There's just no way you can go buy a ranch, stock it, and work it, and make it cash flow. No way.
Whenever land comes up for sale here locally, the buyer is usually a Mennonite. The last 2 farms that have sold close to me, each went for $12,000 an acre. One of them was an especially good farm, mostly all tillable, the other one was divided up between 4 families, with several of them having sold land for big bucks back in Pennsylvania. The standard practice is for them to build a house and barn whenever they buy a tract of land, unless it has a house on it that is to their liking.
The Mennonites here usually make a living in one of three ways........they work in some form of construction, they farm, growing mostly tobacco, or they grow produce. The produce market is very big here, with one of the largest produce auctions in the country located here. There must be some good money in it, because the majority of the Mennonites grow and sell produce. But, I've never understood how that could pay for $12,000 acre land.
I do know that their farms are usually mortgaged to the hilt, unless they were lucky enough to sell land back in PA before they moved here. Some of them never pay the land off, instead just passing the debt off on down the line. For the most part, they must be a good risk for lenders, because it is very unusual to hear of one being forced to sell out. I have heard many stories about how they often go several years without making a farm payment.
Most of the successful farmers that I know either started out with their family in farming and grew bigger that way, or else they started out small, working other jobs, and grew bigger over the years. Also, tobacco has been the key to most of the really successful farmers in this area, as it has always been the one money crop they could depend on.
