Ask HN: Did I make a mistake jumping on the homestead bandwagon? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Did I make a mistake jumping on the homestead bandwagon?

114 pointssigmaprimus182 comments

I made the jump from the "big city" with a good tech job to the homestead a few years ago and have found as much as YouTube and Amazon have provided an incredible amount of information and resources, I find myself questioning my decision.

I am beginning to feel that regardless of modern innovations when push comes to shove...the truth is homesteading requires an almost soul crushing amount of hard work and fortitude for very small gains.

I can't help feel frustrated when I watch my friends in the city enjoy all of the comforts it offers and seemingly pull away from me both financially and socially.

So I am looking for either some hard truths or encouragement regarding this matter.

Please be honest and refrain from judging those who are! I am a big boy and can handle the truth.

Thank You

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Something I've noticed among the "successful" youtube homesteaders is that they almost all invariably have property "in the city" that they rent out (generally unseen, usually unspoken, and always off camera) for significant passive income and treat homesteading like a virtuous hobby. Many of them also have side hustles like giving paid talks on homesteading, renting out "farm experiences", or offering classes on various farming skills etc.

Farmlife is hard as hell and successful farms find ways of leveraging what they grow into hired cheap labor and other efficiencies that takes much of the burden off of the owners. In the case of the popular homesteaders, they don't like to show this much as it takes away from the idyllic lifestyle they are literally making money pushing -- where tilling a field, cutting back brush, or fixing a field drain are 10 second activity clips.

If you want to farm, just go farm, but the homesteading trend in my opinion has smells of a kind of grassroots pyramid scheme where the only way to be successful at it is to bring other people into it.

Any time one is consuming "lifestyle media" where a person is advocating a way of living you have to ask these questions:

1) Are they making a non-trivial amount of money just from the advocacy? Are the living off the farm or off YouTube?

2) What other supports might be invisible? Do they have family money? Do they have a cadre of volunteers?

tl, dr; Is this person Talking Their Book?

I've always said, the only people who think farming for a living sounds fun have obviously never farmed. It is more tenable if you have income sources so you aren't depending on farming for your dinner. If you are independent wealthy and can pay others to do all the farming for you, you aren't a farmer, you merely own a farm. It is a tough life. The best part is the half days, just pick any 12 hours you want to work!

Homestead may not work if you depend on your own farm for all of your food needs. However, I feel off grid life with solar, storage, EV etc. combined with a remote job and hopefully cheaper Satellite Internet in the future may work for a lot of people. If I lived in a scenic country I would've at least tried this lifestyle, but may be that is because I am inherently introverted.

I could see myself having some land out in the country. I'd still have a day job but maybe I'd have a small vegetable garden and use the rest of the land for things like hunting, hiking, or 4x4 offroading. I doubt I'd ever want to have a real farm. I grew up with family friends that had horse farms and even though I'd help out occasionally, I knew it was hard work for marginal benefits. They'd make their money boarding horses but even taking care of their own horses and land was a full time job. You had to be good at fixing things yourself or else you'd go broke trying to hire someone to do it.

I think my ideal spot is 10 or 20 acres in the mountains and a small cabin. It would be a place only a couple of hours away from my main home. I'd be able to pack a big cooler and get away for the weekend. Somewhere I can go do my hobbies and maybe pickup a few more. Because I'm not living there constantly, I don't need luxuries like nearby grocery stores or even gigabit internet.

I think you might be missing a lot of the amenities of modern towns/cities. Let’s ignore energy and internet/cell service.

* You’ll want to live close to a grocery store.

* You’ll want to live close to doctors —- not only hospitals and ambulances but also any specialist you or someone in your family mind need.

* You’ll want access to tradesmen/craftsmen. Plumbers, auto mechanics, carpenters, electricians. Things break, can you fix everything?

* You’ll want some degree of liquidity in your property. Selling a house in a town is way easier than selling a house 50 miles from the nearest town.

This exactly. The level of austerity that comes with traditional homesteading can be shocking to most Americans.

There's a reason kids sold their parents farms to Monsanto and moved into the city.

I can't speak to grocery stores or doctors, but the idea that you should be abele to fix everything in your home isn't that far fetched.

Perhaps the modern world has made things appear otherwise but even the most average adult has the capability to do basic vehicle maintenance, plumbing, simple electrical work, basic carpentry and so on. In fact even if you do live in an urban area you might be in for a a bit of regret not learning those skills when you call for a contractor or electrician but no one is available for months due to the ongoing labor shortage.

> but the idea that you should be abele to fix everything in your home isn't that far fetched

> basic vehicle maintenance, plumbing, simple electrical work, basic carpentry and so on

There’s a big gap between simple electrical work, basic plumbing, basic carpentry etc and the full range of issues that can go wrong with a house. At the first sign of a natural gas leak, or any electrical tasks involving high voltages I’m calling a professional.

Make a trip once a week or every other week into town (1hr drive) to pick up groceries.

Doctors, etc. - why do you need to be close? 1-2 hr drive for something so infrequent does not seem to be an issue.

You learn to fix your own stuff.

At least during the pandemic, housing outside of city centers have been in high demand as people seek more land/space.

You seem to be healthy with no chronic issues, which is good to hear. If you become sick or injured, and especially if you or a family member develops certain long term issues, you may need to visit a specialist multiple times a month. Sometimes these specialists are only available in major cities.

fair enough!

At the very least, you will get injured doing farmwork. I don't have statistics on hand, but I'd wager the need for emergency medical support is likely far higher than a white collar office job.

For us, we've decided that we need to be around a fair number of university-educated people (or at least people who are able to think at that level - they don't have to have a degree). So, first, we need at least a town, not to live 40 miles from nowhere. And second, we need that town to be either a college town or the kind of town where people move there after college.

That's just us. You may be different.

The first year living here was definitely a culture shock, I must admit that people in the country do think differently than in the city. I have over time come to appreciate their points of view though and TBH if I was to show them your comment about Uni Educated people they would just smile and say bless their heart!

You make very valid points and I appreciate your input as it echo's many of my issues.

I'm not disagreeing, but having worked for 20+ years now as a web dev, and also on and off on farms (parents, relations, neighbours, friends, and 30 acres behind my house), I'd move to a farming job that offered the same income in a heartbeat, no questions asked.

There is something much more comforting about having worked yourself to physical tiredness and a feeling of having accomplished "something useful" instead of having fried your brain yet again over some bizarre node.js ritual for the benefit of some capitalist ecommerce overlord.

I'm willing to admit that there are fulfilling jobs in software development that aren't directly feeding the capitalist beast, but they seem to be few and far between.

where are you going to get a farming job that pays the same as tech without also feeding the corporate beast?

perhaps if agriculture and food generation was priced more in line with its value to humanity, rather than along the lines of cheapest product wins, there would be more feasible careers in homesteading, simpler lives and farming.

but in a world where NFT based companies are claiming to be worth billions what hope is there of that? :)

NFTs backed by real fungible property. Own not only the picture of the zucchini, but the zucchini itself, which can be transferred or used independently as an asset.

I am joking of course, but stranger things have happened. You can own a farm, but have conveyable mineral rights, and land use rights, that render the whole of the property unusable by the owner.

The same could probably be said for software.

You can't make any money homesteading software either. Get a half rack 22 u servers, install the os (set up a pxe boot server and golden images plus a bootstrap script). Build out your storage, app server database server, load balancer, write your app, get customers, do support, fix bugs, release features.

You could probably break even with a well targeted market and not hire anyone else (maybe keep it in the immediate family) but you're constantly competing against products whose costs are built on economies of scale. Even if your not up against a giant corp, your up against someone with funding that's probably using giant corp tech.

Even if you do use giant corp tech (which isn't a thing you can do with physical land so I didn't factor that in) bootstrapping a boutique software company has some long odds and long hours. Bits tough work to know and do everything. That's why people specialize and companies hire specialists.

I get your point (i think), but people don't need software. Software is great to have and enhances life to no end, but you could live without it. They do need food though.

Why does working to make software pay so much? Yet working to make food pays so little?

Honestly? Because anyone with a strong back can make food but it takes time and education of some sore to make software.

The same could be said with medicine. Everyone needs medicine as much as food but one makes significantly more money.

They exist. I know several small farmers who are HNWIs in the low 8 digits, not counting their real property. I'd say that's comparable to what you'd expect someone in tech to accumulate over around a 30 year career. They achieved that through a combination of savvy, connections, and growing relatively high margin niche crops instead of trying to compete with corporate gigafarms.

But it's extremely hard work, and depending on what one grows, one can expect to have maybe 2 weeks off a year. Nature is a boss that doesn't accept excuses.

This can absolutely be done. But it's hard work and you have to be very self-sufficient. I've done quite well for myself with my farm as a side project but I can weld, program, do HVAC, mechanic work on out machines, pluming and building upkeep. Then you also have to be able to farm, and to top that off, you have to be ready to work when it's time, which is not unlike tech but you also won't have a backup for your oncall rotation.

I spent Christmas afternoon in the snow digging drainage ditches around a new field after a water retention pond burm broke and started washing seed out of the field. Because it was so wet, we couldn't move any machines into the field so myself and father in law dug the basics by hand with shovels around the whole field.

It's not just something you do cause you watched a YouTube video. It takes a certain type of person. It's not unlike bootstraping any other startup.

This is a fair comment and some days I admit I feel the same way.

Tell me though haven't you questioned your choices? When you were repairing the broken machines or digging that ditch on Xmas, doubt never crept in?

I am at the point where I am wondering if the doubtful times are outweighing the joyful ones these days.

But I will admit, I posed the question at a particularly "Whoa Es Me" time, still I understand what your getting at, When the going gets tough...right!?

I wouldn't say that I question my choices. Before going into tech about 10 years ago, I spent 15 years in construction, farming and mechanic type work.

I love welding, (I went to welding school out of high school but decided it would be a better hobby than job).

I love the crops we make. The whole thing started when we couldn't buy what we wanted in the quantity and quality we wanted.

My whole family lives around the farm so while I didn't enjoy digging a ditch on Christmas, I did do it with my father in law, and then we went in and had Christmas dinner and a stiff whisky with the whole family. It's not something I'm doing alone, and lots of it is stuff I love doing.

