What's a person to do?

I love it when people say rent land. Like there is some magical store out there you go to and pick out the land you want to rent. At least around here its getting almost impossible to rent land. There isn't much to rent and what there is is sky high, I offered $80 an acre for marginal pasture that I was going to have to fence and was told I wasn't even close.

I buy everything cash, but I get the point. Find owner financing.

Many times we seem to get trapped in the incorrect feeling that we need many acres. Not all folks are meant to own and operate a farm that is hundreds of acres. I have twenty acres here of good soil in Arizona, I am looking at what crop I can plant that will make me a few bucks. I am thinking pistachio trees or pecan trees or a pick it yourself orchard. You just need to find a spot you love and then let your brain explore all the possibilities. And no I cannot afford 300 pistachio trees to fill five acres but I can afford a few and that is a start. sis

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www.MontanaSticksAndStones.com at Goshen Farm

Around here, pasture land rents for $150-$250 acre, tillable ground goes for $250-$400 acre depending on the soil. Some have been renting on a flat fee plus yield basis.

True. Forty acre farms of past eras really were 40 acre farms and they are making a comeback since the large farm repossessions of the 1980/1990s

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"I didn't have time to slay the dragon. It's on my To Do list!"

Marry into a farm family.

Someone on here wanted to adopt an adult to lean the farm and then take over

Last year $40 would have been considerd high for pasture. The place I made an offer on is rocky and had little in the way of improvements. Most tillable ground around here that rents is still share cropped. Rental ground doesn't change hands much, but when it does its usually because its sold to a big farmer who farms it himself. It'll be interesting to see what happens on some of this ground that's sold recently if commodity prices stay low.

I'd love to owner finance but no one wants to and in most cases around here its an estate selling it.

I'm making things work I guess but more land would be a big help, pasture or row crop. People say work hard but you have to be smart and abit lucky as well. I still haven't fully figured out how to balance a family and a farm.

Probably the smartest thing that I've done is deversifing my opperation.

The easy way is to marry a farmer's daughter - go and meet girls in the farm country then when you see one that you might like ask her if she is the only child and how many acres her old man has - if the acres are right ask her to marry you - remember there is such a thing as love at first sight -

How close are you to Rolla or Edgar Springs?

I was an instant gratification type of girl when I decided at age 34 that I was going to go ahead and live my dream of having my own little organic farm. It took me a few years to learn I needed to slow down, take smaller bites. If I hadn't been so gung ho about everything we would have got a lot further a lot faster. We wasted a lot of time on things I got us over our heads in and later had to give up on. Here we are ten years later with milk goats, egg chickens, a garden, and raising 100 meat chickens per year. Hopefully we will do better now that I have slowed down.

If you are young and you can start out renting a little place in the country raising a few chickens and growing a small garden and maybe milking a couple of goats you will be well on your way toward your goals. You will gradually get to know your local farmers and things will come along nicely if you are patient and persistent.

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"What if I fall?" "Oh, but my darling, what if you fly?"

A ways closer to joplin Pittsburg ks.

I think it is a terrible thing that people plant pecan trees in very arid places like Arizona, New Mexico and west Texas. Plant something that does not require so much water.

You don't have to do this.
Find a banker that believes in you.
Stay after the FSA till they enroll you in the limited resource farmer program. I think they can loan $1,000,000 no money down.

I Dated a farm girl who stood to inherit 40 acres , her family repeatedly beat into her head that was the only reason I dated her,.
After they got her to quit seeing me they found out that I stand to inherit 400 and you should have seen the mom, for a while I think SHE was trying to date me!
LOL funny thing is they never knew how much I own.

That said there is a advantage to dating a farm girl , forget the land she might inherit, her connections in the farm business are far more valuable. That banker that knows her family, a retiring farmer that might rent to you because he likes her, equipment dealers ,grain buyers etc.

A few ways...

1. Work your buns off, save money, start small, find a niche. Sounds familiar, eh?

2. Go in debt up to your eyeballs, buy a few hundred acres. Buy used equipment and be prepared to work on it. Have a wife that has a job with access to healthcare and a regular decent income (think nurse or schoolteacher. Nurses make more money, teachers have less childcare issues due to not working shifts.) You don't have the money to hire labor, so you must do everything yourself. Have your crop custom cut, because you can't afford the combine or picker.

3. Root hog or die. Lease 1500-3000 acres, buy or lease decent equipment and hope you don't go broke the first year. But...most people fail, but I've seen a couple of guys do this - hit the market just right for a couple of years, hit the weather just right for a couple of years, put the money in their pocket, sell the equipment and walk away. The horizon is finite, because if you hang in there too long, you WILL have a bad year. All it takes is one and you leave a million dollar (or better) hole in the ground.

I guess I'm getting old and cynical, but we have these newbies come on here all the time, ask the same sort of questions, get a lot (34 in this case) of well reasoned answers, not the easy ones they are apparently looking for, and we never hear from them again. There are no EASY answers. If there were more people would take them...I'll go back to my corner now.

