It really depends if you are doing for yourself or want to make money at it. There was a big boom here for hobby farms and i would say more than half have moved away back closer to the cities. At least 3-4 near me thought they could buy land and it magically grows crops. I spent a lot of time helping them get gardens in and explaining soil etc. They lasted 1 year. " too hard" or “too much work”…
I think the primary difference, at least in the hobby farmers I know who are young, idealistic, and just getting started, is that they aren’t expecting to scale the operation beyond some arbitrary point - beyond which, it stops being fulfilling and starts being a giant pain in the ass. Conversely, the dairy farmer I know who has the largest operation in the county is a stand up dude, who avoids cutting corners but is getting squeezed big time by small artisanal operations with street cred and big, industrial operations with margins. The middle, where there used to be a huge swath of family farms, is a bloodbath of debt and suffering.
I imagine most of these new hippies are trying to stay small.
FYI medium sized dairies are being squeezed out by the government back oligopolies in milk processesing that completely control the milk prices.
Many of them also do not have enough land base to feed their animals and manage the waste. The cost remedy this is prohibitive due to mega corporate investment firms buying up land at extremely high prices.
