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Ask HN: Have You Tried Homesteading?

• smoldesu 4y ago
  If you have any children, I'd highly advise against it. I grew up near Detroit before my family moved into the middle of nowhere, and living out there was more developmentally stunting than anything else in my life. Having nowhere to go and nobody to talk to is a pretty huge roadblock for anyone's personal development, let alone a child living out their formative years. Now that I'm more traveled I can understand the appeal of settling down away from everything, but I'm not sure if I can recommend it long-term. Maybe try moving out to a smaller town or village and seeing how that suits you.
  • jacquesm 4y ago
    You seem to have come out alright though? But you are on point that it can be pretty rough for kids, especially when the neighbors are far away or don't have any children in roughly the same age bracket.
    • smoldesu 4y ago
      It just isn't right to make a kid live that way, in my opinion. Growing up, you need a strong support group of non-family peers to help you through personal and extrapersonal struggles. I was lucky enough to attend a public school, if I was homeschooled then I may have lost my mind completely. I'd spend all my free time reading books and daydreaming before I pieced together my first computer. My point isn't to dramatize all this, just to highlight that you should probably prioritize the wellbeing of your children if you have any. Homesteading is great when you've seen the world and want to relax in satisfaction from your detatchment to society. It's the worst thing in the world when you're a curious child oblivious to reality.
      • jacquesm 4y ago
        There are some degrees to this though: agreed that homeschooling is on another level. But plenty of kids live in rural environments and come out fine. I think the biggest question is whether or not there is a sufficiently large base of other kids living nearby and whether or not kids can safely get around. Cities have their own trade-offs and I'm not quite sure what the best spot is to raise kids after having seen a large range of options, all I see is a mixture of drawbacks and benefits for each. Right now I live in a 40k people town near a major city. This seems to be a nice optimum: have the big city when you want it, but much better quality of life and more space. I'm not sure my kids would benefit from living more rural or more in a city, but if that changes we'll be happy to move to maximize their chances.
        • mbustamanter 4y ago
          I grew up in Santiago, Chile, a city with a population of 7M and lived and went to school in the very center of it. Today I have nothing that resembles a social life and school was torture (never bullied, just bored to tears). I was only interested in math, programming, machines, and infrequently reading literary classics. Did this and that, standardized evaluations got me first place into college with a scholarship, even represented my country at international math contests. Good grades but hated every minute of school. This, coupled with high prices for owning a house and crime in a dense city has prompted me to daydream everyday about going to the country and building my house. Even so far as entertaining the idea of becoming part of a religious group. Maybe someone needs to ground me? But every reason people mention (working hard, social life, school) doesn't change my mind, which worries me since it shows my bias might be too strong. I haven't mentioned the religious thing to my parents who are both atheists, they'll think I'm crazy. EDIT: Teachers assigned fucking Hunger Games as reading, and people still do triangle similarity and solving second degree equations well into HS. I wish was homeschooled.
          • jacquesm 4y ago
            Such large cities are a real problem, especially in poor countries, but even in wealthy countries I would not want to live in them as an adult, let alone as a kid. As for religious communities: be careful what you wish for.
  • etempleton 4y ago
    I agree, my parents bought a small farm when I was in elementary school and it was a pretty lonely existences. In part because of the physical isolation and part because my parents became increasingly fearful of the outside world as it pertained to me. I wasn’t allowed to go places or do things much outside of school and it was pretty terrible. So consider your family. The other thing to consider is what type of life you are really signing up for. It sounds romantic, but it isn’t all it is cracked up to be. You can live in a rural area and have a small garden without going full homestead lifestyle.
