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"how well would potatoes grow in a montana climate?"
I'd think in western Montana potatoes would grow well. I grew 60+ pounds of fingerling potatoes in a 5 by 8 raised bed in Anchorage, Alaska last year without any special attention and I got a late start. This year by the look of things, there will be quite a bit more. A good sized potato plot would likely keep a family in starchy food for a year barring blight.
For livestock (not horses) turnips have been an old school feed source. An article to get you thinking out of the box:
Are you planning on horses for work or riding? Without a real purpose in mind, horses are hard keepers providing little return for their expense. If work is what you have in mind, mules would be a more sturdy alternative.
"Anyways, I just think we are talking different things - in my world the person owns his land and has built his domicile, works his own land and provides everything for his family. He may need the local doctor but he does not have the money to afford one, sadly. This person doesn't pay homeowners insurance (they own their land outright), neither do they pay car insurance since they don't own a car. They live in a place where property tax is extremely low. There is no such thing as a fully cut-off life from the world - when I talk about self-sufficiency I mean as much as possible (complete food, water, energy and transportation independence)."
We own our land and domicile. I use a doctor rarely for the reasons stated above. I don't pay homeowner insurance. I pay a minimal amount of car insurance because that is a reality. We live in a place where property tax is extremely low. We have our own water. We tried the food independence and it didn't make sense. Guess who has walked the walk?
You pay car insurance because that is YOUR reality. In my reality I will not own a car, just a horse. I am getting there. You may say "what do you do when your horse gets sick"? I say, whatever people did 200 years ago...
As for trying food independence and "it didn't work", with all due respect, you are ONE statistical data point. That's like telling someone who wants to start a business that YOU tried and it failed so they need not bother . For all we know you just have very bad luck as a farmer or you have no clue how to farm, it's all a possibility. Finally, you tried food independence but it didn't work. Let me guess, you replaced it by "job in town dependence" (and that's why you need a car)?
Either way, you are light years ahead of 98% of America and that deserves to be given credit! Good for you. If most people were like you, this country would be way better off..
I'm going to have to side with Harry here because he's talking about the same problems and economic realities that have been leading people to leave farm life for the big city for generations. I know exactly two full time farmers and neither one is self sufficient but by specializing in just one thing (one owns a vineyard and makes wine while the other grows exclusively nuts and olives) they can make ends meet (if with difficulty) and both of them have their spouse work in the cash economy in order to bring home extra money not dependent upon the farm.
People have been leaving farm life for generations because of technology and perceived ease of life in the city. Most folks would rather sit in an air-conditioned office for 8 hours and then go home to "pursue their interests" instead of tending to animals and crops all day long, EVERY day. In addition to that, the policy in United States has been to destroy the individual 5 acre farmer and prop up the corporate or large scale farming. This country used to be a network of self-sufficient economies, now it is a communist-style federally run planned economy (yes, Soviet Union was all about planned economy!). That's why you could not have a large city somewhere just like that - no way to feed it.
A smart small-scale farmer can have a good organic business on 5-10 acres. Large farmers on 100s and 1000s of acres mostly destroy the land by way of planting monocultures (also drown the product in pesticides and artificial fertilizers), expose themselves to financial ruin when that monoculture fails (and you too since many of them are subsidized by tax payers) and are constantly indebted to the Bank (need equipment, chemicals, huge irrigation systems....). It is funny how a lot of people laugh at the organic small scale farmers ("tree huggers" and "hippies") but they don't understand that this is how it used to be BEFORE our government grew to tell us what to plant where. As we can see today with the drought, we have learned nothing from the Dust Bowl....
would it be possible to just have two horses and use the rest to gorw some winter feed for sheep and chickens and have some land to graze the sheep? how well would potatoes grow in a montana climate?
Horses require roughly 40 pounds of feed per day per horse. That can be hay, grazing, or a combination and you can suppliment with some grain to increase the protein in their diet which is essential if you are working them hard like on a plow.
