Despite everyone somewhat jumping on the bandwagon of wanting to go off-grid, rural, and become a self-sustaining farmer, you need to understand that the task is not for the faint of heart.
In particular, if you have been a city-boy most of your life, don’t expect to suddenly be able to move to the country, go off-grid and be like little home on the prairie all flowers and daffodils and unicorns.
Farming, regardless of where you are, to a level that actually is able to feed you and your entire family AND earn you some cash for those other “incidentals” that are inevitable in the farming life, is far from easy.
At a minimum, assuming a family of 7, like mine, where the children are all still quite small, you will require:
- Sufficient land to grow a number of different crops
- Sufficient water/irrigation or natural rainfall to water your plants
- A greenhouse of suitable size to grow those foods that are more susceptible to being eaten by bugs and wild animals and produce better results in a protected environment
- A tractor with the various attachments to plough, cut and dig
- If you plan to go off-grid you need a serious solar/battery setup. depending on where you are this will run several thousand euro/dollars/gold coins. At a minimum here in Italy it would be 30k Euro, but 50k euro would be better. Even then if you get snow in winter (we do), it will not be enough to run everything you ideally want to run, so prioritising becomes important.
- Wood-heated stoves to warm the house and water too in winter
- Wind turbines tend to break and not be anywhere as efficient as you hope
- Permits/Bureaucracy/Taxes/Regulations be sure what these are before you even buy the property. Sometimes there are legal ways to do what you want despite initial setbacks. sometimes there aren’t. That might not matter in a SHTF situation, but until you’re actually fighting off hordes of zombies, it does matter and can cost you dearly to fall foul of it.
- You will also need an array of tools and tool storage solutions that will cost you a further several thousands at a minimum and many several thousands if you go full “apocalypse warehouse”
- Your income will be very different from what you are used to, and in the best case, dependent on things like: The weather. Chemtrails. Your ability to purchase a bunch of things, from petrol to fertilisers. And possibly, all the way to Laser-fires from above, or, immigrant petrol-lit ones if you are in a place that some government pedovore fancies you should not be in.
And that’s just the material/practical side of things.
There are some intangibles that are also very important to consider:
- Your wife/children may not be ready or willing to undergo the rather extreme shift in lifestyle from “I’ll have my latte Venti with Vanilla extract, a Peruvian berry and a unicorn fart on the foam, thanks” to “You wanna eat? Clean out the chicken-shit from the coop, collect the eggs, water the goats and then make breakfast. I have to feed the chickens, feed the goats, fix the fencing, trim the brambles around the fruit trees and butcher the pig. I’ll be in for breakfast soon.”
- They may also find the remoteness hard (at least at first), and if they are not helped to appreciate nature, farming itself, hunting, building and fixing things and so on, they may well resent you and, like many farmer’s children from all the ages, run off to the glitzy city lights you just escaped from. The difference being that back then the city lights offered a real job and still some semblance of a life. Today, the glitzy lights represent the beams of the operating theatre where they operate on your genitals to make you “more real than a real woman” while telling you that the plastic cheese is good for you while you work in a cubicle farm and are hooked up to a VR headset for 3D masturbation in the 3 hours before you pass out in a glycemic coma; before you are woken by a snort of cocaine and do it all again the next day. And the next. And the next.
- There are no days off. Pretty much ever. The up side is also that there are no set alarm times to get up, although, necessity sees to it that most farmers rise early and go to bed early. I am a crap farmer, because my natural inclination is to be a hunter/scout, so I tend to rise later and go to bed never, but that’s not the way of the farmer, trust me.
- The income you can make from selling produce as a small farm is not a lot. You really need to organise yourself to do that if that is your idea. Personally, misanthropic as I am, I am not too inclined to do that, but it is an inevitable need if your farm becomes your sole way to earn a living.
- Farm animals stink. Chickens stink. Pigs really stink. Goats stink. Cows stink. And they all shit. A lot. All the time. The up side is that if you have raised 5 kids from birth, you are mostly used to the stink already. Being regularly sprayed with snot, vomit, liquid shit, piss, undefinable sticky substances from their grubby little hands, and having the occasional dead bug or small animal brought indoors, somewhat hardens you to the farming life. Even so, your wife may occasionally miss wearing long, flowing, colourful dresses, high heels and smelling of jasmine and morning dew. Try to cheer her up by reminding her that if the farm animals escape, there can be early morning runs in underwear and farming boots, where the freezing dew will mix naturally with the sweat and adrenaline pheromones.
- This may depend a bit on where you are, but the vast expanses of Earth that are covered in greenery, have bugs. Lots, and lots, and lots of bugs. If you are like me and grew up in that environment, you may find the bugs, the scorpions, the snakes, mice, random little animals cool to see or even study. If you are a city girl, you might freak out every 5 minutes and feel like Dresden in WW2 being dive-bombed by mosquitoes, gnats, and other fiery-biting things.
- Injuries. Just like you cannot do martial arts without getting some, it is quite likely that you and yours will suffer some injuries. If you are smart, careful, and go about things intelligently, these should mostly be limited to cuts, scrapes, thorns, twisting an ankle or pulling a muscle or ten. If you are an unsafe idiot, it can mean your death, or worse, that of one of your children or wife. I have worked as an armed bodyguard in South Africa, which is basically one of the murder capitals of the world, with a level of death by violent crime that surpasses the war in the baltic states of the 1990s. And has kept this level of homicide steady for some 30 years, year on year now. I have also done martial arts for over four decades. And I consider farming, especially on hilly, uneven ground that has not been well-maintained, to be more dangerous than either of those endeavours.