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A lot of people these days have "all or nothing" extreme attitudes. They decide tonight to become self-sufficient and tomorrow they WANT the acreage, the house, the goats, chickens, horses, cows and all the supposed happiness these things bring to you.

The smartest people understand that unless they are debt free and have plenty of money in the bank - it will be a long road to anything resembling success.

A lot of this is just instant gratification mentality. Some of it is that people just get spent commuting and running in the wheel, they take on the farm/self-sufficiency thing as a life jacket.

The key to all of this being healthy and having a chance of success is physics: if a body is traveling in a certain direction at a certain speed, if you want it to end up somewhere else, it is much easier to impact it at an angle and "push it" into a certain direction. To hit it head-on or at a 90 degree angle would require a lot more energy. Think of the moving body as your life....

We started out 36 years ago when we got married. I had four kids so our new family of six struggled financially. First farmed on an island where we were Light House Keepers. Then we farmed a rented place. Finally we bought our present place and both worked ten years to pay for it while developing it.

Now we are 68 and 69 yrs old and want to move after developing a very productive ten acres.. We haven't been able to sell because the economy is so slow here. Our desire is to find a smaller house with more land but less road frontage and fewer neighbors. All the neighbors were not here when we bought 29 years ago!
So we are busy saving every penny we can in case we find the land we want we will have a down payment while waiting to sell our place. We find it just as hard now to acquire another homestead as it was the first time around because prices are higher now and building codes are ridiculous here too. There are plenty of properties but they will have to come down on the price before anyone will buy. Our place is priced at the assessment value and still hasn't sold!.
So we continue to downsize our belongings and farm tools so we will be prepared to move when ready.Young and old people both need to work and save and never give up on what you desire to do. If you work towards a goal it will materialize eventually.

I've been filing a schedule F for 10+ years now so I'm not eligable for some of the FSA programs. Alot if thise programs are poorly written and make it hard to accept the people they are intended to help, unless of course your a minority. There aren't alot if bankers that have the authority to help you out if they "believe in you". Alot of the suggestions given are good suggestions but alot of them don't seem to have the validity today that they use to.

I farm with my dad I rent 120 acres to row crop and 30 of pasture. I own 45 that I have cattle, pigs, and a high tunnel on. It's very frustrating to not be able to find more row crop ground. I could farm quite a bit more with no additional investment in machenery. My dad plans to farm another 15 years till he's 80, by that time my son should be coming into the opperation and I want to have more for him and help him out alot more then my dad has me. He started farming after nam and didn't get any help and he tells me he doesn't want me to have it any easier then he did. It's also hard to keep expenses down with kids, or work the same hours if I want to see my kids.

I'd like to add chickens but want to get the other enterprises running smoother first.

I'd recommend anyone starting out either go with something with a high stocking rate like chickens or pigs, Or go with produce. Something with a quick turn around so your money isn't tied up. Look for outside investors, much easier to work with then a bank. If you have an oppertunity see where it leds even if its not something you've previously considered.

I tell everyone to be debt free before they start. Then I tell them to look where they live. If they live in the city, look around the city but don't look into other states unless you have family that can help you find something. Looking elsewhere is the grass is greener attitude and it saps your energies and can be expensive, not to mention that it is a great big country

Find a place close by, start small while you still live where you are (if you can't move to your new place). Keep your day job until it is all ready and running.

A lot of people are impatient and make life harder for themselves unnecessarily.

Today the media propagates different lifestyles easily and we are all exposed to them. We can all see ourselves living this or that lifestyle. However, going from lifestyle A to lifestyle Z is a shock and can be very expensive, not to mention psychologically taxing. Small incremental changes are better than large swings.

One more thing: going green, off-grid, being self-sufficient, doomsday-prepping, being a niche or organic farmer - all of these are industries in this country. This means that every book or magazine you read has people PAID to write all that stuff. They got the job working from home writing about self-sufficiency from their rural home. You, on the other hand, may not (have that job).

I stopped reading Mother Earth News, the Grit, the this and the that? You can only see a picture of a young family with a baby in their hands on a brand newly acquired 40 acres in Wisconsin so many times. The man always has a beard and the woman always has a bandanna over her hair. She invariably holds a baby in her hands with another one in the belly. He is leaning on an old tractor and they are both smiling. The story tells us that they just bought the 40 acres with the old farm house and barn that needed renovations. They make artisanal cheese and apparently that is enough to make a great living, enough to make you smile for the camera. What the article never tells us is how they managed to afford the $799,000 for the place and then some for the renovations. If you dig a bit deeper, most of these folks have corporate backgrounds or they were part of some start-up or they work at home for good moneys. Most of them come from Chicago, LA, San Fran, NYC etc. etc. and in addition to the corporate jobs they left (which padded the bank account for years), they sold their 1 bedroom 1 bed 400 sq ft condo for insane amounts of money in those markets. For them the 40 acres and going back to land is just another fun adventure.

Just my $.02 after my own experiences.

Both Joel Salatin and Greg Judy (No Risk Ranching) have written books about their successes raising beef on leased land. Every where I travel in several states I see pastures sitting vacant and over grown. I would think there are some land owners who would welcome a rancher who was willing to improve the land thru wise use.