on the mythical goal of self-sufficiency
our evolving homesteading life
A few months ago, I announced that my husband, Troy, and I were embarking on a little self-imposed challenge of eating solely from our farm for a year. In truth, we’ve been eating mostly from our farm for years, save the little extras we couldn’t grow (vanilla, lemons, anchovies, olives, etc..). Years ago we stopped raising goats, but we could still get good goat milk and meat from a friend. I don’t like meat chickens, but we have another friend that raises them well and we were happy to pay her for what our family ate. That’s changed over the last while. Now I’m happier to just stick with what we have. But, still, what we wanted to do was trim off all of those extras and just make do with what we have. We decided to see if we could go from around 85-90% of what we grow being what fed us to being nourished by the work of our own hands, 100%.
It’s good to challenge ourselves, to evaluate where we are stuck and shine some sunlight on areas that could do with a little growth. It’s easy to get convinced that the comforts we build into our lives are necessities. We wanted to test that with our food. Now, with fall harvest well done and over, we have arrived.
It’s a little anticlimactic to be honest. Nothing much to see yet. No deep seated hankering for a handful of dry cured olives or a piece of my favourite French, raw cheese. There’s still a few scoops of coffee left in the jar so I suspect the reality of life without coffee and working night shifts will soon hit Troy, but other than that, there’s little to say about any big changes to how we’re eating. What I would like to share is how we got to this place of being able to totally feed ourselves and whether or not that’s even a goal worthy of one’s dedication.
For years, people have been returning to the land, looking for their little piece of heaven so they can grow their own gardens and raise a few chickens. Maybe they’re looking to get out of the city and slow down. Maybe they are going for a nuclear fall out shelter and ten years worth of freeze dried food in mylar bags. The motivations are as unique as the people housing them. Videos on YouTube tell you how to get off the grid, how to grow and process everything from tomatoes to wild game, and how to raise pigs on a postage stamp sized lot. “Self sufficiency” - it’s the name of the game.
Only, the longer I live this homesteading life, the more I realize that we are simply not meant to do it all. At least, not alone. The times, they may require it, but traditionally, it wouldn’t have been two or three people, raising all the meat and all the vegetables and all the fruit and working the fields and moving animals and watering and milking and churning and culturing and fermenting and smoking and building structures and cutting wood and milling that wood and slaughtering and butchering and cooking multiple times a day while also helping neighbours and being a good, contributing member of society. It just couldn’t be that way. Communities came together to accomplish tasks. Large families stayed together to accomplish what needed to be done for their survival.
We’ve lost that, mostly. Today, we’re a fractured lot with multiple choices when it comes to how we want to live. Many people living in the country don’t even have a vegetable garden, never mind an entire farm. A lot of farmers focus on one stream of revenue for income, grow a mono-crop of that one thing, and purchase all of their food. It is exceptionally, exceptionally rare for a farm to produce all of the food the farmers need to survive. Even homesteaders very rarely produce all of their own food. I don’t blame them. It’s an enormous amount of work to get to that point. It takes years of learning and failures to just be able to have one ingredient to carry you from harvest to harvest, never mind all of the ingredients.
So, are we self-sufficient because we can feed ourselves and heat ourselves and all that jazz? No, not even close. We use gasoline and buy our underwear and socks. We use tradesmen when we need them and fill our Christmas stockings with things made both by our hands and the hands of others. I’m drinking from a glass water bottle right now that came from a land far away. Even the glass jars I store our homegrown food in and the waxed paper I wrap our meat in comes from factories.
There’s no such thing as self sufficiency. We are all intricately woven into each other. Of course, we can be conscious about our choices and what we support, but there’s no avoiding these things altogether. Even the off grid home our friend lives in needs the wiring and solar panels from China and the converters and the batteries that need updating and then, in the summer, when the system produces too much energy, he runs his air conditioners all day long just to bleed off the extra energy even though, he reports, “I hate air conditioners”. He lives in a modest home on a few hundred acres of land and buys his processed food at the same crappy grocery store everyone else does. He’s completely “off grid”. Is that self sufficient?
When we decided that we wanted to buy some land and farm, it was for a whole host of reasons. At that time, the whole “peak oil” refrain was an ongoing source of angst. We were looking to build security into our tenuous situation of full reliance on others for our food. I had been volunteering on farms while we lived in the city and knew that a return to the country I knew as a child, was a return home. We never did like the busyness of the city. We wanted tranquility and peace. We both came from backgrounds centred around movement and nutrition and we wanted to live lives conducive to the things we valued. We wanted to grow and raise our own food to our standards - no shortcuts, just done as we thought it should be done. We had a hard time buying the type of food we wanted to eat so we figured we better figure out how to grow it and raise it ourselves.
Our goal was never total self sufficiency, not at first. At first, we just wanted to learn what we needed to learn to grow a garden. Then, we had to learn how to preserve the fruits of our labours. When we got chickens and I didn’t like their feed, I had to figure out how we were going to feed them. Every animal and plant came with its own dogma. Piece by piece we dismantled the “have to do it this way” rules and came up with what worked for us. But that took time. It’s still ongoing. Always questioning.
What started off, on our first farm, as a place to raise and sell organic grass fed and finished beef and organic, pastured, heritage breed pork soon fell away when I could no longer stomach loading our animals onto a trailer and bringing them into the abattoir. I remember going into the abattoir one day with a heifer I was having butchered. It was a small abattoir and they moved the animals with patience and care. Still… I always went into the killing room to witness the animal’s death. Shouldn’t we all? I remember her walking into that sterilized, bleach-scented stainless steel room, this regal beast with hooves clicking on concrete, not earth as she had always only known, and I though, “this is perverse”.
