Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I like country life. The gardening, cutting and splitting wood, catching some fish and bringing them home to eat, having my own acreage.
Those things are enjoyable to me. Why? Because I don't have to depend on those things alone to survive. It's all on the side and a second priority. How labor intensive would it be to be totally self sufficient?
Anyone with even a small garden with a relatively small yield knows how much work it is. Imagine the stress and labor of having a garden large enough to get you through the entire year? You're talking about tilling, weeding, dealing with weather and insects, watering, preserving your yield (canning, dehydrating etc.). All of this occurs at the hottest time of the year. At the same time you have your animals to take care of, plus the maintenance of your home and property. You will be very busy from sun up to sun down. Even if you are fairly self sufficient, you'll still have living expenses and bills.
I'm sure different people have different definitions on the term self-sufficiency. I wouldn't be able to do or have any of the above things if I didn't have a job. I can put four hours in at work and earn enough to stock my kitchen pantry with food for at least a week. The full-time income takes care of the mortgage, utilities, property tax, farm and home insurance, and retirement savings. Now if that's not "sustainable" I don't know what is. Those things would be difficult to achieve trying to live the self sufficient lifestyle.
The back to the land movement did not have much success. I live in Missouri which was back to the land central and sort of still is at a smaller scale. The out of state back to the land people were often taken advantage of in the area of real estate. "Mini farms" were bought sight unseen for far more than they were worth that turned out to be 3 acre slabs of bedrock with a few cedar trees. Having a garden and livestock would be literally impossible. Craigslist has several listings of rural acreage (with no pictures) in Missouri with descriptions straight out of a romance novel in effort to get people to "fall in love with the land." The latest term is "Organic Acres" (whatever that means).
I don't want to sound like the resident meany, but I don't want to see people taken advantage of and heartbroken in the end because of publications that romanticize living off the land. I've lived here all my life and I've witnessed it.
I like researching and reading about gardening and outdoor things, but when it turns into political and societal philosophy, I'm not quite on board. I'd rather not be told how bad capitalism is by a writer that makes a healthy profit selling books and giving lectures. That's basically what it seems to turn into most of the time. When I was a much younger man, I bought into this stuff hook, line and sinker. Not now.
MoNative34, the bills that you outlayed are what Scott and Helen Nearing call in their book "overhead". They do use a bit outdated language (Scott died in the 80s at age 100, that makes him a person from another century). Helen was about 15-20 years younger.
So they retired to Vermont to reduce that overhead and "to have an independent economy which would require a small capital outlay, could operate with low overhead costs, would yield a modest living in exchange for half-time work, and therefore would leave half of the year for research, reading, writing and speaking." They needed to retreat to the land to have free time, how silly was that?
The mortgage, - they didn't have one as they bought a small run-down farmhouse and over summers built stone additions until they had the full stone house built. The stones, the wood for forms were collected for free (I'm not sure if they were paying someone to mill the wood). The cement was bought, the only house building expense.
Utilities - they didn't have electricity (I think, I haven't finished the book yet). In our time, one would need about $10K to put solar and wind power to provide you for all your needs (TV, computer, water heater, plus maybe a solar greenhouse, a solar heat for whatever animals). Don't think that $10K is unrealistic - it is, if you cut off the inflated equipment-peddling sellers.
Property tax - yes, this one would exist.
Farm and home insurance - well, they set out for modest living, so they didn't really have machines, and no farm-size fields to provide food for a family. Home insurance - yes.
Retirement savings - people lived off land from birth to death, and there was no time when one would say: now, I will stop tilling my land and will live purely off cash. So retirement savings would be unnecessary if you are set for simple modest living. (No cruises or vacations, of course).
Helen and Scott had a bit of a following. There was a fair amount about them in the Mother Earth News in the 1970s. Frankly, I never found their lifestyle appealing at all. Scott spent a lot of time moving rocks by hand from one place to another. Great work if you are an ant or a prisoner on a chain gang, but not a particularly edifying pursuit otherwise. Both of them were blessed with extreme tolerance of cold temperatures and relatively strong constitutions. The more common experience of farmers who followed similar lifestyles were arthritic hands, aching backs, and various other diseases.
Such a barebones lifestyle doesn't allow for insurance costs (which increase as you grow older) or medical care. The idea that you can prevent all disease and injury by living a life like this is just plain stupid. They took chances with their lives and were lucky. If a visitor with TB had infected them, if they missed a beat and had food poisoning, if a rock or beam had fallen, that dream could have been an epitaph.
If the property was 'real estate' it would be taxed.
If the property was 'private property', absolutely owned, it would not be taxable.
Wow, I didn't know that. How come we were paying taxes on an inherited property (owned outright)? We are buildign a new off-grid place now and I'm sure they are lining up to tax us. Is it just a Canadian thing?
Helen and Scott had a bit of a following. There was a fair amount about them in the Mother Earth News in the 1970s. Frankly, I never found their lifestyle appealing at all. Scott spent a lot of time moving rocks by hand from one place to another. Great work if you are an ant or a prisoner on a chain gang, but not a particularly edifying pursuit otherwise. Both of them were blessed with extreme tolerance of cold temperatures and relatively strong constitutions. The more common experience of farmers who followed similar lifestyles were arthritic hands, aching backs, and various other diseases.
Such a barebones lifestyle doesn't allow for insurance costs (which increase as you grow older) or medical care. The idea that you can prevent all disease and injury by living a life like this is just plain stupid. They took chances with their lives and were lucky. If a visitor with TB had infected them, if they missed a beat and had food poisoning, if a rock or beam had fallen, that dream could have been an epitaph.
Yes, they believed if they ate clean food and lived less stressfully there was no need for doctors as one wouldn't get sick... Judging by the fact that Scott lived to 100 years old doctor-free and Helen at least close to 90s, they didn't need doctors.
Scott and Helen wrote that they provided about 3/4 of their overall needs. For the rest 1/4 they ran a small business operation, making maple syrop and sugar. It is intriguing to me as I was thinking of ways of making that small income that you do need, and a small-scale business may be able to provide for.
As for stones, if I were to build a stone house now (though we are bulding of wood) of course I would use some means to drag the stones closer, something other than manpower. I will be doing it this summer building my stone root cellar.
Anyway, I'm not promoting anything, but rather exploring ideas that had existed before that I wasn't aware of.
I found another book, "Grow It", from the 70s this time - it seems thatany depression in the economy sends people in search to recession-proof themselves.
This book is convincing me that even having a small animal like a goat or a couple of sheeps is not that hard. Having hormone-free milk is very important to me as having any milk products I could make.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
) in Missouri with descriptions straight out of a romance novel in effort to get people to "fall in love with the land." The latest term is "Organic Acres" (whatever that means).
