[bingerman]

There is not too much common with having a farm and having a homestead except (in most cases) rurality. To support your homestead financially you can be a farmer but you can be a software engineer too like I am. Farming is commercial activity to produce maximum amounts of "stuff" to sell others. Our homesteading usually produces some extra veggies too, but we share them with neighbours.

Nowadays a lot of the most boring and repetitive stuff can be optimised even in commercial farming. Chopping wood (and felling the trees with a chainsaw!) for the whole year, for example, takes less than a week of combined relatively relaxed and certainly not mindnumbing labor with modern tools. Personally I just often use an axe anyway since it gives a superb workout and I like it (I grew up in a farm so it has no novelty value for me).

Doing a lot of various small tasks that itself are boring and mindless when done commercially is really the best lifestyle I know. Of course, your idea of perfect life is allowed to be different.

There are homesteading purists who refuse to use even tractors and that stuff includes a lot more hard labour with little results. Oil has really changed the game and running a homestead doesn't have to be from zero to completely self sufficient in a year sort of thing. Especially those who haven't grown up in a farm (or homestead) need to start slowly to see if the reality of homesteading is what they really are after.