I have been working remotely as a software developer and building out homestead and growing systems since 2014.
We left the SF Bay area and moved to the Sierra foothills in California. Close enough to drive back for work if needed, but where (at the time) housing (and land) was much more affordable.
I only have two acres. I'm not doing anything commercial. Our home was someone else's retirement dream originally - custom built home, basement, small vineyard of a little over 100 vines, fruit trees.
In a good year, we can yield 80-100 bottles of zinfandel, made in a "natural winemaking" style. After years of trying to do too much, my only real goal this year is to get my first chickens going.
To answer the question in the original post, "why aren't..?", I know quite a few reasons, having been doing it myself.
To summarize and expand on what others have already said in other comments -
It is hard to monetize or turn a profit at it. This is 100% true especially when you compare earnings for your software work vs your intensive manual labor. You probably have to being doing it for the love of it and the for love of self sufficiency. If you are thinking about anchoring earnings in a quantitative sense, consider shifting your thinking to all the qualitative aspects instead.
I agree with another comment that much of our industry is probably in a demographic where they don't want to do physically taxing work. Think about how different physical work can tax your body compared to just exercising - if you go to a gym, jog, etc. you can have a routine you specifically design to not overexert yourself. If you order 40 bareroot trees, you're going to have to get them all in the ground within a limited time frame, or lose them. You may be reaching out at odd angles, over-using specific muscles, getting injured, etc. in this type of work.
Also agree that it is not easy! There is significant domain-specific knowledge you will need to commit to learning, in addition to keeping up with the latest tech trends. Probably nearly everyone who has grown any significant number of plants or raised animals has lost plenty. It takes knowledge and experience to get it right. And lots of knowledge is location specific - different parts of the world have different limiting factors, whether it's summer heat, winter cold, short growing season, high winds, predator/pest/disease species. You really do have to find it interesting and put in the time learning. At this point my mind is an encyclopedia of plant knowledge compared to most but I'm still learning about new species every year.
I'll add that, in order to get out, afford some space, etc. you'll likely end up in a rural area. Be fully prepared to get used to going without some of your city comforts. I can't get an Uber driver to pick me up at my house and take me downtown for a night out. Last summer I heard a Bay Area person joking to a friend, "so, been to all two restaurants out here?" Not quite fair, there are some really good places to eat and significantly more than two, but absolutely way fewer options than any large city or suburb. And lots less going on in terms of night life.
It can take some looking to find the right balance of modern amenities and rural charm. We have a modern hospital, a new cancer center, lots of grocery stores, a few small downtown areas, and three or four farmers markets, but a residential population a quarter the size of the suburb of the Bay Area we left spread out over an area significantly greater in size.
To build on this though, offer some good points and illustrate how I wish more of us would do this...
It is incredibly rewarding to see a tree you planted yourself go from palm size to twice your own height.
Local and home production can hedge against supply chain instability. It's a great pastime and/or profession and ideally more of us would be doing it. In an increasingly uncertain world, leveling up in good old-fashioned self-reliance is quite comforting and enjoyable.
Importing your tech worker salary to a region with few employers and less opportunity can make an impact. Tip your servers generously. Shop at local businesses. Hire local contractors and professionals. You might make a big difference. Keep in mind that your tech salary alone could easily be a few times the median household income of the region.
And just... be closer to nature. Observe the cycles of the seasons. Get used to seeing deer every day and accept that they want to eat everything you grow. Enjoy the less frequent sight of hawks and foxes or even a bobcat. Notice how many mushrooms sprout all over after the rains. Go a week, or more, without needing to leave your property. Realize that everything around you is part of nested, hierarchical self-organizing systems. Accept that human beings are a natural part of this world and at our best we can be caretakers of all that is alive.
great post. I made the jump about the same time dec 2014...after realizing that I couldn't do it anymore; the it being trying to grow veggies in S.FLA and have iguanas eat through them/ and the standard 9/5. Id wanted to return to nature as my family on both side were worked the land and lived in balance; and was raised heading and from the property in the sugarcane fields and the farm in S.Ga. its a lasting experience growing from land to plate. But the nature offers endless knowledge... the priceless night skies, feelin seasonal changes and shifts; over looking the deer, foxes and the hawks (whom grabbed at least 10 of our turkeys in the first first year and several of our bird) it s cool soulful experience. one thing I always enjoy when acquiring new plants or animals is traveling to other farms... we talk and talk. discussing each others set up, why we do what we do ete etc. more often when in the middle of no where or hours from my home, me and strangers find ourselves smiling at the world's illustrations as if we knowing are defying the odds. its def not easy and you have to see yourself in it. timing too is important. farmland is very hot now. "after years to trying to do too much" is where the work is or has been most in my experience. when i take a step back, dream, think and plan the work shifts in weight
I was scrolling down the page, thinking, "this application looks great, I have wanted something to replace iTunes for years. It plays FLAC _and_ ALAC! I would love to pay money for this."
