Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Everyone I know who's bought cheap desert property to develop as an off grid compound has ended up abandoning it. If you can find Ian from Forgotten Weapons' old channel you can see how much money and effort he put into building his Arizona desert bunker-house before selling it at (presumably) a heavy loss. The wife might have had some say in that, I'm not sure about the full story.
I was talking to a farmer the other week, saying how jealous I was of people with much better land off in the sticks. She said "yeah, the land's better elsewhere, but we need to live near rich customers who'll pay ridiculous prices for Organic Small Farm produce to be profitable at our scale."
(She's actually profiting by buying things like garlic and potatoes from farmers with better land and no markets, and reselling them at local prices)
In a desert you have neither good land nor good customers.
I went to college in Montana. One of the professors noted that a local baker owned their own farms for quality reasons. At first the farms were operating at a loss, but they preferred the consistency of the wheat that came from vertical integration. As the bread brand grew so did the farm. The farm turned profitable at about 10,000 acres (4000 ha). I would guess most of their competitors were at least 1 order of magnitutde smaller. The college town and climate probably wouldn't support very high-priced organic produce farms (it'd be cheaper to fly in produce from those farms in a warmer state).
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Good points. I'm not interested in being off the grid per se, except inasmuch as parcels that are totally off the grid are way more affordable, and the grid will probably come to them eventually. It's more of an economic question than anything--what does it take to make bad land productive without too much up-front capital?
The answer is, I think, that it's not really doable--you need either lots of capital, or to squander valuable human capital developing the site that would be better off elsewhere. But I was hoping for a cool idea I hadn't thought of.
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