I'll often stay up till 2AM+ on the weekends just building random shit in the shop and listening to music. I'm working on soil moisture and temperature sensors to put into the fields to target watering and start collecting some data. I'm working on turning one of the old 70s fords into a battery motor, I've got the old tractors all tuned up and running and to me this is my idea of taking a break from my desk.

I'm not sure what to tell you. Have you done farming and gardening and other types of manual labor before? If you wanna hit me up and chat a bit about this I'd love to understand a little more and maybe I have tips or perspective that can help out here.

I think the point here was about preferring one type of work over another, not actually about the income.

Just stick with the garden that is plenty of work, homesteads are highly overrated..

I have read through most of the comments regarding my question. I must admit I was amazed at the number of responses I got, so many I was nervous about reading them, but after a day I have read them and think your comment hits home to my current situation.

I would not say I am independently wealthy but I am not carrying a mortgage or any debt and do have enough squirreled away to last me another two years (Depending on inflation) at which point it will have been 5 years since beginning this venture. I would estimate between the property value, equipment and infrastructure I would have between 400K and 600K USD if I was to sell it all today.

I think part of the reason I asked the question is that I have experienced a grave loss and what used to be a shared dream that two people were working towards, now feels somewhat like an overwhelming task that I now must face alone.

I have decided that I will stick it out for another year and then reevaluate my situation, one good thing about my living situation is there is no outside pressure to change it.

Also I know you were joking about the 12 hour days but truth be told from the time I finish my coffee and get to work till the time I put the last logs on the fire and crawl into bed, it is more like 16 hours and the days only get longer from here. (The animals don't care if I'm discouraged they want their food and water and let me know it, especially the roosters which being someone who never lived on a farm, I thought they only crowed when the sun came up, not two hours before!!)

The successful youtube homesteaders also usually have a good looking woman walking around in not much clothing all the time :-). I always get the feeling that this is just show and that a lot of them have plenty of resources they don't talk about. I wonder how many of them really make a living of homesteading.

One of my favorite YouTube channels is an off-grid homesteader in the UK. I once thought the idea was compelling, but watching the incredible amount of work this guy has put in over many years has discouraged me, as has the toll it took on his body. Plus, he is massively more competent than I am at just about everything: he built a hydraulic post holer and a log miller from scratch, built several buildings, planted thousands of trees, miles of fence, built and installed a hydro-electric system, and so on. And even with all that work, the smallholding isn't self-sustaining—his real income is building hydro-electric systems for other people (and YouTube I suppose).

https://www.youtube.com/c/KrisHarbour

A lot of what these YouTuber's do looks fun as side-projects or hobbies on an on-grid plot of land. The fun gets taken out when you have multiple "must-do" tasks adding up.

Yea, his channel is great. Another one is My Self Reliance ( https://www.youtube.com/c/ShawnJamesMySelfReliance ), located in Canadian forest. The amount of labour required to build cabins, food supplies, etc. is nearly endless. No wonder man evolved to living in tribes and eventually cities -- doing it all by yourself is just absurdly hard.

I'm not saying any of this is bad, but if you have romantic notions about living like this and having lots of free time to pursue frivolous things, you're probably going to be disappointed. Perhaps there is a better point somewhere along the spectrum of Manhattan to solo cabin life in the mountains.

Kris the embodiment of a grafter. He started on that land in a tent, p*ping outdoors. He's in the UK where's it's cold and wet half the year. Yet he got up, every day for years and made the land a bit better.

No way do I have that in me and I doubt most people do either.

> Something I've noticed among the "successful" youtube homesteaders is that they almost all invariably have property "in the city" that they rent out (generally unseen, usually unspoken, and always off camera) for significant passive income and treat homesteading like a virtuous hobby.

Another thing is that the most successful ones are making a bunch of money from their YouTube channels. So how self-sufficient can that path really be? You can't really say "anyone can do this!" if you're relying on hundreds of thousands of subscribers for passive income. This kind of gets at your last point, that it smells like a pyramid scheme.

I think it's best to view most YouTube homesteaders as entertainment, and not take it too seriously as a "how-to" manual. There are other sources for that. Homesteading can be done, of course, but it doesn't look like 30 minute clips.

there are two ways to make money in farming, write a book or scale to thousands of acres.

You guys have talked me out of it... thank you. I have really considered to live in the woods last past few months.

I am by no stretch of the imagination homesteading, but I happen to live on a farm. It is not an active farm - the land is rented out to a nearby farmer and the only animals to be seen are a couple of cats and deer like you wouldn't believe.

Anyway, just keeping what land is not rented out and the buildings from degrading is nigh on a full-time job in itself; trenches need to be dug and maintained, forest kept at bay, houses painted, roofs mended &c.

I've much respect for anyone who decides to give it a go, but I believe your assessment is correct: It is an awful lot of work for little gain but subsistence, not leaving much time or money for other pastimes.

A couple of hundred years ago, the alternative to this back-breaking work might have been starving or succumbing to the elements.

Today, the alternative is just about any paid job, outsourcing all the backbreaking work to other, larger, more efficient units.

For most people, the choice is simple; for other, more adventurous people, trying out the lifestyle is tempting enough to actually go ahead and do it.

You've gone ahead and done it, found it not to be all it was cranked up to be.

Unless you find (or think you will eventually find) comfort and fulfillment in the work in its own right, I'd say cut your losses, find employment somewhere and try to use the lessons learned while homesteading to your advantage in phase II of your career in the big city.

What you said about the work required to keep buildings from degrading and the forest at bay is so true, but it's something you don't realize until you live it.

The other option I've been playing with is to treat homesteading like a hobby. Outsource all the non-core homestead work and insource the gardening, animal husbandry, etc (which is harder to outsource anyway), all while keeping a remote tech job.

I've tried the outsourcing part before. Unless you have fields you can lease out or some other basic need of other farmers, it really doesn't work. Especially today with the shortage of "blue collar" workers. The costs to have someone clear land, dig ponds, run water lines, etc is either too much or you simply can't find someone that's reliable.

I've seen a few folks move from the city in the last 5-10 years and try the "we'll just hire a landscaper to manage the drive way and cut by the trees". It didn't work out well. 10s of 1000s of dollars a year to have someone reliably do it, or they simply couldn't find someone.

-Except the 'remote' part, this is basically what I've done - I work for an engineering company 2.5 miles from home, then tend to the land with my father-in-law on weekends (and evenings if something comes up!)

We grow some fruit and veggies, tinker with the property, trying to improve a little here and there, leaving it in a slightly better state for the next generation (We live here as my wife's family has been living here quite literally since the dark ages; when Columbus wore diapers, my wife's ancestors had already tilled this plot of land for at least a hundred years)

I'd go nuts if it was all I did, though - farming is lonely, hard work. I'd much rather do engineering. Different strokes, &c.

The same can be said of large houses. They look fantastic and wonderful but many people don't think about the scale of maintenance. A smaller/modest house can have it's roof replaced for $4500...that fancy house down the street: $25000 for the low-ball.

Heck most people won't even figure in the extra cost of electricity for a larger home, never mind understanding upkeep is a fairly consistent fixed cost that’s proportional to the size of the home.

Man the cleaning in itself is pretty crazy on big houses..

I can’t for the life of me remember the name but there’s a site that’s kind of a Couch Surfing/Airbnb/Craigslist mashup where people can post a room or a property available in exchange for a certain amount of work each day/week/month. Some people will post a typical home for a week on the condition the occupant feeds and walks the dog while they’re away but a lot of the listings were for rooms on a farm in exchange for a few hours of work each day. I used it once in Spain with a friend and it was a ton of fun. It was really hard work even though I suspect it was “easy” work by farming standards.

Perhaps someone here knows the site and will chime in with the name because if you have a spare room or two and enjoy meeting new people it might be an affordable way to get a bit of help.

https://wwoofusa.org/ ?

Also workaway.info. One summer I participated in two consecutive ones - one in Romania, one in Austria.

You haven’t mentioned why you made the switch. That is potentially the most important factor regarding how to proceed.

For example, if you did it due to an ingrained sense of moral responsibility, your current feelings may be temporary and you’ll get through them if you stick to it or hang out with different friends which align closer to your values.

If you did it because it looked like a fun challenge but ended up being more than you can take, the solution may be to abandon the experiment.

Perhaps it’s a mix of both, in which case maybe you can cut back without doing a complete reversal or hire someone to help with the hardest parts.

You mentioned YouTube and Amazon, but not local people in similar situations. Is there no one geographically close to you, a neighbour with a similar setup, you could talk to?

I long ago decided it's not for me, though I have friends who do it.

If you are going to stick with it, I get the impression you need a community above all else. Forget youtube, learn from people in person, and share the labour.

If you are motivated by ethical/environmental concerns - there are plenty of other ways to make a positive difference to the world. Some of these are jobs in tech, if you pick carefully. Either in a city, or remote (if you've decided you like country living but not the manual labour).

Or you can go for a hybrid lifestyle - live rurally, grow a little food, also work part time in tech so you can buy more of life's comforts. (or, y'know, other jobs - teach maths? work in tourism? my friends are building a business selling fruit wines).

But yes, I get the impression that fullon homesteading is hard, e.g. at least some WWOOF hosts couldn't survive without the free work of volunteers. Maximum kudos for giving it a go.

I made the jump 8 years and 3 days ago. (In fact, I wrote books about it https://www.amazon.com/Escape-City-1-Travis-Corcoran/dp/B093... and https://www.amazon.com/Escape-City-2-Travis-Corcoran/dp/B093... ).

My first two years were full of buyer's remorse. I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I had expected, the work was very hard, I felt incompetent, I missed my friends back in the metropolitan area, and I missed out on a lot of the food choices.

...but the buyer's remorse passed. Partially this was my preferences changing, partially it was making new friends, partially it was hiring on help to do some tasks (farmhands to install fencing and clear an overgrown pasture, etc.), partially it was acquiring the skills and equipment that made work easier, and finally it was cutting back on the task list.

I'd be happy to share more thoughts if you want to go into more details on your thinking.

I have your books on my shelf, very helpful. Thank you for writing them.

Thank you! So kind of you to take the time to say so!

Woah, I had no idea you posted on the Orange Site.

I can also highly recommend tjic's Escape the City. Even if you don't actually homestead, the recipes and tips on workshop/garage organization are fantastic.

And if you like Heinlein mixed with Vinge, Powers of the Earth is also quite good.

LOL, yes.

