[Retric]

My old boss operates a 1,000 acre farm as a hobby due to that efficiency. Sure it was a “family farm” but it was a trivial portion of their income and involved 10-15 hours of work a week. It’s hard to argue that’s a bad thing.

[mabbo]

Had an old teammate who would talk about his "family's farm" back in Kentucky. Got the impression he meant some 500 acre plot of land they were just getting by on.

Oh no, it's 8,000 acres or so and they have a staff of workers to maintain it.

[prepend]

When you say operate do you mean do all the work? Or manage the farm and hire people to do that?

If the former, would you say what kind of farm it is, 1000 acre farm that’s easy enough to spend 15 hours a week seems interesting to me.

[Retric]

Operate as in he and his wife did 95+% of the work so it was more like 20h/week total. As to the type of farm, they had some beef cattle and mostly grew corn.

The time spent is kind of an interesting question because they could spend either time or more money to solve many issues. It was enough time to break even, but not enough profit to live on. However, a pure corn farm would taken less work, so they chose to spend more time than needed to make it more interesting.

[gruez]

> It was enough time to break even, but not enough profit to live on.

AFAIK this describes most small-scale farmers. They're only doing it because of inertia (eg. they inherited the farm and they don't want to sell it), not because it's actually profitable.

[cmrdporcupine]

Probably the latter, but that said, a modern cash crop monoculture farm involves just a few high intensity bursts of activity a year.

During most of the growing season it's just sitting there without intervention. And all winter. A huge burst of activity in the spring with tillage / planting and/or seed drilling & spraying / fertilizing etc. Maybe a couple passes over for herbicide application. And then combine harvesting in the fall and maybe some tillage and planting of winter rye, etc. Then some machine maintenance, outbuilding maintenance, accounting / bookkeeping, seed and other inputs purchasing thrown in here and there throughout the year.

I can see it being as little as 15 hours a week if you averaged it over the whole year. But it would have moments of intensity.

But the reality is that most of these farmers around in my area are contracting out portions of this work, because owning the equipment ends up being a huge capital investment that only makes sense for very large plots of land.

[fouc]

There's definitely lots of low effort options for farming. Look at permaculture farming for example, key ideas behind it involve no-tilling, sculpting the landscape with various shapes like berms, which create microclimates, arranging rows of trees to retain moisture, etc. There's a lot of ways to make the land work for you, but can take a few years to get it to a highly productive state.

[Loughla]

Just for reference, I've lived on our current place for 20 years or so, and it has taken absolutely every one of those years to get to a point that our 'permaculture' farm is anywhere near running efficiently.

The amount of work involved in that process is simply staggering. There are principals that can be effectively integrated to a backyard garden. But, to have as close to a self-sustaining cycle as you can, you're going to invest thousands and thousands of hours. Honestly, I have never figured up how many hours we've spent on this, just because it's a hobby and quantifying it would spoil part of it for me.

[beachy]

We have a great permaculture farm near us, they run classes, tours etc. (Apparently a popular joke in the permaculture world is that the only way to make money off permaculture is to run permaculture courses).

Everything I've seen there echos your sentiments. An incredible amount of work - and knowledge - to achieve a rather peasant-level existence.

That said it's amazing seeing anyone live a genuinely sustainable lifestyle. I always think that if everyone lived and thought like these guys, our environment would be recovering nicely.

[Loughla]

>I always think that if everyone lived and thought like these guys, our environment would be recovering nicely.

That's the problem.

>to achieve a rather peasant-level existence.

Without massive, massive disruption to the way people live, this is not a thing that will happen.

This is why I'm very negative about the prospects of climate change and the future. I don't think there will be a stomach to change to a lifestyle that supports climate improvements until such time as we're already fighting world wars over land, water, and food.

We also run tours, but in conjunction with the local state university extension office, for free. We could charge, but that defeats the purpose of getting the principals we believe in out to the world.

