Go find a bank or a credit union that deals mostly with agriculture. Hint: You won't find these in the city.
Go talk to an officer, asking them how much land you can buy. Tell them you want to use the land to graze cattle and sheep using rotational and regenerational techniques. (Go look up Joel Salatin, Gabe Brown, Greg Judy, so you understand the basic principles.)
Depending on where you are at in the country, you can get different stocking densities. Where I am at, I get an average of 36" of rain a year and I can easily run 2 acres per cow -- free food! That's 72" rain-acres per cow. Do the math for your area. IE, if you get 12" of precipitation, you'll need at least 6 acres per cow. You can always ask people in the area what kind of stocking densities they recommend.
I only have to buy about 4 bales of hay per cow (cheap hay -- $50 per bale) to winter them, and I spend about $100 per cow for protein supplement. So estimate you'll spend about $300 per cow to winter them (in East Texas).
I could do a stocking operation, where I buy the cows in the spring and sell them in the fall, so that I spend nothing on wintering them and I can give the ground as much rest as it needs, too, but I prefer the cow-calf operation I run now.
Calves sell for about $1,000 after about 8 months at the sale barn. Each cow should give you about 1 calf. (If she doesn't, sell her.) I'm being very conservative here. Lately people have been getting a lot more, but I doubt these prices will hold out for long. Regardless, $1,000 of revenue per cow per year is pretty decent, and it's roughly the same for a stocker operation.
All this to say that running cattle alone, I should be bring in about $350 per acre per year. This is more than an interest payment on the land should be, unless the land is wildly overpriced.
That's the cattle story. The sheep story is VERY different. Caveats with sheep: You'll NEED livestock guardian dogs, and they die a lot easier. They are also a lot more physical labor to handle. That said, they make a lot more money.
You can run about 8x as many sheep as you can cattle. This is because the sheep will eat a lot of weeds that the cows just ignore. Sheep winter better. In warm humid climates, they get parasites pretty bad, but if you're rotating them at least every 3 days, and if you focus on getting parasite-resistant sheep, you should be OK. (I don't treat for parasites AT ALL, and they are doing just fine.) Sheep should give you between 1.5 -1.8 lambs per ewe vs. ~1 calf per cow. In addition, right now sheep are selling for much more per pound than cows. In summary, I am going to get about 3x-4x revenue per sheep. That's around $2k per acre in revenue. Plus they don't eat as much hay and they don't eat nearly as much supplements!
As long as sheep prices are higher than beef prices, heck, even if sheep drops in price below beef (as it always has been historically) you'll still make money with them compared to cattle. It is said that if you want to make money grazing, you graze sheep. If you just want to graze and break even, do cows. Cows are for old people who can't do sheep anymore.
FURTHERMORE -- by combining sheep with cattle, you get a beneficial combination. There are health benefits to the soil and to the animals by doing so, and you'll find lots and lots of people running sheep and cattle either in separate herds on the same land, or in a "flerd".
But besides that, it's well-known that you can make tons of money grazing chicken on pasture. It's a TON of work, WAY MORE than most people are willing to do, but if you're young and hungry, I can show you how to literally double your money in 3 months with chickens. And you can do that 5, 6, 7 times a year, as much work as you are willing to do. Ducks, geese, turkeys, all the poultry is money-making and easy to figure out -- but a LOT of work. Eggs are also profitable. Of course it comes down to marketing, but it doesn't take a genius to sell people chickens and eggs that are grown with NO herbicides pesticides antibiotics on pasture.
I'm not even mentioning the value of chicken manure on the pasture. Ranchers pay people to truck in chicken manure and they spread it because chicken manure is literally the best kind of manure for grass in the universe. Chickens + cattle + sheep = golden opportunity. Lots of work, but LOTS of benefits.
When your pasture improves, you can run more animals per acre. Maybe you double the fertility, so now instead of making $2k per acre you're doing $4k. The sky's the limit for fertility. There's guys who have been doing this for years with forage that grows 8 feet in the air, dense and so thick the cattle get lost in it.
My point is this: Sit down with a banker from one of these agricultural banks. Say you are a young man who wants to get into grazing and agriculture and you're wondering how much you can borrow and what the payments would look like before you start looking at land. Let me know how the meeting goes and let's compare notes.
I have a feeling that young men today can absolutely start off with a good chunk of land (~100 acres) and the payments wouldn't be too bad. You can probably also get a loan to buy your first herd or repair the fencing and stuff.
I'm not telling you to actually get a loan, just give them your info to see what kind of loan you could get.
If they say "Nah, I won't give you a loan" ask them why. Maybe they don't think you can do it, so ask something like "What if I worked on a ranch for 2 years? Would you consider me then?" or if they want a larger down payment, or if they want you to keep a job while you work the land. I want to hear what reasons they give why they won't give the loan.
Right now in East Texas land prices are much higher than reality. I believe you could go to a ranch that is selling at $6k per acre and offer $5k or even $4k and probably get it, especially if you already have a bank willing to finance it. This is for large tracts of land (~100 acres) that are definitely only good for grazing. IE, it's nowhere near Dallas and the closest interstate is at least 30 minutes away.
I have a suspicion that any decent blue-collar worker making $50k more or less a year, can, with a proper leveraging of their assets, make the move to ranching, especially if they are under 40. So I want to hear what you guys find out.
As for me -- I'm already living the dream. My wife told me we needed some cash in the bank and I said "Sure, let me sell a few cows I don't want anymore." My "bank account" is grazing grass right now, adding dollars to my wealth every time they take a bite of grass. Their manure is also growing me more grass. I'm trying to get out of cash altogether and shift to bartering as much as possible. It's tremendously liberating to be on the land and to watch your "bank account" grow. It boggles my mind that every year, my cows will give me another "free" calf. There's not any stock in the world that doubles every single year! I would love to share this lifestyle with as many people who are smart enough to put 2 and 2 together and create their own independence.