But I don't currently have a mac running anything later than Mojave, 10.14.
And the primary machine I would want to host music on can't upgrade past it (2010 Mac Pro, 12 cores, 64 GB Memory, 4GB GTX 770, 4 easily-swapple internal hard drives, all in spent under $1,000, used, parts and all - not a bad deal, would anyone agree?). Of course, I'll probably be moving it to Linux at some point after Apple gives up on 10.14.
I'm a very atypical case these days - I don't stream music, I actually buy CDs sometimes (often cheaper on Amazon shipped to your door giving you a hard copy backup and freedom vs buying the digital version they offer). I like to repair and upgrade older hardware. This kind of music player is right up my alley.
I'm not trying to complain. This is awesome. Maybe I'll buy it anyway just for whenever I get around to upgrading my macbook.
I wanna chime in to say that's a great Mac. You could use a patcher to get it to Catalina but I definitely wouldn't go any higher. That will extend software support life a bit more.
I have a lot of vintage Apple tech. Much of it still works...
I have a 2001 PowerPC G4 Quicksilver tower. Haven't booted it in a while, but it worked fine last time I did. If you can find these local to you, you can often get them very cheap. Shipping is expensive though, so buying them on a place like eBay is kind of a non-starter. I recently found a sealed old copy of Cubase VST available online for about $10. Bought an old M-Audio PCI card a long time ago for this machine too. At some point I may set it up as a Digital Audio Workstation.
I found a pair of old (2001) PowerPC iBooks on eBay a while back. They're good for running kids games and software - useful if you want an inexpensive, air-gapped machine for a young child you don't want on the open internet. Or typing / writing. These can be had very cheaply, I think because many schools bought them and eventually liquidated their inventory to replace with newer equipment. I had no problem finding inexpensive new batteries for these on eBay, and bought a couple extras.
More regularly, I use my old mid-2007 black macbook to run the original Starcraft. I'm running it via the OS X Installer (it's originally a PowerPC OS 9 game). I'm not much of a gamer these days, but Starcraft can be fun once in a while... like when PG&E in California shuts off the power for days and you want to conserve your main laptop's battery for work... And it's cool to have games that actually support local lan multiplayer, which Blizzard moved away from over time.
For anyone looking to delve deeper into this topic, here's some recommendations (off the top of my head) on what version of OS X to settle on for a given machine:
For older Intel Machines, I recommend 10.6 Snow Leopard. This is the last OS to support Rosetta, which allows you to run PowerPC OS X software. Note: PowerPC OS X software, not PowerPC OS 9 / Classic software.
For older PPC machines, I recommend 10.4 Tiger. This is the last OS to support running OS 9 applications via the Classic environment. Or of course, you can just install OS 9 and forego OS X altogether.
I live due east of the SF Bay Area in the Sierra Foothills. Per Google Maps right now it's only 2 and half hours by car, realistically it's typically at least a 3 hour trip or so to make it out here.
I have been working remotely as a software developer out here since 2014, when I left the Bay Area and my commute behind. My property is a little over two acres.
I got into permaculture right around the time we moved. I have yet to try Hügelkultur specifically but am working on establishing a food forest and various other perennial systems. It's slow going - there are challenges to this climate and elevation that I certainly didn't face in the mild climate of the SF Bay Area. Our summers are very hot and irrigation is pretty critical. But working outdoors on the weekends and PTO days is actually a very welcome change from being in front of a screen all day.
Living here the past six years, I have learned tons about what works and what doesn't on this property.
If you want to hear more, seriously reach out - there should be a pointer to my LinkedIn and an email in my HN profile.
That's awesome! I didn't see an email in your profile but I sent you a message on LinkedIn. My email is via hushmail.com, username sforman. I'd love to hear more.
This and Object Prototypes (You Don't Know JS Series)
Fall: Or Dodge in Hell
Fortress Marin
Count Zero
Become What You Are (Alan Watts)
Swords and Circuitry
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
The High Sierra of California
Trees of Power
I highly recommend Data Intensive Applications, as have many others on HN.
If you live around San Francisco, and don't know the history of the shore batteries across the Bay, Fortress Marin is a nice, short, illustrated history of California's coastal defenses. There are good places to go hiking / camping in that area around the old fortifications.
I'm into planting trees and gardening, so I thoroughly enjoyed Trees of Power by Akiva Silver.
