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?
Ask HN: Did I make a mistake jumping on the homestead bandwagon?
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Re: Ask HN: Did I make a mistake jumping on the homestead bandwagon?
#32I 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.
Re: Ask HN: Did I make a mistake jumping on the homestead bandwagon?
#33As 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.
Re: Ask HN: Did I make a mistake jumping on the homestead bandwagon?
#34There'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.
Re: Ask HN: Did I make a mistake jumping on the homestead bandwagon?
#35> 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.
Re: Ask HN: Did I make a mistake jumping on the homestead bandwagon?
#36Can 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?
Re: Ask HN: Did I make a mistake jumping on the homestead bandwagon?
#37Every 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.
Re: Ask HN: Did I make a mistake jumping on the homestead bandwagon?
#38As 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…
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.
Re: Ask HN: Did I make a mistake jumping on the homestead bandwagon?
#39As 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…
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
Re: Ask HN: Did I make a mistake jumping on the homestead bandwagon?
#40I 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.
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_.