Why are more people not working their land and being self-sufficient? (sustainable, homestead)
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No, I get it, I am in the same "boat" but for some reason I don't mind the hard work. We don't have a TV so there, problem solved, I am $80/month richer and much more time to do stuff I really like.
It is funny, my parents lived in the city, my grandparents in the country - my Mom's grandparents were self-sufficient, owned land, had flocks of various birds (chickens, turkeys etc.), cows, pigs, made their own jams, brandy, wine etc. etc. I remember them as the happiest people there were, my grand father is in fact still alive at ripe age of 91, still takes no medications.
My parents left all that, got education, raised us in the city and sent us to school etc. But, I am "back to the land" and so will my children be. I would consider it a punishment for a child not to grow up around a garden, an orchard, cows, horses, fresh air. My household will NEVER have a TV.
Funny, even my father who grew up in the country and tended cows when he was 10 and made a living picking cherries when he was 12 (7 children family after WW2 in a country ravaged by the war), could not wait to go to the city and make a life for himself. Nowadays he is big into growing food - he constantly tells me that he who grows healthy food has the most noblest profession of all....
Anyways, to each their own I guess
I guess.
I grew up in the city but it seems like we always had a garden of some kind, even if it was just tomatoes and beans. When I was younger I liked the excitement of the city, but as I got older the idea of being a "farmer/homesteader" really began to appeal to me. My dh grandfather was a foreman on a huge farm in Canada, so he grew up playing in an orchard and "helping" his grandfather when he visited, so it was a natural for him, even though he grew up living in the city too.
Personally, I have no problem working hard in the garden. I was out in the 100 degree heat watering tomatoes and it didn't bother me in the least (I watered myself too!!!). I can't wait until we can get our chickens and sheep, even though I know it will be more work and responsibility. People just don't know what they are missing.
You are aware of anyone in the USA's self-sufficiency / homesteading / organic community who is described as:
....
Anywhere in the USA?
Negative on all accounts. Don't know anyone like that. But if I want to find several of those attributes, I needn't look any farther than many of the inner cities, were I can, in fact and in general, find dysfunctional living at its best. But that all gets a pass. It's only the "hayseeds" that are riddled with these flaws and must be ridiculed, scorned, and otherwise emasculated before they destroy our grand Utopia.
Why are more people not working their land and being self-sufficient?
I'd wager most people in the USA don't actually own their land... they are mortgaged.
When you have to pay the bills or get your home taken away from you, it just isn't practical to live a self-sufficient lifestyle. It takes an awful lot of work to make a couple acres productive and who has the energy to do it after spending all day at their 9-5 job?
Location: RI, MA, VT, WI, IL, CA, IN (that one sucked), KY
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sunnyKid
People are interested in living that lifestyle, but many of them can't afford it. Ironic, isn't it?
I'm not sure of the irony, but yes, it requires a significant initial investment. Also, money is needed for health insurance, and I don't know about anyone else, but I want a vacation at least once a year. Having goats/chickens/crops/etc don't lend themselves to being able to leave for a couple of weeks and fly to Asia. Never mind needing to save retirement funds for when we're too old, tired, or sick to do the back breaking work. This lifestyle also seems to work better for situations where people are couples and one works a regular job for salary and benefits and the other does the farming. Great for those people, but not everyone is partnered or ever will be.
People are interested in living that lifestyle, but many of them can't afford it. Ironic, isn't it?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chango
I'd wager most people in the USA don't actually own their land... they are mortgaged.
When you have to pay the bills or get your home taken away from you, it just isn't practical to live a self-sufficient lifestyle. It takes an awful lot of work to make a couple acres productive and who has the energy to do it after spending all day at their 9-5 job?
This is the crux of the matter, right here.
The banksters have us all by the gonads with these mortgages. It's called "financialization" - google it, look it up. It's a way to raise the prices on everything, and pay extra interest to the banksters. They want us all slaving away at city jobs and paying them interest from our earnings.
I'm old enough to remember when you could buy a house for the cost of a car nowadays. Easy - $25K - 40K would get you a nice house, and not so long ago, either. My dad bought a 2-story, 4 bedroom 2-bath home in the city for $23K in 1976. Try getting a decent car for less than that, now. The banksters have financed cars to 7 years of payments! That's more than a quarter of a 30-year mortgage!
Remember - every dollar you pay to the banks in interest, is one less dollar you get to keep.
If one is to concede themselves into the life of a "super specialist", then they should not own land that they do not properly care for. They should live in an apartment and utilize public services that they contribute to with their income. That would cut down mightily on infrastructure and energy costs. This works well for NYC and I must admit that it is an amazing city. In most of America, however, we have access to fresh water and lots of fertile soil that isn't already topped with concrete. This makes it easy in America to straddle the line between a specialist and generalist. All I ask is that if you're going to own some land, then do your due diligence and take care of that land - keep a garden and plant some trees instead of a perfectly manicured lawn.
