The dream of many homesteaders is 100% self sufficient living, but this is a big goal. While it certainly is possible to live off the land entirely, it requires a sizable upfront investment to get there or a willingness to sacrifice a lot of creature comforts. This guide will look at the individual systems you need to live off your homestead and help you start planning your journey.
The Elephant in the Room: 100% Self Sufficiency isn’t for Everyone
While we will talk about what is necessary for 100% self sufficient living, we want to underscore that this should not be the goal for most people. While you can do it if you really try, it can be a lifetime of work and it honestly costs a great deal of money to get there. Knowing this before you begin is important because it can help you set a more attainable and realistic goal. For many people it is entirely possible to achieve fully off the grid living, get most of your calories off your homestead, and even turn a profit from any extras you have left over. What is unrealistic is making all your own household products. You’re very likely not going to make your own cooking oil or sew all your own clothing. You can, but you probably don’t want to do these things as they make much more sense at scale.
For most products that come from economies of scale it will be far more efficient for you sell things you produce on your homestead and buy those items with that cash. It’s not a moral failing to enjoy some shopping. It’s also not a failure to admit you’re going to need to purchase somethings for yourself and your family.
If you do end up wanting to go “all in” you’re essentially giving up modern industrial process altogether. Electronics are right out and can’t be made at home. Most household chemicals can’t be produced by any fewer than several skilled chemists or labors. Modern clothing can be replicated at home, but the quantity and quality will be severely lacking. If you’re fine with giving up on those creature comforts, and resign yourself to a more simple life, you can do it, but it is exceptionally hard.
To be honest, when most people think homestead, they think about some self sufficiency, but they are really just thinking of eating what they grow and raise and getting their power themselves. They’re not often cutting down trees to build their cabin. As admirable as that may be, homesteading is much more enjoyable when we let go of purist ideas of total self reliance and embrace our role as part of a global community.
The Absolute Basics of Homesteading for Self Sufficient Living
Growing Your Own Food
The most vital key to homesteading is growing a major portion of your calories at home. To do this you need to not only grow a lot of food, but you also need to grow a wide variety of food to account for the needs of the human diet. You also likely need to focus on preserving and storing that food if you live in an area that doesn’t have a year round growing season.
Crop selection can be of vital importance. It’s nice to think you’re going to live off of rice and beans, but it’s not often enough to keep people going without other supplemental sources of nutrition. On top of needing to consider the nutritional impacts of what you grow to eat, you also need to consider the ability to grow crops in your area. If you get a majority of your calories from beans, you need to grow dry beans so they last. If you get a majority of your calories from gourds, you’re going to have a hard time storing them long enough to get you to another growing season.
Variety is certainly a key to success here, but quantity of shelf stable products can be just as important. If you have the land for it growing wheat or other grains can get you a lot of shelf stable food to last you over the winter. If you don’t have the room for these types of crops you’ll want to aim for things that can be grown in batches and are easy to preserve through drying, canning, pickling, or cold storage. Flash freezing is off the table for many people, but if you can do it you can keep a lot of food at peak nutrition levels for months at a time.
On top of all this planning you need to know that farming isn’t easy. While it’s one thing to talk about growing your own food, it’s an entirely different beast to actually achieve the goal. This leads us nicely to our next topic, space.
Homesteading Takes Space
Crops need space to grow. Animals need space to live. You need space to live. Living modestly can help a bit, but homesteading on an acre or less requires a ton of knowledge and even more technology. When you’re considering your space you need to think about maximizing what you have or scaling your space available.
We’ve seen stories of people supporting a family of four entirely off an acre, but that’s the exception and not the rule. Ideally, you’ll want 3-4 acres available to support a family. At least one of those acres will be dedicated entirely to crops in most cases and the land will need to be fully utilized to get a decent amount of calories out of the ground. If you have animals, which we’ll get to, you also need space for them to live as well as more crop space to grow them food.
