If you're salaried at Google for 40 hours/week with no paid overtime and no side gigs allowed, the median value of your time is $149/hr but the marginal price is $0/hr because working an extra hour doesn't make you any extra money.
I suspect farming is similar - it's not like you can take that free hour, add 4 square feet to your field and produce $149 more wheat.
Hence I do engineering instead. The farm is just an expensive hobby. :)
Homesteading is a dream of mine, but I may be too rooted in the comforts of working in tech for it. Maybe if I win the startup lottery.
-I guess that depends on how you define homesteading; I quite enjoy myself living on a farm with no animals larger than a cat (And I could do without the cat, thankyouverymuch!), having a day job in engineering and spending some - well, a lot of - my sparetime picking up useful skills, like how to fix a tractor on the cheap, forestry, digging trenches, building sheds, maintaining said sheds, filling them with firewood, repaving roads...
I have the good fortune of having my in-laws living next door, though; they've been running the farm since forever and I pick up all sorts of useful things, not to mention they still put in a ton of work. I wouldn't even be able to keep the land from degrading unless we had them to help us out; so homesteading, even by a quite loose definition of the term, means you'll have a hard time doing it part-time.
Hence winning the startup lottery first probably is a good idea; then you can (with any luck) outsource some of the back-breaking stuff, too.
Having a hundred repair jobs a year that might be each be quoted between one and ten thousand sound about right for medium scale farm here, and the bulk of those would be done "in house" .. welding up jigs, repairing sprayers, building sheds, moving silos, putting in gas, power, water lines etc .. all par for the course.
That's the life style, steady fettling.
