Why We Moved to the Country and What We Set Out to
(Page 5 of 7)
March/April 1970
By the Mother Earth News editors
I point this out so you will see that it is entirely possible for you to raise your family's food in your spare time if you go at it efficiently. A garden, hens, broilers, cow or milk goats, bees, etc. sound like an awful lot. Actually, only the variety is impressive - not the quantity.
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Another thing, even though you have only enough poultry to supply your family, you use the most up-to-date, easiest way to take care of it. Then again, you will find this plan broken up by projects so that you add one project at a time and get that working perfectly before undertaking another.
Every so often somebody asks "How much of the Plan should I undertake?"
You yourself will have to decide this. The most difficult job is to get your house, barn, fencing and land ready for efficient operation. But once your place is set to go the actual chore time doesn't take long. A small flock of hens takes about 7 minutes care a day . . . a garden, the biggest and most difficult home food raising project, may take 150 hours a year or so.
Many people moving from the city to the country hesitate to add livestock to their places - because they don't want to be tied down. Livestock, however, can supply 40% of your family's food. Our livestock doesn't tie us down - our neighbors will do chores for us and, of course, we do chores at our neighbors' when they want to go away.
What has amazed us, was how relatively easy and practical it has become in the America of today for the average family with modest income to work out this plan of country living and city job.
No doubt many city families who have considered getting a place "out in the country" where they could live and raise some of their own food, have not done so because they thought it would take too much time and trouble to get back and forth; it would be all hard work and no play; it wouldn't be practical - it would cost more to grow food than to buy it - their chickens would die, the garden wouldn't grow, the bugs and birds would get all the fruit and berries; it would cost too much to get started anyway.
Well, the real reason we have written this Plan is to tell other people that these objections just aren't so. The average family can, today, make the country-living-city-job idea work and they can make it pay.
Some of the reasons why they can make it work today, where they might not have been able to even ten or twenty years ago, are these:
1. There has been a tremendous amount of highway building in the past twenty-five years. Automobiles and busses, plus train service where needed, make it entirely practical for most people to live a considerable distance from their jobs. These same highways and cars have taken the loneliness out o f country living, too.
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