Homestead-Based Income Key to Success

Reader Contribution by Staff
Published on May 21, 2012

I had the good fortune to meet a young man who recently moved from the city to a country property not far from me. He bought 100 acres of decent land and he’s been bouncing technical ideas off me about building and growing things. One thing that didn’t come up spontaneously is economics, and that’s why I raised the topic with this guy. As a homesteader, economics are much more important than I realized when I started out nearly 30 years ago. This same oversight is one reason I regularly see new homesteaders fall into a sad scenario that often goes remarkably like this:
a) Visionary person comes to the country wanting to be part of a good and natural lifestyle.

b) Person has plans for pursuing small-scale agriculture as means of making the modest amount of money they figure is necessary for purchased essentials (i.e. a little bit of fuel, a bottle of Tylenol now and then, tools for the self-sufficient lifestyle, property taxes, etc).

c) Person under-estimates the amount of money required to meet their expectations, while also over-estimating the earnings they expect to come from a small-scale, agriculture-based business.

d) Economic realities (i.e. poverty) force the person to take some basic, off-homestead job “temporarily” – a job that’s typically incompatible with the ideals that brought them to the country in the first place. This temporary job also takes up all the time, energy and enthusiasm available most days.

e) Two or three or four years down the road, the visionary person runs out of enthusiasm and goes back to the city because their life is consumed by a basic, off-homestead job and bears virtually no resemblance to the homestead lifestyle they set out to create. As noble and necessary as all legitimate occupations are, few of them mesh well with homesteading. In fact, a homestead situation is a definite drawback when you’ve got to travel away from it regularly to earn money.

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