Fat of the Land, Continued

This book is starting to get a bit discouraging. Even in 1904, this person had to invest over $100,000 to get his farm going, with income running about $4000 per year in the first few years. Of course he had a large country house, with servants, and money was no object to him (built a forge for his daughter on the place), so he could do that. 

The question is, at manageable scales, can farming be practical and profitable enough for a person to live who is not already independently wealthy? I know that if you grow your own food, and just enough of a niche crop (fresh greens for fancy restaurants, fashionable veggies or value added stuff for the "farmer's market" in an upscale neighborhood of carbon-guilty urbanites, etc.) to pay taxes and insurance, you can survive, but even then initial inputs will be necessary to optimize soil, improve drainage, build house and outbuildings, etc. A lot of "modern heroes" of the back to the land/organic movement (Helen and Scott Nearing being the example that comes to mind) were actually independently wealthy people. My ancestors left the land because they could not survive and keep it (property taxes went too high and farm product values went too low), and my Dad was not interested in a hardscrabble existence tilling the soil. He actually became a maintenance electrician, still getting plenty dirty every day, but getting a dependable paycheck-until the factory shut down. Then he had to search for (and found) a new job.

I guess this book has me thinking, for all its good points, about how farming has become a big business. Streeter's "factory farm" vision has turned into a nightmare, and we cannot fix things with fairy dust and gourmet restaurants.