I think it comes down to the same reasons people pay insane housing costs to live in major cities rather than buying a $50k house in the rustbelt. The former is often more net profitable due to job prospects, despite the higher cost of living. In addition to non-work amenities like social circles and dating pools.
Maybe you can live for $100/mo somewhere, if you can solve the part of actually getting the deed to some land and splitting taxes, cost of basic infrastructure, etc. with enough people. But could you earn an income to support this indefinitely? Would you find satisfying social relationships, friends, a spouse?
Perhaps in the American West you could get a job as a farm hand, where they wouldn't care so much whether you showered daily or had presentable modern clothing. Do those jobs still exist? Would they expect you to have your own transportation, rather than the old-fashioned style of providing worker housing?
At some point the gears of your life need to mesh at least a little with some other gears around you, unless you have built up a large capital fund by participating in society first and then wish to disappear from it altogether.
There are still lots of family farms out there, and they need workers of several stripes. Migrant labor for harvesting produce is commonly known, but there’s also a class of jobs out there where you basically act as an “apprentice farmer”.
A family we’re close to has a poultry operation. They have around 15 houses (as in “chicken houses”), probably fifty or so acres of hay, and various equipment and infrastructure to support it all. They do well for themselves, but absolutely cannot leave for more than a day at a time, because someone has to be caring for the animals and watching to make sure things don’t break.
They own a small home on the property that they don’t use for themselves. Instead, that home is part of the compensation for the “farm hand”. In exchange for doing whatever needs to be done around the farm during the week and coordinating any time away with them (so they can ensure someone is there to cover things), the farm hand gets to live in the house and is paid about $1,500 per month. They also get use of a pickup that belongs to the farm for both personal and professional use.
The house isn’t a shack or something either - it’s an older farm house, but it’s a three bedroom, two bath home that was remodeled not long ago and has a half acre or so of yard. It would be a great place to raise a family.
They’re having a lot of trouble finding people who they can trust to take that job. In the past couple of years I know they’ve hired three people, none of which lasted very long.
The first one did great for a few months but ended up getting drunk and driving a tractor through the side of a chicken house at 2am. They would have been willing to let that go with a warning if it hadn’t ended up costing something like $50k to repair once the cost of the animals that were killed or lost are considered.
The second was on heroin, though they didn’t know that at the time. Things went well until about six weeks in - he’d gotten paid at the end of the first month, spent it all on drugs, but had managed to keep that hidden well enough that he wasn’t fired for it. Two weeks later he ran out of money and decided the best way to handle that was to steal equipment and pawn it. Our friend discovered this when he noticed his chainsaw sitting on the shelf at a pawn shop in town. That whole ordeal ended up costing ~$25k. Most of the stolen items were recovered, but the house had been damaged pretty badly.
The third one was better, and they thought they’d found a long term employee. Almost a year in, they trusted him to the point that they finally felt comfortable traveling a few hours away for their wedding anniversary. The second night there, they got a call from the neighboring farm - there were “a bunch of cops” at their place. Turns out the guy had an outstanding warrant in another state. They had to cut short their first trip away in years and come home to deal with animals.
All of that said - farmers like that don’t see their long-term help as just “employees”. They feel responsible for their welfare, and end up seeing them as part of the family. It’s not at all uncommon for them to inherit substantial land and assets when an older farmer dies, nor is it uncommon for a “farm hand” to end up borrowing money from their employer to start their own farm nearby. The salary isn’t impressive, but you get a large amount of freedom, opportunity to learn an important and difficult to acquire skillset, and a support system.
In short… being a “farm hand” these days isn’t easy and you won’t get rich in that position, but it’s not just a job. In a lot of ways, it’s the way you enter the farming community.
> The house isn’t a shack or something either - it’s an older farm house, but it’s a three bedroom, two bath home that was remodeled not long ago and has a half acre or so of yard. It would be a great place to raise a family.
For raising a family on $18K/yr + free rent?
It's basically, everything considered, the equivalent of entry -level fast-food pay, but worse because its mostly in non-monetary form, for a job with much greater skill and responsibility demands.
Yeah, I bet its hard to fill.
> All of that said - farmers like that don’t see their long-term help as just “employees”. They feel responsible for their welfare, and end up seeing them as part of the family.
Even if its true, what that ultimately means is that, as employers, they expect employees to sacrifice obligated, contractual compensation for the hope of future non-obligatory generosity in am a patron-client relationship rather than a bargained-for-exchange market relationship.
>They’re having a lot of trouble finding people who they can trust to take that job
Let's be generous and say room and board in a rural farmhouse and use of an old farm truck is worth an additional $1500, you would still make more money working 40 hours a week at my town's McDonalds, and if it's like any farm I've ever worked at you'll be working at least twice as hard and twice as long.
That's not a job, it's exploitation, right down to the "slave for use and maybe, if we decide, at some unspecified point you may get something nice from us!" sales pitch.
The economics of it are very different here. The per capita income is under $40k per annum, and housing costs are quite high relative to that. I don’t have a median income figure handy, but I’m confident it’s much lower than the per capita. I’d have to check, but as of last year our McDonalds was paying $14 / hour.
The pay is on par with other entry-level/unskilled positions here, and the figures above are what they were advertising - I’m certain someone who was a good fit could easily negotiate upward. I know they also offer guaranteed raises at six months and a year, though to be fair, I’m not sure how much those would be.
> if it's like any farm I've ever worked at you'll be working at least twice as hard and twice as long
I called it a “farm”, but it’s definitely not what you’d normally think of when you hear the word. It’s some poultry houses and a couple of hay fields. The majority of the responsibilities for the job would be centered around making yourself available to check the birds multiple times per day.
Honestly… if I were single, I’d probably make a pitch to take the job while working remotely as a “day job.”
The experience that they have had trying to hire for the position at the comoens5 they are offering suggests that that is less true than you seem to think.
> I’d have to check, but as of last year our McDonalds was paying $14 / hour.
$14/hr is about $28k/year, which is $10k/year more than the cash pay of the job you are talking about. Sure, the house and allowed personal use of the truck adds some value, but especially for the house realistically less than the what the standalone rental value would be for the house otherwise, because the people taking a job paying $18k/year beyond rent wouldn't be renting a 3 bedroom farmhouse if it wasn't part of the compensation-in-lieu-of-wages of their job.
> Honestly… if I were single, I’d probably make a pitch to take the job while working remotely as a “day job.”
So, maybe their problem is advertising to people who need the pay of a primary job and not single remote-working tech workers looking for a side gig. (Certainly, the added value of the house would be less wasted on the latter group.)
Maybe you can live for $100/mo somewhere, if you can solve the part of actually getting the deed to some land and splitting taxes, cost of basic infrastructure, etc. with enough people. But could you earn an income to support this indefinitely? Would you find satisfying social relationships, friends, a spouse?
Perhaps in the American West you could get a job as a farm hand, where they wouldn't care so much whether you showered daily or had presentable modern clothing. Do those jobs still exist? Would they expect you to have your own transportation, rather than the old-fashioned style of providing worker housing?
At some point the gears of your life need to mesh at least a little with some other gears around you, unless you have built up a large capital fund by participating in society first and then wish to disappear from it altogether.