Posted: 7/9/2008 3:30:54 PM EDT
| Has anybody here launched into such a venture from scratch? I'm looking to find out how much out-of-pocket I'd have to spend and how much could be offset by farm subsidies. Actually, I'm looking for anybody who has done this to tell me how it went and what "gotchas" they encountered. |
self admitted dumb country boy, and I don't know what you mean by "subsistence farming" and the word subsidies is a dirty word. But if you are talking about growing enough to eat, you might check out the food section. It might be odly named, since it is really the gardening forum. I posted many threads there, and while I am an ameteur, there are people there with a lifetime of food growing experience. There are threads on what to grow, links to ag sites, etc. edit: you know kill-9, religion on the religion forum, gardening in the food forum..  just messing with ya...
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My goal is self-sufficiency - making enough by farming, via crops, animals, or both, to pay the mortgage and taxes on the farm. |
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You need fo find a farm with high value subsidies already in place. It is nearly impossible to sign up new farms. Good farm real estate agents should know what the "farm payment" is. If they don't know, move on. My farm in NM had a payment of over $40k/yr but that wouldn't cover the mortgage, and was about 1/2 the fuel bill for irrigation when diesel was $1. Example of good farm real estate listing Note that you can't farm or graze CRP. You want crop base payments. |
OH, ok, understand... here's my two cents... paying the mortgage with the farm is sort of "new" and it isn't new, at the same time...over time, the mortgage became some cruel joke that allowed people to convice themselves they could have a big fancy house. Then two hard years and the house didn't belong to them anymore... Taxes, now that can be done. The story goes many years ago, the State of SC had a pecan program that helped landowners get a small number of pecans going to eventually pay tax on land. My bees pay our taxes on many acres. You need to understand what kept people alive in your area about fifty years ago. Talk to some gray haired people now, cause they are dropping like flies...and when they are gone, so is their knowledge...then, you'll be left with uncle google, and he lies and just makes some stuff up. Potatoes. Turnips. Beans. (green beans and field peas.) If you have enough acres, and a source of fertilizer, corn. Everything else, onions, especially tomatoes, is "fu fu food." someone will be along shortly to fight me on the tomato comment, but it's true. It may give your palate a change of pace, like summer squash will, and I guess keep you sane, and provide some vitiman C, but it won't keep you alive like potatoes and turnips. Im experimenting with wheat but it's turning out to be an incredible amount of work and consumes at least one full acre for a family. The wheat field draws turkeys and doves and rabbits. At first, it draws herds of deer, but mostly at night. So that's some ramblings from my perspective. kill 9, what you want is a "truck patch garden." go to www.tractorbynet.com and type truck patch or look in the projects section. You don't have to buy a farm- to have a farm...my acreage started out as "cut over" with stumps everywhere when I began. |
Hell, you're not talking about subsistence farming, you're talking about plain old family farming.  It's kind of a sad commentary on the state of affairs in our country, but around here there are more farm families where one or both of the adults in the family work outside the farm to make ends meet than having both on the farm 24/7. The farm may make enough to pay the mortgage and keep the line of credit from getting out of hand, but it's the job in the feed mill, doctor's office or body shop that puts groceries on the table. I'll throw out some of the same questions to you that I've been considering over the past months: 1) What is your land good for? Crops? Livestock? Both? 2) When you answer the first question.......do you have enough land to accomplish your goal? 3) How many person-hours do you realistically have available per week? No point embarking on something that needs a hundred man-hours per week if you can only supply forty. 4) How developed is your land relative to the plans you have for it? Is it a turn-key operation or do you need to build/develop your property? 5) How are you set for equipment? What will you need and do you have it already? 6) What's the local market like? Where and how will you sell your product? No sense in investing in a koi farm if no one wants to buy koi. 7) How will you pay for start-up costs? Savings? Line of credit? How much financial risk are you willing to tolerate? How will you fund operating costs? 8) Are you planning a "one product" farm or will you have multiple products? (What's "Plan B" if your primary crop fails?) Anyway, there are more questions, but these are a few to start with. |
