Plan the Perfect Homestead
(Page 2 of 9)
April/May 2006
Edited by John Stuart, Carol Mack and Megan Phelps
Making Ends Meet
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For many people, the homesteading dream is to buy a few acres and earn a living from their land. There are hundreds of ways to generate income: conventional or organic farming, market gardening, raising seed crops, operating a bed and breakfast, and selling homemade products ranging from goat cheese to hand-crafted furniture. The challenge is to create a stable market for your products or services. Earning a living can be a challenge, no matter how much you economize. Many farm families make it work by having at least one partner hold a traditional job with benefits.
Ed Smith lives in Marshfield, Vt., where he has worked as a carpenter and cabinetmaker, taught college and written a book, The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible. “We grow a lot of our food, cut our own firewood, built all of our buildings ourselves and maintain most of our machines,” he says. “And there is no way we could have done this without some semi-steady outside income.”
Computers and the Internet are making it much easier to work at a traditional job from home, or to market the products your homestead produces online. “In my experience, you need to serve more than the local market if you want to thrive in the country,” says Steve Maxwell, who lives in a stone house he and his wife built by hand on Manitoulin Island in Ontario, Canada.
Maxwell says most rural markets already are saturated with all the goods and services they need, but you can reach larger markets with a Web site, e-mail, phone and fax machine. “Identify some highly valued commodity — either physical or intellectual — that can be easily exported to places where the money exists, then go to it,” Maxwell says. He earns much of his income by writing for woodworking magazines, but he says the possibilities are endless.
Another good example of this homesteading strategy is the business run by David Schafer and Alice Dobbs, who sell grass-fed meat from their farm in northern Missouri. “We had an Internet presence with our meats from the start, and about 25 percent of our business was mail-order,” Schafer says.
Roberta Bailey of Vassalboro, Maine, says another good farming strategy is to sell a variety of products. She earns a large part of her income by working for Fedco Seeds, but she has a variety of profitable homestead enterprises including selling organic fruit and juice from her farm’s orchard; raising seed crops; and selling meat, yarn, felt and high-quality fleece from her flock of sheep. “If one market or crop fails, it is balanced out by another’s success,” Bailey says. “Plus it keeps life interesting.”
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