How to pay for the land with itself? Newbie here

Thanks, mate.
I wasn't aware of that.

I wonder how farmers buy land here in Oz, if they can't afford it outright. Any alternatives?
Additionally, with the small amount of $$ we have, I reckon 100 acres is plenty to start with, but will accept other points of view as well.

Our main limitation is the financial side, really

Thanks again.

Look to a share farming venture to get a start. Look around at different areas, it will be handy to make a list of what you expect, water, sealed road access, electric power if you are not going off grid, buildings, sheds etc. Anywhere on the coast is going to be expensive, highlands are too cold for farming in winter, tropics too hot and wet in summer.
It took us 3 years of looking around to find this place, sell our other farm and bug out to here nearly 20 years ago. Never regretted it, but really thought we might have more done by now. Still, most of my immediate family, my kids, mother in law and so on are here in their own dwellings.
With the net, looking at properties should be easy, but its not.
Welcome to the blog.




You know you own an old tractor when.....Using someone else's tractor you just assume there are no brakes.

Can you move to a rural town, pay much lower rent, work from home, and greatly increase your savings? You might find a house with a couple of acres on the edge of town is affordable and still meet your prepping goals.

You've well and truly missed the boat for acreage anywhere within commuting distance of Sydney. Although you might check out any rough bush blocks on the Putty Rd, tbey used to be relatively cheap.

Otherwise you might find a cheaper block near Goulburn.

Friend of mine recently bought 100 acres with an old cottage near Neriga for $650k, and she reckons she got a bargain. I bought 3 acres south of Bateman's Bay for $180k five years ago, you'd need $550k for a similar block now.

Rural towns like Ashford might still be cheap, don't know what the internet there is like for working from home.

As for earning an income from your property, consider farmstay or air-bnb type setups, city folk might pay good money to spend a few days in a cabin on the right rural block, or you could investigate carbon credits, having business pay you to plant trees so they can claim a carbon credit offset.

Yep. There's a reason why so many who grow up on a farm don't get into farming. LOTs of hard work to get it going and many years of learning things the hard way.

I guess the real question is how much yearly revenue do you plan to make from the land?

Do you want it to earn enough to cover its ownership and maintenance costs or make a profit on top of that?

The size of your property its zoning and geographical location will all play a determining factor in what you can do and how much potentially it can earn and whether the earning is a passive income or something you have to be active in to produce the income lastly your own knowledge base and skills will also play a factor in how quickly you can get the property to earn its own self funding income  

Some times the land itself doesnt directly produce a source of income but how you use the land to earn an income let me give you a simple example

Bob has a small 20 arce block that was once cleared  for live stock and has a couple of small dams with a scattering of standing dead timber 

bob cuts the dead trees down and sells it for firewood at $150 a ute load ( ton ) with the money raised from that bob goes out and buys a truck load of firewood logs that sell at $600 per 10 ton
( old prices not sure of them now ) he then uses the space to cut up the logs into  firewood and sells that at $150 a ton giving bob $1500 for the load of logs roughly $900 profit bob does this several times till he has made enough to start on other projects on the property such as raising chickens but not just any chickens ones that people like and buy when they reach point of lay and will buy fertilized eggs to hatch

now when it comes to chickens its an interesting subject because if you breed the right chickens you can get a lot of money for just the eggs my wife use to get $45 a dozen for her Araucana eggs to hatch and $35 a dozen for her F2 olive eggers  and $25 a dozen for the bantam Rhode island reds then during the rest of the year we would sell the eggs as easter eggs and charge $6 a cartoon and people loved them because of all the crazy colours on the egg shells 

Then after awhile you can start on other projects it dosent take long for the for the property to pay for itself if you slowly build it up step by step with a plan to make sure they compliment each other

See I um i mean bob was able to get to the point were he was able to sell 50 ton a year easily from his property then sell the eggs , chickens and waste products "saw dust and chicken poo ' while building nice fruit and veg gardens

Yes every starting point will require some capital outlay on your behalf to get started but if you spend the time drawing up a flow chart and plan to ensure it all goes hand in hand to your end goal then it doesn't matter if its chickens or sheep so long as it make sense and is within your and your lands capability then most properties have some form of ability to pay for themselves however it is important in these turbulent times to not go in blind and try random things without thinking it through to the end point ive seen that far to many times where people spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars on their pet project only to produce a finished product there was no market for 

