Quote:
Originally Posted by 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.
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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.