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
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.
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!!)
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.
https://www.youtube.com/c/KrisHarbour
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.
No way do I have that in me and I doubt most people do either.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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!
farmhands _decrease_ the buyer's remorse?
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.
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.
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 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.