Agricultural corporations are rationalized for profit and not for health and safety concerns. This side of the debate has gotten too inflammatory for my tastes. It seems to me that some people are under the impression that pure capitalism automatically corrects itself for the needs of the society whereas others fear that the government is breaking the safeguards of capitalism by supporting bad corporations. All I know is that I am suspicious of anybody who tells me that they have my best interests in mind, not to worry about it, and that will be $5.99 please.
"My mama's words still in my mind
Always work hard, always be kind"
Last edited by curzon_dax; 12-10-2013 at 07:27 AM..
The banksters have us all by the gonads with these mortgages. It's called "financialization" - google it, look it up. It's a way to raise the prices on everything, and pay extra interest to the banksters. They want us all slaving away at city jobs and paying them interest from our earnings.
I'm old enough to remember when you could buy a house for the cost of a car nowadays. Easy - $25K - 40K would get you a nice house, and not so long ago, either. My dad bought a 2-story, 4 bedroom 2-bath home in the city for $23K in 1976. Try getting a decent car for less than that, now. The banksters have financed cars to 7 years of payments! That's more than a quarter of a 30-year mortgage!
Remember - every dollar you pay to the banks in interest, is one less dollar you get to keep.
Well, it basically boils down to this: do you consider yourself free if you have debt? I don't. I feel like I am in chains if I have debt.
The whole system is structured to create indentured servants from the beginning, since age 18. For everyone who wants to go to college (main source of specialization), college costs money. While you could get by with working your way through college (I did but that was 20 years ago, it is getting more difficult these days for the kids starting out), professional schools are impossible. My wife went to veterinary school and had to have debt, there is no way you can save for 4 years of living expenses and vet school tuition by the age of 18-20 and vet school will not let you work on the side and make enough for it all. So, we busted our arses after she graduated, took jobs that were not "my cup of tea" and paid it all off. But consider this - at the same time we were doing this, we needed to pay for shelter, transportation and all other expenses WHILE paying off primary debt. That means mortgage or rent, car payments etc. If both spouses work, both will need cars etc. etc. It is next to impossible to get out from underneath that crap.
So the whole system of specialization is great, except that it counts on debt to get you there. Except that the costs of everything down the road to specialization are inflated. The way the federal education loans are structured, the Universities basically have a guaranteed stream of income. In fact, they lobby to keep the student loan rates and student loan programs, not because of their desire to see more of the population educated but because they are businesses. Heck, even their endowments are tax free. Places like Harvard are sitting of tens of billions of dollars of tax free endowments.
I am now almost 40 and finally debt free and on my way to self-sufficiency, step by step. Chemical free house built of natural materials, independent source of energy, large garden with all the veggies, fruit trees, a plot of edible grapes, chickens, my own well and septic, all on 5 acres. These 5 acres are all maxed out and we did/are doing all the work ourselves. Being debt free is the biggest gift you can give yourself and the best way to tell anyone off. It even doesn't have anything with end of world crap, it's just pure common sense.
My choices of food today are:
1) chemical doused garbage that passes as food, grown and selected to have thick skin to sustain transport - cheap but useless and harmful
2) organic - healthy but pricey
3) my own - I know what goes into it, up front costs to set everything up (fencing, drip irrigation, screens, covers for winter etc.) are pricey but with every year it gets cheaper
I choose 3. People in this thread have whined about gardening being expensive, too much work, crops fail. A few tell us that their tomatoes didn't make it this year etc. That's NOT an argument against growing your own. You may need more education and you may need to put more thought into your setup but ANYONE can grow food. Heck, Terlingua, TX has a community garden and it is in the desert of SW Texas with 12 inches of rainfall a year.
Back to debt: if we had to do it all over again, my wife would have never been a veterinarian and we would have started out with no education debt. That alone would have accelerated our path to independence by 15 years or so. There is a book called "Mortgage free", I found it after we had gone to school and did what we did. I wish I had it when I was 18
Also note that going to college today is no guarantee of employment. The bar is being raised every day and now it takes advanced education to earn what people used to earn with Bachelors degrees a decade ago and what people used to earn with high school diplomas a few decades ago. Many jobs got exported to slaves in poor places, leaving Americans to all become service providers. Only that each service in the chain from origin to final consumer gets to raise the price of the final "service". Again, how many people can you build into a price of a product before the product price becomes so inflated that the majority of the population cannot afford it without going into debt. Oh wait, that's already happened.
