I have never seen them succeed with less than four able bodied active people. The two people either hire help or have a supplimentary income. The Diaxaris project had a cattle operation run by 2-3 people that wasn't our cattle operation, but in the event of SHTF, we were to provide food processing and security services in return for sufficient supplies of beef. When Shit is not on the fan, the cattle owner paid a nominal rent to the property owner for use of the fields and road access to some acreage he owned that was otherwise landlocked.

Issues included the terrible condition of the living space and the amount of money and work that it required to become even remotely tolerable as indoor camping, let alone a real house. Thus on that, it required investment and there were constant arguments over what the place was worth after we moved in and fixed things up a bit, but I had reached the limit of my tolerance on the amount of money I would spend on a residence that I neither owned nor lived in.

What ruined it was Jones converting the land share contribution to a cash debt. Not a mortgage mind you, but an artificial deadline cash debt because those "darn dirty banks" would not agree to finance the amount of money his family decided they needed to solve their tax delinquency and building code violation problems on other properties.

In every single one of these things that I have seen fail, there were people who were functionally outside people who set it up as a cash siphon. In that, these remote areas can usually just produce a stumbling sense of partial self sufficiency. If they were so great for cash siphoning, they would be Manhattan real estate.