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.
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.
Most of the smaller farms were a lifestyle more than a profitable venture. Selling the land and just putting the money into a diversified stock portfolio would result in higher returns than the farming itself with none of the work.
If you're running a 300 cow operation with 4 quarter-sections you're going to need about $500,000 cash on you at bare minimum to get lending without even factoring in the cows themselves. You can sometimes get upwards of 80-90% financing for the cows with government backed programs but without them ~50% if you're lucky meaning you need another $150k then you need enclosures and any equipment for running the operation. You're looking at needing to make bank payments of ~$130k/yr. There's also property taxes and any other expenses you need let alone feeding the cows. Your $300 estimate seems very low to me. Maybe 20 years ago, not now.
Of course, you could always start much smaller but like I said, that becomes a big lifestyle venture at that point and you're likely quitting your day job to go out here so for a guy already making $50k/yr in a nice town, dropping $100-200k for a quarter-section, likely in the middle of no where isn't necessarily the best move. If you're a single guy doing this you're likely throwing away most chance you have at ever finding a woman because in the small ag towns you'd be looking to move to, all the girls are already taken before they turn 16yo or they move to the big city to never be seen again.
The only guys I really saw getting anywhere in this industry were guys who inherited the farm. All the real value is in the land. If you don't know what you're doing it's actually quite daunting work and not very rewarding unless you're absolutely in love with the lifestyle but most guys aren't.
It's not a bad idea, it's just not really that easy. Without hundreds of thousands of dollars, you aren't likely to get anywhere. Most guys don't have a few hundred thousand sitting around.
That's why I mentioned sheep and chickens. You make way more money with sheep. Lots of cattle guys in Texas who aren't rich are trying sheep on their land to make ends meet. The issue they run into is predators and labor. Usually they don't have the right kind of fence or dogs or they just can't do the work anymore. Smart, young people can figure both things out -- lots do.
In Northeast Texas where I'm at, I should be bringing in around $300k a year in revenue with 300 head of cattle, at a minimum. A full 160 acres likely includes a significant chunk that isn't really usable (in my area). I ended up with just 60 acres, all of it usable as grazing land except for a small pond (which I don't need or use).
> finding a woman
I beg to differ. There's plenty of young women out here who are looking for someone to hitch their wagon to. They are an entirely different breed, of course, but they aren't interested in people from the city or rather people who'd rather live in the city.
> lifestyle
That's the only reason I'm out here. I'm done with modernity and society.
> rewarding
It's way more rewarding to spend time outdoors with your animals and land than paying a psychiatrist to give you pills to try and keep you from killing yourself.
> easy
If it were easy everyone would be doing it, and I wouldn't want any part of it.
I'll keep you guys posted on how much money I bring in with the sheep and cattle. I'm not going to sell my calves this year as I still have plenty of grass and hay. I bought 80 sheep this year and I should be seeing lambs from them next year. I should be able to get 2 lambings from them. I'll let you know how many I sell and what price I get at the local sale barn.
I recommend leasing land if you can.
Getting started, I was using youtube and some books I bought.
It was a rough start. It takes about 2 years to get the grass to really grow, and those are a slow 2 years, so don't start off with a bunch of animals like I did. Work your way up, buying a few more animals each year, until you know what you are doing. It didn't help that we've had 3 years of back-to-back severe droughts, but at least now I know how to handle them.
I'd recommend starting off on something like 5 or 10 acres with just a few animals, but the price of land in the 5-10 acre range is twice that at 50+ acres. You may not be able to make a living on such low acreage too.
In terms of investments -- I probably spent around $5k on a water line and $3k in temporary fencing. I spent about $5k more on getting electric wire around the property and another $2k more or less on the charger. Those are sunk costs, more or less. You aren't going to sell your water line to your neighbor anytime soon. Did I need all this? Probably not. I could've saved a bunch of money but I didn't. A fence is a fence is a fence and in hindsight I shouldn't have done what I did, but I did and it's done now. I spent $10k on a side-by-side and I splurged and spent $90k on a shop but I don't think the shop is necessary. It's just nice. Probably could've gotten a loan for that but I just paid out of pocket. Necessary expenses are probably around $10k depending on whether you have a good fence or not.
Most of this stuff you can probably ask Uncle Sam for a loan or a grant. You'd be surprised how much free stuff he gives away to farmers. I know there are programs specifically for young farmers. Be careful though. Uncle Sam is not your friend.
The assets are the animals. You buy a cow and it maintains its value more or less. Same for sheep. It's called liveSTOCK for a reason. You can get loans from Uncle Sam to buy animals as well but I didn't. I bought my first cows from my neighbor and I got a decent price. I don't recommend buying animals from a sale barn. Find someone local and buy direct from them, and get them to tell you how to keep them properly. If you have no cash to buy animals to start you can also try to do "custom grazing" where you graze other people's animals and get paid for weight gains.
The hardest part is when you are trying to grow your herd or when you have to wait before you take your animals to the sale barn. If you can't manage your pocketbook and plan out your expenses over the course of an entire year, you can't do farming at all. You need some way to feed yourself while you wait for the calves to drop and such. A mistake a lot of people make is they get their first big paycheck and they spend it all and end up needing to borrow money. Don't do that. Live within your means and budget yourself.
There are tons of youtubers out there who give away all the "Secrets" for free. I can send you a list of videos or if you have specific questions...
You'd be surprised at how helpful people are out here. If you're young and interested in raising animals, old timers would love to share their experience and help you get started.