You make some great points. If I may, I’d like to expand on them with an alternative perspective.
When investing:
- A reasonable target for a business is around 10% per year (i.e., each $1M in assets should generate $100k in profit).
- An aggressive target for a business is around 20% per year.
- A conservative target for personal investments is around 3% per year.
- A more aggressive target is around 6-8% per year.
(These figures are approximate but are close enough for the purposes of my point.)
If a farmer has $10M in land and equipment, then we’d expect to see at least $1M profit per year. This is on top of the money that would be earned as a skilled employee who works significant overtime.
In 2022 Canada, potato farming (the second most profitable kind of farming) saw an average revenue of $600k on $480k of expenses. All the investment in land, its preparation, and the business enables an average Canadian potato farm to make the salary of a Canadian senior software engineer. And the senior software engineer doesn’t have nearly the buy-in costs.
Then there is the matter of risk. In Alberta, we’ve recently had some droughts that resulting in harvests so poor that harvesting what did grow was done at a loss. It’s like earning a paycheque so small that it’s not worth driving to pick it up. (The farmers did harvest the crops because it was necessary to collect insurance.)
So, yeah. High cost of buy-in, a lot of work, and a lot of risk for for the opportunity to make less than an American SWE.
Pedant rant:
I take issue with ‘needs a lot of work’, though it is common phrasing. It promotes the false idea that ‘business is more efficient’ by making it sound like the public administrators are too dumb to know how to do their job.
The real issue, in most jurisdictions, is that it needs more and stable funding, and less political interference.