Lets talk about four models for making a homestead aka a farmstead. A couple of these might be new to you. Though you may be able to blend models in your own stead, you benefit from seeing the models laid out here separately.
A Profitable Niche
The first model is to find a niche. Find a speciality in small scale agriculture that can support you. The normal modes are very high-quality organic foods; some kind of agritourism; or a very specialty product. Salatin’s famous Polyface farms model is here. In the right specialty niche, you can consistently turn out a product that provides your primary income.
Lifestyle
The next model is the homestead as a hobby. (I don't use the word hobby as an insult; lets call it ‘lifestyle’ homesteading just to avoid any hint of a putdown). This is the steader who farms without concerns for making a profit. Bottom line--this homesteader is not homesteading as their primary source of support or even as a side hustle and their motives have more to do with wanting to have richer, more nutritious food or wanting to have a richer, more authentic life that is engaged with the land or a better way to raise family.
A lot of remote tech workers are getting into this but it can also be a good thing for jobs that can be had anywhere in the country that have a certain amount of ability to schedule hours in a predictable way, such as being a teacher or a nurse. Lifestyle homesteading can develop into a side hustle with experience and the right niche. Lifestyle homesteading can also be a way to explore. The lifestyle homesteader can make tentative forays into the Polyface farms model, for example, getting valuable experience without jumping in with both feet. The reason people describe this as a hobby is because the homesteading is not intrinsic to the household economy. A remote tech worker could be a remote tech worker in the Bahamas or an urban condo as well as on a little farm in New Hampshire.
However, we strongly feel that there are potentials here that are underexplored and frontiers of growth in social innovation. There are ways to elevate the homesteading, we believe, into spiritual practice or identity forming bonds that make it much more than just a hobby. We see, for instance, the potential that could come from mutual lifestyle homesteading, for lack of a better phrase. A small community of likeminded familiies with mutual efforts and shared and overlapping steads, making a way of life that can last for generations.
Beat the Big Boys
Another model of homesteading would be directly competing with industrial agriculture in an area that is not just a niche. Literally just growing staples such as vegetables or ordinary fruits or pork or chicken or eggs or beef at competitive prices. Perhaps you can only compete on price by marketing directly to the consumer, but you still compete on price. Competing on price ideally with better quality, but still competing on price.
This is very hard to do.
There are some areas where it happens. Some u-picks qualify. We’ve seen apple orchards, cherry orchards, peach orchards, table grape vineyards, blueberry patches, and raspberry patches that had prices superior to the grocery stores with better quality fruit to boot.
We have also bought beef and lambs direct from farmers for total prices comparable to retail. This has occurred with eggs also.
There is often some specific reason why the operation can compete on price that doesn’t scale. The lady who sold the eggs at supermarket prices, for instance, had a few acres of pasture that she didn’t have another use for, so she let the hens roam free out there. Her land cost was effectively “zero.” These particulars means that the operations don’t scale. You can’t generalize a model that any willing and capable person could adopt. But it is often quite clarifying to think about areas where you or your children, as steaders, could compete on price. Industrial scale agriculture can be scary efficient but has the usual exploitable problems that any overly large system has.
A viable scalable model of this kind would require an intense amount of innovation but would make the people who did it benefactors of mankind. Our view is that the areas with the most immediate potential for making this work are meats, nuts, and possibly some fruits. There are already blueprints emerging for regenerative agriculture that could allow for profitable market participation in various steps of the livestock process, for example buying calves and raising them to sell to feedlots in the fall; or going all the way direct to the consumer with eggs and lamb. We also believe that there are emerging blueprints for doing this on a small nut operation, where family labor substitutes for some capital equipment. With careful attention to location and initial land costs, we believe that u-picks for fast growing foods such as raspberries or grapes may be within reach.
The goal of steaders and small scale production being able to compete on price may not be easily achievable across the entire food spectrum, but it is the goal. Those who see steading as only providing what are essentially luxury products are faint hearted. Dare more.
Our belief is that the goal is more likely to be achieved with regulatory changes and with wider systemic awareness of the modern health crisis and the role that bad food plays in it. If the slaughterhouse rules were loosened to allow marketing to local butchers, for example, local meat operations would get a huge boost.
Homesteading before the Hard Times Hit
The last option is concierge homesteading. Subsistence prepper farming as a service. To our knowledge this is essentially not been done before. The idea will not be familiar to you so let’s explain.
Imagine you are lifestyle farmsteading, but not for nutrition or for spiritual and family benefits, but for prepping. You may not get all your food from your stead, but you are running it in such a way that in an emergency you could. The stead may or may not turn a profit, but if you lose a little bit of money you don’t care because you see that as the cost of catastrophe insurance.
Now, not everyone is a prepper. But also not everyone understands tail risks. You may think the combined risk of nuclear war, solar flare Carrington event, Y2k, civil war, epidemic, or other disaster capable of collapsing our fragile global supply chains is low. It turns out I agree with you. But how low is low? 1 in 20? 1 in 100? That’s a 1-5% chance. But when you are talking about death by starvation for you and your family, well, how much are you willing to put aside to hedge against that risk? We could crunch various kinds of numbers all day—in fact we have, and we would love to go over them some day—but for now its enough to say that at some point some combination of the following starts to seem like a smart idea:
you have some pasture and a few beef cows and a milk cow. But in a pinch, you could just eat them yourself while having enough calves to raise the next generation
you have some chickens and some pasture and a year’s worth of stored food. In a disaster, you can live off your stored food while rapidly expanding your flock to where you can meet most of your needs through eating eggs and chickens, or trading them.
you have a few acres of nuts that you harvest by hand. In a disaster, there is enough to feed you either directly or through trade
On the other hand, for someone living in the city, the “cost” isn’t just some extra work and maybe a few thousand a year in expenses. The cost is a move, a lifestyle change, and maybe even a career change. That’s a lot.
There’s a middle ground. Our city family could pay some one they trust to do it for them.
The idea is something like a CSA but for prepping instead of for bespoke pretty vegetables. Let’s do a rough sketch. 20 families are in a co-op that supports one family that runs a subsistence style homestead. Subsistence-style meaning that (1) the homestead produces enough variety of food that it can sustain life long term and (2) everything is done, or is possible to be done, without using industrial supply chains. The homestead is large enough and has enough production that in a crisis it could support all 20 families with their labor, either immediately or through ramping up over a reasonable time period such as a year (arrangements would be made to have stockpiled food to cover the ramp-up period).
The market here would be the same sorts of people who diversify their incomes and buy gold and buy insurance. People who are aware of the probability of black swan events and who wish to provide against tail risk. Or from the other direction, who started out by buying guns and iodine, and who then started thinking seriously about the implications of actually surviving a collapse-level disaster long term.
In the meantime, perhaps the co-op families would be provided with milk or meat or produce from the homestead but they pay above market rates for it. Or they pay an annual co-op fee. Or else they pay nothing annually, the homestead pays for itself by marketing its products, but the co-op members bought the land and paid for the initial stock and equipment. Lots of homesteading approaches become much more viable if the steader doesn’t have to cover their capital costs.
These expenses for the co-op members are their catastrophe insurance. Who knows, maybe they all vacation at the farm every fall for two weeks to help with the harvest and have a good time.
We have given a great deal of thought to this last model and have much more to say about it in the days to come. One of us is actually working through an informal prototype of this model right now in the Midwest, very successfully.
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Certainly these models can bleed into each other, but thinking it through hopefully is helpful you will arrive at your destination.