That is not a moral judgment on the people running the one near you. My partner and I have full-time jobs that support our lifestyle - the 'farmette' is just a hobby.

[fouc]

Let's say you had the same piece of land, but you put a hard limit on how much time you'll spend working on it every year.

No time for make work. Bring in machines to quickly shape the land. Borrow some pigs or chickens to root through the ground and then sprinkle random seeds all over. Spend your time on observation, avoid working on the land for a couple of years, etc. See what comes up and where.

[Loughla]

You would end up with a weed patch. There is a very natural progression of plants that happens when a piece of land is left unattended. Small grasses, then brambles and bushes, then fast growing trees, then slower growing trees.

There is not really a way to create a space for growing food and/or cultivating anything that doesn't require time. The weather, weeds, pests. These things do not care for the calendars of men.

>No time for make work.

This is the main difference between farm life and work life. Most of my work life, in the office, is spent finding work, or creating work. New initiatives, better processes, etc. These are all things to either improve what already works, or fix what doesn't work that well. Either way, it's make work.

On a farm, the tasks you engage in (outside of hunting or fishing or other fun endeavors) exist solely because the need to exist. I have to create a dead furrow or swale (sp?) or berm, because otherwise the soil will furrow and wash in the next spring rains. I have to build fence on the back 15, because otherwise I cannot pasture that ground in the spring and cannot have cattle. 'I have to' guides the daily/weekly/monthly plans; there is no strategic planning process to keep middle managers busy.

[vram22]

Right. I had given a few examples of quite successful long-running permaculture / regenerative agriculture operations here - people like Gabe Brown (Brown's Ranch, ND, US, ~5000 acres), Richard Perkins (Ridgedale Permaculture, Varmland, Sweden, 25 hectares?), Geoff Lawton (NSW, AU, well-known permaculture pioneer, 66 hectares/acres - countries consult him, even):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24827234

Most of them have YouTube channels with a number of videos each, so you can see that they are actually walking (or plowing or no-tilling :) the talk. They also do invited talks and run internships. Gabe, Richard, Geoff and many others also use conventional or adapted machines (traditional heavy machinery or lower-cost appropriate technology), too, so it can be a hybrid what-makes-sense-as-well-as-is-sustainable approach; it is not a totally back-to-nature hippie kind of thing. In fact all those I mentioned are highly educated (whether college- or self-taught), and well aware of critical modern scientific discoveries and development in ag-related sciences (plural) and use them as appropriate in their operations. One big such example is Elaine Ingham's work (a Ph.D. soil biology scientist, founder of Soil Food Web, Inc.), which I also commented on in the same thread as the one I linked to above (it is very significant, and they all quote her and apply her results):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24828524

There are many more, doing their thing successfully and quietly, although there certainly are talks, books, videos, conferences, associations, courses, etc.

And some of them claim that their approach is lower effort and / or lower cost than so-called "conventional" farming. In fact, Gabe says that it is their approach (permaculture / regen ag) which is closer to "conventional", since it mimics nature, as much as feasible, and nature has been at it for millenia before we even walked the earth. And in a holistic sense, it is actually more efficient.

Edited for typos.

[svieira]

There's also Ernst Götsch down in Brazil and Joel Salatin in the Eastern Seaboard.

[vram22]

Thanks, will check them out.

[xyzzyz]

“Permaculture” is opposite of low effort. No tilling is not going to save me much effort, given that I can till 200 acres a day with a tractor. Sculpting the landscape of the same 200 acres will take incomparably more effort.

Permaculture is well suited for home gardens, where you want to maximize land use and fun involved. It is not going to feed the population.

[foxhop]

Any monocrop or one sufficiently subsidized is my guess. I grow a lot of food for myself and my family on less than an acre using hand tools. I don't focus on single crop because that would yeild a feast-or-famon phenomenon.

Grow what grows well in your context and locality, part time. Additionally, a focus on perennials will significantly chop the work hours needed to just reaping the harvest.

For more subscribe to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RussellBallestrini