Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pinkmuffinere 320 days ago
I don’t know how to say this without seeming rude, but a few hundred acres is very small. 500 acres is less than a square mile. Is there something about your community that makes farms of that size more common than normal?

Edit: my (extended) family has a farm, and they cultivate X0,000 acres every year, though they own far less. They do plant a larger area than most for their community, but they’re not planting 20x their neighbors.
2 comments
arbor_day 320 days ago
Yeah, it's sorta both big and small.

It's small in that you can't support a family farming 500 acres of corn/beans. It's big in that buying 500 acres would cost $5M - $10M, that's real money!

link
pinkmuffinere 320 days ago
If you don't mind me asking, how do you make it work for yourself? Are you single, so you don't need more? Or perhaps you're closer to a 'hobbyist' farmer? (although 500 acres is also well beyond a hobby haha)
link
arbor_day 320 days ago
I've been a FAANG engineer for the last 15 years, tech pays pretty well. The things you see on the news about "farming subsidies" often show up as government subsidized loans (lower rates and higher leverage) which has helped.

It's somewhere between an extra job and a hobby. It's just touch for planting / harvest season -- lots of nights / weekends / day job PTO along with getting help from relatives.

link
pinkmuffinere 320 days ago
Oh wow, you're FAANG _and_ you're farming? lol that's impressive. I hope you make lots of jokes about how the F no longer stands for "Facebook", but rather "Farm" :)
link
potato3732842 320 days ago
You're projecting "western desert but we pretend like it isn't" norms onto "eastern rich arable land" areas.
link
akgoel 320 days ago
On a recent Odd Lots episode, they interviewed a Canadian lentil farmer. His claim was that a family of 3 (Father, Mother, Daughter) could farm 1200 acres of lentils with time left over due to modern automation.

So I guess it would depend on the automation level of the kind of crops you’re planting.

link
pinkmuffinere 320 days ago
Interesting! It shocks me that you can run a farm on less than a square mile, I can practically plant that by hand, lol
link