Homesteading villages?

Belfrybat · #21 07/22/15, 05:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by boweja777

I appreciate it, and I very well might. I think it's worth noting that the closest thing most people seem to have achieved is fairly mystical and communal. I'm not sure what that's indicative of, but it's probably important.

I think because something like you are talking about takes a commitment that goes beyond just a like mindedness where to live is concerned. IMO there has to be something "bigger" binding people together -- either religious or ideological -- if nothing else as a foundation to get past tough times.

I also think you'll find that a lot of people on this board (if not most) would resist being a part of a community with rules and regulations. Even the term HOA is a four letter word around here because it is seen as stifling the individual.

I don't want to rain on your parade and wish the you the best. As a first step, you might want to move to a parcel of land close to a small town and get involved with the folks of the town. You might find that will be enough community for you. I know it is for me.

crazydave · #22 07/23/15, 01:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DaleK

Perhaps WIHH has other thoughts. She might end up being the bartender and you the barmaid. Hope you have the cleavage for that skimpy barmaid outfit.

I'm guessing that would probably make Cabin Fever the local floor show !!

Wolf mom · #23 07/23/15, 05:41 AM

Check out Paolo Soleri and his philosophy - Arcology (combining architecture and ecology).
He manifested his ideas in Arcosanti, a self supporting town, but after 35 years is only 3 % completed. Why? Because of his tight controls on the way it was suppose to be. Lots of investors thought it was a "good thing", but have dwindled away because of this.

Arcosanti is a beautiful study, with people still living and working there.

This may give you a little different viewpoint.

BohemianWaxwing · #24 07/23/15, 05:47 AM

Boweja, I admire your passion for a very worthwhile dream.

A couple of practical considerations: One of the fundamental principles of permaculture is that of working in zones. The high-maintenance activities/products are located as close as possible to where people actually ARE and the further you get from the home front, the less things should need attention. Packing all the houses together in one place and having the fields and animals in more remote areas doesn't seem very feasible. Getting up at 4 AM to milk 3-4 cows is rough as it is but if you have to walk 10-15 minutes through sleet to the cow shed it'll get old real fast.

I think the suggestion several people have made that in addition to continuing to analyze and plan you ALSO get your hands a little dirty is a good one. You don't have to go full TNAndy, but are you growing a garden now? Do you have a couple chickens? Have you made cheese or beer? Pick a couple homesteady activities that float your boat and get some practical experience to go with the plans. You might be surprised at how even a little digging in the dirt bears fruit in your thinking and planning on a grander scale.

Since one of your primary goals seems to be sustainability and low environmental impact, you might seriously reconsider your planned infrastructure requirements. If you do pack some or most of the housing close together, rather than putting in a sewage system and water treatment plant (not sustainable), why not consider building the townhome section of your community around a composting toilet system. A couple infrastructure related books you might consider are "The Humanure Handbook", which discusses not only the simple sawdust bucket toilet system, but a couple of actual community wide experiments which have been done with putting toilet "waste" to good use. Also, you might look at the "Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond", and "Create an Oasis with Greywater".

All that being said, I wish you all the best in your plans. My family and I are actually thinking a little along the same lines as far as wanting to live a more community-oriented and simple/independent lifestyle. Our plans are more along the lines of plugging into an existing neighborhood and getting to know people who are already living that way and maybe, over the course of a lifetime, convincing one or two like minded families to put down some roots near by. Even that much of a plan has seen some ups and downs over the last few years, but I think we're getting close to within spitting distance now...

I'm going to PM you a friend's contact info with whom you may enjoy a chat or two. He's also a visionary who isn't afraid to consider and even tackle some pretty unorthodox and ambitious projects much along the lines of your efforts here.

GREEN_ALIEN · #25 07/23/15, 06:47 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by boweja777

I'm looking to belong in a community oriented around those things, because I am a very social being.

