sprocket

Honestly, I'd rather hire someone at a reasonable wage, train them, and turn them loose without my supervision, or spend 10k and automate part of my production, than have to supervise people. It's likely a bit different in dairying than it would be for something like vegetable production - I don't have lots of repetitive, low-skill tasks (sorry, vegetable farming people!) like weeding or harvesting that I could safely unleash untrained people upon.

I have a hard enough time finding reliable paid help (and we're well above minimum wage); managing people with even less incentive to put in a day's work isn't that appealing. :)

I believe that the requirement for > 30 day leases is also an attempt to block the proliferation of AirBnB rentals, which the city doesn't look favourably upon.

ie) You can't claim your house has been occupied for 6 months because you've had 30 one-week AirBnB listings in there over a year.

This is starting to happen already. China has started launching lawsuits in Canada to seize real estate purchased with questionable money:

  http://www.reuters.com/article/canada-china-court-idUSL1N19K03D

I graduated with a degree in CPSC in the early 2000's and worked in the field for about 10 years before my wife and I moved to a more rural locale, bought a small herd of dairy goats, and started making cheese. It's a very different and difficult life, but on the whole is very rewarding.

The money will never be the same as working in tech, and you'll almost certainly have to scale back your lifestyle expectations. I still do remote freelance work in slower periods to keep cash-flow flowing, and to fund farm expansion as we grow.

Here's a fun video of my non-tech lifestyle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb0ur8cdOfY

More recently, I've been applying my past development experience to farming automation using Raspberry Pi's. I built an automated greenhouse controller last year and this year am working on a device to automatically mix and dispense milk replacer for all of the goat kids we have born each year. (You can of course purchase commercial versions of the projects, but it was a fun application of programming, while learning about the RPi and automation, which I'd never done before.)

It's not entirely clear to me either, though I would assume it's so that the first server in the list doesn't get constantly hammered by a hundred people going through the list sequentially.

I'm in a very similar situation; I live on a island in western Canada, on a farm, and contract remotely. I don't have the extreme cost of living like our nearest city (Vancouver, BC), and being remote, no one cares about how old I am, they care that I can get the job done.

We farm on Vancouver Island and the drought we experienced this summer (effective no rain from May through September) is going to hit us hard, as the hay crops we took off are significantly less than previous years. We do irrigate some of our pastures and hay fields, but grass regrowth was very obviously affected.

By September, hay was going for 50-60% more than it had been at the END of the previous year's season. There will probably be a dire shortage come February/March 2016. This will eventually translate itself into rising food prices. Normally, one would be able to import hay from Alberta or Washington, but they've also just come out of a poor growing season.

How much of what you do is limited to being beer-centric? I run a small artisan cheese company, and having data like this would also be helpful at refining our make processes, as well as detecting seasonal preferences in both the milk we produce, and the cheeses that are derived from it.

Came here to look for responses about the AND/OR issue - was wonder why searching for "goat meat" and "flour" suggested that I should make shortbread cookies. :)

I'm a big fan of a lot of Joel's methods. His advice to develop cheap, low cost, portable infrastructure is what we've been building our farm around. As an added bonus, the quality of pastured chicken or ducks or eggs or whatever is unbeatable. We strive to raise only the best quality produce or meat, and by selling the vast majority direct to our customers we can actually earn a reasonable living from it.

I left full time tech work 3 years ago to start farming and overall, my quality of life has increase substantially. (Though I often joke that I can't tell if it's the best-worst decision I've made, or the worst-best decision.) After having spent 15+ years doing software development, I'd encountered a lot of disillusionment along the way and felt that I was always building something ephemeral and that in 9 out of 10 cases, didn't really matter in the bigger picture of life.

The biggest adjustment was the income disparity between the two - we're definitely a lot poorer at the bank (though rich at the table). That's something we've gotten used to though. Many of my hobbies and projects now involve building things on the farm that end up eventually being used to produce something we'll sell.

I do still supplement the slower winter months with the odd telecommute contract, but the plan is to eventually go all in on farming (hopefully by next year).

