Ask HN: Have You Tried Homesteading?
I've been kicking around the idea of living comparatively off-grid for a while, and my family is on board with the idea.
Have you ever done this, or started researching into it? With a steady-enough income stream via remote work and reliable internet, is a "fully remote" existence a good idea?
Or are there downsides to the approach? I'm not exactly a "hang out with people" type, and I'm racking my brain trying to talk myself out of the thought, but every risk seems to come with opportunities. Am I missing something?
42 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 54.2 ms ] threadNow that I'm more traveled I can understand the appeal of settling down away from everything, but I'm not sure if I can recommend it long-term. Maybe try moving out to a smaller town or village and seeing how that suits you.
My point isn't to dramatize all this, just to highlight that you should probably prioritize the wellbeing of your children if you have any. Homesteading is great when you've seen the world and want to relax in satisfaction from your detatchment to society. It's the worst thing in the world when you're a curious child oblivious to reality.
I think the biggest question is whether or not there is a sufficiently large base of other kids living nearby and whether or not kids can safely get around.
Cities have their own trade-offs and I'm not quite sure what the best spot is to raise kids after having seen a large range of options, all I see is a mixture of drawbacks and benefits for each.
Right now I live in a 40k people town near a major city. This seems to be a nice optimum: have the big city when you want it, but much better quality of life and more space. I'm not sure my kids would benefit from living more rural or more in a city, but if that changes we'll be happy to move to maximize their chances.
This, coupled with high prices for owning a house and crime in a dense city has prompted me to daydream everyday about going to the country and building my house. Even so far as entertaining the idea of becoming part of a religious group. Maybe someone needs to ground me? But every reason people mention (working hard, social life, school) doesn't change my mind, which worries me since it shows my bias might be too strong. I haven't mentioned the religious thing to my parents who are both atheists, they'll think I'm crazy.
EDIT: Teachers assigned fucking Hunger Games as reading, and people still do triangle similarity and solving second degree equations well into HS. I wish was homeschooled.
As for religious communities: be careful what you wish for.
That's the biggest issue with it, very few people doing it are trained teachers.
Source: my wife wanted to homeschool, I gave it my best, realised we were failing our children.
Most adults who fuck off into the hinterland are not well-functioning, responsible, productive people.
Your 40k town and “sufficiently large base of other kids” do not describe rural living IMO.
I did not mean to imply that it did.
From Megapolis -> Large City -> City -> Town -> Small town -> Rural -> Isolated
Is an enormous scale in experiences. My estimate is that the edges are the extremes in terms of downsides, which is why I ended up in 'Town' with my children. I've personally experienced all of the above (but, not all as a child though I can see just fine as an adult) and would not want to go near those extremes with children because I do not think I would be doing them a favor. Town and small town with a big city nearby are - from my perception - the optimum and anything else is more downsides than upsides as a kid.
> Most adults who fuck off into the hinterland are not well-functioning, responsible, productive people.
Yes, that goes for the majority. But I've also seen some awesome parents in locations like that, but that's a huge roll of the dice and still does nothing to change your surroundings.
The other thing to consider is what type of life you are really signing up for. It sounds romantic, but it isn’t all it is cracked up to be. You can live in a rural area and have a small garden without going full homestead lifestyle.
I could talk ALL DAY about the +/- but youll never know till you do it.
Can you pull a dead fetus out of a sick goat at 3am in the middle of winter? I have. Can you load a full size pig with an injured back foot into the back of a truck, probably not but I've done that too.
Do you like living around animals that could kill you if you look at them wrong? A bull is absolutely nothing to fuck with. Do you want to be 15-30 minutes away from the closest gas/food/hospital?
I say do it but to be honest, most people can't, won't and don't want to even HEAR about the realities of farm life let alone do it themselves.
That being said, no matter where you land, it will be work. Probably more than people think. The weather will dictate what you do. And for the first couple years as you build skills, tools, and infrastructure, your "free" food will be the most expensive food you've ever had.
Is it really homesteading if you can walk to a grocery store?
I'm not sure that the labels matter. Different people make different choices in what they choose to grow, raise, buy, or barter. At the end of the day, many people produce some of their own food, and that is a good thing whether it is a hobby farm, a homestead, or a garden box on an urban apartment balcony.
Farmers primarily farm for other people, and live off the money they they make from doing it. Their goods are grown/raised specifically to be converted into money. That money is the commodity that the household lives off of.
