Permi-punx help this poor city boy!

I guess you talk about "permaculture" - this is really the high art of ecological/organic farming - and it would make a really great first step, so I would recommend a less difficult approach... if you plan to try it on your own.
Farming isn't that romantic, especially if you are trying to make a living out of it, endless hours of weeding and preparing acreage and sowing in wind and weather aren't everybody's cup of tea - but it's hard and sometimes tedious work, you need lots of patience and endurance, more patience and frustration tolerance. And you have to learn lots of things and skills besides the manual work, depending on your work you have to know the peculiarities and "moods", needs and disadvantages of the plants you work with - this necessary education is one more argument to cooperate with someone already experienced before you try it on your own.
Plants are demanding, their needs must be met and constantly watched, no matter what your plans for your personal free time are - so it's first priority to find out if it's your kind of work worth doing: Try to find an existing holding on which organic farming production methods are applied and work there for some time - it might change your actual view on the matter, and I guess Thoreau made the same experience somehow...

I spend more than five years in an anarchist farm collective in England, which was made up mostly by punks who were hardcore organic farmers and vegetarians, wildly determined to break capitalism - and I guess it was the most sensible/useful time of my life, the landscape gardening i do now is pure wage slavery.
But we made the mistake to expand to fast and had to deal with too many newbies' illusions about the working part of the fun - so the whole utopia went under in endless discussions about a 40-hours-week, pay according to actual performance and the like - a stupid end for a great project.
Don't let this bad example frustrate you, give it a try and find out if it's your future living - I still stick with some of my former comrades and we still get wistful from time to time - especially if there are news of another conventional farming holding in our area is for sale - too bad that we don't have the money to start again...

 

Yess, I love the smell of compost in the morning and I'll never forget the sight of our favorite Lil'Apple struggling with this rekord-breaking pumpkin twice her weight... those were the days!

And to add information to the praising:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture - with lots of impressive and useful links!