I visit internet farming lists, to learn about rural living from farmers. I dream of buying a communal farm well away from the city. Also, I repeat what the country cousins tell me to my City cousins hoping they'll join me in an exodus one day. There are two schools of very negative thought about country living. One comes from in-the-know COUNTRY people who say it's murderously hard. Then, there are the rumors that city people spread which keep them from moving to the country, which is that country living is murderously hard.
RUMOR #1.) The reason life is hard far from the city is that ranches and farms simply don't make money. They cost an arm and a leg. They're a money pit.
When asked, 'what about this?, TIV the farmer replies: "Farms do cost their owners lot's of money, yes, but that is not the biggest problem with a "communal" farm. Mismatched people fled screaming from Biosphere 2 experiment, and they weren't stuck with having to pay off the mortgage with others on board. A group mortgage is doomed to be problematic. Out in the sticks, even the best online business can have dry months. Say JIM doesn't have his five hundred, ya gonna toss him in to the woods for the bears and wolves to eat?
So I tell the city folks, pair yourself up in a compatible manner, no helter skelter dry wallet roomies on a farm. Maybe try farming in the city for a while, with a roomie or two to test their temper and wallet.
The house I used to live in when I was smack in the middle of the city had a large yard to grow food and a small fruit orchards. I had a single hen for eggs. I grew vegetables and fruits but on 5,000 square feet of land, that couldn't make me money. I may have gotten a summer's worth of zucchini out of the yard, all the salad I could eat, mulberries one month a year but there was no extra.
I put in a peach tree, nectarine, avocado, fig ) but then I got evicted by ignoring the landlady's whims, (STOP growing pumpkins, corn, morninglories as they TRAIL OR TOWER around and STOP feeding the feral cats on our entire street. My luck, she'd drive up while I was putting pieplates of food out!) So I moved. I unplanted everything except one Santa Rosa Plum tree that got too big, and moved it and the soil to a house with a nice landlord and got a lot of nectarines and apricots and peaches each year.
When I moved, I found that in JANUARY one could lift all the young fruit trees and move the dormant bare root trees to a new house. This second property was even farther from the city, twice as big, twice as cheap. All but one tree survived. This new house is generous chunk of land, enough to take me a good year to landscape, ---FOODSCAPE I mean! But in return this land will give me all the food I need in a year. A single chicken, who lays very well, gives me all the protein I need and I'm crazy about eggs. All I have to buy at store is milk, bacon, sugar, coffee and soap and toilet paper. The rest I can grow. Purslane grows all over the curbs here. More than I can eat.
I'm still in the city but on the very edge of it, on a home property with slightly larger yard than I found in L.A. or even Van Nuys. Here, at the very edge of the population center, the lots are much larger. 150 x 300. I can grow all my food needs on such a lot, and do so all year round (as I'm in no-freeze zone, California.) In another state, I'd probably have to learn to can or make preserves but here I can eat fresh food year 'round.
I have peaches growing here, oranges, mulberries, avocado, lemon, nectarines, artichokes, salad and all the trimmings. My loyal hen Puck Puck also gives me enough manure for all the plants. I food scaped about a third of it in the 2 months I've been here. The old house in Van Nuys, closer to center city, took me two months to foodscape entirely, so thickly that I couldn't get a single tomato plant into any cranny of the garden. It was too small, being 50 x 150. I ran out of space for the things I could do. What a drag.
This larger lot gave me near food self sufficiency for five or six years, but then the fruit trees got big and I realized I hadn't left one spot bare. I had a jungle. Great when it's hot. You spray every leaft up to 30 feet high, and it chills the house like a refrigeration grid. But not a space here for a tomato or zucchini plant!
So a 5 acre piece might give self sufficiency and maybe a surplus to sell. This might contribute to its own rent or housepayment. Nothing wrong with that.
BENEFITS: ORGANIC FOOD, HIGH MINERALS and EXERCISE! There are many collateral benefits. When you garden daily, you save on a gym. You're very fit. If you garden with a cartwheel hat on so skin doesn't burn and I always do! And I basted two potholders onto the fabric of my trousers over my knees so I'd never be afraid to kneel and use a trowel. And I keep gloves near so I'm never afraid to get my hands into alkaline soil. So the allegation that a garden is a useless money pit is way OFF! It's a health pit!
MINERALS: Organic vegies have up to 14 times the mineral as shop bought. No toxic poisons which STEINMAN's POISONS IN OUR FOODS will reveal are on everything.
RUMOR 2.) The work is horrendous, many
hours a day. And it takes tractors and other expensive equipment.
