myself. You don’t have to feed the entire neighborhood yourself, and will like 30min of effort a day you can have more than enough for your own needs.
If you’re not eating anything else, but still have a year-round growing season, it takes an acre or two for modern agriculture to feed a person. That’s a lot by city standards, but not in general (it was more like 60 in pre-modern times). It’s basically what the Ethiopians mentioned are doing, plus the cocoa so they can have things that don’t grow on trees, as well.
Mountains of human experience suggests it takes a lot more effort than that. Have you had to deal with pests, drought or disease yet?
You might still come in under 8 hours a day, but then you add in the cash crops… Again, this is something only white people generations away from subsistence farming seem to think will be easy.
I’m not saying you need to grow enough to feed a village on 30min a day. After I got everything prepared I water every other day if there’s no rain and spot weed when I feel like it. My goal was enough for like 50 meals from a small garden and anyone can easily supplement their diet without that much effort. Hobby vegetable farming and industrial agriculture are two different things and as food insecurity worsens and costs go up, it’ll be a valuable skill to have. For me it takes more work to preserve the food than it does to grow it.
Yup. My extended family is farmers. They got out of livestock decades ago because there was no profit at the scale they were willing to do it in and animals smell terrible at (abusive) scale. Corn and soybeans, they had a contract with a major company for sweetcorn last I heard.
I love the idea of an air conditioned tractor cab that’s mostly run by GPS and lets me sit around and listen to podcasts while babysitting the tractor, but I don’t want to live in Bumfuck Iowa so I didn’t go into farming.
It’s always a balance of what you can afford, what you want to do, and what your market can bare. You may love raising chickens, but eggs will almost never pay off. I love hot peppers. But I can’t get by growing just that. It is skilled and complicated for sure.
I don’t know where you live but round here if you want to raise chickens you gotta first buy some chicken quota (I am serious).
So you are in the hole before a bird lays its first egg.
I’m in Japan. It’s not worth it on my scale to even try. I do plan to get chickens for our eggs (and bonus bug eating and compost helping), but otherwise I’m just in the veg business. I have full English support and website which helps me find my market
So do you have a kind of mixed farm + social media presence thing going then?