With this in mind, let's look at the difference between hobby farming and homesteading, which is solely what I was doing in my original comment:
Hobby farmers farm for their enjoyment, and not strictly for a living (except in the case of petting zoos, etc, but that is far and away from commodity farming), and require groceries to maintain themselves. The key is the word "hobby" in the title. It's not commercial, and it is not their primary way of survival. What they grow/raise is for the hobby aspect, and any commodity aspect is extra - something additional. It's the difference between a professional and a hobby skier. One skis for fun. The other skis for money. One can become the other, but the difference between them is still pretty clear.
Homesteaders literally live off the land, off the grid, etc., and thereby are differentiated from hobby farmers. They grow food for their own consumption. Only excess is traded, and it is nearly never a commercial venture. If we had to cram in the ski metaphor, then to a homesteader, skiing becomes a form of transportation. And just the same, skiing could get you to your neighbor's farm efficiently, but you could also do it as a hobby. Oh, there's that word again! But surely you see the difference now. Intent and purpose have everything to do with the difference.
There is cross over between homesteading and hobby farming, but they are not the same thing. This is precisely what I said in my previous comment. There was nothing mentioned in any way about profession commodity farming. You pulled that one out of nowhere.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Pearl
Okay, eggs and milk are from animals, but they are not meat, at least.
Yes and no. I am not entirely off grid. I have surprisingly reliable electricity and even have fiber internet thanks to a government grant. My goal was not to homestead but rather I have goals that require a rural property where building codes are not highly restrictive and where I can have enough land to be off grid if it came to that. So my goal was not to homestead but rather to be independent and some day have a large steel barn that will have climate controlled space for chickens and enough land for solar panels, horses, chickens, maybe an insulated geo-thermal greenhouse. My to-do list is rather long and finding resources locally even for materials is problematic. I will likely have to ship in materials from several hours away. I am retired and take care of both domestic and wild animals because that is what I enjoy doing. If I depended on this for money it would be much more stressful. If making a living off this was my goal then my preference would be to raise show/racing horses as they can potentially sell for a lot of money, downside being I would have to not get attached to them.
So I guess I would ask what your end-goals are and if homesteading helps you reach those goals. Are you the self sufficient type, meaning you can fix most things that are critical to you? I ask because in some or most rural areas there may be small businesses that can fix some things but you may find that many of them are faking it to make it so to speak.
I'm not exactly a "hang out with people" type
That's not required however being able to socialize at least a little bit with your neighbors can be very important when moving to a very rural area, especially if you do plan to go entirely off grid. A network of neighbors can be very important when bad things happen or even when you or they have tools and/or equipment that the other does not have.
Is homesteading the goal or the tool to achieve your goals? Are you perhaps looking for more isolation from big cities? If isolation is the goal you actually have more options and should research what locations made proper use of their government grants for internet.
1. I'm a formerly reckless guy in my mid-30's, and I've wanted to try it for about a decade or so, so it seems like a challenging adventure.
2. My hobbies and interests seem to constantly preoccupy with survival and understanding how the world works. I did a stint WWOOFing, and found it extremely enriching.
3. Suburbia and urban living really rub me the wrong way. I like to fix and work with things more than "trust experts". I was very fortunate to marry someone who thinks the same way.
4. In a political sense (i.e., "people power"), I anticipate that if this goes well I can build a small town someday. My wife jokes it as a "tech commune", but I'm still hammering out details on what it'd take.
I guess it's my own "mid-life crisis", where I realize that I'm significantly better at understanding and fixing everything than winning friends and influencing people.
Edit: I keep forgetting that formatting thing where 2 line breaks is a paragraph break on HN.
That is incredible. I mean, seriously that is probably the best thing going for you.
I anticipate that if this goes well I can build a small town someday.
Well that is quite a large project. That's a bit bigger than homesteading. There are videos on Youtube of people building out small ISP's and showing all the challenges they had. I wish you luck on your project. I can envision the obstacles you will face but it sounds like you are the right person to do it and being on HN I can only assume you will research every step of the way to avoid the money pits and mazes of regulations. I hope you make a video log of everything but wait until it is done to publish it to avoid the Youtube griefers and nay-sayers.
Check out Alan, this dude who tried to build his own pico-version of such a vision [1]. He accumulated an insanely-long list of maker skills.
Trying to homestead by yourself is the fastest way to learn and respect our modern world's tech tree's fractal complexity. You quickly learn that you have to build a community and trust experts unless you want to yak shave all day long on endless branches of the tech tree, or you're willing to drop a few centuries down the tech tree.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwievpEnXrE
May I suggest mountaineering, hunting, hiking, or motorcycling instead? They all involve significant amounts of insight and understanding to not die. I've enjoyed them all.
I've also tried living off the grid as much as possible, and, well, it's not practical to be a purist about, not if you want to maintain modern living standards. I mean, you could decide to live like you're settling Nebraska in 1862, but are you willing to put your loved ones in a situation where medical care isn't available?