- Sometimes you will simply need other people to help you. Be they friends or paid workers, especially while setting things up (which is also when you will make the most mistakes). Some jobs can’t be done alone, and some jobs really need an expert guy who has done that most of his life to come help you and show you how it’s done.
- Community. Wherever you are, as a farmer, you will need to be a good neighbour and rely on them too. This is not optional. Every farmer knows this. Which is why farmers are some of my favourite people on Earth, always have been. They are also far more level-headed, salutary and pious than soldiers; though, the two types are not as far apart as you might think. Especially if the soldiers are honest types instead of wound-up toys pumped full of battle drugs and retarded ideology. So… make sure you can get along with the people living near you.
So, know all of that before buying into some online grifter telling you how the “homesteading life” is the easy way to removing yourself from Clown World and be totally trouble free. And while people like Wranglerstar might make their living from their YouTube channel, or others may survive on donations, that is not a model you should base your ultimate survival on. Nor is it one in which most will succeed, either. It can be a side stream of income and it can take off and be great for some, but beware of anyone that tell you that the self-sustainable lifestyle is easily or quickly achieved.
And if you want to multiply those problems by an order of magnitude, then try creating a brand new community of people that all do this together and in harmony.
Believe me, you need God then.
In any case, despite all the above, it looks like soon we will have the first purchase of a home near us by a loyal henchman. May he be the first of many to come.
Oh… one last point… if you ARE prepared to face all that stuff… is it worth it?
Absolutely, yes!
I recommend pasture pigs, like kune kunes, as they don’t smell bad. They smell more like a horse as they eat hay.
Switching to pig slop will likely make them smell bad.
Thanks. But I am really rooting for the hot-war/apocalypse scenario. In that case, I will happily be the Lord protector, muster a few like-minded men to guard the village against intruders, perform forays against enemies and generally man the walls. In exchange, we will draw our allotted food allowance from the hard-working peasants we will protect with our blood.
I have been truly impressed with what Owen Benjamin has done as far as farming, homesteading, raising animals, etc. Between himself, his family and I think some employees, the amount he manages to get done strikes me as very impressive.
Owen is not doing anything himself. He has a millionaire’s income, much of it crowdfunded by people who believe him. He has a large staff that takes care of everything and his “homestesding” is a LARP. It’s not anything like actually doing things yourself.
So, no, I am not impressed with anything he has done. I briefly thought he was alright when I first came across him years ago and didn’t know anything about him. I don’t think that now and haven’t for years.
Doing what he has done with his level of passive income and doing a crowdfund that in my opinion is morally dishonest, is really not impressive at all. With that level of resources I’d be half-way to having built an entire village with opportunities for people to actually live in it in properties in their own names.
Part of the reason I wrote the post is exactly because of disingenuous people like Owen.
There is no real farmer on Earth that can stream 4 hours a day every day. It’s all nonsense. And anyone who can afford to pay a small army of workers to so it all for them may well live well, but so what? Anyone can do that with some 30k a month in income, or whatever it is now, but certainly was that or more for years prior to now.
My post points out the realities that people like Owen simply ignore, gloss over, or flat out lie about. And even then, Owen’s place is absolutely not self-sustainable. He’s on the grid and doesn’t produce enough food to feed his family from his own land. Why that is, he only knows. The still being attached to the grid especially is truly baffling.
I know someone that had similar resources and they bought a huge property, got off the grid immediately, with redundancy, set up proper animal pens etc all with hired labour to build solid infrastructure that can eventually be maintained with a minimum of effort once it’s all set up. And by minimum effort I mean still an every day full job for him and his wife but thanks to machinery and fuel reserves on site, probably enough to keep him going a few years even in an apocalypse.
Owen is play-acting and crowdfunding, he’s not farming. Don’t confuse the two.
I definitely respect your perspective on this. To be honest, I have been perplexed by the apparent chasm between what Owen and his family have appeared to be able to do on their own (greenhouses, various animals from chickens to cows, dairy products, fruit trees, etc.) and what I see other solitary families able to achieve on their own. There is certainly nothing wrong with getting help and doing things collectively, but yes, one should be upfront about what level of homesteading and production is achievable as a single family unit vs. using significant levels of outside labor and funding. I have paid enough attention to him to notice the results, but not enough to have an opinion on how he is claiming to have done it. Certainly, other homesteaders such as yourself can offer a reality check on what is within the realm of the realistically achievable for a single family with small children. (Varg Vikernes may be another)
Without any doubt at all, Owen is quite simply pretending.
The idea he grows all his own food is absolute nonsense and if he claims that it’s a flat out lie.
No farmer anywhere can stream 4 hours a day, or whatever it is, have baby soft hands, and supposedly do what he has there himself.
There are plenty of real farmers that laugh at the very idea. And if you do meet a few such actual farmers, after your third or fourth one, you’ll realise not only that Owen is making it up, but that you can actually recognise a real farmer from a fake and gay one.
[…] have written about the realities of farming before in Some Truths About Self-Sustainable Farming which is fundamental reading for anyone thinking about it, and in more general terms also in The […]