Not sure why, but I'm thinking they can grow potatos in Idaho?  That would be my first bet, unless you are in an usually cold part of idaho or unless the potato thing is just a cruel generalization. some basic questions: How many acres can you farm? (arable, preferably currently lush with grass...) One is an OK answer, half acre is still ok for a truck patch garden. What do your neighbors grow? all suburbanites or you got some country folks nearby? |
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Another way to look at the issue of "self sufficiency" moves closer to the original notion of subsistence farming. It likely won't pay the mortgage, but it's worth throwing out there for consideration. If you can make your homestead/farm less reliant (notice that I didn't say independent) on outside goods, then you reduce, to some degree your cash out. Can you recoup enough money to pay the mortgage? I doubt it.......but every little bit helps. Personally, my goal is to make our homestead less reliant on outside meat, milk, eggs, cheese, vegetables and breads by 2010. |
You guys aren't understanding the OP questions. He was correct in calling what he wants to do subsistence farming. From a wiki article: Subsistence agriculture is self-sufficient farming in which farmers grow only enough food to feed the family and to pay taxes or feudal dues. The typical subsistence farm has a range of crops and animals needed by the family to eat during the year. Planting decisions are made with an eye towards what the family will need during the coming year, rather than market prices. Tony Waters (2007:2) writes that "Subsistence peasants are people who grow what they eat, build their own houses, and live without regularly making purchases in the marketplace." |
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Spent a good portion of my life on self sufficient small farms. I don't how to say this but be pretty blunt. Those farms, still wholly owned by family, aren't self sufficient anymore nor could I even imagine doing so from scratch unless you have a ton of money you can just dump into something. The financial just don't work anymore. Medical cost alone is a deal breaker. Its pretty much gone to large farms these days. A small self sufficient farm is all about community. To give you an example, around here tobacco use to be the cash crop. Tobacco is government controlled. Its called a "Base". You can grow as much as you like but then you can only sell what the number of pounds the base allots. The bases were very small. As farmers could not make ends meet and took jobs, they didn't have the time to work their farms. They leased their "Base" to their neighbors still hanging in there. They in return leased their base in time to the larger farms as they couldn't make ends meet. Cost wise, its like once a farm financially hits the break even point financially, you could live off the interest on the money the farm would sell for. Other than a few rare exceptions, that pretty much means self sufficient is the larger commercial farms and that's where our agricultural growth is. In my county, I know of two self sufficient small farms. Both are about 100 acres of very good bottom land. One is a dairy farm running about 200 head with a milk house that runs 24/7. The other about 400 acres which found a nitch market. Being so close to the city, they changed from a corn soy rotation to selling sod. Of course, there's a bunch of folks living a rural existence taking every social assistance they can, but that's not self sufficient. I'm not talking crop subsidies here but welfare. It helps to understand that a farm even 50 years ago or 2,000 years ago is a business. Its dependent on communities and markets. The land its self has an inherit value and if it has an income that's just tacked onto the selling price. Its very sad really. Still that doesn't mean you can't have a small farm that makes life better and would help dramatically in hard times. Its still much better to be unemployed on a farm than in an apartment or mortgaged house. Tj |
OK, now that we've got the terminology agreed on, how should he go about it? |