A good chunk of your land will also be living area. You need space for your house and a place to store your tools and equipment. The more intense your farming the more space you need for equipment too.
In any event, the more space you have the easier your homesteading/self sufficiency journey will be.
Vegetables are Essential, but Meat is a Treat
You don’t have to have a vegan lifestyle to be a successful homesteader, quite the contrary it is often beneficial to have a source of milk, meat, and eggs for a lot of reasons. Selection of these protein producers is important though. Cows are terribly inefficient animals. Chickens on the other hand are highly efficient and produce eggs and meat reliably.
Some people really push certain animals based on sale price. We’re not looking at there here. If we were just going by profit, cows are number one, but each cow requires 2-3 acres of land to graze or you need to supplement their feed, which is both expensive and the opposite of self sufficient.
Depending on your region and what you’re looking at doing, the best options for self sufficient livestock on a smaller homestead are ducks, chickens, and rabbits. For milk, fleece, and meat, goats are the most compact and space efficient mammals you can raise.
Each one of these animals has their own pros and cons, and you certainly don’t need to raise them, but if you want the products they produce it may be worth the cost of the space as well as the financial investment to get started.
Pest and Predator Prevention
You are supposed to be the one eating your crops and animal produce, but hungry bugs and opportunistic predators are literally looking to steal your lunch. With this in mind you will need to spend a good deal of time working on pest prevention that works for you. Animals often need enclosures. Crops need pesticides (natural or otherwise).
When homesteading you can control a lot more than you think. Bird houses are an easy way to keep pests down. Bug hotels can help you attract beneficial insects that will drive out bad ones. Praying Mantis and Lady Bug eggs are cheap and effectively safe hundreds on crop protection. Even the animals you raise can help keep your crops safe as ducks and chickens will eat a lot of common garden pests.
As for protecting your animals the first step is using a fence, but often encloses or tall overhead netting is essential to help prevent predators from getting into your farm. Raising a good farm dog is also a great way to keep your animals safe, but requires some special training as protecting animals is a difficult job.
This should go without saying, but an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and we’ve lost lost of crops in the past to letting our guard down on pests.
Power
While it’s nice to think we can get by without electricity, it’s not easy living. Luckily there is technology today that helps us buck high energy costs and produce our own power. Solar and wind power are the obvious choices for most homesteads. Solar is far more reliable, but if you can utilize both you’re going to be in a far better state than most.
In addition to generating energy you also need to store it for use when you need it. The wind doesn’t always blow and the suns not always out, so backup batteries are a must have for any self sufficient homestead.
There are a million options when it comes to generating your own power today, but generally people start with a solar setup. If you have crops that need constant shade, solar installations that are raised off the ground can actually help you double dip in areas that would otherwise be used for one or the other type of production.
Power Efficiency
It’s not enough to just generate and store power, you have to use that power wisely. Simple things like switching to LED light bulbs can save a lot of energy on their own, but choosing energy efficient appliances is a solid must.
The biggest energy vampire you’ll have to contend with is heating and cooling, but in most places you can use highly efficient heat pump systems to heat and cool your home. The efficiency of these system is so good that they often pay for themselves in terms of energy savings within 2 years. There are even heat pump water heaters now that help you save even more money!
Not Just Food
While food should be your main concern, and power your next, there are other things you’ll want to work on for self sufficient homestead living. You can’t do everything, as we discussed before, but you can do a lot. For some homesteads it may be pottery, or woodworking. For others it’s rug making and knitting. There’s a huge amount of functional and useful handcrafts you can master that will bring a lot of value to your homestead and save you a ton of money avoiding outside expenditures.
But Wait There’s More!
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to self sufficient living. While there’s so much more to talk about, these ones are the real basics you need to think about. Sure, we can talk about hunting and foraging, growing mushrooms too, and we will, but those are not enough without the basic understanding of the concepts above. SO before you jump deeper into homestead work on your plan, cultivate a green thumb, and map out your initial expenses. You’ll need to be prepared for a lot of steps ahead.