People always said that buying is better than mining (and they have been right almost all of the time), but where's the fun in just buying?
When you're an ex-miner, recognize how unprofitable and a pain in the balls it is to run a mining operation, end up doing the math on a miner + electricity + Time to ROI... fuck the fun.
Time is money. Cheaper to buy what you would spend on a miner now, than what it would likely generate 18 months from now, IMO.
Unless you have cheap or free electricity, I don't see the benefit of mining right now vs just buying corn outright.
I actually made a very quick and very rough calculation, summing up leccy and miners and comparing to having spend those amounts in that year at the average yearly
BTC price. I'd probably have ~30-50% less corn now.
With a lot of fake shame and affected guilt I admit, I have only profit-switch-mined scrypt shitcoins on my own pools. I held them until they pump (only 10-20% do that, the rest is loss) and then sell it. For example I piled up short of 2M musk doggie coins in the last 3 years, most of that time they would have given me ~20 Sats per block, this time around I could sell most of it for > 180 Sat per block. And these were free merge-mined.
Though I have to give you, that if I had spent the time I invested for my mining as a burger flipper for minimum wage and invested that wage additionally via DCA in Bitcoin, I'd definitely have the most now.
Please take note, that I do in no way say that is a recommendable investment strategy - in fact when somebody asks me about it, I say exactly this: Just buy it. But I do enjoy running my little shitty mining op a lot and by being patient I got lucky quite a few times.
Ironically, I heard you are building a ranch/farm and as somebody helping out currently on a small farm because somebody being ill, I can safely say I'd really never wanted to have one.
I could probably advise you to better spend your dollars directly at a quality grocery and get your bio eggs from there and your fine deluxe steak from the local butcher. It is just not worth the time consuming hard work, the pain in your back and all the worries to have your own fresh bacon and eggs I tell you - but then I guess everybody defines fun differently
EDIT:
(I totally deserve a bat slap for my shitcoin talk and I will happily accept the beatings in total submissiveness)