Why We Moved to the Country and What We Set Out to
(Page 2 of 7)
March/April 1970
By the Mother Earth News editors
After we thought about this we realized these men were trying to run a commercial farm by remote control. Usually they went to their farms week ends only because it was so far away - and a hired man ran the farm for them. We wanted to keep a city job, for cash income; we wanted to stay near enough to the city to keep its advantages. We wanted to add the security and fullness of living that seemed more likely to come if we owned our home and some land, not much land necessarily, but good land and at least enough of it to raise most of our food.
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There was nothing new about this idea. We were aware that Henry Ford and many others had been advocating just this for years. We knew that hundreds of thousands of American families were already doing what we proposed to do.
We faced the fact that we knew absolutely nothing about raising any part of what our family needed to live. In fact, our utter and absolute dependency on my job was appalling. If I should lose my job - even temporarily - we would have no money to pay our rent the landord would put us out no money to buy groceries or pay the butcher and we wouldn't eat.
If there were another depression - and I were to lose my job like millions in the last depression - then there wouldn't be a thing to do but stand in line and beg the government for "surplus commodities" . . . rent money . . . relief clothing until things got better again - which might be years!
Living in the city we couldn't save much. Everything we did, almost, cost money. Our biggest item was food. Suppose, we thought, we could raise a big part of our food . . . We knew nothing about farming. But we began to look at things we ate . . . started to study how we could grow them ourselves. For a long time before we actually did move into the country we studied how to raise things. Perhaps in all we read a couple of hundred books and pamphlets on this. We found that most material was out of date and most of the newer books were designed for commercial farming specialists. For example, we found a dozen huge books on commercial dairy cattle, but no simple, up-to-date little book telling us how to produce milk efficiently for our family - and whether it was really economical to do so.
Then again there were lots of people telling you how to choose a farm of say 50-100 or 200 acres, but a dearth of information on telling us how little land we actually needed to raise food for one family.
Yet we gradually accumulated a good many excellent books and pamphlets - all of which you'll find listed in these pages. When we had a fair idea of what we wanted to do we moved to our small place in Connecticut, about an hour from my job in New York, to try out our ideas.
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