Building the Homestead I Can, Not the One I Want 🚜 🏘 🐮

Often when I go out and visit my parents place, I spend some time walking around the yard. My parents are in their mid-70s, and I am realistic and realizing that they may not be able to live independently forever and will pass at some point. I’ll miss them terribly, but I also see a lot of potential in their five acres should I end up taking over their homestead.

Both me and my sister will have a 50 percent claim on the land, most likely. I doubt my sister, who is raising her family in suburban Saratoga County will have much interest in moving back out in country. But I certainly do. I think I am in the position that I could buy out her share of the homestead, paid for in cash, and then only have to pay taxes and utilities going forward.

I look around and think about what I could do with the land. It’s only 5 acres, there is a lot of junk on it, and a lot of it is has been reverting back to woods in recent years. There are neighbors within 500 feet of the most of the land, so probably the opportunities to do a lot of shooting on it are limited, and I have to be careful what I do with fires out back, not burning anything too noxious that produces a lot of smoke, especially with the state’s burning ban. But also, because it’s not neighborly to fumigate your neighbors with smoldering plastic garbage. But there is still a lot of possibility on this land.

Meat goats could do a lot to help clean up the land. Not only are goats relatively small, easy to transport, slaughter and turn into meat, they are browsers and would be perfect for cleaning up the land of brambles and turning land covered with trash species into meat. Portable electric fence means I could move them around to various portions of the land, but they also have a barnyard with stalls for keeping them in the winter. They have a barn and chicken coop, that could be restored for raising chickens and rabbits – a source of meat and eggs.

Eventually, it would be great to run some feeder pigs – piglets bought and raised to weight. This is a move involved adventure, not sure if I could process them on site, so that might involve having to borrow a cattle trailer to get them processed. There are big feed bills involved with having pigs — were talking a few tons of feed for having a couple of hogs — but pigs turn feed into manure which becomes incredibly rich soil for growing other crops.

And maybe cows! But not my own, I am not sure I have skills or even enough land to get started with cattle right away. But a few years back, my neighbors approached my parents about using some of their land to graze cattle. My parents declined, as they had concerns about the noise and smell of having cows so close to their bedroom. But I think it would be an excellent way to help restore that field, fertilize it with manure, eat up the grass and maybe get some home-grown beef out of the process.

I would also like to restore their little pond behind the old well. Certainly chopping down the big junk trees, getting goats back there to clean up the brush and trash species would help. But I’m sure it’s also mucked and probably would need some help from a backhoe after all these years. Maybe it could be enlarged too. There is a good water supply there — it’s fed by a spring that runs out of the shallow well — although the ground around it remains kind of mucky. But it could be cleaned up for sure with a backhoe, maybe a small rental backhoe like on the a tractor.

For having fires, there is all of cinder blocks around the backyard from a demolition and construction project when they replaced their attached garage. I bet these cinder blocks — with the addition possibility of some firebrick would make for an awesome fire pit / incinerator for recreational fires, burning brush and other burnable debris like paper and light-weight plastics that doesn’t make a not of lot of noxious smoke. With a high chimney, it could have a good draw, helping to burn things with minimal smoke that could smell bad and annoy neighbors.

5 acres is nice, but my parents house is not exactly my dream homestead — the house is much too big, too poorly insulated, uses too much energy, and the neighbors are much too close. I want to eventually own more acreage, farther away from neighbors, so I can shoot my guns, have big fires, burn trash and debris without causing nuance. Where I can have more large livestock, cows, make hay and timber, have a simple off-grid property. But if this is the hand I’m dealt, it’s something I can work on for a few years before I upgrade.