Excerpt from our upcoming book, The Joy of Hobby Farming, published in April 2011 by Skyhorse Publishing:
The best piece of advice that we received getting started on our hobby farm was, “Start small and don’t overwhelm yourself.” There are countless stories of folks who move to the country, buy a flock of sheep and several horses, order a bunch of chickens and start an organic garden, only to exhaust their economic and physical resources. It’s much easier to start small and grow into your comfort level than to go “all in” and try to keep up. This is the key benefit of hobby farming. Since you aren’t pressured to make it profitable right away, you have room to explore and grow into your farm.
Why Hobby Farm?
To Hobby Farm is to enjoy the bounty of your land without making economic demands on it (or yourself) that would degrade its natural sustainability. The ethos of hobby farming is living close to the land, protecting it from development and overproduction, savoring the bounty of what can be produced on it by your hands alone and sharing the fruits of your labors with nearby friends and strangers.
Hobby farming is the idea that smaller is better. Better tasting foods, both plant and animal, come from small farms that don't use intensive cultivation methods to increase profits. Hobby farming profits come mostly from the reddest heirloom tomato that cannot be bought from any store, the firmest egg yoke whose deep color cannot be matched by any close-confinement operation, the hardiest flowers that retain their brilliance for weeks in a vase and the stronger body and mind gained from hours of personal fulfillment working on the land. It’s also the freedom and time to watch the day go by on a porch, gin-and-tonic in hand, without farm or business profits nagging at the back of your mind. You may decide to sell and trade what you produce, but by most definitions, hobby farmers do not live primarily from the income they generate on their farms.
Unless you’re independently wealthy or have inherited your farm, starting out with a job outside the farm to pay your mortgage is the only option. And that makes you a hobby farmer. But it also makes you a prudent person that doesn’t dive head-long into an economic situation that has ruined countless well-intentioned people. It’s much bemoaned that young people are no longer interested in farming and there’s no one to take over for the aging farmer population. But farming is like any profession and there needs to be a vibrant apprentice and training system that doesn’t require investing your life savings for those that are considering farming as a profession. Hobby farming offers this – a hands-on way to explore the skills and economics of farming while saving for that future.
Hobby farming is diversity. Hobby farmers are the key to keeping rural land from becoming a monoculture track-house lot. They grow foods that cannot be found in your national grocery stores. They protect countless species of animals and plants on their lands. And they preserve skills and knowledge that would certainly fade into the hum of our rapid technological advances.
Unlike industrial farmers, who must deal in large economies of scale in cultivating a single crop (corn, soybeans or cattle), hobby farmers dabble in a little bit of everything, like keeping chickens, horses, gardens, bees, mushrooms, timber stands, fish ponds, etc. A hobby farmer may end up specializing in one area of farming, but not until they’ve tinkered with many to find their true passion. Along the way, they’ve created more diversity for the living things on their farm and their lucky neighbors and friends nearby. And they’ve been saving and planning for that day when they might choose on their own terms to go whole hog into farming without immersing themselves in mountains of debt that ultimately force a farmer into larger and bigger mechanized farming, dependent on banks and the government to survive.
Consider how many ears of corn need to be grown and sold in order to pay for a single new tractor. It’s very hard to find even a small tractor nowadays under $12,000. We advocate buying used equipment in most cases, but if you’re truly making a go at farming as your only profession, you will no doubt need new equipment at some point. Even if you’re selling your corn direct to consumers, the best price you could fetch is around $.25/ear. To pay for that tractor, you’ll need to sell 48,000 ears of corn direct-to-consumer and that doesn’t even pay for your labor. Unless you want to buy more equipment to mechanize the process, hire employees or grow exponentially so that you can sell on the wholesale market, your only prudent choice is to pay for your tractor and other equipment from another source of income. When you’ve got all the skills and equipment you need assembled and paid for, then you can truly consider farming as your sole profession. Until then, be proud to be a hobby farmer.
But this is our view of hobby farming that we’ve gleaned from our own experience. Anyone can be a farmer, from the college student growing and selling vegetables in the summer for tuition, to the retirees that can’t stand another game of cards by the pool, to the professional exploring any and all possibilities in life before settling for any one of them, to the young family looking to raise kids to be self-sufficient.
Slowly Farming
Living and operating a farm is only as romantic or as hard as you want to make it (most of the time). We started with just our two chickens, Ted and Bev. It took us months just to get a dog. Then we adopted another. Soon we started building our vegetable garden and fenced it in using our own cut cedar trees as posts and borders for raised beds and the side of a packing crate for a gate. After hatching a clutch of eggs, we built a coop and grew our chicken population to eleven. The grass became so tall in the field, we finally bought a used tractor, after a full year on the farm. A freshly cut field begs for some animals to graze it, so we started with two male donkeys. The next year we added a farm pond. After a couple of more dogs showed up and we had adopted four cats, we decided the donkeys could use some friends that actually produced something. We settled on llamas for their regal appearance and their warm fleeces. Our garden kept expanding and other animals came and went.
We now have a cut flower business and we sell our flowers, vegetables and crafts at three local farmers markets and over the internet. It’s taken almost 10 years to get to this point and by any definition, we’re still hobby farmers. There’s still one full-time job between us that pays the mortgage, our health insurance, contributes to our savings and our entertainment. But the farm business sustains itself at a profit, both financially and ecologically. Many times along the way, we were tempted to “compete with the Joneses.” But we always reminded ourselves that we didn’t need the farm to support us right away and enjoying what we were doing was much more important to us than having the biggest stall at the farmers market.