TLDR; You can have both, but going full rural homestead is hard.

I have a 2 acre tropical fruit orchard in North Florida with 80+ fruits that don't grow here natively, and I'd like to turn it into a side business eventually, but for now I work at a FAANG remotely and my wife is in management. You don't have to give up your life to dip your feet in. I do have Zillow fantasies about 50 acres in the tropics or 100s of rural acres but I temper that with the loss of quality of life. If I'm going to risk everything and start something of my own, it won't be on farming margins, it'll be chasing tech profits.

My great grandfather homesteaded in Montana and North Dakota, dances with wolves style. He had hundreds of acres and built wealth. This is completely different than Youtube homesteaders who build minifarms on 5-10 acres and open the equivalent of a petting zoo. The land and the work is bondage and you can't free yourself from it unless you hire help to do the work, generate more profit per unit of work than industrial farming, or find a profitable ancillary activity. Here are what I've seen be some of the success scenarios:

1. Market Gardens - Look at Curtis Stone or Jim Kovaleski who make pretty good money farming peoples yards. This route requires selling, entrepreneurship, hard work, lack of flexibility. Curtis now makes money from books/workshops/etc in addition to his farms which he has help for.

2. Agrotourism - Make money off the experience of visiting your farm. You will need to build an experience people will want to visit/pay for, and probably require products to sell, and require a steady supply of wealthy customers (example: https://www.congareeandpenn.com/agritourism).

3. Get Youtube Rich - Make supplementary money from Youtube/Patreon, use it to grow your farm and switch to one of the other activities.

4. Online Sales - Use your internet presence to sell plants, seeds, books, workshops, guides, Amazon affiliate money. Pete Kanaris of GreenDreams (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwgfS1k7n0c) had a homestead and market garden and edible permaculture landscaping business, but has rapidly grown into a major online nursery with tons of employees.

5. Own a Nonprofit/Educational Co-op? - Teach people to farm in exchange for their labor to give you the freedom to remove yourself occasionally. Something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmkgbS8RQ2k maybe.

Additionally, you need to be maximizing the value of every single inch of your land. How much land do you have, what type of environment is it, what growth zone, how are you currently making money, what're you growing, how many helpers do you have, what are your current future goals?

user:	hibachi_drama
created:	April 5, 2017
karma:	3