Veteran Homesteaders: I need your help--before its too late!

[Lexluther]

I've done some research on homesteading and what it takes to survive, but it all just seems too easy. Having no experience in such matters, I look at it this way:

1. Shelter

Let's say I buy a piece of land with sufficient acreage to build a house on with a few acres for pasture and enough land to either harvest firewood from or at least a few acres for growing corn for a corn stove to cook and keep warm in winter. I hear a corn stove can be set with a thermostat and really requires very little tending. (Not sure about a hot water heater but something similar must exist.) Also I install a windmill for electric and supplement it from the grid.

2. Food

A consensus out there seems to be that a 500 square-foot greenhouse with crop rotation three times a year should be sufficient for fruits (semi-dwarf fruit trees and berries) and vegetables. Grains for flower can either be grown outside the greenhouse in summer or just buy flower (its pretty darn cheap).

Keep about 16 chickens for eggs and meat (three layers, a rooster and 12 growing chickens for meat) and five sheep (one ewe for cheese, a ram and another ewe for raising two lambs at any given time for meat). This should give me three days a week for chicken (one chicken a week) and about two days a week of lamb (two lambs a years produces about 120 pounds of meat). I could go veggie the other two days a week or maybe wing a deer or go fishing if I want.

3. Clothing

Gimme a break. What do I spend on clothing?

4. Health

Okay, here you just have to buy insurance.

So, given that the land is bought; the house, coups and greenhouse built; The windmill is turning; the seeds and fruit trees, starter sheep and chickens bought; and we'll also assume everything is up and running, what does it cost me in time and money to live?

Time--Well, in the summer I need to plant a few aces of corn (maybe a week to plant and another to harvest?) I need to be sure the chickens have water and toss them some corn every day. Same for the sheep in the winter when the pasture isn't growing (I hear you have to trim their toe nails twice a year), and tend to 500 square feet of garden--which really seems like a tiny area. Of course there is slaughtering and butchering but the one is fast and the other only takes place twice per year for the lamb and once a week for the chicken. (And the automatic chicken plucker makes that a snap.) Frankly, this doesn't seem like much more than an hour a day of work.

Money--Flour, not much; insurance, $2000 a year (?), and whatever electric isn't produced by the windmill. (maybe no cost at all).

Conclusion: in my mind--and with my limited imagination--this just doesn't seem like it would require much time or consume much land, leaving me plenty of time to make $2000 a year for insurance plus beer money. For about three months out of the year, the greenhouse is even dormant.

But I've always heard that farmers work from sun up to sun down and have little time or energy at the end of the day and then die broke. So where have my calculations gone wrong? What am I missing? Or is it your little secret just how easy it is?

This is why I need some real veteran homesteaders to set me straight--before its too late.

[Wags]

A farmer is trying to produce more than their family needs so that there is something to market, if you are only concerned with providing for yourself then you don't need to do as much.

If you can afford to pay someone else to do it all for you and walk into a ready made set up then you could get by on only a half work a day. As for what you would be doing during that time well sooner or later fences are going to need mending, garden is going to need weeding, orchard will need pruning, chicken coop is going to need cleaning.... Everything will take longer than you expect and will wear out your clothes more than you expect....

[craftnkids]

It all looks good on paper, but we tend to our small 15 acre farm and could spend sun up to sun down doing all the things that need to be done!
Something will come up and throw your plans out the window!
We have many more chickens than you, but we spend at least a couple hours a day playing, taking care of and loving on our chickens.
I can not even tell you how long you will spend in the garden- we have 300 sq ft of raised garden beds and spend at least 30-40 minutes daily there. Not to mention the time it takes to get it set up and ready to plant.
I was told that to feed our family of 5 we needed to plant at least 5 acres each year.
I am not all that experienced, but I hope that helps.
Angela

[JDog1222]

Really......really?

[Kmac15]

Well, we have property taxes, car taxes, car insurance, gas and parts for said car.
I like a bit of tea, coffee, sugar to can that fruit up, jars for canning, lids, pressure caner and spices for cooking
Internet service, and dish service are nice along with a phone to call my mom and son.

Lots of money needed to live simply LOL

[edcopp]

Welcome to the forum. We need to have a wealthy member.