• HN_is_for_gemes 4y ago
  I've done it three times. Once on Three acres, then with my wife on 80 acres and now we have downsized to 2 acres. I could talk ALL DAY about the +/- but youll never know till you do it. Can you pull a dead fetus out of a sick goat at 3am in the middle of winter? I have. Can you load a full size pig with an injured back foot into the back of a truck, probably not but I've done that too. Do you like living around animals that could kill you if you look at them wrong? A bull is absolutely nothing to fuck with. Do you want to be 15-30 minutes away from the closest gas/food/hospital? I say do it but to be honest, most people can't, won't and don't want to even HEAR about the realities of farm life let alone do it themselves.
  • codingdave 4y ago
    It doesn't have to be like that. I've done it on 6 acres on the edge of a town, 3 minutes from groceries, all my kids walked to school. You also don't have to do livestock - you can just grow plants. "Homesteading" does not have to be "farm life". There are huge middle grounds. That being said, no matter where you land, it will be work. Probably more than people think. The weather will dictate what you do. And for the first couple years as you build skills, tools, and infrastructure, your "free" food will be the most expensive food you've ever had.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • paulryanrogers 4y ago
      Can you get enough protein without animals? Is it really homesteading if you can walk to a grocery store?
      • kstenerud 4y ago
        When is a Scotsman a true Scotsman? It's not the etymology that counts, but rather what someone is trying to accomplish.
        • 4y ago
• LinuxBender 4y ago
  Have You Tried Homesteading? Yes and no. I am not entirely off grid. I have surprisingly reliable electricity and even have fiber internet thanks to a government grant. My goal was not to homestead but rather I have goals that require a rural property where building codes are not highly restrictive and where I can have enough land to be off grid if it came to that. So my goal was not to homestead but rather to be independent and some day have a large steel barn that will have climate controlled space for chickens and enough land for solar panels, horses, chickens, maybe an insulated geo-thermal greenhouse. My to-do list is rather long and finding resources locally even for materials is problematic. I will likely have to ship in materials from several hours away. I am retired and take care of both domestic and wild animals because that is what I enjoy doing. If I depended on this for money it would be much more stressful. If making a living off this was my goal then my preference would be to raise show/racing horses as they can potentially sell for a lot of money, downside being I would have to not get attached to them. So I guess I would ask what your end-goals are and if homesteading helps you reach those goals. Are you the self sufficient type, meaning you can fix most things that are critical to you? I ask because in some or most rural areas there may be small businesses that can fix some things but you may find that many of them are faking it to make it so to speak. I'm not exactly a "hang out with people" type That's not required however being able to socialize at least a little bit with your neighbors can be very important when moving to a very rural area, especially if you do plan to go entirely off grid. A network of neighbors can be very important when bad things happen or even when you or they have tools and/or equipment that the other does not have. Is homesteading the goal or the tool to achieve your goals? Are you perhaps looking for more isolation from big cities? If isolation is the goal you actually have more options and should research what locations made proper use of their government grants for internet.
  • Phileosopher 4y ago
    For me, it's a conflation of goals: 1. I'm a formerly reckless guy in my mid-30's, and I've wanted to try it for about a decade or so, so it seems like a challenging adventure. 2. My hobbies and interests seem to constantly preoccupy with survival and understanding how the world works. I did a stint WWOOFing, and found it extremely enriching. 3. Suburbia and urban living really rub me the wrong way. I like to fix and work with things more than "trust experts". I was very fortunate to marry someone who thinks the same way. 4. In a political sense (i.e., "people power"), I anticipate that if this goes well I can build a small town someday. My wife jokes it as a "tech commune", but I'm still hammering out details on what it'd take. I guess it's my own "mid-life crisis", where I realize that I'm significantly better at understanding and fixing everything than winning friends and influencing people. Edit: I keep forgetting that formatting thing where 2 line breaks is a paragraph break on HN.
• UI_at_80x24 4y ago
  You will learn more about yourself if you try. Why live with self-imposed limits? Make sure you triple-check your bandwidth requirements and options before you bite the bullet. Try to ease into it. 2-4 days at a time can be a great way to start getting used to the change that would be needed.
