Small point- all farms get subsidies. In fact farm land that's not even being farmed is subsidized. This is because the government, yet again, in an effort to prevent boom/bust cycles that can occur started this program that naturally is now impossible to get rid of.

Having said that, a 10 acre farm? Um, no shit she's not going to make any money. 10 minutes of math/ phone calls would have told her that.

The IRS even has an optional farm method to calculate self employment income, the assumption being the average farmer couldn't build up social security credits otherwise.

Farming is a nice hobby, like woodworking or musician in an amateur rock band as long as you *dont give up your day job*

Her belief that farming subsidies don't allow her to compete on price is a bit of a stretch. Things like carrots and broccoli aren't covered by subsidies anyway. It is the economics of scale, and the transportation costs that really killed off small farmers. If you don't have a truckload to ship to a central distribution point, you are going to be selling your stuff every weekend at the local farmers market, along side the Amish bread, and jam people.

Once you factor in gas, and spoilage, I am amazed she made anything at all.

I wonder if you can/freeze your own vegetables if it would work better in terms of what Isab talks about. You sell some fresh stuff, and then sell lots of tomato sauce or whatever that keeps longer, and you can build up a store to ship a whole ton at once to far-flung places.

I sometimes fantasize about getting a goat and making cheese with vegetarian rennet. But it'd be more of a hobby thing... I saw a great quote about DIY "Why buy something for $5, when you could make it for $95?"

Canning (any processing) adds tools, fuel, permits, training, inspections, ....

Woodworkers can make good money. But most woodworkers don't go into the right "field" or learn enough about the trade. They get stuck and easily discouraged especially when they see the insane level of talent out there.

The thing is those super talented guys need to be babysat and they come with a lot of personal baggage (addiction is pretty common). Managers would rather get rid of them but they can't because there aren't enough guys that know how to woodwork in their particular field.

Isab is right. Go big or go home.

My mom has my dad's farm, 400 acres of South Dakota land. She rents it out to two farmers who do the actual work, and pays 40% of the costs and gets 40% of the harvest. They alternate between corn and soybeans.

And when I mean go big, they go big. You haven't lived until you've seen a 16+ row corn picker rolling down the field unloading it's bin and what it is currently picking into a tractor trailer next to it.

10 acres is a garden, not a farm. Rice and cotton are the two most subsidized crops in California. What did this woman think was going to happen when she decided to rent this place?

" . . . worked upward of 60 hours a week during the height of the season."

Actually, 60 hours a week doesn't really sound like all that much compared to most farmers I know.

And, the farmers I do know are folks I know from high school (I grew up in the country, even though my parents were not farmers) and they have off-season work (snow plowing, working retail during Christmas, etc.) and their wives have a town job all year round. It seems to be the only way for a family farm to succeed.

In NJ, a couple of successful family farms are what one might call "tourist" farms. A lot of their income is from doing things that the city tourists like and are willing to pay extra for; such as corn mazes and hay rides or pick-your-own pumpkins, etc. in the Fall. The one farm even has pony rides and a petting zoo in the Fall. Those farms would be lost without such additional "tourist" income.

That is what family farming is about for a lot of folks - making ends meet in any way that you can; and a lot of the "any way that you can" includes non-farming stuff.

Funny as it seems to me now, I was in FFA (Future Farmers of America) in high school and switched gears my sophomore year as I didn't think farming was in my future. Lack of land was the main reason. Boy, am I glad that I did that!

That sounds like a Hobby farm...other than they expect to make a living off it.

BY my minimal research just now, the government defines a farm with under $250,000 in gross to be a small farm (some other conditions too).

My relatives have a farm. They seem to make a good living at it. They buy new equipment and cars, and took the kids to Disneyland at one point. The last time I visited (~1990) most all the land you could see from the house was the farm. A bit to the NE (I think) you could see some of the neighboring farm. From what little I know I would guess the farm is 500-1000 acres. At that time my Dad's cousin (since retired) and one of his Sons were the only year-around employees (there was some hired in to harvest as well as plant).

My mom has 160 acres. She doesn't make a living farming it.

This chic thinks she can make a living farming just 30x a typical suburban yard? College students seriously need a real education.

One thing not mentioned here is the "Co-op" - short for "cooperative".
Several farms band together to buy/lease the serious hardware necessary for field processing: a bulldozer, several planting machines and assorted harvesters, many of which are specialized. Yeah, as IRADA has pointed out, they go big. I've seen a Caterpillar D9 pulling what had to be a 100-foot-wide disc harrow array. The precision with which drivers run these things has to be seen to be believed, too.

