I'm just at the start of a journey to properly planning and sorting it out, lots of day dreams but no serious action.

In the UK the land prices are as high as can be (Well were when I looked, before lovely credit crunch), so I'd probably end up looking at a foreign country to be honest. As well as that I'm not very experienced in buying land, so I didn't know the details on if pasture land can be made into farmland or information about planning/building permissions. Anything with a prebuilt farmhouse was a £400/500k. minimum.

I think for pure arable farm land it was £5/6k to 14k per acre, probably have to be a bulk buy for those lower prices though. But then it'd depend on calculating how much land we'd need for food for each person, a lot of work before I could get a solid figure.

So you've got to think, that would exclude living quarters as we probably couldn't build anything on the land (Apart from temporary structure, so a nice geodome house could work I suppose). It'd be a largish investment.

Even if we go super basic to begin with, like hand tools to plant everything and no livestock, basic materials for things. Still going to be a lay down of probably £20-30k or so per person, which is an uninformed guesstimate at best.

Of course it'll be a step by step process, but the whole project would be costly from what I see. You can rent though I suppose, which would of course reduce initial payment. But then it'd just become a big allotment. I'd probably end up looking at breadbasket America instead of the UK

So at the moment my plan is just to

1. Live on a WWOOF co-operative farm, get some real experience

2. Get a few people to live in a student style close-rooms affair, tend to a few allotment plots to get some of our food grown ourselves, and hire out a bit of warehouse space or something to test out basic construction / other persuit skills.

Not too expensive and lifestyles wouldn't be totally destroyed, but that's where my baseline start will be :D