Unfortunately, that's where I am at. I make too good of an income doing it to take the hit in the short term for a longer term return that will be lower than what my skills generate. Therefore, I have gone the direction of simply having a large hobby farm, supplementing the inputs with my own earnings outside the farm for now. We grow a massive garden, have pigs, chickens, goats and soon a few calves. I have pretty much cut the grocery bill down to bare minimums. I bought property with a lot of good, solid, newer outbuildings, and now have two separate apartments with my FIL living in one, and my sister and nephew living in another one. They pay rent, which is applied to the monthly overhead. We have a big family dinner every night around the table, share chores, and are starting to return to more of the family homestead. I think this is really the key. Families are going to have to face reality and start pulling back together. It really makes more economic sense anyway. Add up all the income earned by your mom & dad, brothers & sisters & their spouses. Now add up all the interest that they are paying individually on their own suburban tracts of useless 1/3 an acre plot in a HOA development. Doesn't it make more sense to pool the resources & income, eliminate a lot of mortgage interest, share in expenses and responsibilities while still serving the individual needs of each family unit? Family estates didn't happen that way by accident. SMART families stayed together, worked together to build giant antebellum estates with mansions. |
TJ, the plan is called a Base & Excess plan. That means that the farmer tells the .gov how much of a given product he produced for a certain period, say the average of the last 5 years, although the definition varies. That average is called his base & it might be X lbs. of something. I'm familiar with it from the dairy industry. In that case the dairy farmer usually established a base from the amount of milk produced during the fall, when fewer cows are lactating & production is lower. Anyway, the net result to a farmer is that they get a higher price up to the base amount, say 10000 lbs., & a lower price for the excess. As far as the dairy farmer that you mention he may be doing OK simply because he is in the right industry at the right time. They get about $20/cwt. these days. With 200 cows lactating they would probably produce about 50lbs./cow/day so that would be about 10000 lbs/day for the farm. (If he milks 3 times a day, his production would be even greater.) That would translate to a gross milk income of $2000/day 7 days a week, or about $730000/year. Then he probably sells some of his crops too, what with all that acreage, so his overall gross is pretty good. The farmers will be along shortly to tell you about how their costs have increased & there is some truth to that, too. Obviously their gas prices are up. I read that the fertilizer & pesticide companies are doing well so obviously their prices are up. The cost of machinery isn't coming down. Land pries are probably high because the income available from the land is so high, so, to a certain extent, it an autoregressive spiral. It will be interesting to see when the commodities bubble bursts. |
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I wish you guys could see this dairy farm. Its radically different from a traditional dairy farm. Its really like an old traditional farm that someone converted to dairy. I mean the milk house is traditional farm small thus why they run it 24/7. How they manage the cattle is pretty impressive as they rotate them between three fields across a public road. Like most dairy cows, they are very well mannered animals that follow direction very well. I always enjoy setting there as they meander across the road or worming my way around them on my motorcycle (yes very slow as to not alarm them.) The farm its self though is not impressive at all. The buildings are old and not well kept. There's one house that is for the hired help (very small wood frame). I don't know the exact arrangement just always assumed free rent and a small salary which is kind of normal. The main house is pretty nice but on the total other end of the farm around the fields. Besides crops (this is a little different), they also have a good amount of calves every year which they segregate and then later segregate to milk or beef. Each pasture had a large shallow pond so watering is at a minimum. They of course use traditional feed troughs to draw the cattle in for milking. The feed trough is of good size kind of traditional for a dairy farm while disproportionate to the milk house. There are very large gardens and have some horses and of course a good amount of pigs. Its kind of neat as hell to see something this where its located. Of course, that's both a blessing and a curse. Being so close to the lake, I don't know how long this place will last. The land at rock bottom prices is about $35K an acre there. That's both a heavy tax burden and since it can be sold for much more also a heavy financial temptation. He's already sold off on tract of land along the road opposite his fields to developers. Since none of that money went back into the farm in either buildings, maintenance, or even a tractor, there's a good chance it was used to make up for a few bad years or send a kid to college type thing. Its hard thing to live such a hard life when technically you are a millionaire due to the lands worth. I bet he's politicking very hard to keep that tax burden down. Anyway, though not a really pretty sight to look at and definitely not one to smell, the place is very impressive as far as its economic balance goes. They truly do live like a nation to their own being surrounded by housing coming in. The other dairy farms here are more traditional. Tj |