In most of Montana, that means roughtly 15-20 acres per horse of good dryland pasture, less if it is irrigated.
One way you could have work horses and a smaller piece of ground is to use Shetland ponies. We have had some that were really good draft horses, they just can't pull as much as full sized, but they eat a lot less and work well on carts and such.
Potatoes grow really well in Montana, in fact, the Gallatin Valley and the area around Three Forks up to Toston produces potatoes of such quality and are so disease free, you can't hardly buy them for food, they are used as seed potatoes elsewhere.
My Great-Great Grandfather grew potatoes for the miners in Butte and Anaconda and was able to sell train car loads from his place south of Livingston, and he used horses to work the ground as that was all that was available at that time.
One resource that may help you realistically is the county extension office. They can tell you what will grow where, how much land you would need for grazing, how much hay you need per animal, and associate costs of agriculture in Montana.
There are Extension Agents in every Montana county, and they work with the universities so constant studies are being done and cutting edge information is available for free. Montana State University Extension - Bozeman Montana
If you are serious, you will need to decide what your goals are. Self Sufficency on a small holding, or a commercial enterprise based in agriculture as the requirements are very different.
Most folks on small holdings that can make a living at it have a specialty crop or product they produce.
Self sufficency requires growing several kinds of fruits/vegetables/grains and livestock. In Montana, a self sufficent place would need to be at least 160-240 acres, you would need equipment either horse drawn or tractor, a fuel source for heat on the land such as a woodlot, a well insulated house, and probably a barn or shop, and most importantly, a wife with a good job in town.
You would probably have a couple of calves or lambs for the market, wool from your sheep, maybe some hay or grain, and possibly some wood or timber you could sell, but it would be very limited amounts unless you rented pasture as well for the summer so you could hay your ground and use the second cutting for winter pasture. You could probably have some hogs as well, but while those can be pasture raised with good fences, you will probably need to suppliment them with grain or other feed as well, but you could have 3 litters of piglets a year per sow and up to 14 pigs per litter, so they multipy fast and can be a good crop for a small holder.
You pay car insurance because that is YOUR reality. In my reality I will not own a car, just a horse. I am getting there. You may say "what do you do when your horse gets sick"? I say, whatever people did 200 years ago...
As for trying food independence and "it didn't work", with all due respect, you are ONE statistical data point. That's like telling someone who wants to start a business that YOU tried and it failed so they need not bother . For all we know you just have very bad luck as a farmer or you have no clue how to farm, it's all a possibility. Finally, you tried food independence but it didn't work. Let me guess, you replaced it by "job in town dependence" (and that's why you need a car)?
Either way, you are light years ahead of 98% of America and that deserves to be given credit! Good for you. If most people were like you, this country would be way better off..
OD
First, to address the concept that my definition of "self-sufficiency" is not fair - take it up with the those who define the language. Our language can have dangerous creeps - for instance; literal once meant that a statement modified by that word was fact, and "virtual" referred to the essence or thought involved and was not to be taken literally. "She was virtually dead from fatigue." can now be said as "She was literally dead from fatigue." and be acceptable as a way of saying she was extremely tired. With the tendency towards over-reaching use of words, "literal" can no longer be trusted as a word. You could literally die from misunderstanding that. "Self-sufficiency" is another phrase that has suffered such a word creep.
Why does this matter? Because clear thinking requires the precise use of language as symbols. A person who sees "This product will make you self-sufficient in any disaster situation" written in a magazine or ad will not question that or think "Self-sufficient within the limited range of having marginally sufficient protein for a healthy diet of tasteless foods that won't want to be eaten." Instead, the glow of "oooh, I don't need to be dependent on anyone or anything" will color their judgment. Saying a plot of land will make you self-sufficient is, in essence, a lie. The land may reduce dependency on others, and act as a buffer in bad times, but it will not make you able to survive without the rest of humanity.
