When I was in business school in 1999 and 2000, the entrepreneurial program was packed with young capitalists trying to make money online. Everything ended in "dotcom" (or, if you were cool, "dotnet.") If we were to have been faced with a business plan about farming in the famously launchity "entrepreneurial management" course? We probably would have laughed our classmate off the PowerPoint projector.

Not so today. This week the world is full of people getting money for things like organic fertilizer and soy-free chickens:

• An innovative incubator in New England, the Vermont Food Venture Center, helps small farmers by letting them rent commercial kitchen space and gives advice on "adding value to raw ingredients." Farmers in the small town of Hardwick, Vermont are working together in other ways, sharing tractors and trading resources, co-marketing, and lending one another working capital.
• The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has always been committed to fighting hunger in third-world countries. This year, the charity doubled its commitment to African agriculture with $306 million in grants going towards causes such as developing drought-tolerant maize.

The headline could read, "Move over Supermom: The tale of the übermom." Or maybe, "Super (simple) Mom is new maternal 'It' Girl." In today's New York Times, the profile of Shannon Hayes is full of generosity, nuance, and flaw; she's a representative of the mother who chooses to trade a power suit for cast-off jeans, to home school her children, to eschew plastics, to recycle and compost everything, to live more simply. She's also a representative of the women who can't do it all (her fridge isn't sparkling, she doesn't fold her clean laundry).

All that aside, her lifestyle is appealing to those who would Live More Simply. She raises her own food and her family barters its chickens for handmade pottery. She and her husband don't work conventional jobs, choosing instead to spend plenty of time with their two young daughters and evangelizing the sustainable lifestyle; to butcher and sell their fancy organic lamb.

When I see an article like this, the question that always springs to my mind is, could I do this? And, hand-in-hand, how much does it cost?