Readit NewsMy 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.
Although I find things like farming and agriculture and outdoors to have a less capitalistic shade and more of a genuine "i want to help people achieve their goals and not die" shade.
I'll be very upfront: homesteading is a money losing proposition. It's a consumption good - it costs more than any (monetary) profit it brings.
And my writing about it is ALSO money losing. I'm a coder. When I write and sell novels, the opportunity cost is huge - at an hourly rate, I lose about 90% of what I could otherwise be making coding.
Writing about homesteading is much better - I only lose about 50% of what I could otherwise be making.
I write because (a) I am more driven to create and share my ideas with people than I am to make a marginal dollar, (b) I am ideologically in favor of people moving to the countryside and living a different lifestyle, so writing is an ideological / political choice.
Interviewing three people is also apparently worth 5K.
And the book's photos are black & white ...
I didn't "need" $90k to write the book.
I chose to sell copies of a book, at typical book prices. Thousands of people chose to buy the book. That's where the $90k number comes from.
> And the book's photos are black & white ...
"The food is terrible...and the portions are so small".
The wonderful thing about the free market is that those who want to buy a thing can, and those who don't, need not.
Cheers!
Thesis proven!
Even if the statistics is accurate.
Even if denying people the right to self-determination is a positive in your ethical system.
Even if X, Y, Z are true... I still have to ask: what about the COST? Pesticides exist because they do something useful - kill off pests. They increase food production and decrease labor.
What if we've saved some lives...but also made 200,000 farmers each spend an extra five hours a week bent over in their fields, picking bugs off leaves? Or made them plant more land in order to harvest the same amount of food?
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!