We have explored in the thread and determined that "commercial" (ie: "for profit") farming is inherently interdependent on others. You cannot be interdependent AND self-sufficient in a commercial enterprise. It really is as simple as an either-or logic step.
You can MINIMIZE your dependence on others, which I think we all agree has some really good points. Had we stayed in Florida after the housing debacle, we likely would have lost our home to the bank. Having the independence of no mortgage has been a tremendous advantage. Does that make us self-sufficient? No. It makes us more self-reliant, which is really a much better word to be using.
It is possible to raise your own food. No one here is denying that in any way. Raising your own food is NOT "self-sufficiency". It is interfering with and bypassing much of the vertical monopolies of agribusiness. There are rare times when market forces allow you to gain the system. If you grow your own tomatoes and the tomato crop in Florida or Mexico fails, you win. Most of the time however, like the casino our food distribution system is, you lose.
Was I a poor gardener? Perhaps, perhaps not. I learned a tremendous amount from my efforts, and I'm not a dumb person. In a push-comes-to-shove situation, if I have the available seeds and tools, and the health to go along with that, I could survive. Those who have gardened before could also likely put forth a good effort. I chose not to continue because of a few basic reasons - it was a financially losing proposition and money is tight, I was no longer learning significant new techniques and had satisfied my need to educate myself, my time was not being used profitably but was instead spent in 95 to 100 degree weather attempting to fight off pests and weeds and harvest before other pests got to my crop first, and I was noticing skin changes that told me my body was being abused.
My point in these posts is to bring a beginning understanding of the reality of surviving in the country to people who have only been exposed to books, magazines, and programs, where they sit back and watch or read without expending any labor, sip a cool drink instead of dealing with aching muscles day after day in summer from a scorching day in a garden or other physical task. The posed pictures of a horse on a beautiful hilltop pasture are lovely. I don't deny it. The biting horseflies, shoveling manure, and constant shlepping hay and feed somehow don't make it into those pictures or articles. Many people cannot connect the dots until they experience the situations first hand, but a few are willing to accept that there are negatives to the glorious pictures portrayed by magazines that have a vested financial interest in making things always look lovely and enticing.
When I see a healthy twenty-something interested in spending years on a task where the result forty years later is quite possibly going to be a damaged body, poverty, and a lack of any sort of viable retirement income when work is no longer possible, I feel it my duty to ask that person to step back and examine all aspects of the plan carefully.
In the employment market in the U.S., those years between 20 and 40 are the critical years to build any income or job history that can advance the individual. Starting around age 40 age discrimination starts kicking in.
If someone gets a kick out of the challenge, great. If someone can carve out a niche survival system, fantastic. My point is that it isn't easy, it isn't terribly safe, it isn't reliable, and after examining all the risks and possible rewards, their might be other life paths that provide greater rewards at less risk, and don't preclude the possibility of a hobby farm or huge garden later on in life.
BTW, reasonable work CAN hurt people, especially on farms. A neighbor was paralyzed from the neck down when a bush hog he was pulling threw a stone that hit him on the tractor. A childhood friend of mine died in a tractor accident. A great grandfather died from a kick from his horse. Farmers with missing fingers are pretty common.
Oh yeah, No, I didn't get a job in the city. I still manage to make enough money from my business and previous investments for us to survive.
harry chickpea,
You raise some valid points, and your reasoning is solid from your point of view, but my question is if you feel this way about folks trying to raise their own food and rely less on establishment/manufactured sources of food, why are you on a forum expressly for those who enjoy working in the garden or fields to provide nutritious food for their familes?
I have ranched in Montana for more years than I care to count, been out at 0 dark 30 in a calving shed trying to save a calf born in -40 degree weather with a 30 mph wind, I have been out there every morning feeding, twice a day milking cows, building fences, fighting predators and disease, shearing sheep, slopping hogs, cutting hay and bucking bales when it is 100+ degrees, raised a garden while fighting grasshopper infestations and horses breaking in and eating whole crops.