Anyway, that keeps a single farmer from being on the hook for a half-million dollars' worth of turbocharged machinery that gets used around the clock - but for only one or two weeks a year.

Off-farm income sometimes means the farm is secondary. If you lose money on farming, you farm the tax code. These folks, although doing well with off-farm income, are presented as starving family farmers and distort the overall picture but come in handy at the next attempt to boost again subsidies.

(sigh ...)

When I was about 20 years old, I completed a very lengthy computer questionnaire that was supposed to determine what my ideal occupation would be. Some of the questions seemed odd, and there were an awful lot of them, but I took it very seriously and dutifully plowed through the questions, answering each one as truthfully as I could.

At the end, way out there in front of all the other options, head and shoulders above the rest, was: FARMER.

There are quite a few things I could happily do all day long. Play Dragon Age, drink wine and enjoy conversation with my sweetie, make beautiful things out of needle and thread, go for a bike ride on a nice day, get lost in a book, or snuggle up with my sweet little dog for a nap. I cannot get paid to do any of those things.

Jobwise, I eliminated everything that didn't pay enough for me to live on, and then chose from the remaining options based on what seemed the least distasteful.

I will make a very happy retiree!

A very rough rule of thumb is you can feed a person on on acre of farmland. Factory farm less than an acre organic more. 10 acres would feed your family and a little more not even close to a life.

Google $100K organic farm and you'll see how someone unfamiliar w/ commercial farming could believe that they can make a living off of a 10 acre plot.

A lot of organic farming advocates want to supplant conventional farming w/ purely organic methods. This leads them to make all sorts of exaggerated claims about organic farms.

A popular one is that organic farms can yield a gross revenue of $100K per acre - which is many many times what conventional farming yields. It's also a fabrication based on a very selective analysis a few small, often 1 man, growing operations and a lot of wishful thinking.

What's annoying is that when you ask why conventional farmers don't take up these method - seeing that they'd make them billionaires overnight - they'll tell you it's because those farmers are dupes of the devil Monsanto. They just don't have the proper 'consciousness' or intelligence.

It's a very arrogant and insulting attitude that has unfortunately infected a lot of mainstream discussions of organic farming.

The truth is that organic produce isn't any more nutrient rich than conventionally grown produce.

And surprisingly organic farms aren't more efficient - which you'd expect because they heavily re-use plant matter. But it turns out that the increased tillage requirements incur greater costs both in energy use and over time in fertilization.

The big hit against organic farming is that it's very labor intensive and doesn't scale well. Large factory organic uses most of the same techniques as conventional farming, though they'll substitute organic pesticide and fertilizers. This is why most organic produce in stores comes from China and India, where they still have acricultural peasant communities.

In the end it's just another way to grow food. I'm all for people having that option, but I think they should be honest about the costs and benefits.

As someone who grew up on a small farm, I'll second that "Duh", but only because I can't think of a strong enough word.

First, 10 acres isn't a farm, it's a garden. It can feed a family; with good soil, lots of water and sunlight, and a whole lot of work, it might feed three families, but you'd probably need chemicals and commercial seed to manage that. But this isn't the Middle Ages anymore. A family needs a lot more than food to survive, and much more than 3 times the value of their food - especially unprocessed straight-from-the-farm value, which is going to be less than the wholesale price.

So, consider a real small farm, such as my Dad's 100 acre plot. That farm was Dad's hobby; in real life, he was a professor at the community college. A hundred acres is still not enough to make a living on, not if that living includes medical care and a car - and it's pretty much impossible for a rural family to survive without transportation. (Horses are likely to cost you more than keeping a used car running - the Amish are just about the only non-rich families that own horses these days, and they work incredibly hard for very little.)

My friend has a real farm that he inherited: 600 acres plus an equal amount he rents. Illinois, grows corn & soybeans. Has a self-driving GPS enabled tractor and all sorts of equipment. Economy of scale. Also 200 cows. That is what it takes for a middle-class income. Oh, and it is organic farming, but not hand-garden vegetables...

"popular one is that organic farms can yield a gross revenue of $100K per acre - which is many many times what conventional farming yields. It's also a fabrication based on a very selective analysis a few small, often 1 man, growing operations and a lot of wishful thinking."

Marihuana farm? I know someone who has one......😀

"Farming is a nice hobby, like woodworking or musician in an amateur rock band as long as you *dont give up your day job*"

Yeah, there's a lot of gentlemen farmers around here. A guy I used to work with had 50 acres and he called himself an "agriculturalist". He explained: "There's a difference between a farmer and an agriculturalist. A farmer makes money on the farm and spends it in town. An agriculturalist makes money in town and spends it on the farm." They do exchange a lot of info about how to play the subsidy game...