My wife and I are in for the lifestyle/long term. 3 years back, we'd decided to move out of the city into a more rural area to start building a farm business. We've built up a herd of about 50-60 dairy goats in that time, as well as produced some of best pasture raised chicken, ducks and eggs you'll find. We've just finished all our approvals and licensing to start building and operating a cheese making facility on the farm, hopefully due to start operation this spring. My exit plans aren't for another 15-20 years or so, at which point I figuring farming will've taken its toll on my body.

I welcome any data that you care to provide.

This is a ridiculous assertion.

First of all, "organic farming" doesn't preclude you from treating sick animals with antibiotics, if necessary, nor does it prevent you from vaccinating. (Sick animals are required to be held back for a specified period before entering the food chain.) What it does attempt to prevent is animals being fed prophylactic antibiotics, which is a major cause of antibiotic resistant bacterial strains.

Second, organically raised animals are not festering with disease. My wife and I have hundreds of healthy, organically raised animals on our farm. For example, in the last summer we have grown, processed and sold over 500 chickens which we have lost ZERO to illness.

Animals raised in humane, low stress (and the low stress is key) situations GET SICK VERY INFREQUENTLY. It's in situations where they are concentrated in industrial settings (ie. chicken broiler barns or cattle feed lots) that the stress kicks in, suppresses immune system function and you end up with sick animals that get fed antibiotics to cover up the symptoms.

Just because food is grown in a non-organic/commercial system, doesn't necessarily mean it's grown without using manure as a fertilizer. There have been many cases of non-organic products being contaminated with E.Coli as well:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_North_American_E._coli_O157:H7_outbreaks

Pesticides also don't necessarily inhibit bacterial growth (though granted, they probably don't help it), so I don't buy into the assertion that their application is somehow sanitizing your food.

I live in Canada so I can't compare directly to a USDA Organic chicken. However, based on a chicken one could get from Whole Foods, for example, our bird has a much richer flavour and a firmer, less rubbery texture. This part is very subjective, of course, but in a side-by-side comparison you would definitely be able to taste and feel the difference.

We also raise our birds to be much heavier than a store bought bird - on average about six pounds after processing vs three-ish pounds in the store. I'd wager that your meat-to-carcase ratio is probably higher for one of our birds, giving a better value. (Actually, it's better value regardless - we sell our birds for $4/lb vs $5/lb for the broiler barn organic birds in the store.)

Environmentally, there's less concentration of pollutants. All of the chicken manure goes straight on the grass and is a primo source of nutrients for subsequent hay crops. For me it's a win - I don't have to apply fertilizer nor clean out chicken barns.

Coming from an animal welfare standpoint, just because you're buying "organic" chicken in the store, doesn't mean they've been raised in a humane fashion. I carry no guilt in eating our chickens. They're not overcrowded, debeaked or in a dusty, foul smelling environment. They live as well as I can provide up until the day they go for slaughter.

My wife and I run a small farm and one of our products is organic, pasture raised chicken. All of our birds spend the majority of their lives out on fresh grass in the sunshine and our never exposed to any antibiotics, pesticides and herbicides.

The difference that a bit of exposure to green forage in an outdoor environment makes, both to the flavour and texture of the chicken, is AMAZING. Industrial broiler barn chicken pales in comparison.

I'd encourage anyone seeking to buy a more environmentally friendly chicken to try to make contact with a local organic farmer who's able to raise his birds outside and in a humane fashion.

If you're young, debt free and don't have any family relying on you for support, then I wholeheartedly recommend leaving to do what makes you happy.

When my job ended this past February, I booked a ticket to Europe and spent the next four months in "mini apprenticeships" making cheese in France and the UK. I learned to milk goats and sheep, castrated pigs, sheared sheep, and improved my French markedly. There's a lot to be acquired by immersing yourself in a different culture for an extended period of time.

Before I'd left I'd received a lot of remarks claiming I was "sabotaging my career" (or something to that effect) by taking extended leaves to follow my passions. The way I look at it is that I'm doing these things while I'm young and still physically capable of doing it, at a time when I'm not prevented from doing them financially or because I have a family to support.

You could wait to start living the care-free dream when you're 65 and retired...but who knows if you'll even be around then?

I'm spending 2 months in the Pyrenees at a farm producing Tomme de Montagne and a variety of smaller sheep's milk cheeses and three months outside of Toulouse producing a variety of blue cheese.

Five months in France learning how to make cheese.