Been there, Done that.
Because of severe allergies, I cannot live full time in that environment anymore without medication so I have a town job, but I still have cattle, still buck bales, still have a large garden, and I love it.
It is hard backbreaking work, and I don't get a paycheck for doing it. So what?
I love having good food for myself and family that I know exactly where it came from and what it has been given. I am not dependent on fuel prices or the trucks arriving at the store on time to provide security for my familys nutritional needs.
I still love to go out and pick berries, gather wild foods in season, fish and hunt to suppliment my meat supply.
I could do this as a hobby, not as expensive or time consuming as collecting cars or other things I could do that people enjoy and spend a lot of time and money on, but I don't.
I love being able to make my own fuel, cut timber and chop the blocks for my wood heat, generate my own electricity, have my own stores of food, be able to fix my own vehicles, do my own repairs on my equipment or fabricate what I need, work the fields, and generally use my hands to make a good life for myself and my family.
What is the harm in that?
Do I have to live a life similar to a European pesant in the middle ages? No.
Am I unhealthy from physical activity in the fresh air producing something instead of going to a health club to run on a treadmill? No, in fact, from my last doctor visit last month, my blood pressure is 118/60 and all of my blood work shows my lipids, cholesterol and glucose levels as well as everything else they check for, are perfect.
Can working livestock and heavy machinery be dangerous? Of course. I could get run over by a commuter with a cell phone while trying to get to work in town too. Nothing is perfectly safe.
I simply don't understand if you are so bitter about folks who enjoy working with their hands raising their own food, why you are on this forum instead of on the business forum or investment forum as you obviously disreguard the benefits of living a rural lifestyle?
If the only worthwhile pursuits in your view end in a paycheck, then you should speak to those who are consumed by the pursuit of money, not simplicity and a return to simpler times that don't pay much, but are very fulfilling in other ways.
There are programs where an individual can work and live on an organic farm, to gain experience as an apprentice. Rotate through a few farms, some of which may be off-grid and low-impact. Spend a year as a Farm Manager at a Co-Op farm, and then there is a number of groups that can assist you onto your own farm [after you have all of that experience].
I just got an email today, from one network that organizes these Apprenticeship - Journeyman programs. They gave updates about how apprentices are doing on a list of different farms.
If you have nothing but the shirt on your back, and you want to be a farmer. These programs are about the best way that I know of to do it.
I don't understand why you think I am bitter, or wonder why I am on a forum like this.
I am absolutely not bitter about people raising their own food, or trying to get out of the rat race. If someone points out to you that a sports car you are thinking of buying won't transport a family of six very easily, would you label that person as bitter?
I am a realist and pragmatist who also knows how to dream of better things. If there is anything that even comes close to bitterness, it is how the world is often described in half-truths, and those half-truths trap gullible people and do them harm. I saw people in south Florida buy into the house-flipping idea with abandon. "Oohh! We're going to make a lot of money and be rich, while living in increasingly expensive homes that we can't believe we can afford!" Reality came crashing down on their heads because they didn't have a full grasp of what was going on. When you tried to talk with them during the craze, they were simply not listening and setting up fantastic deflections to avoid hearing what they didn't want to hear or consider. There is a lesson to be learned there.
The magazines like TMEN, Countryside, and others are just as guilty at painting a one-sided picture as any of the real-estate brokers in Florida. Pointing out the other aspects of the lifestyle, the ones that fantasizing people love to ignore in their rush to engage in the fantasy, is not being bitter. If you think it is, you may want to re-evaluate your own thinking.
If I lived back in Vermont, I would probably have fun with another smaller garden. The weather there is cool enough that working midsummer is not as draining. That all comes down to personal choice. Laying out facts of why I now do not have a garden is simply laying out facts. There is no emotion attached to that for me.
