A lot of people have been joining the Homesteader Craze and the worst thing that can happen is if you make mistakes in your first couple years that make you regret your choices. In this how to we are going to look at some of the bigger and more common mistakes that new and established homesteaders make and hopefully you will have a better experience.
The First Homesteader mistake is Picking the Wrong Property
Picking the wrong property is something that can be overcome by simply selling your property early but if you invest a lot of time money and resources into your property before you sell it and those investments aren’t something that a new owner will appreciate then you might end up losing money on the situation.
I always tell people look for a property that has its utilities established and this is extremely important. Even if you think you might want to live off grid it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have the ability to benefit from utilities. Now Utilities are the necessities that you need to survive: Water, Electric, Fuel Source For Heating and Communication. You might not pick a homestead that is close enough to town to get water and sewer but if you have a water well an a functioning septic system established that is what you need. Electricity and Communications are a different matter. You should make sure that your property has access to communications. This can be a landline phone or it can be 5G or Satelite Internet and Phone Service. You may think you can do without them but if you are home schooling or wanting to run a business they are a necessity and not a nice thing to have. Being Grid Tied means that you can sell your own power back to the grid. This means you can use and sell back during the day and offset your use of electric from the grid at night. Without that ability then you are relying on a large battery supply and this is really something you should not be doing when you are first starting off. Yes you should have some battery backup but not so much that it lasts you days which would be necessary if you were off grid and there were clouds for a week.
So picking a property with established utilities or utilities that you can easily put back into use quickly is extremely important. If you do not do this you could actually spend $100,000 or more over the cost of your property.
Building Your Home To Code Even If Your Location Doesn’t Have Inspections
A lot of homesteaders boast about living in an area without inspections and this can be great but as a home builder I can tell you that inspections are really the bare minimum of safe building. Codes have been established over many decades and the reasons for them are normally tragidy. For instance building a deck on your home you might think that it is a very simple process but the code behind them is to ensure that home owners and small contractors follow safe practices. I have seen more than a few decks that were built with 2x4s as joists and this meant the deck was unsafe.
Another reason to follow code is that often an insurance company will not insure buildings that aren’t built to Code Standards. If you try to insure your home they may require an inspection but if you ever have to sell your home you will be guaranteed that the buyer will require at minimum a private inspection because their bank or lender will not lend the money without an inspection. If you were to have built with lumber that was self milled or not certified and stamped you would not pass that inspection and you would have lots of potential buyers back out of deals. You might be forced to sell at an unreasonably low price or wait very long for someone willing and able to pay cash.
The Third Mistake Homesteaders Make Is Raising Animals They’ve Never Cared For
Now you might want to raise a herd of cattle on your property or maybe just a few chickens but most people don’t understand how to care for these animals safely without having taken care of them for many years. You might say I am just going to be raising a dozen chicken to collect eggs but if you have never taken care of them you don’t understand that you must protect yourself when dealing with their bedding or inhaling the dust could make you sick. You might also not understand how much and what food and suplements you should feed your chicken. If they are low in calcium you will see problems with their eggs and the chicken are likely to stop laying. A very simple thing to cure but because you have never experienced this you might think that a healthy chicken with a calcium deficiency is sick and then you might need to call a vet or you might try other things or you might just not be able to harvest eggs from otherwise healthy birds.
So it is not enough to want to be able to do it. You must understand either from direct interaction with the animals you are raising or maybe by helping a neighbor or finding some other way to inform yourself of what troubles you can expect. You could actually make your animals sick and yourself sick.
The Fourth Mistake Homesteaders Make Is Not Having Enough Money
When you are talking about Homestead Property you might be forced to purchase them with cash. Other ways are when the current owner finances your loan. Both of these options are very difficult to rely on. Most likely you will end up taking out a personal loan to offset the costs you can’t cover with your savings. This could put you in a bad cash flow situation where you don’t have money to cover building costs or any problems that happen.
If you buy a property with an established home and utilities you will be paying much more but you are likely to find many lenders willing to give you a conventional 30 year loan. You should also have a source of income outside of your homestead. Even if you were to just harvest hay from your fields or sell trees for lumber or firewood you can see some good income almost immediately and I have actually seen people with wooded property sell the trees to cover much of their building costs and first years of ownership. However you can not always rely on what you think you can do so you should have an established income that can cover your mortguage and basic needs. This way you or your kids won’t be without a meal or new shoes if needed and you won’t have your property taken for not being able to pay your property taxes or loan payments.
Having savings, income and planning for the very worst that could happen is extremely important and this could be the problem that takes away everything you fought for.
The Fifth Mistake can happen to Established or New Homesteaders and that is Wasting Resources
I know a variety of farmers, homesteaders, active gardeners from around the world and one thing that is extremely common is to see people in America or Europe wasting massive amounts of their resources. They pay a lot of money for their land and they pay even more for improvements and equipment and they waste whats right in front of them.
One guy I knew for seven years now has a habbit of running out of firewood in mid January when he is at the peak of heating season. I have seen him burn scrap lumber in his wood burning stove. I have even seen him buy scrap lumber from a local company that makes wood pallets. And maybe that would be excusable except for the fact that all summer long he is cutting down trees and burning them in a pit fire. Many many cords of wood he just burns off and I am not the only one that pointed it out to him. Eventually it got so pitiful and comical that I just gave up caring.
I know another guy that just established his homestead. He has his primary home pretty much finished and he sold a lot of trees off his property to provide for about 20 acres of fields. He uses about three of those acres to graze his goats, pigs and free range his chicken. Three would be a generous amount to say he uses and the rest he ends up cutting with is tractor. He doesn’t gather the grass for hay for his animals and he doesn’t plant anything on that land. But this is expensive land that he had to have cleared. I told him get a 50 pound bag of seed corn and just plant it. If you lose 20% of it to deer and pests so be it but plant the corn and then you have corn for your animals and for your family to eat. Three years now and he hasn’t done this. Even if he planted the corn to attract deer to hunt it would be something. But he has all this land and does nothing with it.
Another guy I know has a good running spring off of his property. He loves to fish and he has a tractor. I told him just dig out a pond 30×50 foot and throw some fish in there. Most farm stores sell fish in bulk for ponds or there are companies that just sell fish. You dig out a pond and let the spring fill it up and throw in some fish and let them populate the pond. Now it can be difficult to build a pond but the fact is he hasn’t considered this and it has been many years. So all he has is a tiny little crick that is running down his hill to a larger one and all that water is going to waste. And the thing about that is he is very remote so every home that is very remote with the ability to do it should establish a pond so the fire company can drop a hose in the pond and have access to thousands of gallons of water. And he is Canadian and they have had a lot of fires this season.
There are many more examples I could give but you get the point. Resources you pay for that just sit there doing nothing or that you don’t use or even burn away while you freeze all winter. This is just not acceptable and in many other countries this would never happen but in first world countries it seems to be the norm. And most of all the main thing that unites all of these people is that they are First Time Homesteaders. They do ok but they are extremely wasteful.
Final Note
These are five of the major mistakes that new and established homesteaders make. There are countless more such as ordering feeder pigs every spring and not birthing your own and the same with Chicken that you buy every year instead of having your own chicken give birth to the next group you will raise. Not gathering seed from your produce crop so then you are buying seed every year. It is just unnecessary and wasteful but most of all it puts you in a position of dependence and Homesteading is suppose to be about independence. Being completely off grid but having to run to the store to buy food you could easily grow is just foolish.
Anyway I hope you get the idea that the dream is not enough and planning may not get you there if the advise you are taking is from someone that isn’t feeding their family from the land and having a bonus surplus they can sell.