An anonymous reader shares a report: It’s not an easy time to be an American farmer. The number of farms in the US is declining, according to the Department of Agriculture, as consolidation makes big operations even bigger. In 2017, the most recent year for the USDA’s industry census, the average farm income was just $43,053, and less than half of farms reported positive net cash. The price of commodities like corn, wheat, and milk have fallen, making it harder to turn a profit. Extreme weather, like this year’s devastating floods in the midwest, puts additional pressure on farms. Many have also been negatively impacted by the US trade war with China. “The weather still dictates a huge amount of our lives, input costs have skyrocketed, meaning most of us live under a mountain of debt that we hope we can make the payments on every year,” says Zach Johnson, a fifth-generation farmer whose channel Millennial Farmer has nearly 400,000 subscribers.

On YouTube, though, the picture is sometimes much rosier. There, farming can seem more like an aspirational lifestyle choice rather than a precarious livelihood. Buxton says YouTube has seen an influx of new creators who specifically chronicle what it’s like to open a farm after living in a city or working a corporate job. Like #VanLife videos, where creators share how they abandoned the mainstream to live on the road, farming content serves as a how-to guide to an alternative way of living. […] Jake and Becky, who asked that only the first initial of their last name be used to protect their privacy, have over 400,00 subscribers, a large enough audience to turn YouTube into their main source of income. Some of their most popular videos revolve around their livestock, which isn’t surprising — animal videos have powered the internet’s content machinery for decades. But that enduring appeal can make some situations complex for farmers to navigate. “The animal lovers don’t want to see anything happen to the animals. That’s been a tricky balance,” Jake says.

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Source: Slashdot – Some Farmers Have Discovered That Online Stardom Can Be More Lucrative Than their Crops or Livestock