I think that a disconnect you may be having here is that the beneficial aspects of growing and harvesting your own food are NOT something that I deny. What I am concerned about is a young person attempting to take that, without much prudent thought, and turn it into a total lifestyle that will eventually come back to bite them in the derriere.
I think that a disconnect you may be having here is that the beneficial aspects of growing and harvesting your own food are NOT something that I deny. What I am concerned about is a young person attempting to take that, without much prudent thought, and turn it into a total lifestyle that will eventually come back to bite them in the derriere.
I do not wish to get involved in the Harry versus the forum argument about self sufficiency. There are valid points on all sides and I won't rehash.
I don't think that there is one experienced person that has weighed in on this thread that believes that the OP isn't in some danger of going off like a gun half cocked. In my initial post on page one I recommended that he investigate intern programs before spending a dime or much time on his plan.
As a person raised on a farm with the obligatory 2 acre garden patch and canning late into the night to keep the food that we raised or feeding stock in screaming zero degree winds and who now as a master gardener (and working 24 hours a week as an estate gardener) that partially feeds myself from my garden and has a plan to take it much farther, I understand from personal experience that the work is hot, buggy, unrelenting and hard stoop labor but it is also satisfying to me.
I don't know if the OP is just understanding the satisfaction as depicted in the glossy pastoral press or if he really "gets" the level of work and year round responsibility involved and perhaps he doesn't really know either. There are only two ways of finding out. One is relatively risk free as in the intern program. The other: starting small, gradually expanding as skill and desire grows involves less risk than going into hock for big acreage that he finds he has no talent or desire in the end to work.
Seriously I think we are all in the same book if not on the same chapter or page. Hopefully the OP takes it all in and makes use of what has been shared here.
A smart small-scale farmer can have a good organic business on 5-10 acres.
OD
I don't know how good of a business that would be but I do agree that for any degree of self-sufficiency one has to be smart *and* creative.
What that little organic farmer should have learned from the dust bowl is that his crop can fail, and for reasons much less severe than that, so he'd better have back-up plans.
If I had to, I think I could sell enough produce to cover taxes, insurance and a number of other things. We own outright but we do buy insurance. We would have to significantly increase production in order to grow enough for ourselves too. I don't think I would earn enough to put some away to carry me through a bad year, much less for 2 or more years, but maybe others could. Maybe I could, but it would be a last resort option for me.
Personally, I think if someone has internet access he isn't trying to be *totally* self-sufficient in the strictest sense. If anyone is doing it, he won't be online telling us about it.
I own a business (not farm related) but if I had followed someone else's business plan, it would have failed years ago. If I had been so unyielding and insistent that my original plan should have worked, it would have failed. If one way doesn't work whether it's business, farming, etc., you try another way - or you give up and tell everyone else that starting a business, a self-sufficient farm, etc., doesn't work.
My definition of a more self-sufficienct lifestyle is mine - and yours is yours, and his is his. For me, being self-employed is one aspect of self-sufficiency and it doesn't matter if anyone else agrees. I don't need validation and I don't think you are seeking validation for your lifestyle either. If others would rather work part-time or full-time for someone else, that is his/her version of self-sufficiency. For me, it's the working for someone else that I object to and it simply does not compute with my ideals. But that doesn't render it invalid for someone else.
Anyway, we grow the majority of the food we eat (and hunt and fish) but we also have cash to buy and keep food stored if at some point in the future our crops fail or produce less than what we need. I have back-ups for business as well in the form of subsidiaries. It's unlikely that all would fail at the same time but anything's possible. So meanwhile, the cash I earn is also a means to prepare for self-sufficiency in a stricter sense in the event we have to, or want to at some point.
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. For all we know you just have very bad luck as a farmer or you have no clue how to farm, it's all a possibility. Finally, you tried food independence but it didn't work. Let me guess, you replaced it by "job in town dependence" (and that's why you need a car)? 