We stopped selling grass fed beef.
Where we live there are no mobile, on farm abattoirs so deciding not to use an abattoir meant that we were deciding not to sell our meat. And if we didn’t sell our meat, we were losing the income stream that was supporting our pursuits. And if we couldn’t accept the rules of the system, we had to figure out a way outside of it. I think a lot of people have a romantic idea that they will sell some chicken eggs or some lettuces as a way to support their dreams of living off the land. Perhaps, if you are blessed to have been given some land on a family farm or you have otherwise been well funded in other ways to keep things chugging along, this could work. But in reality, buying a farm or homestead today requires money. Not just for the purchase of it, but for the living of it as well. You will never make money off eggs and zucchini. The inputs are simply too high and the revenue too low.
I could buy all of our food, minus the fruits and vegetables, for cheaper than I can raise it. But I can’t buy the animal foods raised the way we do it, anywhere. There’s no profit in it. The benefits come in the immeasurable things like our health, the health of our animals and land, and the deep connection we have to this piece of the earth that holds and nourishes us all so profoundly.
There’s a reason why even now, on most commercial farms, one of the members of the family needs an off-farm job to keep things going. And that’s a commercial farm with revenue coming in. On a homestead, we are replacing working to pay someone else to feed us with working to feed ourselves. How we work to fund what needs to be paid for can be through income generating projects around the farm or by a job completely separate from the farm. We have generated income through our woodlot, via firewood and milling boards, through meat and other farm food sales, and through selling live animals when we have excess to sell. I’ve sold a few lovely A2/A2 heifers that were raised on their mother’s milk to other small farmers as well. Still, none of that brings us what we need to live off of.
We have property taxes to pay. There’s car insurance and registration, home insurance, energy bills, gas, telephone and internet, animal feed and bedding, infrastructure repairs and builds, equipment and tools, clothing, vehicle and tractor maintenance (one tire on a tractor is well over $1000 now), helping our kids out when e can etc.. And now that our daughter and her family are living in the US, we can include travel costs in that equation. The costs, and the dependence on these things, is evident.
To be truly self-sufficient, we shouldn’t have any of these ties. So, maybe this whole goal of self sufficiency is best left for the hermits in the mountains. Our personal motivation is to live lives as we want to live them. Sovereign lives as best we can. Are there concessions and shortcomings? Of course there are and my guess is there always will be. But year after year, we get better at honing and refining our lives. Isn’t that what it’s supposed to be all about?
It would be possible for my husband to work full time off the farm and make us some really juicy, big dollars. But then, we’re moving further from where we want to be. Trading the lives we want for separation and stuff. Since the time of buying our first farm all those years ago, we have been moving to a place where we can fulfill our goals of living lives outside of the system as much as possible. Back then he had to work full time so I could be home with the kids and slowly chip away at all of the things we needed to acquire just to make homesteading possible. From hand tools to skills, our journey was one we carved out together. We inherited nothing - no skills, no practices, no knowledge. We had to scrape it all together. That, too, is a twisted realty resulting from our culture of separation and laissez-faire attitudes towards tradition and the knowledge of our elders.
After all these years, it’s only now that we’re at the point of Troy being able to work a very pared back schedule. That keeps us now. That keeps us because as the incoming money declined, we adjusted what we thought we needed. We’ve never been very materialistic, but as the years go on, we seem to have developed less and less a tolerance for mass marketed goods. Maybe it’s being nourished by this place, in body and mind and spirit, that the trappings of modernity become ever more clear. If Troy stopped working today would we lose it all? No, but that’s because we have chosen to live without debt. Debt, too, is the farthest thing from self-sufficiency there is. There is no freedom in debt. Debt steals possibilities.
In a couple of years from now, as the infrastructure projects end and the needed tools and fencing are complete, the need for outside work to fund us will fade. But even then, money is required in this life. Will we be able to count on our small pensions and savings? Hard to say, but there is security, or as much as we can claim it to be so in this topsy-turvy world, in the knowledge and skills we have gained. Maybe by then, it will be time to say goodbye to our little slice of heaven, hand it over to the youthful ambition of another, and move onto a place and to a people that, hopefully, remember to ask us what we have learned.
As we are growing this farm I yearn for the community of past. The group of ladies gathering to make sour kraut, the group of men helping to erect structures, the motley crew of children climbing, roaming and making mischief. I often feel quite alone and brainstorm ways to devise this community. Is it even possible anymore. People’s lives are too busy rushing from this to that that the modern world deems important. I don’t want to be self-sufficient I want to be community sufficient! You both are and will be a boon for any community that inherits your hard won skills and knowledge!
Thank you for this! Your words have captured all the rumblings and worries of a heart that yearns for a similar self-sufficient lifestyle such as the one you and your husband have built. My husband and I are on a path to inherit our family farm that needs much TLC and repairs. Sometimes I get so overwhelmed before we have even reached that place in life and I wonder how we will support our family and our dreams with me wanting to be a stay at home mother. I wonder how we will support our family without sacrificing our values and the hopes we have for our land. I probably put too much on myself by thinking of all of these things that come in due time and through experience. It’s hard not to when your dreams run so richly through your veins! Thank you for your words of wisdom and the reminder that you and your family came to be where you are over time, not all at once.