You must be wealthy. I see you need to keep your location secret. You mention several hundred thousand dollars worth of things that you need in the first few sentences. I do not know how to help, but welcome anyway

[Alice In TX/MO]

The OPs name says it all.

Took me a minute to figure out why he wanted to grow flowers. ROFL.

[Windy in Kansas]

Welcome to the forums. It really is a wonderful pipe dream isn't it. Just not quite that simple however.

[Oldcountryboy]

Survival on the homestead depends on a lot of things. Your needs and wants vs. your needs or your wants. I myself feel like I could basically live on a dime......if I was a single man! But I'm not. I have a wife and 3 growing daughters that require a lot of expense. If I was a single man, my house would be very small so I wouldn't have to use so much energy for heat. Most all of my meat would come from the great outdoors. Lots of fish, crawdads, deer, squirrel, rabbits, quail, ducks, and geese. Then I would have only 2 or 3 hens for eggs and wouldn't even mess with a rooster. Most of my vegetables I would raise from the garden along with harvesting lots of edibles from the wild such as wild onions, fruits and berries, nuts, and mushrooms. My winter heating would be from a wood fire. There's plenty of dead trees everywhere to cut down for firewood. Money would come from the closes place for employment. It might be a janitor, maintenance, or bus driver at the nearest school district. Right now I drive a school bus and live just a mile from the school. I'm allowed to drive the bus home and keep it overnight and during the day during school hours. Therefore I'm not out any money for gas and food and I come home everyday and do gardening, wood cutting, hunting, fishing, foraging, or shopping for clothes at yardsales. I also drive around and collect junk metal for the recycle plant.

However, my wife and 3 daughters require a lot more expense to pay for all those cell phones, makeup, movies, nice name brand clothing, CD's, and plenty of other wants. Not to mention store bought foods that they would rather eat then my wild edibles.

[mduncn52]

Better not plan on eggs if you're just going to "throw them some corn". Laying chickens need lots of protein and calcium to plop out eggesses. Corn is part of scratch. used for exercise and fiber(body heat)

[Harry Chickpea]

Awright... which one of you wags turned the time machine back to 1968? Now they'll be coming out of the woodwork.

[Tracy Rimmer]

If you're serious, then I would suggest that you do a bit more reading and maybe get a bit more experience with gardening, animal care, and the expenses involved with daily life than you apparently have. Your estimates are WAY off, and seriously, this idyllic belief that it's cheap and easy to live this way is why so many fail.

[copperkid3]

Don't ya think EVERYONE would be doing it???!!!
Go ahead......give it a try and then when you wake up in the REAL WORLD.......
come back here and share with us how it all turned out.:smiley-laughing013:

[||Downhome||]

The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often askew,

things never turn out as planned, better have some safety net built in.

I also notice you don't have any cost factored for feed, you will need to supplement your chickens feed even when able to forage if allowed to forage you should consider possible (most likely) losses.

if your raising heritage birds you better up your numbers cause 12 chickens to 4 months-6month of age to supply 3 days of meat each week in a short month well lets see I figure
24 pounds of meat more or less. even if you only eat a 1/2 pound per meal/day
what about the other 108 planned days for chicken? the lambs well I figure less also
maybe 80 lbs after you factor the offal,hide,bone and other butcher/processing
loss, that's a pretty mature pair of lambs I would say grown and call it mutton (eww or is it ewe lol) I like a young lamb 4-6 months, figure 40% loss in weight after processing, so a 50 lb lamb would give you 30lbs of meat, though if you wanted to you could keep them longer to hit your 120 mark but you figuring from retail cut figure which includes the bone. but lets figure 60 lbs of the best quality lamb you would get 1/2 lb a day for 120 days per your plan of lamb 2 times a week. so you need to raise enough veggies to supplement meat days plus cover 188 days of no meat , unless you correct the chicken figuring. you need at leas 39 for the table not factoring loss or less yield per bird hens will be smaller.

are you going to hatch the chicks in a incubator or have momma brood them? if the second well they wont be laying so you will need more chickens to lay.

if your animals are not receiving the best nutrition they also wont perform as well either
so to hit the same numbers on lower feed, which may run you more in the long run as you will need more animals to produce what you need there by feeding more.

and well certain tasks must be performed daily you still have to check on your animals through the day to assure things are as they should be. so there's more then just water and feed so you need to adjust your time calculations and figure more animals more time to.

now the green house I would keep going all year, you have the investment in it right,its there. I would use the excess heat during the day to heat the house. 1 foot of green house heats 3 feet of interior space on a good day.

nothing in life worth doing is easy and the more its worth the harder it is to do lol.

think of it as law of conservation,
you can not get more out, then you put in.

and if you should suffer a loss which happens more times then not will you have resources to recover from the set back, crops and animals can and do die even with the best of care.