Anyway, it's very hard work, subsistence farming is literally a full-time job, and it involves a _lot_ of isolation. Some people can go into the bush alone for six months and come out fine, some people lose their shit after a weekend with no company other than themselves. I'm in the latter group (although to be fair, it takes me a week to reach the twitchy stage), and I have no shame in admitting it. We've evolved to be social animals.
Lastly, a reminder that the ol' philosophical father of modern homesteading thought, Henry David Thoreau, wrote Walden while living in a hut 1.5 miles from his family home in Concord.
Make sure you triple-check your bandwidth requirements and options before you bite the bullet.
Try to ease into it. 2-4 days at a time can be a great way to start getting used to the change that would be needed.
As for being 'not the hang out with people' type, beware: your family may be on board with it now, but it looks like you might be the one in their element, and they may not be after a while. And that can get quite tricky, especially for kids when they get a bit older.
Also: go take as advanced a first aid course as you can afford. You don't need to be able to do brain surgery but it helps if you know how to set a broken bone and do a lot of other common things because the nearest ER may well be too far away to be useful.
Other downsides: hauling groceries across any distance requires careful planning, especially if you only plan on doing this once a month or even less frequent, during the Canadian winters we sometimes did for three weeks or longer without free groceries and that can really work against you in many ways so plan your diet well and well in advance to make sure you get enough of everything that your body requires to stay healthy.
For energy I used solar panels (2x8 on trackers, though I would just install them fixed if I did that again) and a small home brew windmill. Between those we very rarely had to back that up with a small generator.
Fresh water came from a well, but it was rather high in sulfur content and that made it smell quite bad, this you may well end up missing as well, clean tapwater is a luxury that you only really come to appreciate when you don't have it.
Assuming you had a source of heat, could you grade where you would normally have to shovel snow for it to melt into cisterns, then run the heat through pipes under those paths/areas?
> ...go take as advanced a first aid course as you can afford...
Stock an appropriate IFAK (military-grade ones are not necessarily what you want [1]) on your person, then appropriately more comprehensive and larger kits in your vehicles and house. And stock vehicle and house consumables and parts that commonly break down; if you think the supply chain is bad now, wait 'til you experience it at the end of a long-ass last-mile segment.
Be prepared to repair and fix everything on your own, as much as possible. This is why many working farms and ranches run extensive workshops.
[1] https://www.primalsurvivor.net/ifak-contents/
Too much surface area. The house was about 350 meters away from the nearest road.
As for workshop: we ended up being the 'go-to' place to fix plenty of stuff while we lived there. Welders, lathes, mill, plasmacutter, not a whole lot you can't fabricate out of metal with gear like that on hand.
I've always wanted to live close to nature. I was burned out with my corporate programming job, and I was dreaming of starting out some life-style businesses/SaaS/ something of that sort. I already had some investments that allowed me to live there without financial stress (i.e. the passive income more than 2x covered my living costs).
I was within walking distance of grocery stores, ~1-2km from downtown.
Did it work? Hell no. The biggest issue was I think that I was single, knew nobody in the area, and basically the time spent with just maintaining the house and the surroundings would take more than half of my energy and time.
5 months out of 12 I had to take care of the fire for heating. The whole garden and vineyard were invaded (still are) by a few species of trees such as black locust, that were growing faster than I could cut them, but also oak, birch, basswood and so on. I had a chainsaw and still couldn't keep up. Even after I had a big stack of dried firewood, I still had to spend 40 minutes every morning with actually setting up the fire in the woodstove and so on. And then the snowfall. It was not like in my grandparents' time, when they occasionally had 50-80cm of snowfall, but if I didn't want to be completely stuck there, I had to shovel a lot. The house was about 3 flights of stairs and about 10 more meters away from the street, so it was a bit of work.
Doing the groceries, while not that far away, less than 2km, the return trip usually meant about 150m of ascending. I didn't use a car at the time, so it was a bit tiring. Cooking also takes a big portion of your time.
Then the house itself. I had to do a lot of repairs as the house had been uninhabited for a few years, after my grandparents passed away. The roof. Humidity problems. I had to do some concrete underfloor, that meant carrying tons of sand and bags of ciment uphill, again really hard tasks.
The house had electricity from the grid, and while all the other amenities were available, I chose not to connect to them. I was using water from a well.
In late summer, autumn, I was picking fruit, making jam, also spending a lot of time with that. I tried my hand with organic agriculture, planted vegetables such as tomatoes, potatoes. But then I had issues with wild boars that would come and ransack a lot of it.