Uh, an over simplistic idea here... GO TO SMALL TOWN USA! This country is loaded with little pictures of what you are talking about. Little communities surrounded by agriculture. Some of those communities have manufacturing while others are all retail. Some are nothing more than a handful of bars, churches and blue hairs... I think it was TNAndy that gave a great piece of advice... Get out from behind the computer and do it.

Your posts indicate that you don't seem to have the foggy frogs bottom of an idea when it comes to agriculture and the costs vs rewards of such. These here people that you want to live there... they trudge out to their little plot and do what? Farm? Farm what? What crop exactly are they going to produce on your little dream plots of 5 or 10 acres that will in turn provide them with enough money to actually live on? Corn? Corn at 130 bushel per acre dryland X 4.06 per bushel = NOT EVEN ENOUGH FOR BASIC NEEDS. Cattle? A few units of top quality beef on a few acres tops X each unit right now could bring 3200 ea = NOT EVEN ENOUGH FOR BASIC NEEDS. Nut trees? LOL Read just how long it takes some of the nut trees need to develop before harvest = A TON OF HUNGRY YEARS.

I am going to leave alone the like minded community thing... won't work, can't work and frankly, BORING as hell idea.

And right before ya go there - I too am educated, I too am a software developer and first and foremost I am a farmer.

**Terri** · #26 07/23/15, 07:34 AM

Yes, I find the idea appealing. I wish you were our city planner.

The problem that I see is, the people in my area WANT to get away from agriculture. Most of them want to get away from bugs and dirt, and they prefer the pretty produce in the grocery store. They want to earn a living by working for 8 hours a day in air conditioned comfort, work out at the gym, and have nothing to do with the great outdoors. MOST of America feels that way, I am afraid

I do find the idea appealing, of course, but I would want to own my own land. Actually, I do own my own land and I will not leave it.

It is a wonderful plan, and I want you on our own City Planning department, but then you are preaching to the choir, here. Most of my neighbors prefer HOA's and such, not gardens. Most of us here prefer gardens to HOAs, but then we are few and far between!

And, yes, it is doable if there were a wholesale outlet in town for flowers, vegetables, and such and if the parcels of land were a bit bigger. But, EVERY new business has start up costs, and people would need to live on something before their new business broke even and started to turn a profit. That means it would take more than a few thousand for a family to get started.

frogmammy · #27 07/23/15, 08:21 AM

Isn't that ALREADY a computer game?

Mon

BohemianWaxwing · #28 07/23/15, 09:14 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by GREEN_ALIEN

Your posts indicate that you don't seem to have the foggy frogs bottom of an idea when it comes to agriculture and the costs vs rewards of such. These here people that you want to live there... they trudge out to their little plot and do what? Farm? Farm what? What crop exactly are they going to produce on your little dream plots of 5 or 10 acres that will in turn provide them with enough money to actually live on? Corn? Corn at 130 bushel per acre dryland X 4.06 per bushel = NOT EVEN ENOUGH FOR BASIC NEEDS. Cattle? A few units of top quality beef on a few acres tops X each unit right now could bring 3200 ea = NOT EVEN ENOUGH FOR BASIC NEEDS. Nut trees? LOL Read just how long it takes some of the nut trees need to develop before harvest = A TON OF HUNGRY YEARS.

Not to speak for the OP, but I'm guessing the community he's gunning for isn't going to be doing subsistence farming. It wouldn't be $4.06 a bushel for corn grown on a couple acres, but a backyard patch of exotic corn turned into gourmet popcorn on sale in pretty bags in a cute store front to supplement an off-farm income and keep more of the community money local.

There may well be a market for this kind of "gentrified agricultural community" in some places. It will probably have to be close enough to a major metropolitan area to make commutes to off-farm work a possibility for many of the residents... at least until their nut trees start bearing.

DryHeat · #29 07/23/15, 10:19 AM

Quote:

Check out Paolo Soleri and his philosophy - Arcology (combining architecture and ecology).
He manifested his ideas in Arcosanti, a self supporting town, but after 35 years is only 3 % completed.

