Not sure there's much to add. Economies of scale, specialisation and technological innovation are probably three of the oldest and most fundamental concepts in

Not sure there's much to add. Economies of scale, specialisation and technological innovation are probably three of the oldest and most fundamental concepts in economics. It's the difference between one layman person spending an hour to bake a single bread by hand on a wood stove, and ten persons each operating a part of a machine in a factory that spits out 8000 breads per 8-hour shift. You can try to replicate factory-style production in your homestead somewhat and get decent productivity numbers. But you'd need to do this for bread, and cheese, and clothes. You simply can't specialise nor get the right scale nor make the necessary capital expenditures across multiple product categories for that to work. Homesteading thereby really means accepting that your productivity is a small fraction of that of modern life. Of course you can trade and obtain most of the things you don't produce like any other person on the planet. But what you're trading in the end is your time, and its value is measured in productivity. If you sell an hour of your time but only produce 1 loaf of bread, and you're competing in a marketplace with agents whose productivity is 100 loafs of bread, your purchasing power is very weak, and the prices of everything measured against your own labour-time will be exorbitant. Of course you can also say you don't homestead but instead simply live in a rural area, in isolation, working a modern remote job (e.g. in tech). That'd work fine, but it's probably not defined as homesteading. But it's a modus that probably works better for you: enjoy the closeness to nature, enjoy agricultural activities as much as you enjoy it as a hobby, live relatively simply and without many expenses and luxuries, and work only a few hours in tech to sustain this cheaper lifestyle.