Farming - What Would Your Dream Farm Be?

I'd grow Cocaine in Columbia and Opium Afghanistan too.

j/k

 

Yeah, but, Oregon or California or Colorado, why not have both farm in America and farm in the UK if UK legalised too, pot farms here and there (around the world) maybe better to grow different strains outside naturally (and legally) and supply lines, if money wasn't an object and you wanted to farm and THC pot was legal to sell in the UK.

Not for Bromley because, defeats the point.

But, I do want to buy a farm in England one day (somewhere else) and just have like the Eden Project but, field sized pyramid shaped (it's a good shape) green houses/environmentally controlled fields on a massive scale with different environments and if I have to design and build it or if I have to have it designed and built by someone who knows what they're doing, an industrial irrigated field where you can farm what you want when you want pest free controlled environments capable for different environments.

It'll be a big structure, why not make it a power station too for clean energy?
Grows, uses gravity for water, using renewable for power... Why not?

 

Why?

 

I grow weed on my farm in the foothills of the Ozarks, it's not completely legal but it never did stop me from growing the last forty years.

 

Because you can control the growing conditions and guarantee it gets enough light.
In a British season, by the time a plant goes into it's flowering stage it's too late in the summer.
You can grow it outdoors but you have to trick it into flowering early by artificially cutting the sunlight to12 hrs a day in July rather than September when the equinox is.
That's ok on a small scale but impractical on a farm scale.

 

I think you have longer, hotter summers than the UK.

 

Sure but weed can grow within a three month period.

 

I'm guessing you've never experienced a British summer.

 

Yeah, but the wet tshirt contests are fun though, gotta lotta modeling agencies in Croydon.

 

I have raised pigs and chickens , goats and cows. Pigs are the most agrivating and stubborn animals alive. And they smell....expensive to feed, and with a low profit margine.

 

I just found out 1000 acres is closer to 45 fields than it is 14.

It's also, apparently just over 400 hectares, but how many acres or hectares do you need for a good yield of a crop? - I guess you have to calculate how much ton per hectare and work from there.

1000 acres is only 1.5 square miles though, so, what's that, like, 3 miles?

Guess that's okay.

3 miles of Bromley purchased around that 1 acre I found (so the farm is still where it is) and buying up everything around it in a 1.5 square miles for my new farm.
That would be awesome.

 

There already is a website for backpackers who want to work in exchange for room & board; I don't have the name of it handy, right now. But I don't think you will be able to get away with charging them, on top of that (otherwise, I'm sure they'd opt for a hostel).

As for hiring construction laborers, I guess it depends on your crops & harvesting methods, but there are still many crops that require hand-picking, like apples, for instance. And I doubt these workers will work for what you could reasonably pay (when I was just a kid, over 40 years ago, I picked apples at nearby orchard, for 50¢ a crate). I do know of orchards, including a local one, that lets customers go out & pick their own berries. Maybe with apples, as well, but that would just cover the low-hanging fruit. Even though customers who might be willing to climb would come nowhere close to picking your trees clean, it would be an insurance nightmare, I predict, for you allow them to climb (or use ladders), at all.

 

The website you're probably thinking of is called Workfare.

I helped a friend cut down 300 commercial apple trees on a farm once.
The fruit could not be picked for less than the cost of importing apples from Eastern Europe. The orchard was cut down mid-season with the fruit still on the trees and the field was returned to wheat which was far more profitable.
Adding value by turning the apples into cider would help but it would take a lot of investment in equipment.
I realise that RoL is just fantasising but the reality of farming is that without subsidies most farms would fail.

 

I start mine indoors in February and March to put outside in April.

 

We have a monsoon season also.

 

When does it go into it's flowering cycle?
Here it wouldn't naturally start to flower until September and by then there is not enough strength left in the Sun to get a decent crop.
You'd end up with something not much better than hemp.
Indoors under lights you could get 3 or 4 crops a year and control all the nutrients with hydroponics.
Remember we are talking about commercial farming here not a bit of homegrown.

 

Mid August when the sun reduces exposure.

 

Here you have to cover the plants to artificially reduce the hours of sunlight in July to give them a couple of months of good growth in the flowering cycle.
It is possible to get very good results on a small scale doing this but doing it on a commercial scale would be next to impossible.

 

@The Rhetoric of Life

Though it sounds as if you want to exclusively run the show, Rhet, so this is not what you had in mind, perhaps some sort of collective, or even a commune would be a more feasible option. In Virginia, we have a commune called The Farm, I think, that's been viable for about half a century. If you bought the land, yourself, those who came to stay/live, would be, "free," labor. You could even have them build housing for the community-- for low cost domiciles that can be built by unskilled workers, I recommend your first crop be hay (you would probably even get non-members to come, as is done here: workers come to build the home, in just a day or so, in order to learn how it's done, so they can repeat the process, themselves, with their own trainees).

Or, though I know it is time-consuming & expensive, getting land certified as organic (on this side of pond, anyway), doing so would allow you to make a greater per-item profit, making a smaller parcel of land more financially-sustainable. Having others who also longed to farm the land, but who could not afford a substantial farm, on their own, invest in small plots adjacent to your own, could allow you to share resources, lowering the costs & creating benefits, for all.

Another option might be finding a niche-crop, for which you knew there was a market for all you produced; can you grow hemp, over there (I mean the low-THC, male plants, used for rope, paper, and all sorts of other things)? If you had a commune, like The Farm, some members could increase your profit margin by turning some of the hemp into finished products, such as furniture and the like.

If you like the organic idea, here is one more thought, but it is a more circuitous route, & I realize time may be a factor. If you began by running a market for organic/locally-raised farm goods (the start-up funds for which might be defrayed by selling either memberships, or actual shares, in a collective), this would give you a ready base for investors in their (& your) own, organic farm.

 

As an aside to the above post, hay or straw (from grain crops) can be a very lucrative crop. Just a few years back, a wealthy woman, living in a very affluent area near me, was murdered because she discovered people pilfering from the bales she kept, ever on hand, for her horse stables.

 

My cherry tomatoes have only just started flowering.
Be a while before I'm munching on them.

 

If anyone's got Amazon Prime, that show Clarkson Farm that I binged watched yesterday is a huge inspiration for this thread.

Jeremy Clarkson (with the help of people who knew what they were doing so they could teach him) taught him how to run his farm and the whole series is Jeremy Clarkson farming his 1000 acre farm (that's where I borrowed the size from) in the Cotswolds.

 

Okay, well here in America, your small holdings are comparable to a decent sized lot in most places. Most people, however, get constrained to 5 acres or less by lenders though I have heard they are going to change that to 10 acres or less since they discovered that people were getting around it by buying 5 acres and then being "gifted" the extra acreage by separate deed, leaving the bank with less acreage than they could otherwise foreclose on.

Anyway, I have close to 5 acres but bought some of them in separate deals than my house. About 2 1/4 of those acres are wooded though. I just bought them to keep them undeveloped. There are a couple more undeveloped lots than I am hoping will become available on the cheap at some point and one developed lot that is in the neighborhood behind mine that backs up to my property I figure will realistically be gettable. If I buy the last one, I will cut off the acreage on the back and attach it to mine and then resell the house or turn it into a rental (which it already is). That neighborhood is one of those post WWII boom communities so houses there are not as desirable to buyers being old and small, but most of the tracts are acre tracts

 

Look again. That is not an acre for sale. It is 0.099 acres. You would basically be paying £18,000 for an allotment