• rcarr 4y ago
  Give it ten to twenty years for large battery storage to get cheap, solar panels prices to drop even further, online education options to get better and high quality satellite internet to become prolific and I think you’ll see more and more people opt for this kind of lifestyle. You’ll most likely get more and more pre fab kits and shipping container style homes you can just slot together and drop anywhere. It would also be a rational response if the insanely high house price inflation/insanely low wage inflation trajectory continues.
• jacquesm 4y ago
  I've lived on St. Josephs Island, Canada for a couple of years. The biggest downside for me was how much time was spent shoveling snow every year, if I were to do something like that ever again I'd do it in a place where the climate does not eat up half your time or so. As for being 'not the hang out with people' type, beware: your family may be on board with it now, but it looks like you might be the one in their element, and they may not be after a while. And that can get quite tricky, especially for kids when they get a bit older. Also: go take as advanced a first aid course as you can afford. You don't need to be able to do brain surgery but it helps if you know how to set a broken bone and do a lot of other common things because the nearest ER may well be too far away to be useful. Other downsides: hauling groceries across any distance requires careful planning, especially if you only plan on doing this once a month or even less frequent, during the Canadian winters we sometimes did for three weeks or longer without free groceries and that can really work against you in many ways so plan your diet well and well in advance to make sure you get enough of everything that your body requires to stay healthy. For energy I used solar panels (2x8 on trackers, though I would just install them fixed if I did that again) and a small home brew windmill. Between those we very rarely had to back that up with a small generator. Fresh water came from a well, but it was rather high in sulfur content and that made it smell quite bad, this you may well end up missing as well, clean tapwater is a luxury that you only really come to appreciate when you don't have it.
  • yourapostasy 4y ago
    > ...how much time was spent shoveling snow every year... Assuming you had a source of heat, could you grade where you would normally have to shovel snow for it to melt into cisterns, then run the heat through pipes under those paths/areas? > ...go take as advanced a first aid course as you can afford... Stock an appropriate IFAK (military-grade ones are not necessarily what you want [1]) on your person, then appropriately more comprehensive and larger kits in your vehicles and house. And stock vehicle and house consumables and parts that commonly break down; if you think the supply chain is bad now, wait 'til you experience it at the end of a long-ass last-mile segment. Be prepared to repair and fix everything on your own, as much as possible. This is why many working farms and ranches run extensive workshops. [1] https://www.primalsurvivor.net/ifak-contents/ https://www.primalsurvivor.net/ifak-contents/
• runjake 4y ago
  There is a wealth of homesteaders on YouTube who discuss every facet of the life and its challenges. They are often frank. Check there. That’s the best place I’ve seen. Reddit is decent, too.
• scott_siskind 4y ago
  I've done it at the edge of a small town (~12k inhabitants). My grandparents' home was sitting uninhabited for a few years and it once had a beautiful vineyard, a big orchard, and generally a wonderful view. At the edge of a forest. I've always wanted to live close to nature. I was burned out with my corporate programming job, and I was dreaming of starting out some life-style businesses/SaaS/ something of that sort. I already had some investments that allowed me to live there without financial stress (i.e. the passive income more than 2x covered my living costs). I was within walking distance of grocery stores, ~1-2km from downtown. Did it work? Hell no. The biggest issue was I think that I was single, knew nobody in the area, and basically the time spent with just maintaining the house and the surroundings would take more than half of my energy and time. 5 months out of 12 I had to take care of the fire for heating. The whole garden and vineyard were invaded (still are) by a few species of trees such as black locust, that were growing faster than I could cut them, but also oak, birch, basswood and so on. I had a chainsaw and still couldn't keep up. Even after I had a big stack of dried firewood, I still had to spend 40 minutes every morning with actually setting up the fire in the woodstove and so on. And then the snowfall. It was not like in my grandparents' time, when they occasionally had 50-80cm of snowfall, but