Back a bit over five years ago, DW and I stayed at Arcosanti for a couple of nights. One of their diversifications is maintaining a few rooms effectively as a B&B for visitors. You pretty much have to do a stay like that and sit and chat with a few residents off and on, then read back and forth on the net plus and minus articles to get a "feel" for the place and its history, and then prospects or lack thereof. The Wikipedia article is totally "pie in the sky" tone by participants but it's easy to find balanced, and negative, stuff. Here's one that could be a starting point: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/0...gust-12th-2013 Going to Google Earth and searching on Arcosanti, AZ gets a decent overhead view of the setup, also.

Soleri was a student of Frank Lloyd Wright and tried to build a demo project of his concepts of combining architecture with ecology in Arcosanti. He retired as CEO/whatever a few years ago and is in his mid-90s now. Up to then, he was pretty much the dictator of the project. The general approach does sound right along the lines of what the OP here is discussing. As a practical matter, though, residents there work for the "company." Some work in the central kitchen and cafeteria, others on a farm plot a ways downhill from the main complex next to a small flowing stream, with the main manufacturing activity being casting of Soleri's signature bells and windchimes. You get trained and qualified for various jobs by paying to enroll for a 5-week workshop, then can schedule to work with room and (mostly vegetarian) board included for minimum wage after that. There seemed to be a core group of a hundred folks at any given time rotated in, contributing to keeping the place afloat, some of them using the off-time for active reading, or writing, or other enrichment projects. Or just to bum around planning to hit the road with a few $hundred grubstake on their own terms after a while. One important event in the project's history happened at one of their periodic concerts when in 1978 a hot exhaust pipe parked over desert scrub set off a fire that destroyed over a hundred of the cars. From that point on, the county regulatory folks started getting tough on various issues and inspections, like septic, concrete structure expansions and modifications, with a lot of stuff sort of grinding to a halt and pre-existing facilities getting long in the tooth.

Ah, here's somebody's blog entry describing his experience as a worker there. Hadn't seen this before, but it sounds about right: http://rdfrost.blogspot.com/2007/11/...ear-later.html

rambler · #30 07/23/15, 10:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by boweja777

Howdy, folks, new to the forums here -- I've been contemplating a vaguely homesteading-type lifestyle for some time now. I'm currently working as a software developer in a big city, which is okay, but in the long run, I'd like to shift into a very different kind of lifestyle.

I have a setup for a series of questions. It's big. Y'all better get some popcorn.

A village encompassing 1-3 sections (square miles) of land, with a dense core much like an urban center, with parks and townhouses, surrounded by (mostly) agricultural processing and warehousing facilities, surrounded by a large number of small (2-5 acre), specialized farms. The economy would center around self-sustaining production of food and export of higher value density products -- goat cheese, honey, nuts, dried fruits, and the like. It would use very low-input, low mechanization tools. The ideal number of families/farms it would support before no longer operating well would be on the order of 200 to 600.

This is a bit more centralized than most homesteaders I know are into, but the centralization adds a lot to the efficiency and livability, from my perspective. If you're living close -within just a couple of blocks -- to a few hundred other families, you can take advantage of specialization to a much higher degree on a local scale, and effectively live off of much less.

It's somewhat modeled off of Taiwan's land reform program, which enabled their individual farmers to have global middle class incomes off of an average farm size of just over 1 hectare -- about 2.5 acres. It also takes some lessons from old school classic manorism and smart growth policies.

The fundamental idea is to focus on using sustainable, renewable techniques, labor-intensive industries, mutual credit, efficient lifestyle design, and export-oriented products. By slowly accumulating outside capital, and pouring our efforts into developing our land, we can all be bloody rich, have a great community, and have the kind of hardworking, building-something-from-nothing lifestyle we want.

