>>2801276Be prepared to never come back on the internet or watch tv or play video games ever again.
Farming is effectively playing Factorio IRL.
>there is always something to do>I need to improve something>How can I utilize this to save precious dollarsFor reference I keep a small number of animals.
>12 chickens>4 Sheep>4 GoatsOn 3 acres, altogether.
The sheep eat the grass, the goats eat all the shrubs, the chickens eat all the bugs.
Just these few animals take about an hour out of my day.
This is not production and the animals quite literally only make a profit for their own care.
To make a profit for anything more, I would need effectively double the animals.
Since a lot of the cost is communal cost (rebuilding, food, etc).
If you want to compost, you have to buy organic which cost more, because most hay and corns and such have herbicides that last years.
Literally every penny matters, every single penny.
So if you are wasting pennies on something inefficient or doing this as a hobby. You are quite literally going bankrupt ever so slowly.
Farmers generally learn to live with less, it's not a career where you learn to live with more.
Eventually to live with more, you must begin to industrialize. Which defeats the entire purpose of homesteading to begin with.
So your choices are.
1. Be like me, not a homesteader, just a dude who keeps some animals and practices some homesteading.
2. Be a homesteader and quite literally devolve into primitive farming practices.
3. Don't be a homesteader and industrialize to maximize profits.
The only people who can do number 2 are people who already have such money amounts that it's a fucking LARP to begin with.
Those people don't have to worry about paying mortgages, those people have backup money when things go bad.
So when shit hits the fan, they can choose to bite the bullet.
Where literally 99% of actual farmers pre industrial were going bankrupt unironically.