I'm a coder, ran my own "startups" (small businesses, no VC, no hypergrowth) from 2000 to 2014, my .emacs is thousands of lines long, etc.

TY for the positive reviews of my books!

Thought of you when I saw this post :)

> farmhands to install fencing and clear an overgrown pasture, etc.

farmhands _decrease_ the buyer's remorse?

As someone who grew up on a small farm I have absolutely no interest. It is hard work, all the time, for very little gain. Most small farms barely break even or lose money. You have to love the work. A lot of people do. It is not for me.

Now, do I enjoy nature and want to live away from the city? Yes, yes I do, but I don’t need to homestead to do that.

I feel more or less the same I think. However, if the income was the same as with a tech job, I'd go back to it in a heartbeat. Sitting on my ass all day in front of a screen is soul destroying in many ways - I'd much rather be out doing something in the garden :)

Not sure there's much to add. Economies of scale, specialisation and technological innovation are probably three of the oldest and most fundamental concepts in economics.

It's the difference between one layman person spending an hour to bake a single bread by hand on a wood stove, and ten persons each operating a part of a machine in a factory that spits out 8000 breads per 8-hour shift.

You can try to replicate factory-style production in your homestead somewhat and get decent productivity numbers. But you'd need to do this for bread, and cheese, and clothes. You simply can't specialise nor get the right scale nor make the necessary capital expenditures across multiple product categories for that to work.

Homesteading thereby really means accepting that your productivity is a small fraction of that of modern life.

Of course you can trade and obtain most of the things you don't produce like any other person on the planet. But what you're trading in the end is your time, and its value is measured in productivity. If you sell an hour of your time but only produce 1 loaf of bread, and you're competing in a marketplace with agents whose productivity is 100 loafs of bread, your purchasing power is very weak, and the prices of everything measured against your own labour-time will be exorbitant.

Of course you can also say you don't homestead but instead simply live in a rural area, in isolation, working a modern remote job (e.g. in tech). That'd work fine, but it's probably not defined as homesteading. But it's a modus that probably works better for you: enjoy the closeness to nature, enjoy agricultural activities as much as you enjoy it as a hobby, live relatively simply and without many expenses and luxuries, and work only a few hours in tech to sustain this cheaper lifestyle.

The hard truth is that farming/homesteading is difficult, dangerous work which is even more difficult if you’re doing it cut off from a community. You have to be doing it for your own satisfaction rather than anything else, as the glory days of homesteading were almost 150 years ago in America.

Cities work great for many people, there’s no denying that. The main question should be what works for you, rather than anything else.

I am of the generation of "back to the landers" that did what you are you doing back in the 70s and 80s of the last century. My wife and I moved to bare land, built a house (well, in fact, we moved an old one room school house onto the property and renovated it - eventually it was a fully modern home, although it took 15 years to get the indoor plumbing installed), and have raised large gardens, kept animals, heated with wood, and over the years built and maintained all the infrastructure of a small farm. We raised and home-schooled two children on the farm as well. Since none of this paid for itself or the many things we consume that cannot be produced on the farm, let alone for things like the children's and my wife's college education, I remained employed off the farm the whole time, in a career in technology that eventually put over 2 million miles on my frequent flyer card. I retired recently from my final position as CTO of a top-ranked hospital-clinic and research organization. (I have worked at least 50% from home for the last 25 years).

I would offer you three take-aways from this experience: First, it is an incredible amount of work. I didn't, and don't, mind that, since the work I do on the farm is 95% recreation for me. Doing it with and for my family has been fulfilling and satisfying. But I did not come to this life from an urban life, nor from a one rich in pure leisure time or activity. I grew up on a primitive (for the time) farm/ranch, and did not want to leave that life. I am also an intensely introverted personality. It has been much harder for my wife, who did come to it from an urban existence. In most ways she has thrived, but she would not recommend the life to her own children, or to others.

Second, you can homestead and be engaged in an outside, even highly demanding, technical career. But those are absolutely the only two things you'll do with your life and time if you expect to do both at all well.

Third, it takes a team. I could not have done it by myself.

Maybe what you're really looking for is small town, semi-rural living rather than homesteading?

I don't much like living in cities, but homesteading is a bit of an extreme reaction to it. What brings me tranquility is the ability to be among nature, to be able to talk to my neighbours and get to know them in a friendly way, then come home to most mod cons, and do what I'm reasonably good at - work a tech job - remotely, in comfort. Every now and again I need to go into the city to the office, but those occasional office days become fun, and I can often combine them with going shopping or seeing some entertainment.

If I feel like it I can go get a taste of some 'self reliance' DIY work, but I'm not ultimately required to do it - I can just get someone in and pay them to do the work.

What was it that attracted you to homesteading exactly?

The natural state of man is poverty. It is trade and specialization, division of labor, that allows people to have enough to eat, be comfortable, and have some time in which to do things other than trying to survive.

The prosperous homesteaders on YouTube make their money off of YouTube.

I would view a comfortable life in the country as a luxury. You finance the luxury with a lucrative, specialized job/business that only takes a small portion of your time.

George W. Bush famously liked to spend time on his ranch with a chainsaw clearing brush. Clearing brush, like blacksmithing, woodworking, fly fishing or homesteading, can be a fun way to spend time. But generally these are luxuries that have to be financed with work. Bush could not have survived by trading in his job or business for clearing brush.

I'm a full time Iowa farmer. And not an "alternative" farmer, a John Deere & rows of corn type.

Unless you have:

A) an existing land base big enough to support you (in my area, that might be 500+ acres) and the knowledge and equipment to farm it,

B) a niche market for a rare farm product that you can charge exorbitant prices for, or

C) preexisting wealth (which can maybe get you item A),

you're not going to get ahead financially by homesteading. The business model just doesn't pencil out. Doubly so for any sort of animal agriculture. The market (both inputs and outputs) is driven by commercial farms, and you're trying to compete with that market from a wildly disadvantaged starting position.

Homesteaders I know also tend to be rather unfocused in their plans. They want to grow 15 different kinds of food, build everything they need from scratch, learn how to do a dozen different jobs, and take care of all the various maintenance around it all. That's fun when it's a hobby, but exhausting when you're trying to make a living off of it. And ultimately the work you're doing for yourself and the money your saving are usually the equivalent of minimum-wage-type jobs; having a basement full of home-canned garden produce is a point of pride, but it's not like the price of grocery store frozen peas was making up a significant fraction of your monthly spending beforehand.

There's a couple of things at play here.

You mention friends pulling away financially and socially. Speaking to finances, "Keeping up with the Joneses" is hard to do if you're measuring yourself against a peer group that has not much in common any longer. Socially, it would depend on your group of friends. If you just no longer have time for them, then that's a question of "how much do I value this change in lifestyle versus valuing the friendships I'm going to lose?"

Growing up I lived in a small farming community. My parents had essentially a hobby farm, but we were surrounded mostly by large-scale farmers and the occasional farm that would probably qualify as part of the "homestead" movement these days.

It is hard work and not something I would ever seek to do for myself.

BUT: The one thing I found growing up in that community is that for a specific type of personality, that kind of hard work is its own reward. Patching up fences, being able to "create" a thing (even if it's just growing plants), it's a different kind of reward that for some people seems like plenty.

I think if you find that reward offsets the work you're doing, and you generally find your life to be better for you than before, then I think you made the right choice.

I would also say, the stresses of living on a farm are markedly different than job stresses. Being physically tired at the end of the day but having the mental energy (or hunger at points) to sit down and burn through a good book or documentary is something I actually miss quite a bit.

At the end of the day, if you tried it out and don't like it it's not a failure. You've no doubt learned a lot of valuable skills and those can be handy in unexpected places.

Its only a mistake if you really hate it but stick with it. Otherwise, you learned some things, perhaps in an expensive and difficult way; and now you can go do different things and learn from them.

NFI about "homesteading" but I've lived out in the woods for a very long time, which has had tradeoffs and difficulties. For me "city life" was like wearing an inside out pincushion suit the whole time; irritations everywhere that never went away. Out here I can calm down and pay attention to things and be something other than a hyper-reactive rage monster all the time.

That's worth more than any of the inducements available in other lifestyles, to me.

I've lived a close-to-homestead life for over two decades. It came naturally as the work I wanted to do required me to live in a very rural area. I farmed as a kid, on a production row-crop farm, but this is wildly different.

The main thing people on the internet leave off is that you have to a) be okay with isolation/alone time, and b) you will work every day of your life.

We set out to make a plot that is as self-sufficient as possible (internet, water, and about 1/4 of our electricity come from the grid still, all other inputs are from our land). It took most of the two decades to get to a point where we can breathe. That doesn't mean 'not work' that means that we aren't doing backbreaking labor as much anymore.

It's the call of the pastoral. People have such rose-tinted glasses about the past and how people lived then. It was hard, dirty, and short.

If you don't find pleasure in the work itself, for the sake of itself, maybe consider a change. That doesn't make you a failure, it makes you practical. Learning is part of it. I learned that I like working with my hands more than I like working in an office. I also learned that it doesn't pay the bills.

If you're different, you're different. So what?

That being said, if it's just the social aspect, find people around you to do things with. We share labor with our neighbors. It's nice because it provides much needed help with the work, and it provides a social aspect. But one thing that holds true, is that, if you are in a really rural area, people tend toward being alone. That's why they live there.

Could you provide a description of what you mean by 'homesteading'? Are we talking buy a small farm and try to live off grid?

First time I've heard this term as well.

It's a fairly popular trend now, doing exactly what OP said. It usually involves buying a few acres and trying to be self-sufficient. Of course there's a subreddit for it https://www.reddit.com/r/homestead/

It has been popular for a long time. Internet has made concept exposure & social networking easier. My parents did it as hobby and crisis management; two generations further back my relatives were living it in earnest as norm for immigrants and descendants.

The traditional definition of homestead is an isolated farmhouse or ranch house. Typically refers to the residence on remote land for farming or ranching purposes. I'm not sure if it is the same reference in this context.

If you're not American, a homestead is more or less the same thing as a smallholding.

Optimally, it's obtaining a sufficient plot of bare land and building a roughly self-sufficient complex thereon (home, barn, workshop, garden, orchard, fuel/power, pond, robust kitchen, storage, and/or etc). One may buy a property already with any degree thereof, focus on operational near-self-sufficiency.