I go to my knowledgeable old time Farmer, "What
about the RUMOR that farm work is really beyond what humans today can do?
Isn't the work horrendous? Doesn't it take tractors and other expensive
equipment?" My old timer replies: Not if you do it right. Look up no-till
farm subjects, starting with Manusoba Fukuaka's book "One Straw Revolution".
Read lots of Permaculture books. And don't just farm all day. It's the
21st century. Start an internet business that provides you with cash."
I thought about that. If one runs a home office and can work two hours a day and pay the rent, and do so over the internet, as most of us do, one can do that desk work at night perhaps, and garden by day. The time you spend in growing your own food is about the same as going shopping at a market and going to the gym for a work-out. And I love working in the garden whereas Gym workouts are deadly boring. You can combine both in farming. And look at the old TIME losers you used to endure, 2 hours of freeway commute, and demons around you at the office for 8 hrs a day.
In comparison, life on the farm is bucolic. And conceivably, I could grow enough to make a living off my work. Now, I only have a quarter acre, but if I had 5 acres as I plan one day, I would plow the land with an old fashioned plow and a mule. I happen to be descended from the first muleskinner or mule breeder in the state of california, woman by the name of Dona Josefa. And if I had a larger piece of land than I now do, just give me a mule and an old fashioned PLOW that can duplicate what a roto tiller does, I'd probably do five acres in a few days, maybe a week. Who needs tractors? ANY physical work is good for you. BAD is sitting in front of a VGA or RCA all day, mouse or clicker in hand. Mules are endearing. I'd love to plow a few days each season with such a wonderful animal.
3.) RUMOR # 3 They say that in the state of California, water is very expensive. All farmers go broke.
Tiv says "you can dig a well, have a solar well, be off the grid, self sufficienct". I've seen what that looks like. My pal Brad Draper the male nurse built his own house 5 miles away from Sta Fe, where water is free (it's not inside Santa Fe, there H20's not free and your use is closely measured, monitored.) Brad built his own home on top of a mountain, in a little fertile valley up there. He has an electric sump pump out back, a well must have been drilled for it. Couldn't look down it though. He had an outhouse and in the house, has a beautiful bathroom shower he tiled by himself, and a washer/dryer. He does have electricity provided by the city. No generator, but he could have opted for a home generator in addition. He has poultry pens and I don't know how, but has the gumption to kill his friend the Turkey every November. It's not something I could do.
But the rumor that I heard goes: You can have a well, but it's not free in California. If you dig a well they throw a METER on that and clock your use and you pay for it. When I heard this, I went into stunned shock. I slunk away saying "I'll tell my Homesteaders' List. See what they say." I have only just begun researching this. My country pals with wells don't pay anybody for the water. I guess you have to check the laws in the region in which you live. If any of you have knowledge on clocking wells, get back to me on this.
A list member answered: "I hear from an ex farmer pal who had 700 acres that citrus took (meaning citrus will drink up) 48 inches of water annually. This year, a huge rain year, they had only 30.' Average is 22 inches. So you'd have to pay for all that water and earn it back selling oranges."
That put me to thinking. See, I don't know. I'm still researching this. Friends tell me they don't pay for water in their wells, in other states. Maybe California is the wrong state to try self-sufficiency farming in. On House and Garden Channel, they did a show on two guys who used all house waste water for the garden. Laundry, toilets, bath, dishes. It is obviously do-able. So I put a hose in my bathtub, ran the end out the window, and now I empty the bath tub with gravity!
The old timer on the list writes: True you can use waste water for crops but you can also dig a well, have a solar well, be off the grid, self sufficient even in California." Another lister stubbornly maintained "No, if you dig a well they throw a METER on that and clock your use and you pay for it. And if you dig a well water may be hundreds of feet deep, that's very costly to get to. Also imagine that you can pay the several thousand dollars and it is all yours, that's only until your neighbor digs one and sucks the aquifer dry with his jacuzzi, orchard irrigation and dishwasher." Well, that means the answer is, get an acre and grow for your own family."
But here's where I had some insider info: After all, at the Homesteaders' List I'd read alot about rain barrels as rain catchers. And they'd posted tales of pigs being used to tromp out a private lake, which could catch all the irrigation water you could need, --- their hooves and considerable weight tromping a clay floor lining the bed of one's own, personal lake so you could catch rain water and even grow tilapia fish.
My list pals were surprised that I, a city girl,
could even engage them as far as I DID. But I lost the discussion, when
it came to pig care, pig diseases and the high cost of pig feed but hell,
it's only the Millenium. I may get real knowledgeable about pigs in the
next century.