41–50 of 188 posts
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 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?
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 t…
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?
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 b…
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.
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.
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.