This is particularly ingrained in American culture as we're a very few generations away from such lifestyle being normal during expansion across an undeveloped continent.

We’re planning to buy 10-20 acres about 30 minutes outside the city, have a few animals, have a large garden (0.5 acres probably), but I intend to keep my job. Our goal is to produce something instead of only consume, reduce our dependence on a supply chain that we think is untenable, and be able to grow most of our own food should we need to. We’re going to focus on growing food that’s easy to grow. I expect this will be work, but not a soul crushing amount. Is it possible that doing something like I’ve described would be a “best of both worlds” thing, or worst?

That is a good middle ground, but be ready to drive for SO MUCH more of your life. I grew up this way, and now, live in a city, where I'm engrossed in my whole life, except my job is 30 minutes away, out into the country. 1. You'll be shocked how much planning it takes to accomplish any little task. You'll need to plan days or weeks in advance in order to not forget to get little items that will keep your progress going. And the planning ahead and covering contingencies also gets expensive. 2. As much as it makes sense, it will be also somewhat exhausting to work a whole day, and then have to make 3 stops in town for provisions before getting to go home. Keep that in mind too. 3. Cheers! Weigh these cons, and if they're not bigger than your pros, then find joy in what you've picked. Make some of driving prayer time. Buy a jeep to love time on the road. Gain confidence and self appreciation for the planning and consciousness you're capable of when you're calculating and covering contingences. Nothing is perfect, only good.

My job is remote so no commute, and we plan to homeschool. We’re going to start small, like a 10 sq ft garden lol, then get bigger slowly each season so we don’t get overwhelmed. Once we get to a place where enough is enough we’ll stop getting bigger and just maintain. We’d like to eat only our own food but we realize that’s more work than we want, so we’ll supplement with what local farmers are growing and butchering.

This is similar to how I've been living on my homestead for the last 8 years, and I'm enjoying myself.

That seems like a great model for the modern world.

What is the food that's easiest to grow?

Potatoes. They require the least maintenance and if you employ a small greenhouse (really, just a meter high, sticks and plastic sheets as cover) they can be grown all year round, yielding as much as 4 or even 5 harvests, depending on the potato type.

Depends where you are. I like things I can grow vertical to maximize harvest per sq ft - okra and beans have been my most forgiving and pest free.

It depends on the region. I don’t know much yet, but I’d like a lot of perennials that way it’s less to plant every season. But it might be the case that perennials take a lot of work, idk.

Similar. I built “out in the county” and first thing I did was get chickens and make a garden. I didn’t plan on a full farm, but had a picture of raising a few chickens and things for food. The chickens all got sick, were very gross, needed wormer and finally raccoons and possums killed them, despite my best attempt at an enclosed coup. Fun fact- raccoons will just rip off a chickens head and leave it. I did a spreadsheet and each egg cost about 20$

The garden has fared a little better. I’ve lost crops to squash borers and bad blight. I’ve gotten a few things off of it. But not nearly what I’ve spent in dirt, amendments, plants etc.

What I’ve decided is that there is an economy of scale to these things. For all its flaws, factory farming is efficient. Just like factories cranking out widgets are more efficient than a guy carving widgets by hand one by one.

It may be that after several years I get more efficient. Im trying more from seed and seeing what amendments work. But for me, I now garden for fun. I enjoy digging in the dirt and growing things I can eat. It’s a hobby and not something I think makes sense for financial or even environmental reasons.

As a rural dweller(15 miles from the nearest town) the whole homestead(read: (semi)off grid, no prior experience, DIY ALL THE THINGS!) movement to me seems completely stupid. It's encouraging people that have no experience or knowledge to leave the world they know, and enter a world they don't. Then, start that world on extra hard mode, and if they don't do it all they're laughed at. They also neglect to tell folks that it's manual labor, A LOT of manual labor. Not 1 hour at the gym on the treadmill at 4mph labor. Digging holes, carrying feed bags and building fences with every spare moment of the day manual labor. TikTok and youtube leave out the parts where you just got shit on by a cow, ran over by a pig but that doesn't matter the tractor is stuck so you gotta start digging or you'll have no way to get hay into the cows so they'll starve. And at the end of that day you've got to cook your own dinner from ACTUAL ingredients because hello fresh! and uber eats don't exist. It's not a life for folks that don't enjoy. If you don't, leave it, no shame.

Another thing the socials leave out is how damn isolating it is. You're alone buddy. like ALONE ALONE. ever wonder why you see folks stopped on gravel roads chatting for 2 hours? Because they haven't seen another human for a few days or even weeks. Again, living in the country isn't for everyone, and especially hard on people that didn't grow up around that environment or have a skill that helps out here(carpenter, mechanic, etc)

Homesteading and living in the country isn't about following someone else's way. It's about finding your own. Maybe living 20 miles down a gravel road, only using solar panels to heat your tent isn't for you. Maybe living a little outside the burbs, with 2-5 acres and a big garden is your jam.

Adding something to this incase folks are thinking "I can do this...I love manual labor."

You're not alone alone. In some cases you're actively disliked by towns that you'd move into. Sure the stores and such will take your money, but make no mistake you're the city folks moving out to drive up land prices. You will NOT have the network that people that have lived there forever will have. This network is really what makes living extremely rural work. Tree falls on your house? There's no one to call, and if you can get someone out it's going to be 3-5 weeks if they decide to show up. Plumbing or septic breaks? Electric doesn't work? Truck breaks down at home? I really hope you're handy, because you're waiting and paying way more than you'd expect to have someone work on it. Want to buy some cows or pigs? You're paying retail because you don't know a guy. It will take you many many years to build this network up because you didn't goto highschool there.

i lucked out, the people where i moved accepted me. I have developed quite a network in 2 years.

But then i am a conservative and a lover of God.

I got people on speed dial to help me out if i need it. For anything. Often for free or in exchange for my skills. I have developed a lot of skills.

The social aspect is key out here. Trying to do it all yourself is a fools errand. Also dont expect things to happen overnight.

Folks underestimate the community aspect of church. It was also key for us in building a network. Met some wonderful friends there that have helped us and we've helped them. Same with my kid's school friends and various other things like the co-op and even the local bars.

It's nothing new

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouvard_et_P%C3%A9cuchet (1881) is a novel about two clerks who move out to the countryside and try to learn how to manage a farm (and other knowledge) and completely fail

even today where knowledge of farming and land maintenance is basically free and available to anyone with a phone, farms fail ALL THE TIME. And not just startup farms, multi-generational farms. I live around a bunch of farmers & ranchers, I don't know a single one without a side gig or 8(more towards the 8).

My personal ranch is just a money pit. It's my hobby, it makes a little bit of money but it would never be sustainable. People with much less debt than me and a whole lot more land & equipment are in the same boat.

i agree, dont expect to make a living at it.

I hadn’t realized that homesteading was a tread. I can see the undercurrent in current culture to want more space and be outside more with being cooped up more these days (yes, we could just go outside more). Personally, 2-5 acres sounds amazing. My wood shop is threatening to outgrow the garage and a proper barn/outbuilding would be nice.

Very much agree though I don’t think you need to be farming/ranching in all cases. At least if you’re 20-40 miles from a city/good sized town that’s a resource point.

Having said that, my family about that distance out from the city are increasingly precarious. They’re retired schoolteachers and need at home care. That is probably not the situation to be in so far from the city. One snow storm and the slightest difficulty could be a death sentence.

> I can't help feel frustrated when I watch my friends in the city enjoy all of

> the comforts it offers and seemingly pull away from me both financially and

> socially

If you don't find total value greater than your total losses in the situation, the solution is evident. Make a list, do the math. Revisit it periodically.

Just because you threw time/money at something in the past does not mean you should keeping throwing time/money at it:

* https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/the-sunk-cost-fallacy/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost

Decide whether you're getting any kind of "value" from what you're doing, and take a direction from there. What's done is done, and it shouldn't have any bearing on what to do next.

What did you expect homesteading to be, or to get out of it? People don't do homesteading for the money - it's a lifestyle choice. The very reason many people do it is to escape urban areas, so of course the "comforts" of the city won't be there (that's intentional).

"requires an almost soul crushing amount of hard work"

I consider the work I do, coding for a large organization, to be soul crushing.

It's all about what you want and your perspective. If you want social status, money, and city life, then it sounds like you've already figured out that homesteading is not for you.

I think hackernews is the wrong audience to ask this question. Reading all the comments I didn’t see any other “homesteaders” or those that had tried it. You might try looking into the “back to the land” movements from the 70s. They reduced the soul crushing labor, kept socializing, and saved money by setting up communes.

However overall, it seems like your current situation is not meeting your expectations financially and socially. If you write down what you expected and what you got, maybe you can see where your assumptions were invalid and can decide to adjust your plan from there.

Its seems to me you need to decide what your values and priorities are. If you decided to homestead expecting to keep on pace with contemporary values such as wealth and social status then you made the wrong choice. The choice to largely leave society and attempt what you have is one often made in spite of contemporary values. Its a choice to leave them behind and adopt new values. Subsistence can be enough, if you decide it is. On the other hand if you haven't made those value changes in step with your lifestyle changes you will fail and likely grow depressed.

I have flirted with the idea of homesteading, but I always felt a hybrid approach would be a better way of doing things. You are on HN, so I assume you have some kind of tech knowledge.

Perhaps it's too late for you, but this is my plan, and maybe this will give you some ideas is

- Continue working my regular job remotely (money stability, not going all in, can use money to deal with problems on the homestead side)

- Plant fruit trees (low maintenance, high yield once they are established | fruit/lemons)

- Have chickens and maybe rabbits (low maintenance, have to feed them and that's mostly it | eggs/meat)

- Bees (low maintenance | honey)

- Plant a garden during spring with things I like

In essence I think that going full time self-sufficient farmer is a cool sounding idea, but that's not what I want to be dedicating my time on. I rather be less dependent on others, but knowing that I won't be mining for iron to make my own tools.

So my suggestion would be, pull back a bit, it's obvious you are not enjoying it. Find a job you like that is remote. Remove high maintenance things, focus on low maintenance or enjoyable homesteading things. Then you can add something "harder" once you are used to the current workload. Or make enough money to hire someone to do the things you hate...

I moved out to a farm in 2003, before YouTube, and grew about 90% of what we ate. We had goats for milk, rabbits, ducks, turkeys for meat, sheep for wool, etc.

