Why city CEOS crave life on the farm — and how they’re making it work
Instead of buying second homes on the coast, urban professionals are taking on the charms and challenges of hobby farms
4 min
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During the week, CEO Nick Keenan is a corporate king, working long hours and juggling the parenting of their three children with his wife Jodie from their East Malvern home in Melbourne. But on the weekend, he swaps tailored suits for jeans and work boots and heads 3.5 hours to his farm in the Victorian Alps. A desire to replicate his childhood growing up on a cattle and wheat farm in central NSW and give his kids—Jackson, 16, Jodi, 14, and Jessie, 11—a taste of great outdoors fuelled the purchase of a block of land near the country alpine town of Myrtleford in 2016. Today, their “hobby farm” features three-bedroom completely off-grid homestead, horses and truffle-producing oak trees. The Keenans have done the bulk of the work themselves in their spare time and during the COVID-19 lockdowns, when their new project also became a sanctuary.
“I wear a suit during the week and I’m a farmer on the weekends,” the CEO of media agency Publicis Groupe says.
“When I need to clear my head, it’s my dirty Hilux ute I jump into, not my latest European cars— the BMWs and Mercedes Benzs— you should see the looks I get from some other CEOs.”
The rise of a new crop of farming families. People making the shift are growing in numbers, with hobby farming a plausible option for those weary of city life and an unexpected way for suburban families to find more time together away from the cities—if only on weekends.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics shows 66,000 hobby farms in Australia, with more and more city families swapping their nine-to-five for the outdoors, driven by a desire to escape the rat race and show their kids another side of life.
Those who can afford it are discovering that farming comes with its own pros and cons, but financial decisions are key. The living farm fantasy among the well-heeled often means small-scale producers must accept they may never be able to sell their wares at a profit. While a successful hobby farm can become a profitable sideline, it should not be the main source of family income.
“I just really wanted to show the kids a little bit of what dad grew up with,” says Keenan. “My family had 1000 breeders and 28 bulls, so I wanted to replicate that on a minor scale. And then I wanted to put in a windbreak, and I discovered French Holly Oaks that can be inoculated with truffles.”
“We developed this over a year; I had these romantic notions of wandering out from the kitchen and grabbing a truffle to use in cooking. Essentially, it wanted to escape from the city but we didn’t want it to be a money pit either. I think we have nailed the lifestyle balance.”
The Keenans now have 330 truffle trees which, after just three and a half years, are already producing truffle, which they plan to sell on a small scale in the future. Despite the early success of their truffle farm, the Keenans make enough from their media company and not from hobby farming itself to even cover the Airbnb to keep the lights on.
The Keenans have up around 20 percent of their land, the equivalent of about two football fields, given over to a patch of the grazing truffle inoculated oak trees. They’ve planted another 30 around the outside of the house as a windbreak. But the truffle farm is just a sideline for the Keenans who have no desire to become full-time farmers, only to make a bit of money on the side for their personal use.
Bee farming is now Australia’s most popular hobby farm, according to the Department of Agriculture and Forestry. More Australians are finding bees easier and more economical to keep in their backyards than poultry or other small-scale farm animals. In fact, around 80 percent of all beehives in Australia fall into the category of hobbyists, says Mike Allerton of Amateur Beekeepers Australia.
“All sorts of people are attracted to beekeeping—lawyers, academics, students, retirees, dentists—you name it,” says Allerton, who has 10 beehives on three acres in the Blue Mountains.
“There are a lot of backyard beekeepers; some people have just one hive to make enough honey for themselves and give away to family and friends, and some have up to 50.”
Allerton says different councils have different restrictions on beekeeping, particularly if you keep hives in urban or built-up areas, and bees are classified as livestock. And in his area there is a requirement that the relevant Department of Primary Industry is in your yard.
Additionally, beekeeping must abide by the National Bee Biosecurity Code of Practice which dictates things like you cannot feed honey to bees and calling the Department of American Foulbrood, a bacterial disease for bees found in Australia, that can destroy a hive.
Hobby farmers need a few hundred dollars to start with beehive boxes, a smoker, and hive tools, and more ongoing funds to maintain them.
With farming come a few hurdles and hobby farmers who are new to it, as well as keeping up the stringent biosecurity standards and welfare of animals—and of course, as in breaking even. And you do not need agricultural genes or herb school.
“Our farm has been a lot of work, but it’s probably the most rewarding experience we’ve had,” Keenan says. “There’s nothing we love more than seeing the kids outside, swimming, kayaking, and running around the backyard in the fresh air.
“In my opinion, country kids have the greatest gift of all—the great outdoors.”
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Artificial intelligence is making it easier than ever to build a business without building a team. As AI takes over coding, customer support, marketing, administration, and other day-to-day tasks, a growing number of solo founders are scaling startups to millions in revenue with few—or even no—employees. While the trend is lowering barriers to entrepreneurship, it is also reshaping hiring, raising questions about the future of work and how businesses will grow in the AI era.
