Does anybody balance farming activity with software development?

Working full-time in web development, and a part time farmer after work and weekends. My farmer activity is mainly growing food for the family. Taking care of fruit trees and olives trees. I do my own olive oil. Have a few chickens and pig to have a meat supply. The work never ends that is for sure, but the possibility to drink awesome orange juice for two months at zero cost is just incredible. The down side of it is I cannot eat fruit sold in supermarket, the taste is to different. Farming and development are two things I enjoy a lot, farming at the end of the day is like a decompression from the days work, away from screens, refill vitamin D. Chopping some wood after work with an axe: tremendous to relief stress an keep me fit. Of course my idea is to able to join both activities somehow, maybe trying to have a part time in web Dev, or making a project where both areas are involved. Possibly when I will be tired of working for companies, meetings with managers and bad scrum masters

Not personally, but my father did the same thing in the 90s. He went to consulting 4 days a week and running a 100 acre commercial farm the other 3.

I would say there are some synergies in that engineers have access to capital that not all farmers do.

Burnout is a risk and it takes a special kind of person who is a glutton for punishment. If your farm is more recreational, this could be less of a challenge.

As he aged, farming became more of his identity and his farm employees became more of a family and some of the most important aspects of his life. I think this is was a positive development and am glad he has this surrogate family.

In the long run, I dont think it was a wise financial move, as he sunk close to a million into the farm in the 90's, and the long term value of the farm will be destroyed by California regulations. A lot of heartbreak on that front. From the outside I think it is causing more anguish than loosing his parents.

If asked, I think he would still do it all over again.

That said, my 02c would be to keep in mind how much of your life are you placing in a basket and what the threats to that basket are.

We're more on the side of homesteading than farming. We own a 40 acre property where we raise chickens and collect the natural foods here - berries, grapes, hickory nuts, apples, mushrooms, various edible greens. We'll hunt a deer in the fall and could easily expand that to turkeys and waterfowl. We've started some patches of plants that should grow into sustainable supplies over a few years - lingonberries and elderberries. We're encouraging the growth of our maple trees and likely can have a small maple syrup operation running in 5-10 years. We have a stretch of the property that borders a corn/soybean field so likely will start to grow some small-scale grains there to feed livestock and then we will be producing our own dairy. We're coppicing a few evergreens for Christmas trees, and as our 150 year old hickory trees die off, we use the wood for our winter heating and some lumber.

So we aren't exactly far down a farming road... but we do take full advantage of where nature has put this property to begin with. Add a 1 Gig fiber optic line and that provides the connectivity to do tech.

Tech still is definitely what we live off, with all the homesteading being more of a hobby.

I started a goat dairy about 12 years ago, while software consulting on the side while we built up the farm. We built a cheese processing plant 8 years ago to start adding value to the milk we were producing. Over the years we started processing cow's milk and milking and making sheeps milk cheeses too. We currently have about 125 dairy goats and a much smaller flock of sheep.

As the farm grew it became more and more time consuming, and managing the software consultancy became more difficult as I wasn't near the computer for most of the day. I enjoy the seasonality of farming, though it is very physically demanding, and I can feel the difference that 12 years has made.

In early 2020, I lost my last software client in the early pandemic, and put most of my energies into building the farm up. I currently don't do any external consulting, but have been working on my own tech and development projects. It's fun for me to be able to apply my development skills to on-farm problems. I've been doing minor automation projects using Arduinos and Raspberry Pis over the last four years.

Click Farmers surely do!

(Sorry)

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[Aside, I love the idea of your app - its wonderful, however my ADHD may preclude me as a successful user)]

However - I have a STRONG desire in this area...

Let me give you a few examples though of "the struggle"

A few of my friends who were very successful in SV (chief of staff at cisco, head of HPE sales, PaloAlto Networks, etc) have bought ranch-farm-like places in foothills of California.

Several have started Goating. (Having herds of goats that they rent-out (farm) to various entities and have the goats weed, etc...)

Build an app for the USES SCHEDULING TRACKING blah blah blah.

Make it a community of farm services rather than "nextdoor"

Build "nextFarm" "nextHomestead" etc.

When you build a relationship with the farmers (on an IRL level) - these folks SHARE a LOT of services, help, knowledge, love, equipment, animals, vets, etc...

Your note app - could have a much more refined workflow specific to such.

They use hunting apps a lot to track paddocks and quote regions to goat.

They are all still highly tech and active - just settling for the more rural..

I'd be happy to chat more... but there are some people you may want to meet.

My friend made drone business startup.

This is not exactly what you ask, but he begin on air photo and geodesy and spent huge amount of money and effort on it, with really big troubles (for example once his driver left machine to go to wc, and thieves stole equipment, which costs near quarter of Million dollars).

Once he found niche of agriculture drones, and in a few months sell large truck of those drones, and now as I know, most of his business is for them.

He still sell industrial drones and provide services connected to them, like computer farm, which reconstruct 3d model of terrain from drone video. But he talk about this less and less.

I wouldn't exactly call this farming. I have a very small honey business. I have a garden with all sorts of fruits, veggies, berries, and mushroom. I do software full time. There's not a lot of time required for my "farming" activities.

I hate my dev job. I don't want to be a full time farmer either. It would be nice to have a small farm in retirement, maybe focused on honey and mushrooms.

Not exactly farming, but just tending our small piece of land, our vegetable and fruit garden, our chickens, and building whatever infrastructure we need...

Personally, I find it hard to balance my money-earning work and my garden work. I'd much prefer to work outside all day.

Haven't done it myself because my health isn't good enough to be a farmer, but I want to subscribe to your newsletter and live vicariously.