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If it is over 15 ac I bet he's in the greenbelt (Tn only) Our taxes would be $14k per year w/o greenbelt, $1100 with. ID is mostly desert. Farming there is impossible without irrigation, Even potatoes need water. Irrigation is expensive unless you have water rights and are on a ditch. |
I think it's really hard for middle-aged farmers to look at their relatively modest incomes in comparison to the value of their land for development purposes. This is particularly true in an era when it has become harder and harder to keep the kids on the farm. Joel Salatin, who describes himself as "a Christian libertarian capitalist environmentalist," puts it succintly in the early pages of his book Family Friendly Farming: A Multigenerational Home-BAsed Business Testament:
Salatin knows of what he speaks. You can like his stance on things or not, but his Polyface Farm is one of the most successful anti-farms in the country. By being smart enough, and daring enough, to toss out pretty much everything that big agri-business teaches as a "must do", Salatin has created a successful, sustainable farming enterprise that looks much more like the family farm of 100 years ago than the mega-farms that dominate the food production industry today. Salatin has written prolifically on issues pertaining to sustainable farming and, to get back to the OP's original question, his Pastured Poultry Profit$ lays out a way to raise meat chickens and generate a tidy income while not having to break the bank getting started:
I'm reading this book for the second time and I recommend it highly. It may not be the answer, but it certainly lays out a viable strategy for the small holder. It's worth a look. 
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I used to farm, I don't recommend it. You won't be getting farm subsidies right now with the high grain prices. They only kick in when the prices drop below a certian price that is different for each crop & it also varies from county to county. And the high grain prices also have the land values very over inflated, and then you have those real estate investors that arent helping the matter either (they really tick me off)  .One problem with farmers today (including me back when I farmed), with a few exceptions, is that they buy all their food rather than raise a garden / beef cow / hog for their food. If you really want to move out in the country & grow your own food, just get a 10 acre acerage & raise 1 cow & 1 pig every year. Let the cow graze & put up some hay besides. Then finish the cow out with corn (there's a certian way to do this) & you will have some of the best tasting beef you've ever ate.  It will be easier, alot easier, to just buy feed for the pig. Unless you have a big family, you'll have extra meat that you can sell. And for the rest, plant some fruit trees & grow a garden. Learn how to can & you'll have fruit & veggies from your place year round.It will cost you money though, but having food that you raised is rewarding & usually tastes better than the stuff you get in the store. |
well this frustrates the hell out of me. I think there may be some misunderstanding about what your goals are, and with the terminology cleared up (you call it a paper bag, I call it a poke or sack, you call it electricity, I call it juice, you say take me to the store, I say "carry" me to the store, same thing) you CAN start a little farm nowadays. Now technically can you make EVERYTHING you will need? like wooden wheels for your garden cart? no, this is rediculous...I make honey, but I trade it to the dairy farmer up the road when I can, and when he can... cause when I squeeze my titties nothing comes out....I gave my co workers some turnips and they gave me some of their tomatoes (mine ar en' ripe yet) this kind of community trading helps you to fill in the gaps. so I appreciate your curiosity, but your enthusiasm petered out awful quick when TJ, who I disagree with on many things frequently, gave you a dose of HIS reality and experience. My mistake was thinking you actually had some motivation to do this, as opposed to just asking questions on a whim, of a thing you would never really consider doing, and was just looking for one guy to give you some discouraging words so you could mark that course of action of your list as one you "thouroughly investigated." haha.. no worries, nothing wrong with just asking and in the process we did ferret out a few opinions and issues. but I'm not sure what answer you were expecting, "oh sure, it's easy, just go to the "How Kill-9 can start a Wikipedia defined "farm" with no money down" forum over in the General area, new boutique forum they started since it was easier to moderate...haha. Doh, get your panties out of a wad TJ....I can hear the steam coming out of your ears...
