Something I've noticed among the "successful" youtube homesteaders is that they almost all invariably have property "in the city" that they rent out (generally unseen, usually unspoken, and always off camera) for significant passive income and treat homesteading like a virtuous hobby. Many of them also have side hustles like giving paid talks on homesteading, renting out "farm experiences", or offering classes on various farming skills etc.
Farmlife is hard as hell and successful farms find ways of leveraging what they grow into hired cheap labor and other efficiencies that takes much of the burden off of the owners. In the case of the popular homesteaders, they don't like to show this much as it takes away from the idyllic lifestyle they are literally making money pushing -- where tilling a field, cutting back brush, or fixing a field drain are 10 second activity clips.
If you want to farm, just go farm, but the homesteading trend in my opinion has smells of a kind of grassroots pyramid scheme where the only way to be successful at it is to bring other people into it.
Farmlife is hard as hell and successful farms find ways of leveraging what they grow into hired cheap labor and other efficiencies that takes much of the burden off of the owners. In the case of the popular homesteaders, they don't like to show this much as it takes away from the idyllic lifestyle they are literally making money pushing -- where tilling a field, cutting back brush, or fixing a field drain are 10 second activity clips.
If you want to farm, just go farm, but the homesteading trend in my opinion has smells of a kind of grassroots pyramid scheme where the only way to be successful at it is to bring other people into it.