While I know HN likes to put farmers on a pedistal, and we should all appreciate the people that literally grow our food, the reality isn't that most farmers are "highly educated" in these things, but know barely enough to scrape by
While that is true for most smaller farms - there simply is no way a small farm can afford the capital expenditure of someone who could be working day-to-day spending years in study, it still holds true that farmers by necessity are excellent jacks of all trades. You simply do not make enough money off of the farm to rent professional help whenever something goes wrong.
Just one data point - when the clutch on our 1994 (methinks) Case tractor broke a few years ago, the quoted cost for having a new one installed was close to $5,000. My father-in-law and I spent two days splitting the tractor, refurbishing the clutch using a $250 kit and reassembling it. No expensive or fancy tools, but a lot of headscratching and educated guesses, plus we needed to craft a couple of rather large stands and jigs using timber already on hand.
The $4,750 thus saved is more than we make annually from renting out the fields to a nearby farmer (We just live on the farm, we're not working the land nor having any animals anymore.)
I believe this situation is rather typical on smaller farms - you have to make things work on your own or with the help of friends and neighbours, or you're SOL.
Coincidently my grandfather was replacing a clutch in a Case tractor when I was at the family farm over Christmas. Little older (I believe from the 80s), but probably not that different since you mentioned splitting. The transmission forms part of the structure of the tractor, so replacing the clutch meant the tractor was literally in 2 pieces, each supported by block and tackle in the farm shop. It was odd seeing such a big machine split in half like that.
My grandfather spent his career working on heavy machinery for a government agency and then in retirement has been maintaining all the farm equipment for my uncle. In the summer I helped him replace the complex system of belts in a hay baler. He’s in his mid 80s and was crawling around inside the machine. My job was just to stand there and keep the belt from twisting.
That only saved you $4,750 if your time is worth $0/hr. Assume it was two eight-hour days, times two people, or 32 hours of labor. If you make $149/hr, it's cheaper for you to pay the quoted cost. If you don't, it's cheaper for you to do it. Which it sounds like it was. But thinking you just "saved" $4,750 doing it yourself isn't the right way to look at it.
> If you make $149/hr, it's cheaper for you to pay the quoted cost.
If you're salaried at Google for 40 hours/week with no paid overtime and no side gigs allowed, the median value of your time is $149/hr but the marginal price is $0/hr because working an extra hour doesn't make you any extra money.
I suspect farming is similar - it's not like you can take that free hour, add 4 square feet to your field and produce $149 more wheat.
Depends, at planting or harvest time not working on planting or harvesting when the weather allows costs a lot more than $500/hour. However in the middle of winter there is plenty of time where the farm has nothing you need to do and so the value of your time is zero.
The reality on farms is repairs aren't a one off they're constant .. farming as a business is literally working the land at the critical times and dovetailing working the equipment and the business in between the pure agricultural work.
Having a hundred repair jobs a year that might be each be quoted between one and ten thousand sound about right for medium scale farm here, and the bulk of those would be done "in house" .. welding up jigs, repairing sprayers, building sheds, moving silos, putting in gas, power, water lines etc .. all par for the course.
You just helped me realize the real value of the Open Source Ecology project and ones like it. I've always thought they were neat, but when you add up all the cost of the raw materials and "vitamins" (stuff you can't easily fabricate), plus the necessity of a quite well kitted out shop, it's often not necessarily cheaper than buying the equipment used and fixing it up yourself. But the simple designs make all those field repairs way easier. Also understanding every nut and bolt on the system as you build it creates an intuition about the system holistically.
I considered bringing up that point, but figured it was implied by the post - believe me, no small-time farmer makes anywhere near $149/hour, I doubt it would even be $14.90/hr - so effectively, you can assume your work to be worth $0/hr as a first-order approximation.
Hence I do engineering instead. The farm is just an expensive hobby. :)
$150/hr is $300k TC, and the vast majority of people don't make that. (I don't.) Let's say the average farmer makes $45k/yr or $22.50/hr. $22.50*32-hours of labor = $720. So $250 for the part and $720 for the labor = $920 vs $5,000. Still up by $4,080, but then we also have to add in the increase in knowledge and skills that came from performing the work yourself. Let's say automotive school costs $1,000, and that the hands-on work was instructive and counts for a quarter of that, so that's $250 from doing it yourself so that works out to be $4,330. Which is a pretty good deal!
Homesteading is a dream of mine, but I may be too rooted in the comforts of working in tech for it. Maybe if I win the startup lottery.
>> Homesteading is a dream of mine, but I may be too rooted in the comforts of working in tech for it. Maybe if I win the startup lottery.
-I guess that depends on how you define homesteading; I quite enjoy myself living on a farm with no animals larger than a cat (And I could do without the cat, thankyouverymuch!), having a day job in engineering and spending some - well, a lot of - my sparetime picking up useful skills, like how to fix a tractor on the cheap, forestry, digging trenches, building sheds, maintaining said sheds, filling them with firewood, repaving roads...
I have the good fortune of having my in-laws living next door, though; they've been running the farm since forever and I pick up all sorts of useful things, not to mention they still put in a ton of work. I wouldn't even be able to keep the land from degrading unless we had them to help us out; so homesteading, even by a quite loose definition of the term, means you'll have a hard time doing it part-time.
Hence winning the startup lottery first probably is a good idea; then you can (with any luck) outsource some of the back-breaking stuff, too.