I spent about slightly less than an year there, all in all. Did I accomplish much of my main goal (that is business-wise)? Not really. It was a nice experience that maybe I'll repeat some day, but probably only with a partner so that we can split some tasks, and not be almost completely isolated.
Going there for the purpose of having a really low cost standard of living so that I could focus on my priorities didn't really work, because I had to spend a majority of my time just to live there. I could have invested money to make it easier. There were a lot of things that simply made living there harder than it should have been and could be fixed with some investments. I decided that I would be better off in a bigger city at this point in my life.
This only answers your title. We did move from this to land, which I no longer consider homesteading even though we now have no municipal water/sewerage and more of the above we are now proportionally less productive work to output.
Look for a town/region/community that is properly integrated with broader society and the world. Don't run off and think you have all the answers. Contribute to something that is already okay. There is no perfect - the 'clean and pure' often turn out to be hiding some really grotty things.
All the best.
As far as I can tell from the meandering I've done, good people and more power are a toxic combination. Either the power gets to their head and they stop being good anymore, bad people with less moral failsafes will take over that power, or good people have to sacrifice power to the Great Unknown just to continue surviving. And, eventually, the children of good people aren't automatically good by osmosis, and they're the ones who inherit the throne.
It may be a fantasy wrought by the ending of Robinson Crusoe (which bugged me that he didn't make a sequel), or an over-application of how I found untold freedom when I was a truck driver. Mostly, it's an experiment to see if we can do it, and how far we can go, and I'll keep the apartment manager of the nearest big city on file just in case.
But check out The Swiss Family Robinson. Read both Crusoe and the latter as a kid.
For one, many of the examples in the comments below are really quite extreme! By homesteading folks seem to be implying that you're looking to live in the middle of literal nowhere, alone and surviving off your wits and the grace of god. You can do the homesteading thing in lots of different contexts.
The town I live in is ~1k people on the west coast US, about 2 hours away from a major city and about 10 miles from a small 12k pop city. We've got a nice grocery store about 5 minutes away from where we live, and a few restaurants here and there. It's a very rural farming town, but there are a lot of young people around that live interesting lives. Musicians, artists, etc. Nobody makes a lot of money, but its not a community of dire poverty by any stretch. People just get by with very little, and are conscious of that in a deliberate sort of way.
My next door neighbor (a family of three) catches water via a collection tank that they then filter into a cabin, and during dry spells order extra in. Generally speaking, its more than enough to do dishes, wash laundry, drink and whatever else you might need to do. Electricity-wise they live 95% percent of the time off of three fairly small battery packs that run low-power LED lights that feel as cosy as you could imagine for a small cabin. They have more than enough lighting than they could need. Obviously, no TV or anything like that, but they don't want that. When one of the batteries gets low, they charge it up at work. They live pretty normal lives all said, and you would never guess that they get by on next to nothing.
Another friend lives (mostly) off grid in a small house he built. Put solar in along with a huge battery bank and runs all kinds of appliances from TV to washing machine, to all kinds of power-tools and lights for their house and barn, etc. Water comes from a combination of catchment and a well that his neighbor generously offered to share with him in exchange for some excavator work. He runs a very successful landscaping / earthworks company and again, wouldn't guess for a moment that him and his partner are homesteading.
Yet another completely off-grid friend (with 2 kids, partner) lives in basically the most beautiful house you could imagine, like something straight out of a magazine. He's been working on it (and reworking it) for about 15 years. You walk inside and there's a fancy kitchen, beautiful bathrooms (with composting toilets), three floors, four bedrooms all fully wired, etc, etc. Whole thing is powered by a solar kit purchased from Backwoods Solar for about 15k. He told them what he wanted and they designed it up and shipped it to him for him to assemble, which he did with no specialized knowledge. It was all pretty effortless. He catches water, filters it. Has got a garden with all kinds of fruit trees, a greenhouse, chickens, rabbits for fertilizer. All the basics are covered without too much work required. He owns a happening restaurant in town, kids go to a nice private school, and so on. Again, would never guess they were "homesteaders".
The above examples aren't to say that this kind of living is easy. Each of these friends have serious building skills and were fortunate and wise with their time / money. And in each case they bought bare land (5 to 15 acres) and built things from scratch. So its like, you've got to go into it prepared. But assuming all of the requisites are met, or you're the type of person who is prepared to learn what's necessary, being a homesteader does not mean that you _have_ to live this crazy rugged life. None of the people I listed above do. They put in a lot of upfront work to set their lives up by their design using the skills they had. And now just about every cent that comes into their bank account goes right into savings or other projects / hobbies / businesses that they want to work on. It'...