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hmm I will have to order that chicken book. How about goats? is there an economic sustainability to them or are they mostly raised as easy tax exemptions? (I would be worried about a sole sustainable income based on poulty with bird flue goign to end up here eventually.) |
WHAT? Believe me, you don't want to have those glorious pains in the ass. Goats get into everything, tear shit up, are annoying, ect, ect, ect............ In other words, they are raised by people thet don't know better (usually city folk that move out into the country). |
There are a lot of things that make goats an attractive proposition for the homesteader: small scale meat and milk production to name two. Unfortunately, making money with goats is a difficult proposition. The market for goat meat is niche, at best. Goat milk (which in some ways is superior to cow's milk) commands a premium but it doesn't have a big market either. There's a health food store in the nearest large town to us that sells goat milk for $10 a gallon.......but they don't sell too many of those gallons. With either goat milk or meat, the regulatory hurdles that you'll face are daunting. Goat cheese, as a "value added" product, would probably be the most salable goat product. But it has established competition and breaking into that market would be chancy. You'd need a lot of time, a lot of expertise and, most of all, you'd need to be very well capitalized to make a go of it there. Goats are decent animals for the homestead, but don't look to them to pay the mortgage. |
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look up the book "the farming game" much of it is outdated because of the drastic increase in real estate prices but it will gve you an idea of how you can make money farming. most of it says if you want to make money farming, you eat 70-85% self produced food, you don't have expensive hobbies like buying a new gun every 2 months, and you don't mind long hours and doing the mucking required. |
Washington state just announced new "subsidies" to protect land on the edge of water ways and other important biologicaly diverse land. maybe move to washington. the money will not pay for the land or mortgage, nor will CRP if you buy a place with crp enrollment. |
goats are excellent for producing meat on marginal land, or land that needs rehabbing, but it takes effort. |
In other words, you'll work your ass off for little money. Been there, done that.
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No steam, I didn't write your post for you. All you did was post advising someone they can buy a small farm and make money at it when small farms have been dieing in this country since the Great Depression.  BTW, Just so you know, I can think of no racket that ranks right up there with "Rip off Bob's Car Lot resale the same car 15 times" than buying a farm on a "Land Contract". I haven't met a soul that has made that work and have seen farms sold and resold dozens of times. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know farm income is not monthly. The seller banks on it. Tj |
yeah, but small farms dieing has much less to do with wether (snicker) someone makes a smart go of it or they listen to the agribusiness and buy into the commercial aspect with only 80 or 160 acres. lotsa small farms making it if they think against the land grant colleges "how to run a farm 101" propaganda |
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Here's a somewhat related unrelated question. If you could by the farm (or business property) outright -- ie not have a mortgage or a rent payment, would that aid your business or hinder you business? I've been fantacizing about taking a contractor job overseas for a year or two. Then coming back, buy a house with land to garden out side of a town (40 acres) and and a building to house a business (gun shop) in town. I would ideally pay for both in cash and not have a mortage for the house or rent payment for the business. On the business side, is there a benefit in renting a building vs owning the building the business is in. The company that I work for owns our building but has been trying to sell it and rent it back to get rid of the property tax. I immagine the rent would be able to written off on taxes. Say you are in some podunk town in the middle of nowhere, which would make more sense? |
IMHO, renting is just throwing your money down a rabbit hole while you are at the mercy of your landlord. The tax benefit just isn't worth it. It sounds like you're thinking of a hobby farm. I like the idea of that, just don't expect to make money though. And if you're just going to raise a garden for yourself, 40 acres is going to be a bit much. 10 acres should be plenty. |
I tried to have tongue in cheek and a good attitude, so keep your . I think Kill 9's question was not so much how to "buy a small farm and make money" but to do subsistence farming, which he defined as well. http://www.thehappyberry.com/ Now that was an existing farm if you want to call it that, but converted to blackberries/blueberries, muscadines, etc. Here's a list http://www.pickyourown.org/SC.htm of SC farms many of which were converted to blueberries b/c at the time that's what the market was looking for. Here's another specialty crop...http://www.buychestnuts.com/ Chestnuts produce within 5-7 years, unlike pecans which may not come into heavy (marketable) bearing for many more years. |