if I didn't want to be completely stuck there, I had to shovel a lot. The house was about 3 flights of stairs and about 10 more meters away from the street, so it was a bit of work. Doing the groceries, while not that far away, less than 2km, the return trip usually meant about 150m of ascending. I didn't use a car at the time, so it was a bit tiring. Cooking also takes a big portion of your time. Then the house itself. I had to do a lot of repairs as the house had been uninhabited for a few years, after my grandparents passed away. The roof. Humidity problems. I had to do some concrete underfloor, that meant carrying tons of sand and bags of ciment uphill, again really hard tasks. The house had electricity from the grid, and while all the other amenities were available, I chose not to connect to them. I was using water from a well. In late summer, autumn, I was picking fruit, making jam, also spending a lot of time with that. I tried my hand with organic agriculture, planted vegetables such as tomatoes, potatoes. But then I had issues with wild boars that would come and ransack a lot of it. I spent about slightly less than an year there, all in all. Did I accomplish much of my main goal (that is business-wise)? Not really. It was a nice experience that maybe I'll repeat some day, but probably only with a partner so that we can split some tasks, and not be almost completely isolated. Going there for the purpose of having a really low cost standard of living so that I could focus on my priorities didn't really work, because I had to spend a majority of my time just to live there. I could have invested money to make it easier. There were a lot of things that simply made living there harder than it should have been and could be fixed with some investments. I decided that I would be better off in a bigger city at this point in my life.
• aaron695 4y ago
  We lived 400m2/4300ft2 plot in a workers cottage 20 mins from city center with - 2 dairy goats Aquaponics - plate fish, crayfish, a few other experiential food sources snails and fingerlings Normal garden beds Bees Fruit trees Bamboo hedges for food / thatching Chickens and ducks with duck pods Insect farms, again experiential food but also for the poultry Prep-ing cupboards, sun drying racks, that sort of stuff Lawn (because you need a good lawn for mental health) We had a lot of room to continue. For instance we never used the meter space under the house. Solar 20% of roof, but the rest was only used occasionally at parties when you'd grab a ladder and have beers up there. Obviously we used external mass agriculture to feed our animals on a lot that size, but you'll find a lot/most homesteaders do that in some way. This only answers your title. We did move from this to land, which I no longer consider homesteading even though we now have no municipal water/sewerage and more of the above we are now proportionally less productive work to output.
• goodguysstick 4y ago
  After reading your personal website, and about your history, I would say that you are the type of person that needs other people around them. You've had a troubled past, but you are a good guy. Good guys need other good guys around them. The fact that you have been upfront and attoned for mistakes you've made is a good thing. I think that these people that you might see as having persecuted (2021) you have actually helped you. Look for a town/region/community that is properly integrated with broader society and the world. Don't run off and think you have all the answers. Contribute to something that is already okay. There is no perfect - the 'clean and pure' often turn out to be hiding some really grotty things. All the best.
  • Phileosopher 4y ago
    I sincerely appreciate the personal input. I'm mostly recovered from 2021, and I don't intend to do anything dramatic if I do decide to go partly off-grid. Purely from logistics alone, I'd need to transition to a remote-only job and get money saved, but I've also placed the requirement of finishing my monstrous writing project before starting it. As far as I can tell from the meandering I've done, good people and more power are a toxic combination. Either the power gets to their head and they stop being good anymore, bad people with less moral failsafes will take over that power, or good people have to sacrifice power to the Great Unknown just to continue surviving. And, eventually, the children of good people aren't automatically good by osmosis, and they're the ones who inherit the throne. It may be a fantasy wrought by the ending of Robinson Crusoe (which bugged me that he didn't make a sequel), or an over-application of how I found untold freedom when I was a truck driver. Mostly, it's an experiment to see if we can do it, and how far we can go, and I'll keep the apartment manager of the nearest big city on file just in case.
