Again depends on where you go, tolerance wise. Plus, the open country is NOT less expensive. I have to pay extra for people to come out here to work, extra on gas and time to get to and from, extra for services. Then there's the costs of the things you need to maintain the property well, and the taxes, etc.
And it's not just Cleveland. The general swing towards large boxes eating small business is everywhere. Even out here in hard core farm country. I have HD, Lowes, Ace and two garden centers (all over 40 minutes one way) but they are here. Small garden centers cater to the rich city people that want planters on their deck or stone patios and pretty shrubs and green lawns. The two local green houses run by locals have gone belly up due to people wanting 99 cent 6 cell packs of marigolds.
So that's why we do a lot on our own, as do the other locals, and we swap and sell to each other.
Since I sell a lot of small livestock and network hard I meet a variety of people. There's some isolated pockets of course, locally the Roots and Reeds Skillshare group, Kellys Working Well Farm, the Tradora druids group and a few other places are pretty great so I know it can be done, especially if you have like-minds to come be with you. But I'm still building that group and the resources to make that move and in the meantime my experiences with the general country public haven't been great. I have had to rush out of experiences more often than I like to stop myself from telling people off aggressively while they unknowingly talk **** about me to my face while I'm just trying to buy/sell something. So without a support network and a lot of security I can't imagine that move would be easy.
I have time to put it all together. I mean D is younger than me but he's even still in college after all. And I have some friends moving onto some 8 acres right now where they're looking to do a sustainable permaculture nut farm and oil press thing which is exciting! And they wanna set up some sort of a mutual aid thing between us all since I have a lot of plant growing experience and livestock that thay don't have. I'm even giving them one of my roosters this spring! Amusingly the person they're moving in with is a math professor at D's college, and D is head of his math club so they know eachother. So the pieces are all falling into place, just slowly.