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
The Rust Programming Language
Progressive Web Apps
Permaculture: Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability
Farming the Woods
Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms
Affinity Designer Workbook
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Walden
A Guide for Desert and Dryland Restoration
Ernest Hemingway On Writing
The Two Hands of God (Alan Watts)
The Anarchist's Design Book and/or With the Grain: A Craftsman's Guide to Wood
Dune
Some other fiction reading I'll decide on after I finish Dune
Books/Authors I've read that I would recommend:
Tao of Physics, Web of Life, Systems View of Life, etc. (Fritjof Capra)
^Capra's work has heavily influenced my worldview and ability to think in systems
Designing Data Intensive Applications (just finishing this week)
Permaculture One & Two, Gaia's Garden, Edible Forest Gardens I&II
Black Swan, Antifragile, etc. (Nassim Taleb)
Cloud Hidden: Whereabouts Unknown (Alan Watts, written late in life)
Ishmael, Story of B, etc. (Daniel Quinn)
You are Not a Gadget, Who Owns the Future, etc. (Jaron Lanier)
Goethe's Italian Journey
Vonnegut, Hemingway, Steinbeck
The Wheel of Time
We left the SF Bay area and moved to the Sierra foothills in California. Close enough to drive back for work if needed, but where (at the time) housing (and land) was much more affordable.
I only have two acres. I'm not doing anything commercial. Our home was someone else's retirement dream originally - custom built home, basement, small vineyard of a little over 100 vines, fruit trees.
In a good year, we can yield 80-100 bottles of zinfandel, made in a "natural winemaking" style. After years of trying to do too much, my only real goal this year is to get my first chickens going.
To answer the question in the original post, "why aren't..?", I know quite a few reasons, having been doing it myself.
To summarize and expand on what others have already said in other comments -
It is hard to monetize or turn a profit at it. This is 100% true especially when you compare earnings for your software work vs your intensive manual labor. You probably have to being doing it for the love of it and the for love of self sufficiency. If you are thinking about anchoring earnings in a quantitative sense, consider shifting your thinking to all the qualitative aspects instead.
I agree with another comment that much of our industry is probably in a demographic where they don't want to do physically taxing work. Think about how different physical work can tax your body compared to just exercising - if you go to a gym, jog, etc. you can have a routine you specifically design to not overexert yourself. If you order 40 bareroot trees, you're going to have to get them all in the ground within a limited time frame, or lose them. You may be reaching out at odd angles, over-using specific muscles, getting injured, etc. in this type of work.
Also agree that it is not easy! There is significant domain-specific knowledge you will need to commit to learning, in addition to keeping up with the latest tech trends. Probably nearly everyone who has grown any significant number of plants or raised animals has lost plenty. It takes knowledge and experience to get it right. And lots of knowledge is location specific - different parts of the world have different limiting factors, whether it's summer heat, winter cold, short growing season, high winds, predator/pest/disease species. You really do have to find it interesting and put in the time learning. At this point my mind is an encyclopedia of plant knowledge compared to most but I'm still learning about new species every year.
I'll add that, in order to get out, afford some space, etc. you'll likely end up in a rural area. Be fully prepared to get used to going without some of your city comforts. I can't get an Uber driver to pick me up at my house and take me downtown for a night out. Last summer I heard a Bay Area person joking to a friend, "so, been to all two restaurants out here?" Not quite fair, there are some really good places to eat and significantly more than two, but absolutely way fewer options than any large city or suburb. And lots less going on in terms of night life.
It can take some looking to find the right balance of modern amenities and rural charm. We have a modern hospital, a new cancer center, lots of grocery stores, a few small downtown areas, and three or four farmers markets, but a residential population a quarter the size of the suburb of the Bay Area we left spread out over an area significantly greater in size.
To build on this though, offer some good points and illustrate how I wish more of us would do this...
It is incredibly rewarding to see a tree you planted yourself go from palm size to twice your own height.
Local and home production can hedge against supply chain instability. It's a great pastime and/or profession and ideally more of us would be doing it. In an increasingly uncertain world, leveling up in good old-fashioned self-reliance is quite comforting and enjoyable.
Importing your tech worker salary to a region with few employers and less opportunity can make an impact. Tip your servers generously. Shop at local businesses. Hire local contractors and professionals. You might make a big difference. Keep in mind that your tech salary alone could easily be a few times the median household income of the region.
And just... be closer to nature. Observe the cycles of the seasons. Get used to seeing deer every day and accept that they want to eat everything you grow. Enjoy the less frequent sight of hawks and foxes or even a bobcat. Notice how many mushrooms sprout all over after the rains. Go a week, or more, without needing to leave your property. Realize that everything around you is part of nested, hierarchical self-organizing systems. Accept that human beings are a natural part of this world and at our best we can be caretakers of all that is alive.