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So you’re thinking about living The Natural Life
Or maybe you’ve already taken the plunge.
Either way, it's a great idea with many real benefits like raising a family with plenty of room to play outside, having space to grow your own food, raising animals, and living closer to nature.
Over the past half decade or so, there has been a major shift of people realizing the benefits of moving away from the city to “the country”. Moving out of apartments or suburbs, and finding a house with a couple of acres (or more).
There has even been a renaissance of people “homesteading”. Scroll Instagram and you’ll see accounts showing off their beautiful gardens, perfectly painted bee hives, pigs, chickens, goats, sheep and much more.
For most people, simply finding a nice place to raise a family with a few acres would be just fine. No need to add any extra work to your lives with farming or homesteading.
I recommend learning how to take control of your food chain. Taking a few steps to source your food locally and build a network of local farmers in your area is a great idea for everyone.
If you’re content with simply enjoying your house and land to play and raise a family, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
That’s what we did when we moved out to our current location, it's one of the best decisions we’ve made. In the beginning, we just had a dogs and a cat. Ahh, those days were so simple…😂
But eventually you’ll probably start to realize, like we did, that the land that you own or are planning to own is valuable.
We began to realize, we should utilize our land to produce goods for our family and possibly others, the way God intended.
Here’s an old write up of how we got started.
We added chickens first, these were pretty fun and relatively easy to care for. Goats came next after I built the fences. Then I started taking gardening more seriously and fell in love with growing herbs and vegetables.
I’m still in no way a professional, but gardening is one of the most fulfilling activities I’ve come across. It requires patience and constantly trying different things. But you can see progress quickly and daily. It’s really fun.
I believe that almost every single person who moves to a place with land, eventually begins to come to the same realization that we did.
When you begin your own Natural Life journey (I believe many of you will if you haven’t already) you’ll be faced with thousands of rabbit holes to go down, many decisions to make.
It starts with finding a good piece of land. You may find land that is completely uninhabited, in that case you’ll need to conquer the land (clear it so that you can build/use it)
Then you’ll want to learn about setting up your property and making it usable.
After you’ve gotten your property livable and usable, you can start thinking about different homesteading ideas and systems.
Fair warning to everyone!
After working your ass off for a few years, you’ll probably come to the same question all homesteaders ask “Why am I doing all of this?”
You’ll wonder if you could ever actually make money from your farm efforts. It’s always a dream to get paid for your hard work.
Today I’ll discuss some thoughts you should consider as you begin to go down this giant rabbit hole that I like to call The Natural Life.
Starting The Natural Life Journey
As I mentioned earlier, Instagram and YouTube have popularized the homesteading/farming life. Some of it is accurate, but many accounts don't show you the behind the scenes.
The amount of knowledge, work, and capital required to set up a successful farm can be daunting.
The vast depth of information available for each farm animal, crop, and plant type is almost infinite. Success depends on so many variables, it's extremely easy to get into deep water quickly.
If you’re serious about doing this, you must prepare accordingly.
We have a few friends who recently purchased land and are starting their Natural Life journey.
There are a few issues they are all running into, most of them can be traced back to a few simple bullet points that I’ve came up with.
I'll share them with you so that you don't waste time, money, and heartache.
Lets dive in.
You Need a Plan
A small farm should be approached like a small business. Even if you aren't trying to make money from your farm.
Hint: you shouldn't get into farming strictly to make money. If you have no experience starting from zero, it could take years to become profitable, and it may never happen to be quite honest.
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(now back to the program)
As with any business, farming/homesteading is hard work.
Adding animals, plants, and mother nature to the equation brings another level of uncertainty.
You need a plan.
Before you can make a good plan, you should ask yourself tough questions:
Why are you wanting to get into farming? (good answers are: to learn how to grow your own (chemical free) food, raise animals... (not to make money!)
What are your interests? (good answers are: being outside, working with your hands, building things)
Do you have any transferable experience in any farming ventures? (good answers are: construction, gardening, working with animals, working outside, handy with tools, etc)
What do you want to grow? (crops, fruit trees, animals, honeybees, mushrooms, herbs, or some other venture?)
Do you know anyone in the area doing what you are planning to do? (if not, start looking. Still can't find anyone? Probably not a good idea, might get rugged… you should research more for what other successful farmers are doing in your area.)
How much will it cost to set up? Are you willing to lose all of that invested money (and time)?
Where did you get this idea from? (if it's someone on YouTube doing it in another part of the country, it may not work for you)
Review your answers and ask yourself if this looks like someone who is REALLY interested in becoming a small farmer. Be honest with yourself. Make sure your spouse is on board with your ideas.
If you feel confident in your assesment, it’s time to move further in the journey.
I recommend anyone starting out to go into this with a mindset of taking small baby steps. There’s no need to try to tackle many different projects or add a large number of animals quickly. This is a process, the journey is never “complete”. Take your time and learn to enjoy the ride.
Look at it like a hobby starting out, if it doesn't work, that could mean that it's not a good fit for you. Try something else.
When starting out, it’s important to stay light and easily adaptable until you find something that you're good at, then hit it hard and fast with everything you got!
The goal in this beginning stage is finding something you’re good at. You don’t have to love doing it, you don’t have to be passionate about it. You don't have to be the top 1% farmer with outstanding knowledge and skill.
You just need to be good at it, in order to be successful.
The fastest way to learn farm stuff is hands on experience working closely with a "mentor" in your local area.
YouTube is a powerful resource, but honestly, it can cause you to stumble taking advice from someone who lives in a different region than you.
Nothing beats a local mentor with years of experience that you can call when you need help.
Do Your Research
After you answer the questions above from your list, you should have a few main ideas for what you want to try to do on your farm.
Now it's time to research.
Why?
Most animals require fencing, shelter, water, food, and possibly transportation.