We'd still go to the grocery store 1/mo to get toilet paper, etc. We still had commercial power, cars, full time tech jobs, a mortgate, some form of internet....not sure it qualifies as homesteading, but it was my time on a farm.

Yes it's a lot of work, I'd get up at 5:30 to milk the goats, and again at 6pm I'd have to be home to milk. Barns are constant work in the quiet time, and the "garden" uses up all other time in spring through fall. We didn't take a vacation for ~4 years, and then found someone who would help care for the farm and finally got a break.

All the while we worked tech job, me at a 6 person company. The experience was pretty amazing....so I don't regret that. The pay was horrible, even by standards back then. And my opportunities even worse, I was hours from Chicago so could not commute. And there was nothing else nearby, so I was hand cuffed to that job. When 2009 came by and the job ended as the economy tanked we sold the farm and moved to somewhere with a choice of jobs.

Why did we go to the farm? In our 20s we saw it was a chance to buy a house, land, and see how feed really grows. In this case we succeeded.

But the opportunity cost was huge, we could have taken jobs at the to-be FANGs back in the bay area we left. We could have paid that outrageous some of 500k or 600k for a house in Sunnyvale. We could have spent 6 years in our late 20s or 30s earning 3-4x the salary and having it grow, etc.

But hindsight is 20/20. Who would have expected the FANGs to be so successful after the .com bubble burst? Houses in the South Bay to appreciate so much? Well a lot of people by not me. ;)

Was it a mistake? I dunno.

Imagine you make a comfortable living at a tech job. Now imagine you find out all your co-workers make three times as much as you. Feels bad, doesn't it? But you felt comfortable before.

I'd recommend a middle path. Homestead, but adopt some modern conveniences where it makes your life comfortable. Reject the things that would just lead to more difficulty, expense, complication. Then disconnect from your friends for a while and see if you don't start to feel good about your life again.

Personally, the more I'm out in nature and just comfortable enough, the more I think everyone else is crazy for living in cities. It's really beautiful and quiet and interesting out here. And I really appreciate every little advantage I have. Just being able to lie in my bed, snug and cozy, with a glass of wine, some mushroom risotto, a movie on the laptop, and the whole world outside just quiet and blanketed in pristine snow ... How could anyone ask for more?

Are you able to be in a community of other farmers or just going it alone?

It reminds me of the Amish / Pennsylvania Dutch for example. So much of their relationships are built around community, asking for help, and relying on your neighbor.

It provides purpose, support, and makes otherwise impossible things easy (e.g. barn-raising.)

Can you elaborate on the soul crushing work for little gains?

You can live rurally and not “homestead” in the sense that you can import many (not all) of the conveniences that city dwellers have.

Perhaps some of the work you find most soul crushing can be outsourced or mechanized.

Do you find any of the positives that you expected when setting out, or did those turn out to be mirages?

> I can't help feel frustrated when I watch my friends in the city enjoy all of the comforts it offers and seemingly pull away from me both financially and socially.

I think the keyword here is "comforts". If we are honest in our world today, it is comfort and convenience that, while we crave them, are, for the most part, causing us grief in terms of environmental, political, cultural and economic impact. So while I understand your reticence and reluctance to forge onward, I do applaud your willingness to journey down this path in the first place.

To my mind, this is an opportunity to re-calibrate your system of values in such a way that homesteading becomes a way to reintegrate yourself with the natural world without trying to dominate it. In doing so, you need not necessarily adhere to an ascetic approach to homesteading, but work to achieve a balanced and fulfilling approach.

Have you considered that perhaps your value system is conflicted?

You say your friends are moving from you financially and socially. Did you move to the country for financial and social gain?

Or did you move to gain greater control of your life, be in nature, grow your own food - ie live a more human and less constrained existence?

I had a large property which I then put goats on, and having the goats was a highlight of my life. Sadly, they were a tragedy as well. Both of the boys got block urethras and the girl was a feisty liability (I was the only one that could interact with her before she got aggressive and started fighting people).

I have a lot of respect for people that do homesteading, but it requires making hard decisions if you involve animals.

I was gardening as well, and I love the hands in soil. However, it is back-breaking work for marginal gains.

The only thing I do recommend is finding a balance between what you desire in life versus what others are doing. Comparison is really the thief of joy. If you can find meaning in the labor, then it is great. As hard as it was to take care of two sick goats for years, it was meaningful.

What is the hardwork you are having to do? Will you have to keep doing it forever or it's just until you settle? Also if it's something you didn't use to do (like cooking??) maybe you get better/becomes easier in time. Maybe ask some homesteaders about it.

It's not clear, but did you expect to keep your financial and social status while homesteading?

If yes, I think it was a mistake.

For me homesteading would be a way of escaping the rat race and doing something meaningful. I wouldn't expect to get much money out of it nor any social standing.

I think financially it would be very difficult - you'd likely need to produce some sort of artisanal good that appeals to people. Socially speaking, I think Americans have a revere for a sort of Libertarian Little House on the Prairie ideal where you can go out and build a farm all on your own and make your way in the world. I certainly have a lot of respect for that myself (knowing I'd be very hard pressed to pull it off myself) so it might be good to talk about at least.

I actually have a friend who went and joined some sort of co-op farm situation where she farmed an acre of land for nearly a year. I don't know all the details but it definitely had a sort of homesteader vibe from what I know - this reminds me that I should ask her more about it sometime.

I had the pleasure of living on a farm, while freelancing, where my girlfriend was a cheesemaker.

The farm was amazing: hundreds of well cared-for cows, sheep, and goats. An education program that brought kids around. Rolling hills and a vegetable garden we could not harvest fast enough. A stream we could swim in just outside the backyard.

Working there was hell. Twelve hour days, low pay, no benefits, always covered in shit, piss, blood and every other excrement imaginable. The farm staff turned over every two years, as young people chased the romance of farm work and then spun off, back to a job and a city.

A few of the workers I keep tabs on actually went off to start their own farms. But each of them has a partner with a real job and steady income.

It sounds like you romanticized homestead life if you find that lifestyle "soul crushing". As with many things, it's about the journey, not the destination.

If you expected to do homesteading stuff for a couple years and then 'retire' in some garden of eden, I suspect you are realizing that will never be the case. The homesteading life (or at least why I chose it myself) is about personal fulfillment in managing the land and animals, the DIY and semi-self-sustainable aspect of it and the freedom that comes with privacy and your own space.

Becoming truly self-sustaining and self-sufficient is incredibly difficult these days. Good luck to you.

https://www.outsideonline.com/culture/love-humor/remote-cabi... has a writer who had a similar experience.

You’ve started to discover a kind of truth. It’s just not the truth you wanted to find. Which is part of what makes truth—deep emotional truth—annoying, and part of why so many of us avoid it as much as we can.

Authors you might want to read here on coming to terms with toil and place and work absolutely include Wendell Berry, who has basically made this his life's work.

Here's the thing....long family history of farming row crops and raising cattle. What is shown on YouTube by these popular channels isn't real life. They don't have the camera strapped to their heads 24/7. They are showing what they know will get them eyeballs....and that's the fantasy world.

You nailed it it is a crap load of hard work. It is soul crushing trying to save a newborn calf and having it die in your arms. Have had it happen numerous times and it does not get any easier. Have seen hundreds of acres of crops destroyed in 30 seconds from a weather event. Stress is real and it sucks.

You weren’t expecting hard work?

I miss hard work. The need to go outside and get things done. My teenage self never would’ve thought I’d be 30 missing old rural Virginia and free lands, while sleeping in an overpriced brick enclosure near DC.

> I can't help feel frustrated when I watch my friends in the city enjoy all of the comforts it offers and seemingly pull away from me both financially and socially.

I'll add this: you could have posted the same comment (minus "in the city") were you living along side them. It's easy to cherry pick your successful friends and compare yourself to them, regardless of your current situation in life.

I would instead compare yourself today to yourself ... 5 years ago. Then consider where you want to be 5 years hence.

Dude, you tried and wasn’t a fit. Just get on with it.

I tried homesteading too. All I ever wanted in life is to have nothing to do all day, and homesteading is the opposite. It's for workaholics, and also for people who love driving.

And I don't think it will help you survive in a collapse. Here's a piece from 2004 that I mirrored on my own website, Urban vs Rural Sustainability by Toby Hemenway: http://ranprieur.com/readings/urbanrural.html

Hey Ran, been reading your site since 2005ish. Since then I went from wanting to be a homeless monk hippy to actually being a semi-retired city dweller.

Thanks for all the insight. I revisit your essays periodically.

It depends on what you are trying to do. Grow all of your food? Go off-grid? Make it your full-time job (i.e. make money from farming)? The more you answer yes to above questions, the harder it will be. Especially the last one: it's very hard to make tech-levels amount of money farming.

I would advise cutting back and building up slowly. Stay on-grid (if possible), buy as much food from the grocery store as needed, keep your job (if possible). Then, if things get easier, slowly ramp up your self-sufficiency.

There seems to be separate things at stake here, though they are not independent. (1) the amount of and 'pleasantness' of the work involved. (2) the basic social consequences. (3) the 'joneses' social consequences. (4) what originally, and what still, motivates you about it. (5) what the alternatives are.

(1) is for you to judge. If you find the amount of work is not rewarding, then you are the source of truth on that. (2) is whether or not you can partake in a social collective of likeminded people doing something similar. If your homestead is isolated, I empathize with this being unfortunate. In my own country, there are rustic collectives (think small villages) that have a great community about being self-sufficient. (3) is a personal thing. Personally, I couldn't care less; part of the appeal is refusing the 'keep up with joneses' threadmill. (4) is the core.. do you still trust your basis for making the choice, and with what you have experienced now, can you find a valid basis to continue on. (5) This "FOMO" bit is split between (2) and (3). The 3-part, you can live without. But if it really is more your (2) - your basic social needs - then of course it's not negotiable.

To sum it up, you need 'your fair share' of a social existence, but I question whether you need the joneses-part of it.

I have in my basement between 30 and 40 mechanical keyboards, and the last 4 or 5 months, I've dreaded ordering anymore, because how many keyboards does a human really need.. Are you missing the basic social community we all crave, or that they are caught up in their modern-forever-busy-for-no-reason lives..

