The farmer who produces $91 an hour worth of food for his family
Believe it or not, due to prejudice and there are people who won't pay you $91 an hour and won't promote you. Their loss. Because he's going to have freezers full of almost 100 chicken again this year, plenty of pork, milk, beef, eggs, and more.
But when you're farming competently, your time could be worth $91 an hour or more, even if you're growing food on a small scale.
There's a homestead farmer who's expecting to produce another $50,000 worth of food this season, trying to produce 75% of their own food in addition to sending friends home with armloads of the surplus. (In return, they're more than happy to help him with butchering, weeding, and more.)
He only works at it about 10 hours per week producing food.
Farming is a team effort. His wife, kids, friends, and animals all help him in exchange for food, shelter, and things like that.
Those looking for cash crops have generated $100k on a quarter acre, or $410,000 on less than 3 acres in a cold climate.
If you're in it for the cash, other people's cattle on 1,600 acres of land he doesn't own.
To an outsider, farming seems like a lot of work. But it doesn't have to be. One of the strategies to become more successful is called sheer, total, utter neglect farming, which relies on strong genes.
This idea has taken off, and Joel Salatin, Justin Rhodes, Greg Judy and myself all practice this. Rather than spraying pesticides, fussing and worrying about helping each plant survive, thus breeding more weakness, you let God choose which sheep, chickens and plants can thrive in your weed-filled, pest-filled environment.
The only pest-control is bug-eating, grub-eating animals like chickens (which eat fly larve to reduce fly population, ducks (which eat slugs), bats (which eat mosquitoes) and guinea hens (which, though noisy, eat deer ticks which can cause very expensive diseases).
It's still work and there's still an investment of time and money. You still need a place to grow plants and animals.
Then, of course, you'll need to butcher and eat them.
If you allow animals to gimmick a nature environment instead of shoving them into a cage, it's less work and they'll actually improve the environment.
But when you're farming competently, your time could be worth $91 an hour or more, even if you're growing food on a small scale.
There's a homestead farmer who's expecting to produce another $50,000 worth of food this season, trying to produce 75% of their own food in addition to sending friends home with armloads of the surplus. (In return, they're more than happy to help him with butchering, weeding, and more.)
He only works at it about 10 hours per week producing food.
Farming is a team effort. His wife, kids, friends, and animals all help him in exchange for food, shelter, and things like that.
Those looking for cash crops have generated $100k on a quarter acre, or $410,000 on less than 3 acres in a cold climate.
If you're in it for the cash, other people's cattle on 1,600 acres of land he doesn't own.
To an outsider, farming seems like a lot of work. But it doesn't have to be. One of the strategies to become more successful is called sheer, total, utter neglect farming, which relies on strong genes.
This idea has taken off, and Joel Salatin, Justin Rhodes, Greg Judy and myself all practice this. Rather than spraying pesticides, fussing and worrying about helping each plant survive, thus breeding more weakness, you let God choose which sheep, chickens and plants can thrive in your weed-filled, pest-filled environment.
The only pest-control is bug-eating, grub-eating animals like chickens (which eat fly larve to reduce fly population, ducks (which eat slugs), bats (which eat mosquitoes) and guinea hens (which, though noisy, eat deer ticks which can cause very expensive diseases).
It's still work and there's still an investment of time and money. You still need a place to grow plants and animals.
Then, of course, you'll need to butcher and eat them.
If you allow animals to gimmick a nature environment instead of shoving them into a cage, it's less work and they'll actually improve the environment.
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