I've done a lot of research and I've been consulting some close friends of mine -- one who has been a traveling goat farm hand for about 3 years, and another who is himself quasi-homesteader in a suburban environment, as well as lots of study of historical and modern farming villages.

The village itself would have, after people start popping babies out, maybe a couple thousand people. There would be a school, clinic, restaurants, breweries, etc. The difference is that for a starting cash price of just a few thousand bucks, and a whole lot of sweat equity, people could live well and support a family within just a handful of years, in a fairly.

Right now, I anticipate being the primary instigator of this thing, and it's going to take a few hundred thousand to a couple of million to kick off. It'll take me about five years before I'm at the lower end of that level in my current career.

So there's the setup.

I really want to know four things:
1) Is there anything out there like this that y'all folks know about?
2) Do many people find the idea appealing? As in, if such a thing were happening presently, would you sign up? What's the biggest draw, and what are the biggest deterrents?
It isn't quite the classical homestead go-it-alone approach, but it has a lot of similarities.
3) Any quick tweaks that you think would make the idea more appealing?
4) ...Anyone want the more detailed (pages and pages and pages) info on the nuts and bolts of how this whole thing would work?

You are describing what you already have.

Urban centers, surrounded by farms.

One to five acre farms are inefficient for many many crops. So naturally your setup will evolve - into what we have right now, into where you are already living.

Some garden crops work well on small patches; sweet corn, pickles, etc. and so, as now, you will have a few people doing those tiny, intensive farm patches.

Just like we have. Right now.

You are trying to create what already exists?

What do you want different from what you have right now?

Paul

rambler · #31 07/23/15, 11:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by boweja777

I really want to know four things:
1) Is there anything out there like this that y'all folks know about?
2) Do many people find the idea appealing? As in, if such a thing were happening presently, would you sign up? What's the biggest draw, and what are the biggest deterrents?
It isn't quite the classical homestead go-it-alone approach, but it has a lot of similarities.
3) Any quick tweaks that you think would make the idea more appealing?
4) ...Anyone want the more detailed (pages and pages and pages) info on the nuts and bolts of how this whole thing would work?

1. Rural America, flyover land, small town America, the Heartland, everywhere I see?

2. No. We already have what you describe; what I see is a person wants to be in charge and skim off the top, and I run screaming in terror of any such grand plans to direct the lives of the many commoners. I realize you don't plan to vote yourself emperor, and you are looking to let this evolve organically into a working deal. BUT that never happens - to get going someone has to be in charge, and those in charge are always the folks sitting behind a desk in the middle of the urban center, telling the common folk out on the land how to do things. It sucks! You don't know anything about farming, why would you tell me what is more efficient, how to grow things, how to farm.... I grew up hanging onto dads pant leg riding on the tractor picking up rocks, I know farming, I've beed doing it many decades. I don't need another computer city slicker telling me how to do it. I'm way ahead of you..... This sound mean? I don't mean to be, just making my point in a few words. Nothing personal. But, I have to laugh at the urban folk that think they know the best way to farm. And you want to raise the intensive crops with folk living in the urban center traveling to the farm every day? How inefficient can you get.... It all looks good on the computer screen, real life derails those pipe dreams in a hurry.

3. Get out of the office, away from the computer, and experience the communities around you. What you describe already is out there, despite the urban centers. You don't need to invent this, it already is alive and functioning well.

4. I realize I'm a negative nelly here, but I am always fascinated with how city folk plan up such things. So yes, I would actually be interested in the detailed plan. I enjoy such things, and a person can always learn. Despite my negative comments in black and white here, I enjoy these type of messages that come up every 6 months or so here. I also enjoy learning how folks think and what they hope the future of agriculture is, what direction they see for the future.

So, I blast your ideas, and then I say in interested in them. How's that for a goofy reply?

Gotta go farming now, oats is swathed, dew is off the hay I cut 2 days ago, need to get to work.

Paul