Can I make a living off the farm

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.

Keep the minimum amount of cattle for the grants and bale the 100 acres for organic hay and silage.

Tough to get a better Profit/Loss than that.

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

@Castlekeeper or anyone else with insight into this. I'm in a similar position to the OP on this thread and am interested in horticulture.

Do you have a successful setup Castlekeeper? Is it salad leaves you're doing? Did you struggle to market it / find buyers etc?

Not here, kitchen garden only is my limit. I've a contact doing well at it I'll DM you.

You have been farming for 4 years you should have enough info to do homework and understand your costs and margins. If you continue with beef my recommendation is know your costs inside out, before you buy stock project forward your costs and return through to finishing including all costs from feed, to fixed costs like insurance to your own labour and make sure you can expect a profit. The risk is that you don't know what prices will be but you need to make the best stab at it, some times prices will go your way and some times they will move against you

Meh, I've made better coin outside farming, but I'm happier less stressed and not sitting in traffic hours a day by depending more on the farm for income.

I still depend on some off farm income but reduced hours and working from home and still agri related. Also reduced expenses with childcare and car upkeep I'm not much worse off anyway.

Very hard live a happy life if you don't have enough money to live either..Alot of people look at income the wrong way around IMHO,Work out how much you need per week,month or year and see if you income source can provide it on its current input and output costings. Also allocate a fixed amount for investment every year also (usually works out at a minimum of €100 per acre minimum as a ball