From a 35 year old perspective. Keep in mind I really love being on the farm.
You make a very valid point about selling the land for retirement purposes. More and more of this happens each year. Mainly to bigger farmers because the kids pursued other careers that paid better and had either no time or little interest in the farm.
The one big factor everyone is overlooking is how do you get the capitol money??? It's not like a 25 year old can walk into a bank with almost no credit and expect to get a loan to put out a crop with little to no collateral. The banks aren't going to take that risk.
I am in the same boat. We own a small farm (135 acres). It's nice to have, but I can't make a living from it. I calculated we only make about $250 per year per calf we raise after all expenses. On the amount of land we have, that is only about $5000-$7000 profit. Bottom line is, for the time it takes to farm it has very little annual return per acre. Other business ventures have lower risk and higher rates of return. My father would actually make more money leasing his farm for row crop than having the cattle. Not to mention all the extra time to pursue other avenues of making more money (Dozer excavation) and more time to spend with the family. He's now starting to see that and wanting to scale back to just a few hobby cows.
Bottom line is it just doesn't pay enough for the hours and the risk involved at this time in my life. I would love to do it full time and actually have the equipment that is paid for, but I don't want to risk my family to pursue my dream and quit my engineering job. My paycheck comes whether it rains or not. I told Dad several times to quit investing money in the farm in hopes I will carry on. I told him my plan was to pull up the fences, lease to a row cropper, and me and my son to only hunt on the property as I don't have time to raise cattle. Between my full time job, my wife's home based business, and family time there isn't enough hours in a day.
This post was edited by johndeerefan at 11:26:27 09/24/12.
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