In 2015, my husband and me Packed our belongings – including half a dozen geese and a How-Tos self-sufficiency library- and have moved our lives of two acres in a coastal suburbs in a 93 acres farm in Rural Maine.
My dream was to create a autonomous life. Having grown up on stories of rural heroes from Thoreau to approaches, I wanted to embody an alternative to the life paths that I observed around me. I did not want to climb business scales or join the consumption culture. Instead, I thought I could scratch a more conventional lifestyle of the rocky soil of Maine.
After moving to a 93 -acres farm, the author learned that self -sufficiency is more difficult than she thought. With the kind permission of Kirsten Lie-Nielsen
We started with chickens but we realized that this would not really lower the price of eggs
As much Departure homesteadersI only knew the cost of lifestyle. In my mind, and according to all the books I have read, we could reduce our income needs by limiting our expenses and removing “useless” expenses, such as nights and new clothes. Our needs would still be reduced by reducing grocery trips, instead of cultivating our own food.
I knew we would not be immediately self -sufficient. In fact, until the pandemic has done work at home a necessity, I went to work on rural campaign roads throughout our lives on family property.
We started with chickens, like many other property of property. The chickens have always been the “bridge cattle” because they are small and easy to house, it is not difficult to find someone to take care of the chickens if you leave for the weekend, and the chicks are relatively inexpensive in your local supply of tractors. These days, chickens are more popular than ever. With egg price Share, people believe that they can get “free eggs” by putting chickens in their backyard.
The problem is that chickens are actually a terrible way to get cheaper eggs. During our years of family property, we learned that the costs to house, feed and take care of a few backyard chickens prevail from afar on the cost of simply Pay for eggseven at high high prices high. When we looked at our budget, we realized that we always pay more for chicken foods that we save on eggs.
Not only that, we quickly learned that chickens prefer to lay in spring and summer and sometimes do not provide eggs all winter, and they seemed to be a magnet for predators who would find any crack in the coop and decimate our herd. Birds can also be a health risk – we finally lost our herd because of avian flu in the spring of 2022, a disease that has become more threatening to humans over the years.
The majority of our cattle choices put us in similar problems. To get milk from goats, you have to raise them. This meant that every year, our nigerian dwarf goat would give birth between one and five children, and because we did not want a herd in constant expansion, we had to sell them. The problem was that it was always a struggle; This adorable breed of goat had become very popular, and each owner nearby had children of goat cheese for sale. Visits to the veterinarian were necessary to keep our herd healthy, and fencing was a continuous cost – the saying among farmers is that a fence that can contain water can contain a goat. Due to their buffoonery of escape, goats also proved to be ineffective in Clearing Brush, the marginal benefit that we hoped to offer.
The author realized that being a head of the family would not save him as much money as he thought. With the kind permission of Kirsten Lie-Nielsen
It is more difficult to be self -sufficient than I thought
My perspective on family property at the start may have been naive, but it has been reinforced by countless writers and family owners who promote the lifestyle as sustainable. It took me years to accept the realities of agricultural life. During the summer months, it was easy to replace many grocery products with local products, but in winter, stored root vegetables and pickles have become tedious. Although our animals helped us manage our land, they have never done work as equipment could or have saved the exhausting workforce. Little, if necessary, the properties are really self -sufficient. And those who often only manage such a lifestyle thanks to a radical lifestyle.
Even Thoreau – Considered by many as the father of the self -sufficiency movement thanks to his founding work Walden – had his mother to do his laundry for him when he lived “self -sufficiently” to Walden Pond. The approaches relied on a constant flow of impatient apprentices and income from books and speech tours. A self -sufficient life did not mean to frolic with baby goats in the green fields. Instead, we learned of the hard time that it looked more like to spend in the early morning by injecting sick goats with drugs and crawling out of bed in the middle of the night to stir up the wood stove.
We did not expect it to be easy, but the continuous growth of the lists of tasks and tasks made it feel that for each progress, there was more work to do. Work Following our projects meant little time for something else, from family and friends to pleasant or intellectual leisure activities.
Some families I knew found lucrative jostles, such as the promotion of lifestyle on social networks or by writing, or have occurred on another niche that has provided income. For us, and most of the others, permaculture farm and small -scale breeding have not provided a habitable salary. Real self -sufficiency – The romantic vision of living from the earth with little need for outside income – turned out to be an illusion.
Today we Live in our distant farm. We keep a garden and we even have a few goats that we do not reproduce or do milk but that we have as pets. We like to look at these goats kicking in the courtyard and eating fresh fruit when it is in season, but we are no longer trying to depend on ourselves.
In the end, the real lesson of our time on the farm was not how to be autonomous, but how to balance ideals with reality. And perhaps, above all, it taught me that rejecting a system does not mean escaping work – it simply means choosing another type of work.