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> It's easy to talk about how awesome it is when you basically are selling insanely overpriced boutique goods (organic, free-range, etc) to yuppies who are will
by why15characters 9y ago
> It's easy to talk about how awesome it is when you basically are selling insanely overpriced boutique goods (organic, free-range, etc) to yuppies who are willing to pay triple for their calories.
Most of the hipster microgreen crowd aren't even making their money that way, they are making it by scamming other hipsters into trying to do that by acting like anyone can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year selling $10/pound lettuce to hipster restaurants. There's obviously a very limited number of restaurants in the "overcharge people for local food" market to sell to. But you don't need to do that crap. You can sell normal vegetables for a normal price to normal people and make a perfectly reasonable living.
>Once enough people do this, the prices fall and you're just another farmer, scraping by.
The reason most farms are "scraping by" is the same reason most restaurants fail, and most programmers can't handle fizzbuzz. Most people are simply incompetent, regardless of their occupation. Every farmer I see complaining about money is wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most of them are driving around in $80,000 pickup trucks while complaining about how poor they are.
>Being outside is nice, but there's a reason the kids doing this grew up in suburbs and cities: they have no idea what agriculture really involves when you have to achieve economies of scale to make it remotely profitable.
You don't have to achieve economies of scale to be remotely profitable. Not every farm has to be a corn+soybean rotation.
- bogomipz 9y ago>"Most of the hipster microgreen crowd aren't even making their money that way, they are making it by scamming other hipsters into trying to do that by acting like anyone can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year selling $10/pound lettuce to hipster restaurants." Can you elaborate on this? What exactly is the scam? How does the scam work?
- lancebeet 9y agoThere are lots of youtube channels (and similar) promoting this idea. These channels can generate a lot of ad revenue for their creators. I'm assuming that's what they're referring to.
- jp555 9y agoUnless they’re among the top 500 YouTubers I bet they make more selling fresh basil than YouTube ads.
- tfmatt 9y agoI would disagree with this, my small YouTube channel ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6WpEeF48A7r032N486j1cQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6WpEeF48A7r032N486j1cQ ) generates a couple hundred a week at which point I rotate videos for newer fresh ones. And this channel is literally about saving money by buying things at thrift stores.
- CydeWeys 9y agoYou've only got a few hundred views in total on all of your videos; how could you possibly be generating a couple hundred dollars per week?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- why15characters 9y agoThe ones that actually sell produce bring people to their "farms" as unpaid interns to do all their labor for free. People do this work for free because they are told it will give them the experience needed to start making 6 figures growing lettuce in someone else's backyard. In reality, the market for overpriced lettuce is already saturated and you can only make six figures doing that if you have an established relationship with restaurants who will buy overpriced lettuce, and you get all your labor for free. Lots of them don't even do that, they just sell "seminars" and "coaching" and "intensive workshops" to teach people how to grow lettuce.