Why We Moved to the Country and What We Set Out to
(Page 4 of 7)
March/April 1970
By the Mother Earth News editors
If You Are Planning To Retire:
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Or if you have already retired, you can see that this Plan is a most practical way to stretch your retirement income and help keep yourself in better health. If you are going to receive Social Security benefits, or just a small pension, annuity, or small income of any sort, you can look forward to many years of happiness and security.
This Plan in no sense attempts to turn you into a commercial farmer. There is all the difference in the world between farming for profit and raising only your own family's food. A farmer is a business man whose factory is his land. Probably - if he is really successful - he has become a specialist in producing one crop -milk - or poultry - or fruit. He has spent years learning to become expert enough not only to produce quantity but also to sell wholesale at a high enough price to pay overhead, his labor, machinery costs, etc. You, on the other hand, produce only what your family needs. You save yourself retail prices. You have no labor costs - practically no overhead - no distribution or selling costs. You sell only your surplus - and can easily find a ready retail market among neighbors or friends where you work.
You will be tempted - especially during a food shortage to produce, for example, more chicken than your family can eat - and sell the surplus at a profit. This you can do - but only if you have enough spare time so that you will not have to sacrifice growing some other foods for your family's own use.
The very fact that our "Have-More" Plan calls for raising a variety of vegetables, fruit, poultry, meat and dairy products means a diversification of work, a lot of different things to do, so that none of them becomes tiresome. Planning to have a garden, a cow or milk goats, laying hens and broilers, rabbits, bees - and maybe other livestock - sounds as though you had as much to take care of as many farmers who are notoriously overworked. But you have only sufficient garden, fruit, and livestock to supply your family's food.
A farmer, to have been deferred in the draft, and that meant that he was farming on a full-time basis, had to produce a certain amount, according to government rulings. For example if he himself were responsible for 5 milk cows, 60 hogs, 150 hens, and a 6 acre garden, he would be considered sufficiently productive to be deferred. On the same basis, if you were supplying 75% of your family's food - that is, you had 1/3 of an acre for a garden, 2 milk goats, a dozen hens. 100 broilers, 2 pigs, enough fruit trees and berries, you would have about 1/16 of what a farmer needed to win deferment.
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