I had a feeling you'd be saying vegetables 😉

Local market is also a big factor I didn't mention and we're saturated. Many farmers are selling at a loss and don't even realize it I guess. Too many farmers don't value their time.

We've also tried all the other stuff you mentioned as well and with a young family decided to intentional shrink down to a few enterprises and focus on our Bitcoin customers. We've slowly started adding back but focusing more on homestead scale operations.

Those high figures only scale as labor scales and that starts eating into net profit. There are two larger scale vegetable operations in our area. They create lots of jobs. I've tried doing that work and it's just not for me, I don't have the passion for plants. My wife has managed a vegetable CSA and it's a lot of work and stress for the net result, our market still isn't anywhere near those figures. I like managing animals. I like eating meat. But a resource base can only support so much. We're running 5 cow calf pairs plus yearlings on about 20 acres and I'd be hesitant to go higher so as to not destroy our land. We occasionally run pigs, but the land shouldn't be subjected to that every year.