A lot of the appeal of a homestead/van/tiny-home life is learning that you can live with less. We don't need the fancy car, the restaurants, the grocery stores, the movie theaters, the bars, or the modern traps. When I watch a homesteader I'm filled with a bit of relaxation "They can do it so I could too!" "I don't NEED this job!" "If it all falls apart I'll still survive."

But in the end, you are giving up a LOT! We may not NEED it, but we sure WANT it. The hard part is letting go of those attachments. But in the end we need to be realistic with ourselves. Did we give them up because we want to be free? Or are we just chaining ourselves to a new thing that we don't love.

Homesteading is inefficient, dirty, painful, unhealthy, and stressful. Most fail horribly. Even among those in history who were do or die, a lot starved or froze to death trying it. The common factor among those who succeed is planning and MONEY. Most successful farms and homesteads start with huge quantities of money that they bleed profusely in the first couple years before becoming profitable. To succeed without money means hustling for every dollar and working 16 hour days 7 days a week.

I've just read the book:

https://www.ynharari.com/book/sapiens-2/

Which describes the journey of humankind through the ages. The author has an interesting take on farming in general, in that farming led to centuries of misery for most people...and that the time before farming when we were hunter/gatherers was a far better time for individuals. When hunting/gathering, people suffered less from disease (smaller communities = less chance of catching something bad), worked fewer hours in the day, and were not at the mercy so much of climate change - starvation wasn't a thing as your small band of people travelled to places of good resources. Knowledge was key here, knowing which foods you could and couldn't eat, skills in hunting, working as a team.

I'm not sure if it's possible to be a hunter/gatherer in a modern western country? Certainly not in the UK where I live as all land is owned by someone - I suppose you could try and "live off the land" by hunting wild game, fishing, in the US?

All this assumes that you’re in roughly my spot—software engineer who lives on more land than you know what to do with. (We’re on 100 acres, but most of ours, we just rent out to some guys for pasture and hay.)

I wonder if you’re seeing it as a rulebook. YouTube shows you 45 different projects, and so your mind says that you have to do all of them, now.

If food security is your concern, start with something manageable and move on once you’re done. If you want chickens, don’t think at all about goats or cattle. Just build the best darn chicken enclosure you can, raise some hens, and enjoy the eggs. Only once you’re satisfied you can keep that routine do you think about taking the next animal on.

Exhibit B: our temptation was to build a gigantic garden, because we could. That flopped because it’s really hard to weed that when you’ve got a toddler and a baby and a day job. This year? Small garden that we can keep up with.

What’s our agenda this year?

- Cover our cave so we can use it

- Find a place to store firewood to dry it

- Cut a bunch of it

Everything else is a nice to have. I highly doubt you’re depending on this, so don’t make yourself feel guilty just because someone on YouTube is in a season of life where they can do more.

I’m a development manager and divide my time between Washington, DC, where my wife and I own a small rowhouse, and rural southwest Wisconsin, where we own a house on 38 acres, mostly wooded with some meadow. I lived on my grandparents’ farm in Iowa when I was a kid, before my parents transitioned away from farming.

We use the WI house for summers and holidays, and it’s 2-3 hours drive from either set of parents. We have a garden, a few gnarly old apple trees, and several small sheds for storing firewood and junk. We also spent 6 months there in 2020, to avoid the initial wave of the pandemic in DC. There are a number of organic farms nearby; we support them, but those folks work -hard- for a pittance. Over 30-40 years they will likely build wealth through farmland, but they’ll lack disposable income.

I’ve thought up all sorts of lame-brained schemes for making money off the WI property, but they’re a lot of work and a pittance compared to career advancement. Gathering walnuts and hickory nuts? Maybe a couple thousand dollars. Logging? A few thousand dollars and the pleasure of heavy equipment coming in, chopping down trees, eroding the soil, and leaving a mess of branches and brush, for a one-time gain. I could rent out my rowhouse for the summer and make just as much money with very little effort.

And even without trying to make money, there’s more than enough work to do on the grounds, and I frankly need to hire some of it out to keep from building up too much deferred maintenance. I would say, enjoy the country, invest in limiting your environmental impact (solar with grid-tie for an EV; good insulation for limiting HVAC), and don’t try to make a living from it if you don’t have to. Additionally, remember that city living, at least in dense walkable cities, is far more sustainable than country living.

> homesteading requires an almost soul crushing amount of hard work and fortitude for very small gains

Disclaimer: I am not a homesteader.

That said, my understanding is if you're going all the way with it, you're basically living as our ancestors did (maybe with some modern conveniences like better housing and tools) which, yes, required a vast amount of hard labor that would be unthinkable to modern minds. They had a couple of advantages that we don't:

1. They had no other choice, so there was no temptation to quit

2. They were raised in that environment so they were conditioned for it

3. They had a community around them that could help when things got tough (this is true of some modern homesteaders, but it sounds like you've been going solo, which frankly is probably a mistake if so)

My recommendation would be to sync up with other homesteaders, specifically in your area, if you haven't already and share war stories and see if maybe they have recommendations for you or if the stuff you found to be soul crushingly hard is just the way it is, and then you can decide whether that's worth it or not to you.

You sound like you already had established skills and experience in a career which helped you achieve a certain level of quality of life. Now it's like you've moved into a different career and you're starting out again with zero skills and zero experience. Think about it like evaluating a career move, not a life choice move, maybe it will be easier to compare that way.

What were you hoping to experience with leaving the city and your social circle?

I'm from a rural area in the mountains of Appalachia, grew up on a farm, and I just recently moved back with a remote job. I have seen at least 4 families move in from places like Florida, Pacific Northwest, and Pennsylvania, to try and attempt "homesteading", to say it's going poorly for them would be an understatement.

I would absolutely not recommend homesteading or owning a farm to anyone because the operation of homesteading or farming is inherently fragile. That means that all your free energy is going to be put into maintaining that fragile system. Let me give an example: Say you move out to a farm and decide to be "off grid" and for you that means you don't want to hook into a power or water. You dig a well, mount some solar panels and hook it all up your household. Now imagine you have some bad weather for a few days can't get a full recharge on your batteries you slowly loose all your power. Now because you have no power you have no water, then you decide to house potable water in a tank so that you don't lose out. That require some maintenance and plumbing knowledge Not only that you decide to buy a generator so that you have a stand by in the case of emergencies. That generator requires service that you may not know how to do and fuel that you have to go to town for, so once again you're taking more and more time and energy just to survive.

If you want to be a part of a rural community I would recommend buying a place with acreage that can still be connected to the grid; power and water preferably but power as a bare minimum. You can still have solar, you can still spread out and have a bit of freedom and you won't be as fragile. If your place has a field or farmable land I would lease it out cheaply to a local farmer. Leasing the farmable land helps the farmer, gives you a connection to the community, and helps maintain the land's current state.

It's not like Stardew Valley.

My granparents were farmers, never had a tractor. When they were 50 they looked like 70. They had no other option.

You have other options.

Maybe what you wanted was a cabin, get away, chop some wood ever once in a while, maybe shoot a deer.

I'm not sure what you are trying to do with Homesteading but there are all sorts of scales but it requires real hard work. Most everyone I know who can do it, inherited it and were raised in it. So that means not having to start fresh. If you don't like fixing things and getting dirty and sore then I'm not sure what you were thinking.

It sounds like you are experiencing FOMO more than anything. Like you were hoping your friends would be so pumped and wanting to come and see the farm all the time and you could show them all the cool stuff, but in reality nobody really gave a shit. Been there.

If your dream is instead a nightmare, then sell it. Presumably the property will go for roughly the same or better and you can get back to a life that doesn't make you feel regret.

It seems you're not enjoying it, cut your losses and end it.

There might even been a decent exit plan...

I'm sure there's many people out there ready to jump onto the homesteading wagon and pick up where this person left off. That is of course if they haven't already done so much that there's nothing interesting left to do.

-You're never done with a farm, it is a constant battle against the elements. (It's just doubly hard if you need to break the land first, making it suitable for farming - but maintaining land comes with its own set of challenges. (I've got approx. .4 sq miles of land to tend to beside my engineering job.)

Just to clarify that I didn't mean all work was done... more that the existing homestead footprint leaves nothing of interest left to do as far as homesteading goes.

But still, it's an important point to drive home to anyone thinking of doing homesteading or farming... you're right, the work is never done, and it's often really hard work.

Might be better to go off and work on a farm or homestead to see what you're in for before committing your life to it.

That seems to be a good exit plan, rent it out to people who wants to try homestead and find out if the hard work will fit their lifestyle or it's for people who wants to experience it and go back to the convenient life of the city.

Yes, it sucks. But the work is wholesome and you can listen to any podcast or audiobook you want when you're mending fences or mucking out stalls. Modernity has its perks, even on the homestead.

> I can't help feel frustrated

In 15 years when Ghawar is solidly declining, and the US shale miracle has long since peaked, and EV market penetration is still less than 10% - when the world finally wakes up to how bad our energy situation is, you'll be happy to be providing for yourself.

> when I watch my friends in the city enjoy all of the comforts it offers

Watch their instagram feeds in 10-15 years. Relish in their food riots and daily rolling brownouts while you post your pastured pork belly and egg breakfasts and 80kWh of off-grid energy collection and storage.

It's a hard life, but it will be worth it in the end.

I requires multiple people to be successful at sustenance. There's a reason humans in history have large groups of families and many children bunched into a community (tribe!) to work together. The same is true today. Everything takes time or money. So if you require more than 24 hours a day and 7 days a week to upkeep and grow your food supply or craft goods -- you need more people working on it or you pay the difference.

Sarah Taber might offer some more context on this too: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/america-loves-the-id...

Every lifestyle has its pros and cons.

It's not the lifestyle's fault if you thought it would be fashionable. Understand this though, that same frustration and regret, folks who move from the suburbs or rural areas into the city feel the exact same thing. I'm speaking from experience. This is why theres such a visceral reaction from people when they hear, "everyone needs to live in the city because it's better". For you, sure. For lots of others, get the fuck off my property because you scared off the birds. They sound better than you. You're blocking my view of the trees too.

Civilization is collapsing. You'll soon be way better off than city folk.

It depends on the size of your property and how much you like gardening I guess. Maybe I am lost in translation but I understand a homestead to be a farm of some kind that is remote of anything else. I do very well believe that to be a lot of work. I would have opted for a smaller village or suburb to have easy access to infrastructure.

If you are not happy, you might want to sell. Are you living alone or with your whole family? There certainly is still a world between homestead and city.