[pheasantplucker]

I think a lot of folks see homesteaders and self-sufficient types as those wishing to escape. Perhaps they are escaping the grinding routine of working for someone else in a city, escaping the noise, the conflict, the pollution, the crime, but I'll tell you one thing they are not escaping from and that is hard work. No one I know who farms or homesteads just sits around watching the fruits and vegetables explode out of the ground. My wife and I have a garden that's probably @ 35' x 60'. That might sound small, but it gave us so much...but there were many, many hours that went into prepping the soil, planting, cultivating, but mostly weeding. If you plan on eating your produce throughout the year, you'll need to learn to can stuff. There will be some trial and error here, if you're new to it, and the last time I checked, they weren't giving away canning apparatus at the hardware store. You'll find everything costs money. Fencing and housing for any livestock will leave you scratching your head, wondering how it costs so much. Then there's the time it takes to erect the fence whether you're using t-posts or using a post hole digger to sink wooden posts. You will see a demand for tools and hardware that you never imagined you'd be needing or wanting. They cost money. For my wife and me to go to the nearest town with a selection of most things we need, it's a 52 mile round trip. You have to plan ahead for everything you may be needing in the coming week or two. It's not like you can just take 10 minutes and run to the store and back, if you run out of say, propane. Heating with wood is great, and yes, it can be affordable, if you have your own woodlot, saw, maul and splitting wedges. If you don't buy your seasoned wood from another source, then plan on spending a great number of hours getting it together. The most time consuming aspect of getting a good woodpile together, is moving the wood from the woods to the pile. Splitting it can be a chore depending on how much moisture is in the wood, the temperature and mostly the type of wood it is. Someone earlier said it best...a lot of folks fail because they don't realize how much work is involved. I wish you luck but caution you to not underestimate the challenges that lie before you. Your success will depend upon how committed you are to the tasks that await you. Would caution you to not undertake any form of livestock until you are thoroughly convinced you will commit to them. Neglect your squash or tomatoes...that's one thing. Neglect your chickens or sheep...that's something entirely different.

[Forerunner]

It is easy. Quick, simple and extremely profitable, as well.
As a matter of fact, I spend most of my year in either Cancun or on the Hawaiian islands.

Don't let these clowns fool you with all that trash talk about "dawn to dusk" and how plans never work out. Sheesh, the way they talk, it almost seems as if they might be actually homesteading.

The joke is on them. Life was made to be wasted on free time.

[willow_girl]

"Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field." (Dwight Eisenhower)

I suppose we need to update that to read "keyboard" instead of "pencil."

[FarmerRob]

Before you embark on your journey to La La Land you should consider volunteering for an internship with someone who is already a farmer/homesteader. Nothing like a good taste of reality to see what reality taste like.

Your chicken estimates are way low. You have to feed them lots more than a little corn tossed their way everyday. The ones that are good layers/breeders don't grow out at the same rate as meat birds. Nor do they provide as much meat. Also layers take several months to start laying. Many will stop laying at various times due to age, molting, weather, other stresses. You did not account for losses that will certainly happen due to any number of reasons, not the least of which is predators. Chickens are prey for just about everything that eats meat. That includes winged, four-legged and two-legged.

That brings us to fencing. Good fencing (and cross-fencing) is expensive. Where I live the going rate is about $70 @ hour to have someone else install it. It takes lots of hours. You will need lots of it and it has to be maintained. You will need to walk your fence line on a regular basis to be sure that trees and limbs have not fallen on it, that no one has cut it, that your critters have not found a way to damage it or a way out. Ideally (which seems to suit here,) your fencing will not only keep all of your livestock in but will keep out, or at least discourage, thieves, and predators. Since money seems to be no object for you I suggest for your perimeter fence 10/48/3 fixed knot woven wire fencing with 4-5" diameter treated wooden poles driven in about every 15 to 20 feet. This should be reinforced with electric smooth wire offsets on both sides. This will discourage livestock from rubbing/scratching against it and on the outside with proper placement discourage some predators. A strand of barbed wire on the ground at the base of the fence will discourage some dogs from digging under. They tend to push up and check their progress and will not like the feel of the barbs. (See the Premier 1 catalog for a good education of fencing.)