    • vram22 4y ago
      >It may be a fantasy wrought by the ending of Robinson Crusoe (which bugged me that he didn't make a sequel) But check out The Swiss Family Robinson. Read both Crusoe and the latter as a kid.
• sibeliuss 4y ago
  I am not off-grid, but many of my neighbors and close friends are and I can speak intimately about their experience. For one, many of the examples in the comments below are really quite extreme! By homesteading folks seem to be implying that you're looking to live in the middle of literal nowhere, alone and surviving off your wits and the grace of god. You can do the homesteading thing in lots of different contexts. The town I live in is ~1k people on the west coast US, about 2 hours away from a major city and about 10 miles from a small 12k pop city. We've got a nice grocery store about 5 minutes away from where we live, and a few restaurants here and there. It's a very rural farming town, but there are a lot of young people around that live interesting lives. Musicians, artists, etc. Nobody makes a lot of money, but its not a community of dire poverty by any stretch. People just get by with very little, and are conscious of that in a deliberate sort of way. My next door neighbor (a family of three) catches water via a collection tank that they then filter into a cabin, and during dry spells order extra in. Generally speaking, its more than enough to do dishes, wash laundry, drink and whatever else you might need to do. Electricity-wise they live 95% percent of the time off of three fairly small battery packs that run low-power LED lights that feel as cosy as you could imagine for a small cabin. They have more than enough lighting than they could need. Obviously, no TV or anything like that, but they don't want that. When one of the batteries gets low, they charge it up at work. They live pretty normal lives all said, and you would never guess that they get by on next to nothing. Another friend lives (mostly) off grid in a small house he built. Put solar in along with a huge battery bank and runs all kinds of appliances from TV to washing machine, to all kinds of power-tools and lights for their house and barn, etc. Water comes from a combination of catchment and a well that his neighbor generously offered to share with him in exchange for some excavator work. He runs a very successful landscaping / earthworks company and again, wouldn't guess for a moment that him and his partner are homesteading. Yet another completely off-grid friend (with 2 kids, partner) lives in basically the most beautiful house you could imagine, like something straight out of a magazine. He's been working on it (and reworking it) for about 15 years. You walk inside and there's a fancy kitchen, beautiful bathrooms (with composting toilets), three floors, four bedrooms all fully wired, etc, etc. Whole thing is powered by a solar kit purchased from Backwoods Solar for about 15k. He told them what he wanted and they designed it up and shipped it to him for him to assemble, which he did with no specialized knowledge. It was all pretty effortless. He catches water, filters it. Has got a garden with all kinds of fruit trees, a greenhouse, chickens, rabbits for fertilizer. All the basics are covered without too much work required. He owns a happening restaurant in town, kids go to a nice private school, and so on. Again, would never guess they were "homesteaders". The above examples aren't to say that this kind of living is easy. Each of these friends have serious building skills and were fortunate and wise with their time / money. And in each case they bought bare land (5 to 15 acres) and built things from scratch. So its like, you've got to go into it prepared. But assuming all of the requisites are met, or you're the type of person who is prepared to learn what's necessary, being a homesteader does not mean that you _have_ to live this crazy rugged life. None of the people I listed above do. They put in a lot of upfront work to set their lives up by their design using the skills they had. And now just about every cent that comes into their bank account goes right into savings or other projects / hobbies / businesses that they want to work on. It's remarkable, and I reflect on this every month when I pay my mortgage bill.
• reason-mr 4y ago
  Homesteading itself is a full time job. There are almost always things which need to get done - fencing, fire clearance, animal issues, gopher trapping, tree pruning - and wups, a fox got in the chickens last night. Etc. One of you is gonna need to be full time in this and it is still a lot, and probably you will end up paying people to do stuff for you anyhow if you can’t find time to do it. Not saying it isn’t possible - we kinda do it - but you want a fully committed other person with skills not just “oh that sounds nice”. Considering volunteering at something like an urban farm to get said skills before committing.