To make a farm work isn't really a side job and it would take a lot of hands.

Same. If anyone wants to buy mine off me and learn this lesson for themselves, drop me a message.

Thought it was going to be a utopian "intentional community", and build all the things I'd been dreaming of from watching YouTube vids. Turns out that the infrastructure you need to even get started with that is in the way. Wish I'd just gone suburban with a nice garage workshop instead. That way I wouldn't have to worry about paving a road or pumping water up to the ridge.

I feel that I am of no great use here, but I wonder if "DIY automation" can help you taking some pressure from you.

It seems like there are lots of interesting projects and ideas out there that can help you with "keeping plants alive", maybe some of these can lift some weight of your shoulders?

Maybe you can automate watering some vegetables by using Arduinos and electronically controlled valves and sth. like that. That could free up time which might improve your quality of life?!?

They were always going to pull away financially and socially, you chose a humble country life and they chose a vibrant city life. The reality of rural life is that it's filled with chores. Chopping wood, stacking logs, running the woodstove, making more of your own meals, DIY fixing: all this is not for everyone.

The other option is that you're comparing your life to others' lives. This usually doesn't end well, you only notice what they have that you don't.

It's very difficult. If you don't LOVE it then don't fight it. If you loved it, you'd know. You might still dislike the amount of work or some of the work itself, but I think you'd know.

The other possibility is that you are re-romanticizing city life. Grass is always greener. Perhaps an extended vacation of a month or two back in the city will give you fresh perspective or the certainty you need.

> The other possibility is that you are re-romanticizing city life. Grass is always greener. Perhaps an extended vacation of a month or two back in the city will give you fresh perspective or the certainty you need.

Like you alluded to, we tend to romanticize what we don't have, but I think the mistake is in attaching too much existential meaning to it, like we might get it wrong and fail to be happy. If you do it earnestly, with intentionality, it'll never be a period of failure if you end up changing your mind. Maybe you eventually find that an occasional trip to the city is all you need to satisfy the city dweller inside you. Or maybe a retreat every year and regular hiking is enough nature to calm the soul.

I can yearn for nature and crave a coffee in the city center all in the same day, I think that's pretty normal. While travelling and deeply immersed in another country, I'll get pangs for home, it doesn't mean I need to get on the first plane home but it doesn't mean I hate travelling either.

There is a bit of a false dichotomy going here anyway, there is a broad range between city life and homesteading, maybe just re-gearing to be somewhere inbetween is a good compromise.

Probably. (source, I grew up a farmer, have a small farm, house in the city, and we have a double tech income)

Farming is hard. It's generally about doing more with less which in the small scale just means grinding it out.

There are two ways to make farming profitable, write a book (or do the homesteader youtube/pateron thing) or scale.

It's really hard to scale on a homestead. You spend all day switching tasks and you can't build machines to mechanize your chores. On our farm we only grow a couple things so we cans work to scale. We have multiple acres of a single crop that produces well for us and has a high sale price. That allows us to build things like bedforming machines, harvesters, processing and storage machines.

But we're not homesteaders. Subsistence farming, even with a modern machine like a tractor is still back breaking thankless work, just like it was 100 years ago. And you're always on, protecting crops, caring for animals, doing the work and it's really inefficient. You have to really love the work if that's what you want to do. Because as a job, it's one of the worst you could pick.

Big boy farmers have scale which allows them to do things like buy crop and livestock insurance, million dollar machines, access the funds from the farm bill through various programs. And it's still brutal work but if done right it can also be pretty lucrative.

There's a reason that farming has mostly been ceded to large corporations, it's hard to do and it's hard to make money without enormous economies of scale. It's easy to dig on giant corporate farms that are cutting corners to make a buck but somewhere along the line, every acre they have is a farm that went bust or just decided they'd be better off with the one time price for the land.

And now you know why.

On the other hand, few things will beat a fresh steak on the day of butcher and a hand grown salad. But you can have that buy living in the city, growing a garden and buying a 1/4 of a cow when it goes to market.

So I don't know if this was helpful, but these are kinda generally accepted truths in the farming community that a lot of people don't really understand because so few people are farmers now. I wish you the best and hope you are able to make the right decision as decide what's next for you.

> the truth is homesteading requires an almost soul crushing amount of hard work and fortitude for very small gains.

Yes, that is correct. Funny how the youtubers forgot to raise this point.

But it is obvious to people who ever tried something simple, even like raising some chickens, planting some corn, etc that to homestead is an unbelievable amount of work.

File this one into the internet fads pushed mostly by people who never tried it.

I grew up spending summers on a farm, and my brother lives on a small acreage raising bees and chickens. I know my limits. Even today, I own 6 fruit trees (plum, apple, asian pear, cherry) on my property and they are a pain. I hired a tree specialist to help me, and my fruit output is terrible. Mostly battling the codling moths.

I do enjoy it when we get some good plums in, though, and for me that's enough.

Heh. My inlaws have a "hobby" farm. It is the worst damn hobby I've ever heard of. It is a ton of goddamn work! And they can never go anywhere because the animals need constant care and feeding. It's expensive and endless tasks to do. They're fulfilled and they like it, but they're also trapped by the farm. I enjoy visiting, but that lifestyle aint for me.

Homesteading is a modern day algo trap. As a concept it's so tantalizing that once you watch one video, the algorithms feed you endless hours of other homesteaders pretending for the cameras, asking you to smash the like and subscribe. It's much like the tiny house movement, or van dwellers, or professional gaming.

Be suspicious of any hobby where there are hoards fat margin advertisers.

My homesteading fantasies were tempered by a real examination of the amount of hard, hard work and time every day that's required. It sounds like you might be happier with a house on a one acre lot within easy driving distance of a city, where you can grow a kitchen garden and maybe keep some chickens. A tech job can afford you that ability. Good luck.

Farming is hard work with little pay. Homesteading is harder with less pay.

If I had to guess, you've never lived much in the country before; even just country living is much different and a significantly different point of reference.

I would say ditch homesteading and try your hand at farming and see where that gets you, if you want to continue. Embrace country social groups.

Subsistence farming. Yeah. Not a smart plan. Truth is independence is impossible. Most subsistence farmers around the world are very poor. Chances are you are doing better so congrats. Its quite common that people who move to the backcountry start missing the social functions of a city. Just come back and you will be a wiser person

In general, people lie (even to themselves) about how awesome homesteading is. They claim to make/save money without accurately counting the costs, for example. They fail to mention the disasters or long painful hours. etc. Lots of people have gotten in way over their heads because of this.

I do think there’s an opportunity for someone to homestead and incorporate modern technology. A lot of homesteaders are focused on doing it the traditional way, but I believe there is a good deal of money to be made from IoT and automation in farming and homesteading.

If you are concerned about comfort, over long term self-reliance, then you should go back to the city.

Comfort is the issue.

Hard times create strong men Strong men create good times Good times create weak men Weak men create hard times

Find the spiritual meaning of your decision. Don't think of it as "work for almost no gain." If you're analyzing homesteading with pure logic, it won't work.

How are we defining “homesteading” here? Are you “hobby farming” or truly off-grid DIYing?

I like the idea of hobby farming. Not enough to pull the trigger yet. No way I’m ever going off-grid by choice.

I grew up on a "hobby homestead", moved there when (as babe-in-arms) my folks faced a massive snowstorm that threatened to cut off natural gas supply, clarifying how utterly dependent they were on the grid/system. Big garden, orchard, wood heat, backup supplies, etc. It was all well-balanced with modern living.

When the "Y2K Bug" was looming, I explained the worst-case possible scenario to Dad (an electrical engineer) regarding worldwide computer system collapse. He listened attentively, understood, and responded "then I'll throw another log on the fire and go back to my book." That's how prepared they were.

The key is embracing homesteading, to whatever degree you choose to take it, as a lifestyle. It's not a hobby. It's not a job. It's what you do, blended with and influencing everything else, 24/7.

I now live in the suburbs, with a bit of forest. Having grown up homesteading, it still influences my thinking, and I'd rather return thereto. Though enjoying modern conveniences & luxuries, everything has an undercurrent of considering "one step simpler". I lament my kids not having the same upbringing, and do try to expose them at least a bit to living off the land.

Analogy: coffee. I have about 20 coffee makers, and several coffee shops nearby. Yes it's nice to pick up a cup (black, dark) for ~$2.50 ready to go. Yes it's nice having pod machines, ~$0.50 for "insert pod, press Go". Yes, I've tried every convenience for coffee. What I normally do, with no angst/struggle regarding the work and convenience of alternatives, is roast the beans myself in small batches, hand-grind, and do a hybrid press/pour-over - nearly every time, for years, despite the time and effort, it's just what I do.

Do realize that your friends are beholden to a system which can collapse, fast and completely. It probably won't ... but the probability isn't zero, isn't trivial, and historically we're rather due for another one. You don't want to spend your life preparing for a worst that doesn't happen, but you certainly can live such that societal problems don't tear you down. You can be ready and financially/socially robust; you just have to decide where your sweet spot in life is, regardless of what 'more' others have (and pay for by 'less' elsewhere).

The hard way isn't for everyone. You either internalize it as simply what you do, regardless of what others enjoy, or you move on to what it is you do, realistically, want to do. You do you, and be realistic about circumstances.

Your assessment is correct. There are just no days off, even if you’re a hobby farmer like me. Nothing wrong with cutting your losses.

Its sort of ridiculous, unless you believe the soviet defectors that say we are headed for a nuclear conflict with Russia-China.

I don't have any advice, but as a person teetering on this decision, thanks for honestly detailing your struggle.

What is homesteading? Never heard of it.

In a nutshell: living "off the grid" and growing your own food. Basically pretending like you're in the 1800's.

Oh shit, going from techie to amish is pretty big leap. I can see how that might be hard to get used to.

The Amish have it easier, as they have an extensive community.

consider if there is a in between option that fits. Off grid but not self sufficient? No animals but huge garden? Try to find the things that do give value to you. If you did the whole thing just to be known as the homesteading guy then be honest with yourself and give it up.

The truth is simply that you do not value the gains sufficiently to make the tradeoffs worthwhile.

Tl;dr, yes.

My parents did this when I was a kid, except they moved deep into the country and not a homestead.

Their motivation was that I had the potential to become a bit of a punk in middle school, and the middle school i would go to in NYC was… not so good. It seemed more affordable and a better life than a private school or moving intra-NYC.