One example that comes to mind was a friend back in TAS that probably sunk over 200k into making his property where people would rent out paddocks to store their pet horses these paddocks were nice they were 5 arces each had their own storage shed with horse shelter attached clean filtered water storage for the troughs and the list went on but 2 things happened 
1. There wasn't the market in the area city people did not want to drive an our to get to their horses 
2. No one could afford the asking price because all the people that could afford it had their own properties to store their pet horses on

So my advise is find a property that suits what you want to do and if it does pay for itself then that's a bonus    

Ps bob farm use to gross $15k a year from wood and fertilized eggs sales which worked out to around $6800 profit not including the additional sales of eggs for consumption which was over $3k alone plus the sale of sawdust and chicken poo . the land rates and insurances  for the property were all in total under 3.5k 

 

I think the common theme here is that you're going to have to invest either time or money. If you're working full time and don't have a lot of spare cash (who does these days!) then your investment is going to be time-based. I know that you're looking for land, but could you perhaps start investing time first?
For example we've only just started looking at buying recently but that's given me the opportunity to start spending some of my time learning how to do basic tasks like canning, food storage, growing food, beekeeping, all kinds of different things.

If you can't invest cash just yet investing time is definitely a good way to go in the mean time. I know that's not the answer you were looking for but it might give you something actionable to work on until you have a few more options

We spent several years investigating various properties around NSW, before settling on this one. Time is short nowand you may not have the time left to do such research before it all falls apart.

Water is vital, both for domestic use (rainwater tanks are OK), and a dam or two or creek for irrigation of gardens that will be needed to survive the collapse. A defensible place is also required, not easily visible from the road, and perhaps you put up with a rough driveway for the sake of defense.

I really think that the chances of finding something for $50k within commuting distance from Sydney is a dream.

Properties in Northern NSW are available and most are arable with reasonable access, but not for $50K.

You will know when you've found the right one, so keep looking and don't give up.




You know you own an old tractor when.....You know how to unlock the starter of an IH model M with a two row tobacco planter attached and still in the ground.

I hate to be brutally honest, but if it were possible to pay $50k and have the block pay for itself everyone would be doing it. I'd be first in line! The block won't pay for itself. The time that you spend on resourcing the land is what will make money. If you're working the land (bees, chooks, growing food, whatever) you're spending time. That time will have to be worked alongside your full time job to have that block 'pay for itself'. Chooks don't feed and fix their own boxes. Plants don't prevent pests getting to them and ensure that they're watered. 
If you're resourcing commodities like wood, that will only last as long as there's wood on the land. And with 1-5 acres you're still going to have to spend time organising felling, bundling, transporting, selling, business admin time... All again, something you'll have to do along side your current full time job to make enough out of it for it to pay for itself.

You could organise for locals to pay a fee to come and lop said lumber themselves, but you're going to get bottom rates for that because who's going to pay as much for that when they can call a local company to come and drop pre-cut wood at their storage for them? Sell to the local company instead? They probably won't pay you enough to cover the cost of the mortgage. And after the first winter, you're out of wood. What do you do for the rest of the year? And then the years following that? You can let locals use your land to grow their food, but are they going to pay enough to pay off the mortgage each month? Why do that when they can buy the food themselves at a store for the same price?

I know that sounds brutal and to be honest that's me being pretty blunt. I'm normally a bit more diplomatic than that. But I think that you're possibly looking in the wrong direction because I literally did the exact same thing for far too long!

As the regs around here will know in the last two years I retrained into a different job stream. HECs is a wonderful thing, and I'm now paying off a shiny new diploma that cost me $6k... with a job pay increase of nearly $40k per year that I netted by changing jobs. My husband and I started off with half the deposit that you currently have and in four months from me starting my new job we're sitting at $50k. We've sacrificed little bit to save that hard that quick but nothing life ending and the pay increase I got means we're able to buy as soon as we find a property that suits us.
The change of job also meant that I can WFH which made it possible for us to look in different locations from where we are now, which means a far better chance of finding what we're after at a reasonable price. Now sure, it's not our forever home and the prepping haven of my dreams is still in the future. But getting started with the hardest step of changing to another job got us in the position of even being able to consider buying a home.

I'm not going to sit here and say "I can do it so everyone can". That's pretty short-sighted and I know that everyone's situation is different. But I literally couldn't move away from where we live now in my old job because I couldn't DO it anywhere else. And the prices here is why we couldn't afford to buy. It took a few solid "stop complaining and do something different" conversations with people who are older and wiser than I am before I realised that nothing was ever going to change if I didn't stick my neck out and do something uncomfortable.

/preaching session
If you do actually come up with a solid business plan for a block to pay itself off, let me know. I'm still definitely going to be first in line 🤣.