tony2017

Hi,

My girlfriend (28) and I (31) plan to move to Central Portugal in the next couple of years.

The plan is to buy a plot of land (around 5 acres preferably, potentially planting a 1/3 vines, 2/3 olives over 3 acres to begin with) with a view to live as self sufficiently as possible, growing our own veg, having chickens for eggs, etc.

We plan to be off grid, having solar panels for power, water storage tanks for drinking water/irrigation, etc. However we also want the ability to drive a vehicle (insurance, tax), buy meat, improve our land, etc, so realistically we need a way of making a small income. Buy small we'd consider £5k per year between us to be a workable minimum.

At first we would live in a small caravan with a view to renovate the existing building/s into a house (planning regs permitting). We will be leaving with enough money to do that & 3 years of money to give us a chance to have a proper go at it. We have come to the conclusion that the 9-5 life style in the UK just isn't for us.

We are both handy and have building experience (I'm an electrician), both done a lot of traveling and have a good amount of farming experience and understand the hard work involved which we love. We know we will never make any money doing this, but it's about the lifestyle choice.

After many hours trawling the internet we cannot find answers to a few questions. It seems most are retired couples who aren't out to make money off the land. To those that have a similar set up:

1. Basically, is it doable?

2. How do you sell your produce in quantity? Ie. Co-Operatives - what kind of prices have you been getting over the last few years? How easy is it to sell to local businesses/markets?

3. Is it possible to find paid work on other local farms to keep some money coming in whilst we're setting up?

Thanks very much for reading, any advice would be much appreciated! Tony.

EMR

You will find more than a few brits with the same idea who will be keen to sell them their land having had the same idea and failed.
You have to ask yourself why are there so many parcels of land available and agents eager fir you to buy from them.

tony2017

Thanks for your reply.

This isn't something I haven't thought of - hence asking the question of whether it's doable and whether other local farm work is generally obtainable.

If all else fails, we'd be prepared to work a few months in England for enough cash to live on in PT for the remainder of the year, but of course this would be a last resort.

Is your reply based on personal experiences may I ask?

Thanks, Tony.

EMR

Its based on a decade of posts others like you who want a significant life change and do not realise that living in Portugal is little different from living in the UK except a lot harder for thise who have a small income and are strangers to the countruy.
Who will you sell to? .
Why would the locals buy from you when there are Portuguese who have been doing thecsame for generations
In or local markets you will not see one Brit selling produce, why ?
We are in the Algarve where there are more Brits than anywhere else in Portugal.
We recently met a couple who had the same ideas and are now selling their land and house No market fir their produce and reliant on their UK income.
You best best is as you say, to work in the UK to build up a sufficient pot for enjoy life in
Portugal.
There is an old saying that is not too far from the truth, if you want to make a million in business in Portugal as a immigrant artive with 2 million.

ouriquejan

Tony, do another post, then I can send you a pm.

tony2017

Thanks for your reply

Mike

Why do you think the younger generations of Portuguese are turning their backs on smallholdings? They have seen their parents and grandparents work their fingers to the bone for nothing.
Even the subsistence farmers are becoming fewer.
We are aiming for middle ground, being relatively self sufficient but working to pay the bills.

peterfc

Hi

When the time comes look for the Craft and Produce markets the best i know of is outside of Coja at Barril de Alva.

Good luck

Peter

mfesharne

Hope I'm not going to rain on your parade here but what I'm going to tell you is the cold, hard truth which is what you need.

You're not the first & you won't be the last to come over here with a similar plan & the vast majority of them usually last less than a couple of years before they go home again.

Summers are very dry & helluva hot here and it's far from easy to go out into the fields to labour......... Winters are very often cold & wet so the same applies in those months as well.

That same climate means life in a caravan is often far from comfortable & you need to bear in mind that it's not legal to live like that for any length of time without doing a build or a rebuild.......... It only takes one person to shop you & then you'll have the Camara (town hall) officials on your back.

Now veggie & other prices: In the local markets, you can buy onions, spuds & cabbage etc for around 40 cents per kg........ not per lb but per kg. - In a good cherry year, you can buy a kg of those for €1. - Oranges are almost impossible to even give away.

Another problem you'll be faced with is the deer & more importantly the wild boar will make it their mission in life to eat anything & everything you plant........ In my first year here I accidentally had my field ploughed (I thought I'd asked my neighbour to cut the grass with his tractor) so once ploughed, I thought I'd plant most of it to veggies & it was damn hard work........ The wild boar ate every single thing except 2 parsnips that were the size of golf balls....... they even scoffed the watermelons!

Going rate for good local wines here is €5 per 5 litres so not much profit in that & the olives in the area all come ripe at the same time which obviously causes a glut which results in relatively low sale prices........ most people produce wine & olive oil for their own consumption or maybe to give away to the neighbours and don't even bother trying to sell it.