One of my best friends did something similar. I remember his dad saying when we were graduating high school “I built this house looking for a sanctuary, and it turned into a prison.”

I didn’t hate country life, but I never felt like i belonged either. My friends were into hunting, 4-wheelers, etc, and I was not. Most of the people who lived in my town had been there for many generations and had deep ties to the place — the farmer I worked for was like a 7th generation farmer whose deed was signed by a Dutch West India company agent of some sort.

I didn’t have that, and all things considered, I didn’t really belong to that community. I now live in a small city not too far away, but my family is part of that community, which is something my wife and I wanted.

I’d encourage you to look within and figure out what you want. It may or may not be living in the woods, and your feelings right now may not really be about the house.

My parents were part of the "Back to the Land" movement in the 60's. They bought a parcel of land in rural Maine in the late 60's, built a small log cabin, and lived there until the early 80's. No electricity, no phone, no running water (just a dug well; had to break the layer of ice to get water in the winter). Two mile dirt "driveway" out to the nearest town maintained dirt road where other people lived. Had to use a snowmobile to get in and out in the winter and for a month or so in the spring when everything turned to mud, it was nearly impossible to drive anything in and you just had to walk the two miles every time. My older sister was born in the cabin (I came during a hot spell and my mom wanted air conditioning so she made my dad drive her to the hospital to have me). My dad took on occasional part time jobs and seasonal work so they had a little bit of money coming in for gas, store bought ingredients, and property taxes. Otherwise, they were pretty much self-sufficient with a garden and raising animals. Eventually, we had to move closer to civilization so my sister and I could go to school more easily (the home schooling movement hadn't really reached Maine yet and they were starting to threaten us with truancy charges) but I still have a lot of memories of that time. The house we moved to after that had indoor plumbing and electricity and all that, but it was still a rural farm and we still gardened and raised animals for the majority of our food, so even that's probably pretty close to what people are now calling "homesteading".

It's absolutely a ton of hard work and sacrifice and people shouldn't underestimate that. There are aspects of my childhood that are really idyllic and memories that I'm really happy about. But I also remember outhouses (and a honey bucket in the winter), and a never ending series of chores for all of us (weeding, picking rocks out of the garden, harvesting plants, shovelling out stalls, getting up at 5am to go out into the pitch black freezing cold to feed the chickens and fight broody hens to get them off their eggs, chopping and stacking firewood). I've probably got an above average work ethic and ability to grind out hard work without complaining as a result, but experiencing that life also kind of pushed me in the opposite direction. I now live in a city thousands of miles away, work in tech, and while I still love hiking and camping, I absolutely loathe anything to do with gardening, landscaping or outdoor work. I have zero desire to do anything like homesteading myself (though I will admit that I occasionally think about living somewhere that I can have a pet goat. Goats are obnoxious but awesome and I miss them). Something about having to do those kinds of things for survival makes me never want to do them as a hobby.

If you don't like the experience then move back?

There should be no reason why citylife is intrinsically worse, except for the noise and the pollution (car tyres create loads of microparticles).

Agriculture became big business for efficiency reasons, not due to some capitalist plot. Living in the city (if you commute by public transport) is likely more ecological than living in a rural area due to efficiency reasons.

It's nice keep it up

As other have asked, it would be nice to get some clarification a bit on what exactly do you mean by "homesteading?". Did you buy a full blown farm and are now keeping cows? Is there a specific reason you didn't want to move to countryside but still keep your tech-job remotely?

I can share some of my own experience, as I'm a second year bee-keeper and CTO with around 16 years of experience. So I've chosen to share my life between a excellent tech job & a city apartment and a country side house (2 hour drive from my apartment).

We decided to start bee-keeping with my wife two years ago because we both felt the need to be in the nature. And bee-keeping has really been a great choice because it doesn't need your attention 24/7/365. During the ~4 winter months we have here in Estonia, I barely go there, maybe 2-3 times. So I still have the freedom to travel or pursue other hobbies if I'd like to. And during the sprint - summer - autumn, I only need to be there once a week which also isn't a fixed day, so I can play around my work schedule nicely. Sometimes I even go there during workdays and just do some remote work from there, in the middle of the woods where the only sounds you can hear is wind blowing and birds chirping. I'm obviously there a lot more than that, but this is the bare minium, this is the "I HAVE TO" and if the weather sucks or I'm busy otherwise, I don't have to go more than that.

And even though it's sometimes physically hard and tiring, it has had a enormous positive effect on my life. Doing something with your own hands that you can see and touch is a very different kind of happiness than the one my work offers me.

But all this comes with a "but". I mostly grew up on the country side, even more so, I'm actually keeping my bees at my grandmothers house (where she no longer lives due to her age) where I spent most of my summers during childhood. So I knew what was waiting for me regarding up-keeping the house & land.

What I'd suggest is to do the things that make you happy not the things that others are doing. If you don't like the physical work, don't do it. If you'd just like to enjoy nature, just get a cabin the in woods where you can go from time to time.

I'm in a lot better place with my good paying tech job and half-time bee-keeping because I also have the funds to invest into the house & land and make it more livable for the future. If I would have just quit my job and moved there full time, I'd be struggling to make the ends meet, let alone actually build houses there and develop the place for the better.

Tools, resources and materials (wood, metal, sand, gravel etc) and help from professionals all cost money. It's a lot easier to earn that money in tech than with farming. But in case the society as we know it today collapses, I still have the skills, tools and land to live off, but it hasn't yet, so no point in going full off-grid yet.

I just don’t understand why you would ask that question of perfect strangers on Hacker News.

And why would you call homesteading a bandwagon? It’s a major life decision, not a new kind of yoga pants.

It’s very simple, really. Are you happy? Are likely to be happy? No? Then come home Bill Bailey.

> And why would you call homesteading a bandwagon? It’s a major life decision, not a new kind of yoga pants.

This is true, but I understand why OP would say it's a bandwagon. There's been a sharp increase in homesteading as a trend going around Tik Tok, YouTube, etc. People are seemingly more interested in it now.

I want to encourage us to distinguish between something that happens to be trending, and you decide to do it, versus doing something BECAUSE it is trending. Invoking “bandwagon” sounds like you are doing it for FOMO purposes rather than because it is a fit for you.

I think it's the result of being influenced by _youtube_. Are people just more impressionable or is there something different about all this algorithmic, highly personal media? Every kind of bad decision seems to have a youtube/tiktok following, who seem not to understand how "produced" their videos are.

It also seems that OP has done this on their own, without a partner? Makes it an even more terribly lonely path to follow. There's a reason people everywhere get out of subsistence farming as soon as possible: it's _hard_.

TLDR; You can have both, but going full rural homestead is hard.

I have a 2 acre tropical fruit orchard in North Florida with 80+ fruits that don't grow here natively, and I'd like to turn it into a side business eventually, but for now I work at a FAANG remotely and my wife is in management. You don't have to give up your life to dip your feet in. I do have Zillow fantasies about 50 acres in the tropics or 100s of rural acres but I temper that with the loss of quality of life. If I'm going to risk everything and start something of my own, it won't be on farming margins, it'll be chasing tech profits.

My great grandfather homesteaded in Montana and North Dakota, dances with wolves style. He had hundreds of acres and built wealth. This is completely different than Youtube homesteaders who build minifarms on 5-10 acres and open the equivalent of a petting zoo. The land and the work is bondage and you can't free yourself from it unless you hire help to do the work, generate more profit per unit of work than industrial farming, or find a profitable ancillary activity. Here are what I've seen be some of the success scenarios:

1. Market Gardens - Look at Curtis Stone or Jim Kovaleski who make pretty good money farming peoples yards. This route requires selling, entrepreneurship, hard work, lack of flexibility. Curtis now makes money from books/workshops/etc in addition to his farms which he has help for.

2. Agrotourism - Make money off the experience of visiting your farm. You will need to build an experience people will want to visit/pay for, and probably require products to sell, and require a steady supply of wealthy customers (example: https://www.congareeandpenn.com/agritourism).

3. Get Youtube Rich - Make supplementary money from Youtube/Patreon, use it to grow your farm and switch to one of the other activities.

4. Online Sales - Use your internet presence to sell plants, seeds, books, workshops, guides, Amazon affiliate money. Pete Kanaris of GreenDreams (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwgfS1k7n0c) had a homestead and market garden and edible permaculture landscaping business, but has rapidly grown into a major online nursery with tons of employees.

5. Own a Nonprofit/Educational Co-op? - Teach people to farm in exchange for their labor to give you the freedom to remove yourself occasionally. Something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmkgbS8RQ2k maybe.

Additionally, you need to be maximizing the value of every single inch of your land. How much land do you have, what type of environment is it, what growth zone, how are you currently making money, what're you growing, how many helpers do you have, what are your current future goals?

Why do you think everybody lives in cities now?

I can't imagine why anyone would do this other than to escape their role in society.

The homesteading movement is about the very obvious civilization problem that's about to hit.

https://www.cargill.com/story/the-worlds-farmers-are-aging-r...

Nobody wants to be a farmer anymore because of government policies that not only attack farmers, but also spread misinformation against farming.

In the near future, maybe 3-5 years we're going to be forced to spend money as taxpayers to create farmers. The problem is... we've done this before in other industries and it made things worse. There's a 0% chance this will work for farming.

This is set in stone just from a country average. The number of boomer retirees cannot be displaced with workers. Afterall child labour laws etc. Which means we've known about this worker shortage for ~15 years now.

Germany(-4%), Russia(-5%), and South Korea(-6%) are already impacted by this worker shortage. Canada(3%) and Japan(3%) are right on the cusp of starting the problem. The USA, UK, Italy, Spain, France will be a little bit more.

If we do nothing, Germany will be -23%, Russia will be -24%, Canada -11%, South Korea -26%. USA is projected to basically just stave off worker shortage.

You might ask, 'but isnt that happening now' LOL no, not even close. What we need to do, and what Canada is doing. We are basically letting in any immigrants at all. ~400,000 per year. We have a province, PEI which has 140,000 people. We are bringing in multiple provinces worth of people every year to help stave off the worker shortage.

So you know what the homesteading movement is about? It's about creating farmers. You were manipulated.

My recommendation, figure out how to make it easy/automated. Vertical farming, aquaponics, whatever.

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