SOOO MANY PEOPLE DON'T START HOMESTEADING because they don't have land!
Are you looking for cheap land to get started with? Learn 3 ways to find cheap homestead land in this episode!
I was listening to this podcast at 3 AM in the morning last night. When looking at land, you really do need to think outside of the box it seems, especially with inflation and high price of land these days.
My idea of off-grid homeownership would be closer to camping then modern suburbanite living. My home of the future would be like camping, but with more insulation and better protection from the elements during the winter months and severe weather like heavy rain storms and snow. Having a reliable, relatively clean and non-smelly source of heat (e.g. not a smoky campfire that makes your clothes stink) like a wood stove or coal stove would be important for the cold winter months, a hot shower to get clean, and a refrigerator/freezer to keep cold meat and beer is important too. Running water, at least stored water that is electrically pumped, probably is a good thing too. If I have to purify it before drinking, it’s a not a big deal.
But other then that, I can hardly imagine having much more modern technology then what I already use for camping. I don’t have a problem with composting toilets, building a fire, burning my trash, conserving electricity by using LEDs and low voltage USB powered devices, cooking on a camp stove and Coleman oven. I don’t mind having to purify water or doing some of the dirty work of life like stirring humanure. Having a microwave and waffle iron is somewhat handy in my apartment, but it’s hardly a show stopper to live without. I don’t own a television and I don’t have Internet at home. I do like the idea of building my own small, energy efficient electronics and low-voltage lighting, to automate my house, and provided carefully controlled light output, as efficiently as possible. Just because you have to conserve energy, doesn’t mean you can’t use energy-efficient LEDs controlled by a microprocessor and build displays to tell you about battery voltage and other details, like with my Max7219 projects I’m currently working on.
I often think of rednecks as noble savages. They work hard, don’t have a lot of money so they repair, reuse and maximize life out of whatever they can get second hand. Junk roofing, parts from old cars and motors, they use to repair what they have rather than throwing away.
The farm animals they raise produce food for their families and others. It is a life based on reality one where the piglet comes onto the farm, fed grain, fertilizes the land, has a 22 bullet put through its brain, scalded, quartered, frozen or cooked. Where food scraps are recycled into pig feed where the manure makes the farm field and garden grow.
The redneck homestead with the trash burning barrel goes to the dump like once a year, because most of their trash goes up into smoke and is disposed on site – if the ash and unburnt debris isn’t buried in the farm trash pit. Valuable recyclables – namely metals – get saved for scrap and are sold for money and actually used as industrial feedstock.
Many more remote, rural redneck homesteads are now off grid in part because the high cost of running electric lines up in the mountains. It turns out that solar technology is pretty damn good at supplementing generator power and that solar panels are fairly cheap especially when somebody does their own wiring and builds their own stands.
It’s a life so much more sustainable then the eco conscious suburbanite living in the city. Grid tied solar and your Prisus might reduce your carbon footprint or cleaning and recycling plastic bottles might keep them out of the landfill but it’s nothing like the homestead that keeps old machinery running rather than discarding, that produces and slaughters meat on site compared to buying on styrofoam.
Since the pandemic and even more so in recent years when I’ve learned more about septic systems and sewage treatment plants, I’ve had more and more of a desire to piss on trees and bushes, to crap in buckets and bury the poop in the woods.
I’m not saying there okay systems in urban areas that help protect the public health from dangerous diseases like Cholera and E Coli and protect water quality from excess nitrogen and phosphorus. But the solution seems to often to landfill such substances rather than recover the nutrients.
Maybe it’s just the freedom to pee wherever you want up at camp, up at the wilderness. Flip down the tailgate and pee. Spray urine wherever. Unconcentrated it’s pretty harmless though as noted on the Blue Ridge Parkway, too many people peeing on a tree can burn it.
Outhouses and composting poop outside of the cities makes a lot of sense. While both septic tanks and sewage treatment works biodegrade some of the sludge, a lot of it is lost unless it is collected and spread, a particular concern in sewage treatment plants is pharmaceuticals and long lasting chemicals like PFAS and microplastics.
I get people’s ick factor and concerns on public health but it just seems like such a waste to send it all to the local dumping grounds.
