[Spooky23]

They're good farmers, self-finance and produce a lot of skilled trade stuff.

The big secret to small time farming is that if you don't have to pay for lots of shit like tractors, etc, you can make money the old fashioned way. Not having car payments, cable tv, etc helps too.

Also, many groups are loaded because they've sold land that's been swallowed up by suburban sprawl.

[tsieling]

They also tend to pool and share resources, so an expensive piece of equipment isn't purchased by every farmer in an area, but shared between them. What we'd call a more modern farm has enormous redundancy in equipment ownership in the same local area, which makes it really hard for them to get into a profitable state.