5 min
Ben Broca launched a company last December that offers AI tools to entrepreneurs. He’s already added 10,000 paying customers and is on track to bring in $10 million in revenue this year.
One thing he hasn’t added: any other employees.
The 40-year-old is part of a class of entrepreneurs who are launching, and then often running, new companies on their own. Artificial intelligence tools answer Broca’s emails, help write and debug code, field requests from customers, sign up new subscribers and grant refunds when issues arise.
Broca relishes his ability to make whatever decisions he wants on his own, often from his sun-drenched Sausalito, Calif., living room. “I think compromises make lukewarm results,” he said.
Once upon a time, running a business of a certain size required a team. AI is turning that assumption upside down, and more aspiring entrepreneurs are going it alone.
An analysis by the payments company Stripe shows there are thousands of solo operators on the company’s platform that are generating over $1 million in revenue, with their ranks doubling between 2023 and 2025. The number of solo operators crossing the $10 million threshold nearly tripled in that same span.
In the past, people without business contacts or particular savvy might not have known how to get their ideas off the ground, said Ernie Tedeschi, Stripe’s chief economist. “Now, AI can be a built-in business partner,” he said.
AI’s ability to handle various administrative tasks makes it potentially useful for launching solo businesses in many fields. But the technology’s ability to also handle key tasks in tech, like coding, make that field a particular hot spot.
Analyzing Census Bureau data, Bank of America Institute economist Taylor Bowley found that among all industries, new business applications in the information sector have seen the biggest percentage increase—nearly 45%—over the past year. At the same time, the rate of information-sector applicants saying they plan to hire workers has experienced the sharpest decline of any measured industry.
This Census dataset doesn’t track solo-operated businesses. But the numbers broadly show—in tech and beyond—that applications are flat among businesses likely to hire workers, but generally rising elsewhere. Economists say that’s a strong sign that solo operators are on the upswing.
“The bar for getting started has never been lower,” said Julian Weisser, who runs a San Francisco-based accelerator for solo founders working in tech. The accelerator—which offers founders seed money and mentorship in exchange for an equity stake—attracted 4,500 applicants for 10 slots made available in its most recent cycle, nearly five times the number it drew when it launched last May.
Going it alone with AI can still be surprisingly expensive. Broca said he was losing money on many customers’ accounts while paying to access Anthropic’s Claude to run his clients’ requests—that AI company, as well as others, charges based on usage. He has since switched to free open-source AI models from China.
Broca said he has raised $30 million from investors and, at the same time, has saved millions in salary since he hasn’t needed a team of software engineers.
Another risk: If it’s easy for one entrepreneur to launch an AI-assisted business, copying them can be easy, too. This creates anxiety for founders like Troy Johnston, who runs an AI-assisted business alone in Orlando, Fla.
“Everybody has the sword and we all have the ability to unsheathe Excalibur now,” said Johnston, 40, who used AI to code an app that helps people get the most out of credit card benefits. The company makes around $3,000 a month in profit, with no employees, and is continuing to grow.
What one-person businesses will mean for the labor market remains to be seen. Polling has shown Americans are worried that AI will replace jobs, and top economists are wrestling with that possibility, too. But AI is also creating lots of new jobs, and the go-it-alone entrepreneurs show how the technology can both open doors and limit employment opportunities.
“If everyone’s hiring less, but you get four times more firms, what does that do to head count?” said Rembrand Koning, an associate professor at Harvard Business School who studies entrepreneurship. He co-authored a recent study that found that among 50,000 startups the researchers examined, those focused on AI tended to operate with 25% fewer employees.
Koning also believes a soft hiring environment that’s left some people mired in long job searches has encouraged more to try their hand at launching businesses.
Some founders cite different motives. “It’s a perfect storm of post-pandemic burnout and a re-evaluation of one’s priorities, and also booming AI and a sense of what’s possible,” said Samir Ahmad, 39, who lives in Breinigsville, Pa.
Two years ago, Ahmad decided to leave the corporate job he had worked at Verizon for almost two decades to start a solo coaching and consulting business. He had been seeing social-media posts touting the ease and virtues of AI, which he used to chart a business plan and help with marketing. “It was like my chief of staff, a second in command,” he said.
The business ultimately petered out within months, though, and Ahmad is now back to a full-time corporate role with a utility company.
For Claire Vo, 41, AI helped her turn a passing impulse into a business. She was working full-time as a tech executive when she tapped AI in late 2023 to help code an app that would help her manage documentation and design for new products, with customers ranging from financial services to healthcare firms.
“I was copying and pasting from ChatGPT,” said Vo, who lives in San Francisco.
She put the app online for $1 a month, and within weeks people downloaded it thousands of times. Nearly three years later, Vo’s company—which she ran solo for nine months before hiring an engineer—now has 100,000 users and is on track to make seven figures in profit this year. AI handles the company’s marketing, sales and customer support.
While AI is a shortcut, Vo said her network and credibility in the industry were key. “I think people over-index on how easy AI is and under-index on how much I did to get to this point,” she said.
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