My conclusion is that what we are doing today is unsustainable in the long run. I am no economist but logic and reason dictates me to conclude so. We are basically banking our future on the HOPE that we can keep all the people in this country employed to keep the system going. But, at the same time the same people are being poisoned by the food conglomerates, gauged by pharma and medical providers, taxed to death by local, state and fed governments, their jobs are being exported elsewhere, education to get a new job is more expensive every day and gives you less, real estate and land is more expensive, barriers to entry into business are higher due to corporate laws designed to kill anyone's efforts to get into a field and finally, jobs are simply being automated away to computers and robots.
Last edited by LordyLordy; 12-10-2013 at 07:38 AM..
When I was in my mid-20s, I was discharged from the Navy. My Dw and I both enrolled in college f/t and we both worked f/t. We really wanted to homestead. After a year, we were able to move onto a farm helping the farmer. While we both continued our college and jobs f/t, we operated a goat dairy. By the time that we were nearing our senior year of college; we fully realized that operating a dairy was not going to be economically feasible for us.
With our degrees, we would be able to earn more money. But that would also require moving and focusing on career. The f/t jobs we had were minimum-wage, so they did not require a lot of focus [I had dug tunnels and tossed pizza dough, while my Dw stuck to being a waitress] they allowed us to live on the farm and keep up on that. But going into careers would require that we leave farming.
We did not see anyway that we could make farming to work for us, without a job in town.
At that time, we were not aware of Apprenticeship/Journeyman programs for farming.
We saw that a Navy pension would allow us to live on a farm without need for a job in town.
In some of my classes, my fellow students were mid-career EEs who had found that they needed to polish up their resumes as they had hit various ceilings in their employment. So I listened to their stories of ladder climbing, the need for continuous education and the politics of trying to avoid those ceilings, etc.
Once I got to considering going back into the Navy, those EEs gave me a lot of encouragement to do it for the pension.
As I said, we were not aware of any Apprenticeship/Journeyman programs for farming.
That was why I went back into the Navy. We focused on building our portfolio, so that when my retirement came we would be able to buy a farm with no mortgage.
Was my path to this place easy? Goodness no. It was painful. I would not recommend anyone else to follow such path. It was the best path, that we could see, at the time, for us to get here. And it worked for us.
Farming can be a lot of work.
You do need to stay out of debt. Debt caused both sets of my grandparents to lose their farms. One of my grandfathers lost two farms in his life, there are perils.
Today I have a very low income. Much of our needs are provided by our farm. I sell our surplus at market. Our farm production grows each year. We suffer a lot of losses too. There certainly is a learning curve. Some of these skills require us to try one method, then a different method, then a another method. Some things that we are trying to produce, I really do not know if we will ever be able to produce enough for market. I am glad that there are networks that we meet with to share ideas and trials, to help us through some of these learning curves.
I think that apprenticeship/journeyman programs are fantastic.
We got our land, started building house and farm, all without any current experience in how to farm in this region. We meet with others who are going through the journeyman programs, or who have gone through such, and we can see that they have a lot less trail/error in their approach. Because they have that hands-on training.
Sustainable / organic farming can not 'feed the world' with only 1% of the population actively farming. It is impossible.
At the peak optimum, I can see a farmer [with no petroleum or synthetics] providing 90% of the food needs for maybe 10 families. That is about it.
In a society where 1% farms. For that one to feed the others, he needs to produce food for 100 [himself plus the other 99]. Plus enough to feed populations in other lands where they produce no food [100 X 2 = 200]. Plus waste and spoilage [200 X 2 = 400]. Plus enough to cook some food into fuels and drugs [400 X 2 = 800]. Clearly I am just guessing with these numbers. Lets say that each farmer by himself needs to provide enough food for 800 people.
That is not possible with sustainable practice. Sustainable / organic farming can not 'feed the world' with only 1% of the population actively farming. It is impossible.
My goal is not to 'feed the world'. I only need to feed my family, and provide some food to my community.
People are interested in living that lifestyle, but many of them can't afford it. Ironic, isn't it?
Most of them are not willing to adjust their standard of living. You cannot have new cars, boats, vacations, cable television, high speed internet, etc., if you want to live a sustainable lifestyle. Most people are not willing to sacrifice these expenditures under the auspices of "quality of life". If that is what you need to have a good quality of life, then you do not truly want to live this way.
My husband and I have old cars, old clothes, and live in a cheap old mobile home because we do not want to have a mortgage or be "beholding" to someone. The reason that we do not live this life 100 percent now is because we have debt to pay off. Otherwise, we could live well on very little money which we could obtain through selling the things we make/grow on the homestead. Hopefully, in the next 2 or 3 years we will get to that point.
20yrsinBranson
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Why are more people not working their land and being self-sufficient?
