[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Have You Tried Homesteading?
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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?
Author : Phileosopher
Score : 15 points
Date : 2022-12-26 20:18 UTC (2 hours ago)
| runjake wrote:
| There is a wealth of homesteaders on YouTube who discuss every
| facet of the life and its challenges. They are often frank. Check
| there. That's the best place I've seen. Reddit is decent, too.
| smoldesu wrote:
| If you have any children, I'd highly advise against it. I grew up
| near Detroit before my family moved into the middle of nowhere,
| and living out there was more developmentally stunting than
| anything else in my life. Having nowhere to go and nobody to talk
| to is a pretty huge roadblock for anyone's personal development,
| let alone a child living out their formative years.
|
| Now 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You seem to have come out alright though? But you are on point
| that it can be pretty rough for kids, especially when the
| neighbors are far away or don't have any children in roughly
| the same age bracket.
| smoldesu wrote:
| It just isn't right to make a kid live that way, in my
| opinion. Growing up, you need a strong support group of non-
| family peers to help you through personal and extrapersonal
| struggles. I was lucky enough to attend a public school, if I
| was homeschooled then I may have lost my mind completely. I'd
| spend all my free time reading books and daydreaming before I
| pieced together my first computer.
|
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| There are some degrees to this though: agreed that
| homeschooling is on another level. But plenty of kids live
| in rural environments and come out fine.
|
| 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.
| cpp_frog wrote:
| I grew up in Santiago, Chile, a city with a population of
| 7M and lived and went to school in the very center of it.
| Today I have nothing that resembles a social life and
| school was torture (never bullied, just bored to tears).
| I was only interested in math, programming, machines, and
| infrequently reading literary classics. Did this and
| that, standardized evaluations, even represented my
| country at international math contests. Good grades but
| hated every minute of school.
|
| 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 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.
| moistly wrote:
| My experience of rural life in north-central BC says that
| the kids mostly don't come out fine. The people living
| out there by and large have rejected society. Child abuse
| was rampant. A kid in my elementary class slept with farm
| animals to stay warm because the family was too poor to
| afford electric. Another was raising her siblings because
| her parent would fuck off for weeks at a time. Poverty,
| malnutrition, sexual abuse, abandonment, beatings,
| untreated injuries & illnesses, my classroom had it all.
|
| 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.
| HN_is_for_gemes wrote:
| I've done it three times. Once on Three acres, then with my wife
| on 80 acres and now we have downsized to 2 acres.
|
| 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.
| codingdave wrote:
| It doesn't have to be like that. I've done it on 6 acres on the
| edge of a town, 3 minutes from groceries, all my kids walked to
| school. You also don't have to do livestock - you can just grow
| plants. "Homesteading" does not have to be "farm life". There
| are huge middle grounds.
|
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Indeed. It think a lot of people romanticize this sort of thing
| without actually looking at it clearly. But props to the OP for
| at least asking.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I've lived on St. Josephs Island, Canada for a couple of years.
| The biggest downside for me was how much time was spent shoveling
| snow every year, if I were to do something like that ever again
| I'd do it in a place where the climate does not eat up half your
| time or so.
|
| 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.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| _Have You Tried Homesteading?_
|
| 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.
| Phileosopher wrote:
| For me, it's a conflation of goals:
|
| 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.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| _I was very fortunate to marry someone who thinks the same
| way._
|
| 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.
| UI_at_80x24 wrote:
| You will learn more about yourself if you try. Why live with
| self-imposed limits?
|
| 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.
| rcarr wrote:
| Give it ten to twenty years for large battery storage to get
| cheap, solar panels prices to drop even further, online education
| options to get better and high quality satellite internet to
| become prolific and I think you'll see more and more people opt
| for this kind of lifestyle. You'll most likely get more and more
| pre fab kits and shipping container style homes you can just slot
| together and drop anywhere. It would also be a rational response
| if the insanely high house price inflation/insanely low wage
| inflation trajectory continues.
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