this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
37 points (97.4% liked)
Simple Living
2494 readers
1 users here now
Live better, with less
Ideas and inspiration for living more simply. A place to share tips on living with less stuff, work, speed, or stress in return for gaining more freedom, time, self-reliance, and joy.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think the primary difference, at least in the hobby farmers I know who are young, idealistic, and just getting started, is that they aren’t expecting to scale the operation beyond some arbitrary point - beyond which, it stops being fulfilling and starts being a giant pain in the ass. Conversely, the dairy farmer I know who has the largest operation in the county is a stand up dude, who avoids cutting corners but is getting squeezed big time by small artisanal operations with street cred and big, industrial operations with margins. The middle, where there used to be a huge swath of family farms, is a bloodbath of debt and suffering.
I imagine most of these new hippies are trying to stay small.
Yeah I grew up with a friend whose parents owned a ranch (one of the biggest in the area, but still a family operation) and the way he told it, they didn't really make money, they just (usually) made enough to keep up the payments on their mountains of debt. The main reason they're even doing it is simply because their family has been doing it for generations, not because they're turning much of a profit
Even just getting buy, working and earning from my own land sounds far better than just about anything else. Something special about work being part of life rather than something to seperate out.
FYI medium sized dairies are being squeezed out by the government back oligopolies in milk processesing that completely control the milk prices.
Many of them also do not have enough land base to feed their animals and manage the waste. The cost remedy this is prohibitive due to mega corporate investment firms buying up land at extremely high prices.