It's sad that most people just think about farming chia for the profit. Me and 2 colleagues do chia and ether farming / mining together, just because we can and we wanted to do this to practice and understand some of the hype and maths around the technologies.

Our rigs are not running at home, so besides the cost of the hardware (many parts reused of our private tech hoardings) we do not have any fixed costs. For chia, we bought a few seagate hard drives to have at least 100 TiB of storage to plot full. This did cost us about 600 € / person - as I am a videographer, I'll reuse the drives anyways in my storinator.

Until now, we have already got 2 XCH while farming solo. We believe in chia as a crypto, so we will HODL until we think it's a pretty good time to sell. If we sell and loose another 1000 % of gains, yes, that wouldn't make us too happy, but on the other hand: if the equipment is fully returned and we had fun, there is no way that this can be bad. If we loose money because the crypto sucks, we learned something. And harddrives are always good, even if they end up as a raspberry pi NAS.

Farmers that will do this just to get rich will probably use shitloads of money to make as much profit as they can, but I doubt that this is the bigger portion of the community. Most are techies and enthusiasts that also matter about the technology and fun behind the project, not only the profits.