Can I make a living off the farm

Jez I think the way cost of living is going your leaving yourself a light income.

bit it depends of herself works or indents to keep working if ye have kids.

maybe a change of job might reinvigorate your interest and farm alongside it.

Thinking out loud you probably aint big enough to be kept busy but if kids come yer way,i expect youd take up the responsibility for childcare which should make it work.Childcare would be costing E200+/week for a toddler and thats only the start of it so i would hang on to job there or another bit.

Could you increase the rate o turn over of cattle on the otherhand like keep extra cattle but for a shorter period and have the same proit/head

If you want any decent standard of living I wouldn’t think €35,000 would keep a man with a family going for 6 months of the year. I know it wouldn’t here anyway.

Also 100 acres is only part time with dry stock if you are set u right. Keep working is my advice but get a job you like or one that suits the farm.

Rent it out tax free and get a job you enjoy even if it’s lower paid. You’d be nuts to consider dry stock over renting it if you own it outright.

Why do you think a petting zoo would be a dead loss? If they are somewhere there isn't one it could do really well, parents are always looking for places to bring their kids. They could set one up on say 20 acres and farm the rest. quad biking might be another thing they can set up.

Look at all the direct payments you might be able to avail of, incl Organic which in your case is €9K plus, Acres €7K and BISS, total €20K. Can you keep that and not have to spend any of it on the farm? That would be a good start. If you land is fairly good, you could grow organic oats or other crops which pay fairly well on part. Growing a mixed arable crop or red clover silage would provide a finishing diet for beef cattle. Definitely has potential to work alongside possibly future child rearing duties.

I wouldn't lease just because of the money being offered ATM. Some who leased before found it given back to them when pressure came on milk price.

If you go into organics you need to go into Sucklers, sheep or grain. It's going to be interesting over the next few years as lads realise that.

@chreeko84 it not really about numbers it's about a system that works for you. Short-term cattle may be the most profitable, however you need serious capital to back up such a system. If you opt for a 70-100 day system you will need to be buying buying 8-10 cattle every week.

Even a six month system will require you to buy 150-180 cattle a year. Any short term system will probably require 30-50k more money tied up.in cattle than a long-term system

300 euro per head of a net margin is achievable on 12 month system. 5-700 in a calf to beef system but your numbers will be well back.

It would be hard to get to 100. 70-80 might be optimal in a yearling/store to beef system calf to beef gives you a system that is relatively low cost to buy into to variable costs will be high

My own inclination would be ''keep the day job'' as the expression goes.

It is tax free however you pay PRSI and USC on it. This is usually in the 10-12% range. The catch is even if the tenant dose not pay your rent you are still obliged to pay the PRSI and USC

I agree with Bass here, even though I suggested it above, those 3 to 4 day jobs which pay anything decent are few and far between unless you have a qualification in a specific area which makes you in high demand.

None of the alternative diversification projects are easy either but if one suited and you had the interest in it maybe.

As others said - a house with a couple of kids and any sort of mortgage needs maybe 60 or more net of tax to function these days.

Your other halfs job and how possible it would be to continue that/any cut in income there resulting from having kids would be a big factor in your decision.

Best of luck, it's not easy, I've been in this situation twice over the last 8 years and it's still not fully resolved.

I'm only asking so don't ate me!....

You mentioned 20hrs a week and 50k, sounds good to me but are there any catches?

Who is buying the salad leaves? How do you develop a market, is there really only 20 hrs labour in producing 50k worth of it etc

Article here about the last scallion grower in Ireland. The rest packed it in. He farms about 400 acres a year. He might not get the same economies of scale with 1 acre though.

Same man here in a FJ article where he mentions that the only way in horticulture is to go big or get out

If you want to try to make small work, you have to go niche. Even then you take a big gamble. The most recent example is of people who spent loads of money and were promised returns on snails ended up selling at about half the cost of production. If you think monopolies in beef with the like of ABP are bad....wait til you start into veg.

We will all have our own blinkered view on this scenario and a lot may depend on the OP's current occupation and that of their spouses if any. Interestingly the OP has only one post on Boards.ie ever so not sure if they intend on coming back anyway.

Through some good/and bad luck I've landed in my current situation which is part time farming and a very flexible WFH role where I am contracted to do 20 hours a week but can do 40+ if I want too and can more or less pick the hours to suit my schedule.

I did take a redundancy package after working with a multinational for 17 years which helped reduce the mortgage and with no more requirement for childcare, I was able to take a year and a half off of the day job, which was OK and we were managing as she has a good income but it was a bit more of a struggle than we'd like. In the same year my youngest daughter was diagnosed with epilepsy and had been hospitalized 5 times, for me it was a blessing that I was home full time as my previous field service career often had me traveling long distances from home so for this reason I had already decided I'd never go back to a 9-5 role with any kind of commute. Just before Christmas I started in my new role which is agri software related which keeps me at home and the little one's school is literally next door so if she has any episodes I'm only 1 min away. Her condition is much more under control now with medication so now we are a bit more relaxed and I have a much better handle on both family and farm life and much more time to appreciate and enjoy both.

If I have any advice for someone in the OP's position it's, life is too short and precious to waste it in a day job that you are sick of but it does not need to be an all or nothing situation either, with a little compromise you may have a far better quality of life even if you are not making the maximum possible income, also considering the costs of going to work with childcare/travel etc, it may not be that much more lucrative anyway.

Not directed at you obviously.

Salad leaves a have a short shelf life, and so there is an Irish Market for Irish produce through the regular retail market. There's a lot of low quality imports.

The day to day labour isn't massive.

On the general theme of taking a chance and quitting the day job - if you really want to do something, then you will find a way to get there. May mean sacrifice and hard work but having the heart in an enterprise is critical. Just try and avoid debt and putting yourself under pressure.

Did not know that but getting slurry is not cheap. If you were near a pig farm yes but most other lads use up there own.

Looked at going into organic scheme and even with vast majority of my land index 3/4 could import decent amount of slurry.Any maps given here I expect the slurry spread for me.

Bit of careful soil sampling would give you massive scope for slurry import