Just one data point - when the clutch on our 1994 (methinks) Case tractor broke a few years ago, the quoted cost for having a new one installed was close to $5,000. My father-in-law and I spent two days splitting the tractor, refurbishing the clutch using a $250 kit and reassembling it. No expensive or fancy tools, but a lot of headscratching and educated guesses, plus we needed to craft a couple of rather large stands and jigs using timber already on hand.
The $4,750 thus saved is more than we make annually from renting out the fields to a nearby farmer (We just live on the farm, we're not working the land nor having any animals anymore.)
I believe this situation is rather typical on smaller farms - you have to make things work on your own or with the help of friends and neighbours, or you're SOL.
Having a hundred repair jobs a year that might be each be quoted between one and ten thousand sound about right for medium scale farm here, and the bulk of those would be done "in house" .. welding up jigs, repairing sprayers, building sheds, moving silos, putting in gas, power, water lines etc .. all par for the course.
That's the life style, steady fettling.
Hence I do engineering instead. The farm is just an expensive hobby. :)
Homesteading is a dream of mine, but I may be too rooted in the comforts of working in tech for it. Maybe if I win the startup lottery.
-I guess that depends on how you define homesteading; I quite enjoy myself living on a farm with no animals larger than a cat (And I could do without the cat, thankyouverymuch!), having a day job in engineering and spending some - well, a lot of - my sparetime picking up useful skills, like how to fix a tractor on the cheap, forestry, digging trenches, building sheds, maintaining said sheds, filling them with firewood, repaving roads...
I have the good fortune of having my in-laws living next door, though; they've been running the farm since forever and I pick up all sorts of useful things, not to mention they still put in a ton of work. I wouldn't even be able to keep the land from degrading unless we had them to help us out; so homesteading, even by a quite loose definition of the term, means you'll have a hard time doing it part-time.
Hence winning the startup lottery first probably is a good idea; then you can (with any luck) outsource some of the back-breaking stuff, too.
If you're salaried at Google for 40 hours/week with no paid overtime and no side gigs allowed, the median value of your time is $149/hr but the marginal price is $0/hr because working an extra hour doesn't make you any extra money.
I suspect farming is similar - it's not like you can take that free hour, add 4 square feet to your field and produce $149 more wheat.
My grandfather spent his career working on heavy machinery for a government agency and then in retirement has been maintaining all the farm equipment for my uncle. In the summer I helped him replace the complex system of belts in a hay baler. Heβs in his mid 80s and was crawling around inside the machine. My job was just to stand there and keep the belt from twisting.
Check out Project Farm on YouTube to get a sense of what the average farmer is like in terms of engineering mindset.
They would love this.
Farmers are smart. When your combine breaks during harvest, you can't just grab another or wait a couple of days for the repair guy to show up -- you need it fixed now. That's not easy.
Not to mention, understanding your soil, your crops, the weather, how they interact, how to handle everything from planting up to post-harvest processing... it's not an easy job.
And this starts at a young age, because all the kids help out on the farm, too. You know why licenses for vehicles aren't required on private property? Farms. Early-teenagers need to be able to drive around a truck, then a tractor, etc.