Crops require water, fertilizer, equipment to plant/harvest etc.
The costs are high, cash register will be dinging constantly without a solid plan.
But don't let me scare you!
You don't need millions of dollars to start a small farm, quite the opposite!
Don't go out and spend thousands of dollars starting out on a project you have no experience in.
Do research, find local groups and find someone who is a professional doing what you want to do. Ask them to let you work with them a few days a month to see their operation.
In fact, I wouldn't recommend starting anything for at least one year. Take your time finding locals who are already doing it and learn from them.
If they have a decent sized operation, there is plenty of work that they will gladly let you help with!
This will give you an invaluable depth of knowledge in a relatively short amount of time. High return on investment.
You will know quickly if you're "cut out" for this crazy idea you had with little cost out of your pocket and much less heartache.
Get to Work
By now you know if your idea will work. After working with a pro, if you find out you don't like it, back to the drawing board. Do the same thing for the next idea.
If you found something you are good at you will know without a doubt.
The next step is to build.
By now, you should have a pretty good relationship with your farm buddy. You've been working with him for a while now, so you can take what he's doing and put a few of your own improvements on it.
He can definitely help you get set up on your place, and best of all, he knows all of the tricks, best materials, best deals, etc. He probably has old equipment, animals, or supplies he can sell you to get you started.
Another thing he can help you with that is absolutely priceless, is he can help you set up your place.
One of the hardest things to do when setting up a farm on a fresh piece of land is figuring out where to put everything.
Where will the fences go? Where will you put your gates, your barn, your chicken coop, etc??
Having a real life pro come out to your place and give his advice is a god send.
Now that you know what you're gonna do, and your friend has helped you with the general set up. You can now start a budget.
You can start a cost estimate for materials you need, begin pricing items and even schedule the work for the various projects.
This is where the fun begins... hopefully you'll be doing most of the work yourself.
Sticking to the plan
In your quest for knowledge and information. You're going to come across new ideas and rabbit holes. You'll meet people along the way that seem to have the perfect setup, making loads of cash with seemingly little effort.
It's a psyop!
What you don't see is the amount of work it took for them to get where they are today. And you can't see their balance sheet either, they could be massively in debt. It's not uncommon for large farmers to be running huge debt balances, it's just the nature of the biz.
If you've done adequate research and found something you're good at, stick with the plan.
It’s also important to note that you will run into problems with your family members, especially if they aren't as interested in The Natural Life as you are.
You'll start to get push back from them on investments for your farm venture.
The start up costs are high! Most people just can't see the potential. They see the high cost, and seemingly small returns. They can’t justify the amount of work and sacrifice when it’s so easy to just go to the store and buy fruits and vegetables.
Some family members might want to “see a return” on their “investment.”
The truth is you may not see a return for quite a while. This is where you go back to your plan and remind them (and yourself) of why you're doing this in the first place.
It's tempting to switch to something else when the road gets tough. Honestly, if your plan isn't working out, you may need to make an honest decision on whether you should continue. But don't quit something that other people are telling you "you're really good at this".
Don't chase shiny objects. Don't chase only the things "you'll get a return on" Money will come, if you're good at it
If you developed a good plan and did proper research, this shouldn't be an issue.
Not Factoring in Time
The small farm is exactly like a small business, remember? It's actually harder because you're managing crops or animals and sometimes other employees, and don't forget mother nature. It's going to take time away from your personal life.
Often times, people don't realize the amount of time it takes to keep everything going from day to day.
It all looks good on Instagram, it's all so easy!
Then, when it's time for your two week trip to Hawaii, who's gonna take care of the farm while your gone?
Business trips, kids sports, day job, other businesses all compete with your free time.
This often leads to the farm getting neglected, resulting in poor results.
But again, if you develop a solid plan and did research ahead of time, these issues shouldn't arise. You already knew what you were getting into back at the beginning of your journey!
Make sure you're being honest with yourself about your time commitments when doing your research.
Being Teachable
When you're just starting out in farming with little experience, you need to be easy to teach in order to be successful. Hopefully you found someone who is an expert in the field and are able to get good advice regularly.
Listen to them, don't be hard headed and try to go your own way.
If you're going to be successful, you need to listen to advice from others in the beginning. Sure, at the end of the day, its your farm. You can do whatever you want to do with it.
But you will not be successful going against solid advice coming from someone with local experience.
Another big issue I've seen is people trying to go "completely organic” or “natural". Sure it's great to try to farm or raise animals with limited and minimal chemicals/medicines/etc.
We should all do as much as we can the natural way. But when you’re just starting out, you may need to follow the best practices and use time tested systems until you have enough knowledge to venture into the completely “natural” way of doing it.
When you become experienced your knowlege base has increased so much that you will have enough knowledge to make smart, educated changes to your farming methods to improve on your system.
As mentioned already many times, following what someone recommended on youtube or google SEO articles can lead you to failure very quickly.
For example, I've seen beginners try to to do all sorts of wild stuff. One friend is trying to raise bees without any foundation in the hive frames. The result is a huge mess inside the beehive, with no way to check the health of the bees. Apparently this idea was "the natural way”, but it’s not going to work unfortunately.
This goes for all types of farms. People trying to grow citrus in cold regions, people trying to go completely no-till or strictly raised beds for gardening. The truth is certain regions have conditions that are favorable for one type of system, yet in another region, it's just not viable.
There are thousands of ideas on YouTube, but you have to find something that works, specific to your area!
Starting a small farm is a great idea if you are good at it. I truly belive that small farms are the solution to many of the problems we're facing today like climate change, natural resource shortages, soil depletion, etc. But it's not easy.
You can be successful if you do your homework and stick to the plan, just like everything else in life.
Many lessons in here…
Thanks for reading.
FARMER