To give you an idea of how common your plan is, such people have their own nickname of 'hairy hippy halfwits' - Which should give you an idea of how successful people think you're plan will be.

Portugal is a fantastic place to live or more accurately, to retire to but it's not so good for earning a living which is why it's lost 20% of it's (mostly younger generation) over the last few years.

mfesharne

Oh & I'll add that it's not at all uncommon to see pieces of land being allowed to lay fallow for years on end & the reason for that is the owners don't want to farm it themselves & neither does anyone else. - Not even for free.

macliam

I do have to echo what mfesharne says - subsistance farming is not just tough, it's almost impossible. 5 acres of good, flat, fertile land will supply you with enough food for yourselves (I don't have the problems that he has with wild animals, the local hunters kill everything that moves).

However, I have 7 acres around my house, but it's hilly and about half a metre of dust over schist so it takes a lot of manure and work to get it halfway"fertile". So the land is mainly scrub, with about an acre or more of cistus (good for fires) and a dammed pond/lake full of turtles - the rest I allow my neighbour to graze his sheep on to keep the grass down.

That being said I have some olives trees, citrus, pomegranate and fig (too dry for grapes). They grow and crop happily - if you can get to the fruit before the Charnecos who can strip an olive tree in a morning!

I'm 2km off road and 10km from the nearest town, but luckily I have mains electricity. Solar is great for heating water, most of the year, but not for power - batteries are too expensive. Generators require fuel...... and a woodburner is great in the room where it sits, but the rest of the house..... so I'm installing central heating and that costs! In summer we can get into the 40s, usually 35 or so. In winter it can be 20 in the day, but below freezing at night - few plants do well with that variation.

Don't get me wrong, you can scrape by - but forget becoming a supplier. As for working, I have a guy who worked as a gardener in Germany, he's very good. He asks 8 euros an hour for general work, but gets turned down by people who only want to pay 5.

If you have an income, it's great. If you don't, it's tough. By all means follow your dreams - but it really will be tougher than you imagine.

mfesharne

I couldn't even get any of my neighbours to graze their sheep on my land because they have so much of their own sitting there doing nothing...... so in the end got some ducks just so I didn't have to spend half my life cutting the grass!

liveaboard

Where I live we have an irrigation canal, so we have plenty of water year round. Also, it's a coastal tourist area with good demand for produce in summer.
As far as I know, there are no small holders able to make a living from their produce.
There are a couple of 100 hectare farms that are apparently turning a profit.
There are a lot of frustrated farmers, with machinery and knowhow. Some grow for home consumption.
I have a tractor and 4 hectares.
I don't grow any food. It's just so cheap to buy anything that grows locally.
A little bit of fruit that the old people planted before we bought the place.

mfesharne

On that subject we live on the very edge of a village with forest on the other 3 sides & although they have 2 or 3 montarias every year we still often get wild boar & deer very close to the house........ the wild boar sometimes eat the moss off of the walls of the house in the winter & just a few weeks ago my missus took the dog for a walk at 10am & was very nearly run down by 3 deer within 20 metres of the house........ but that's one of the reasons we bought the place.

tony2017

Hi, first off thanks for all your replies. Much appreciated!

Mike - This was one of my first concerns when we started looking into this plan. As you say, young Portuguese people have left over the last couple of decades and farms are laying dormant.

Presumably the young people don't bother with it as I'd imagine you can't even make minimum wage, so why would they bother? Whereas we'd be happy to earn the minimum wage of one person between the two of us, so maybe perceptions are different. I understand that if you are looking to buy nice things and live the 'perceived' good life, then working the land is no way a sound logical option.

Also, it begs the question - young people who have had the land passed down, it's cost them nothing so why don't they farm it? - but in a lot of cases the land is split between siblings who aren't all in a position to farm and thus it is sold. Also, do they have the ability to invest a substantial amount of capital in one go to make the land workable? As when looking at land to buy, I can't see past the fact that a lot of them have trees planted non-uniformly, they aren't irrigated and don't seem to have enough water regardless. We would be thinking small farm but commercially orientated, would that make a difference?

You mention a middle ground - working to pay the bills. What do you intend to do for work if you don't mind my asking?



Mfeshane - We appreciate that it will be hard work in the conditions, however we have farmed out of a self converted campervan for long periods, in temperatures between -3C and 45C+ with no running water/no power/no proper toilet/no A/C, no heater etc. So the Portugal plan would be luxury in comparison.

Thanks for your tips re pricing and wildlife (we hadn't considered boar). You mention olives being ready at the same time causes low sales prices. Do you know what recent sales prices are at all? And do you know how easy they are to sell in bulk? What seems a low price to some may seem fine to us.

Thanks again for all your replies. Does anybody out there know how the Co-Operatives work? Is it easy to sell your produce to them, etc...?