Farming, whether a 5,000 acre corn/soybean farm in the midwest, or a 1/2 acre produce farm with occational market sales, takes a lot of startup, a lot of time to learn the ropes, and a _lot_ of work.
The payoff typically comes 10 years down the road, long time of living off noodles, and putting more money into it than you get out of it for a long time.
The big bucks per acre require you have a cheap labor force (children or nephewsneices or_ if_ you can find good help) that does an amazing amount of grunt work, and you spend most of your time on the phone or traveling to sell your product. You need to retail, and you need to catch the latest fad, and be prepared to change to the next fad, and sell, sell, sell. You need to find the market if you want to get the cash. You need to sell yourself and your operation as better than all the rest, and charge a lot, rather than trying to undercut others..... You want to give the illusion of being extra special and worth getting more than others get for what is, essentually, the exact same product they can buy in the store for pennies.
Often about 5 acres is a good size for these high dollar, high workload, high risk operations. You might want to end up still renting out 15-20 acres when you get to where you want to be.....
The high risk I mention is the weather - you can lose an entire year's crop in 15 minutes of storm, or a few months of drought or a night of frost - but you still have all the operating costs, plus you will be letting down your customers with no production so have to start over with marketing the following year....
And the market - your customers can be fickle and change their mind - or the ecconomy can change it for them and what worked well for you this year, fails to sell or make money the next year.... Again leaving you with all the costs, but no income or future for the following year.
It is a big feast or famine deal!
And takes a long time to establish. It is good you have 5-10 years to work up to the goal, and see how it goes for you, make your mistakes on small scale and learn what your area wants.
Many of the successful operations have multiple crops to spread out the risk, spread out the work load, and spread out the customers so you are selling to many more types of people. Expand your market, expand your sales window, expand your work load....
I'd be a little scared with just fruit. Takes 5 years to get to production, and another few to get mature production trees. Pretty much all comes ripe at the same time. Not really any value added to make your crop stand out. One night of frost and you are hosed, That is all super high risk.
Up here vineyards have really caught on. What they sell is an experience at a nice little farm, some interesting wine selections, maybe a bed & breakfast. They don't sell grapes; they sell an experience and charge for that experience. Who wouldn't pay an extra $15 for a bottle of averagw wine when the farm looks so cute, the owner is so friendly.....
Anyone can grow some crops, you'll need employees to do that grunt work.
You need a hook, an experience, a show, to attract people with dollars.
You need to spend your time selling yourself and your experience to the folks with the dollars.
You need to start with a ton of dollars and several years, to set up and create the 'experience' that you will be selling.
Certainly you can do farmers markets, or direct to resturants, or invite people to your farm for U-pick, you don't need to make wine.
But you need the vision, you need the creativity to sell 'that', not just sell a crate of fruit like any other store that gets the same fruit for a buck a crate.....
That's how 5 acres, or 20 acres, can make big bucks. It's not the digging in the dirt.
Paul
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