Everytime

[Garth]

Hi, I am...a retired farmer (a secret, I never liked farming, a lot of heavy work just to go broke).
The age pension doesn't exactly give me great ways of spending money- more like ways of not spending at all!
My health is good apart from a hip which is to be replaced around Feb 2015, then watch me go!
Always looking for different things I can do, I will browse a bit.

 

[frank]

I always wondered if farming was profitable. I see you say lots of work to go broke. If you had it to do over would you still farm or would you have gone another direction? most farmers around here in iowa seem to do pretty well for themselves.

 

[pb4uski]

BIL's family (brothers) were farmers and took over the family farm. From what I saw, the pluses would be the flexibility and way of life and the minuses would be lots of hard, physically demanding work and at least in our area in many cases, struggling finances.

 

[Garth]

I always wondered if farming was profitable. I see you say lots of work to go broke. If you had it to do over would you still farm or would you have gone another direction? most farmers around here in iowa seem to do pretty well for themselves.

I live in Australia, the land is much, much older and therefore lower fertility, lower(no) mountains, therefore lower rainfall.
I was farming with my sister, she owned the land and we were partners in farming business. In 16 years, we survived by selling bits of land off!
My sister is still there, she loves it.
The biggest factor is the size of the farm, do it long enough and the formula became blindingly obvious to me. Each cow eats X so needs Y amount of land (with grass) to stay alive. We did not have enough land to feed enough cows to be able to cover our costs.
To have enough land (in Aus anyway) you need enough money (duh!).
My sister's land is worth around AUD 1.5 million and isn't big enough. I think the minimum $ is more like AUD 3m.
We didn't have it...funny that.
Return on investment in farming is lousy all over the world...so you should only farm because you love it, and I don't.

 

[Sarah in SC]

I worked on our family farm from the age of 15 (summers) and after graduating HS until I was 25 years old. I don't miss it. Very low pay, always work left at the end of the day, and no real vacations.