You should add guns and training to your list. Coyotes, like many people, don't have any respect for your property or your plan. They will steal or kill your livestock until there is no more. Same is true for a birds of prey. Once a hawk finds your birds free-ranging on the pasture it will be back over and over to have an easy meal. If you shoot a bird of prey you better not get caught doing so--see Federally Protected Species.

We don't know where you are planning to have your dream farm but depending on the location many worse predators may factor into the equation. However, no matter where you are you will also have to contend with, possums, racoons (clever and much hated evil rascals,) skunks, snakes, rats, bobcats and the number one predator is probably dogs. Your dogs, the neighbors dogs, and all the dogs that folks from the city drive out and abandon will all want a cheap and easy meal from your livestock. Here is where you want to learn about the three S's.

I didn't see any mention of farm equipment. If you plan on preparing the land, planting, weeding, and harvesting by hand then you have way underestimated the amount of work required to produce several acres of corn. And even a small garden requires lots more work than you are figuring on. Makes me think you haven't done much gardening, if any,

I also did not see any backup plans for when you have bad weather, such as too much rain or not enough rain, and your corn crop fails or significantly underproduces. This WILL happen, it is only a question of when/how often. Droughts can and do go on for years. How will you grow your crops (corn, hay and garden) when this occurs. You have to plan to worse case and more. Nothing goes as planned for too long.

You need to be able to provide for your livestock even when crop failure happens (not that just some corn will do that in the first place.) Good grazing pasture doesn't just happen by itself. It takes work and tending to--livestock have to be moved around as well.

You are either going to have to produce hay or spend more money for someone else to grow and deliver it to you. You will need a proper storage facility for it as well.

You will need enough hay for food and for bedding for those sheep/lambs. You will also need to feed them more than a few handfuls of corn a day, assuming you want them to grow or even survive.

I would not count of your figures for health insurance. Obama-care will definitely push everyones costs up dramatically if allowed to stand. And you might want to add a little more for beer money as well. And I guarantee you that insurance will not cover all of your costs.

The above just scratches the surface of the issues and problems you will have to deal with.

Unless you have something against pork, you should consider buying a few weaners every year and growing them out. Since they are competetive eaters you should get two or three at a minimum--although there is not much difference in the work load, usually, to grow out five or six rather than two or three. They are very efficient converters of pasture and supplemented food. You can get a better meat return per dollar and time invested than most other livestock. If you are concerned about them being too large to handle during slaughter/butchering, bear in mind that nothing requires you to let them grow to "market weight" before harvesting them. Nothing at all wrong with younger pig.

Don't start with trying to breed them. First you need to learn how to raise them.

STUDY everything before you try it. You can learn alot reading the experiences of others on the HT forums and individual blogs. Of course the best education is experience. So let's go back to my original suggestion. Find a farmer who is willing to put up with you for a while and trade your sweat and back-aches for some practical knowledge. A helpful hint here is to not tell the farmer you want to apprentice with how easy you think his life must be...he might hurt himself when he falls on the floor laughing!

[||Downhome||]

Originally Posted by Forerunner

It is easy. Quick, simple and extremely profitable, as well.
As a matter of fact, I spend most of my year in either Cancun or on the Hawaiian islands.

Don't let these clowns fool you with all that trash talk about "dawn to dusk" and how plans never work out. Sheesh, the way they talk, it almost seems as if they might be actually homesteading.

The joke is on them. Life was made to be wasted on free time.

you should of issued a disclaimer, I see it for what it is as will many others but lex already has sold him/her self this dream and I'm sure there are others
that will buy this at face value also, but you got me rolling forerunner. thanks for the laugh!

[Old Swampgirl]

FarmerRob's post is excellent. Welcome & get some experience. You've a lot of good ideas, but have forgotten about all the chores. Who's weeding & spreading manure?
Who's canning, freezing & dehydrating the bounty? Ever plucked a chicken?