Off-Grid Living for Agrarians, Part 6

To Read Part 1, CIick Here

To Read Part 2, Click Here

To Read Part 3, Click Here

To Read Part 4, Click Here

To Read Part 5, Click Here

Looking into Agrarianism and Off-Grid living can be very, very overwhelming at first. There are a million things to learn, and a million choices to make, and it seems as if any bad decision or wrong move will leave us penniless and homeless, foraging roots on a stark landscape of despair. Well, it can seem that way. Too many people, as I have mentioned in previous parts, think that they are going to, someday, just leap into this idyllic "Little House on the Prairie" life, and if it can't be like that - then they aren't yet ready. So rather than make progress every day (It is a Process Driven Life, you know) - they make no progress at all. Always planning, they never act. Always intending, they never do. Sometimes the problem is not in the reality of "can we do this?", but it is an error in the mental view of what it is to live as an Off-Grid Agrarian. As I have mentioned, if you have a picture postcard idea of what this life will be like, then you will always fall short, and the mountain will always be too steep to climb.

Reading some Agrarian blogs, you will find people who seem to do it all (and it can seem overwhelming) - canning, butchering, growing, husbanding, cattle, rabbits, goats, pigs, sheep, geese, chickens, turkeys, quail, drying herbs, smoking meat, root-cellaring, making candles, making lard, building outbuildings, etc., etc., etc. I mean, who can learn all of that and do all of that? Well, eventually you can, but if you think that you will be required to step out of a suburban apartment or cracker-box house and be able to do all of these from the get-go... well, I can see why your current life might seem safer and easier, and why most people do not ever pull the trigger. I can't think of any Agrarians, off-grid or otherwise, who stepped into this life doing (or knowing how to do) all of that stuff. I know I didn't. I was working a corporate sales job when my father offered to sell us our first five acres in 1997, and to put a single-wide mobile home on it for us. It was many months after that when we got our first animal besides a dog. Some friends came out when I was at work and put up a small square goat pen and put a Billy-goat in it. I came home to find my wife staring at a Billy-goat in a bare pen with no housing and no food other than the grass in the pen. We had no idea what to do. Then the goat started breaking out of the pen... several times a day... every day. So, slowly, I learned fencing. I had never built a pen in my life, but once I had to fix a fence three times a day - chase a goat, and drag it back into the pen - I felt sure I could throw up a workable fence. Taking my newfound skill, I built a pen around what would be a large garden. Then I built a larger pen for a goat yard, and we got more goats. Then I built chicken pen, because the same friend who gave us the goat pen gave us 14 chickens and a set of chicken nests. Well, that's how we learned about chickens and goats. In May of 1998 my wife quit her job to homeschool and tend the homestead, and 5 months later I quit my job to preach and teach full-time. We didn't know how we were going to make it, or how we would live. Within a year or two we had a couple-hundred chickens, a dozen goats, geese, and turkeys, and a cow. We didn't know anything about any of it when we started, and there weren't a million Agrarian sites and blogs out there either. We had Carla Emery's Encyclopedia of Country Living, and we used it every day for every thing we could think of. I learned homestead carpentry the same way I learned homestead fencing... by making mistakes, and by necessity. I tell people - "if you want to be a successful off-grid agrarian homesteader, then make a mistake a day for 11 years and you'll be right where I am". The point is that you don't learn all of this stuff and become proficient at it while you are still living in the city. Sure you can practice a few things in your back yard, but you will not really know what you are doing until you JUST DO IT. And you will not just do it all at once. You add skills a few at a time, as God makes them necessary, or as He puts it on your heart to learn them. I see folks who are new at this, and they are usually in a couple of different categories. Some want to do it all, and they want to do it right NOW. They are akin to the guys I meet who want to learn survival techniques, and for their first survival trek they want to go into the wildest, coldest, most unforgiving situation imaginable, and they want to do it with only a pocket-knife and a stick of Big Red gum. Others are on the other extreme. They think that by raising some herbs in a pot on their patio, they are learning the skills they will need to survive as an off-grid Agrarian. Ten years later they will have an herb garden and a chihuahua and they will still be telling themselves that some day they will take the leap! The realistic situation is one that is somewhere in-between the two extremes. You do have to pull the trigger and choose when and how to get out and onto the farm. You have to do that regardless of all the consequences and all the "giants in the land" that conspire to keep you immobile and dependent on the world. But once you get out, and get your land, you have to move intelligently and you have to learn your skills as they are necessary. You cannot expect to do it all at once. This is why COMMUNITY is really so important to a proper Christian Agrarian existence. If we live in Community with like-minded believers, then we all don't have to be experts in everything. If you work together, you can all learn different skills, and teach and help one another.

It sounds hard to believe, but most of the Agrarian skills are really easy and intuitive. It is only because we have been so colonized into the world's way of doing things, using machines, etc. that we don't know how to do some really simple things. I mean, getting and raising chickens was one of the "giants" in my thinking. It seemed so complicated - and what if kill them all, or they all fly away? Well, in my experience keeping chickens is one of the easiest and most rewarding things you can do as an Agrarian. It really is a no-brainer. Sure you can make mistakes, and sometimes you might kill all your chickens (I did it once) on accident, but you know, I got more chickens and learned from my mistakes. It's not like they are children (they put you in jail for accidentally killing all your children!). Now, I can tell you that maintaining chicken and egg production is one of the easiest things we do around here. I think most of the people in our community will tell you that the hardest thing they have had to do is to pull the trigger on actually making a firm decision to move and live off-grid. Once the ball got rolling, and they were actually on the land, the rest has been pretty easy.

Now that we are all living an off-grid life, the trick is to not get into too many things at once, or into the wrong things. When we recently went to visit Homestead Heritage my girls talked about wanting to learn Pottery, and some of the guys mentioned wanting to learn Blacksmithing. Well, these are great skills, and it is good to want to learn them. But how practical is it? I told Tracy (my oldest daughter), "The problem is that knowing how to make pots would be great. But it takes a huge investment in time, money, and equipment, and how many pots can you use? Are you going to just keep making pots after you have all you need, or are you going to sell them? Do you have a market for pots?" I mean, maybe there is a market for them, but how many do you have to sell to pay back the thousands of dollars it would take to set up a kiln, etc. and all the other equipment it would take? I would love to be able to make pots and plates, etc. if we need them (and I think I know enough to do that in an emergency), but I don't think that we are going to be going into the pottery business. Blacksmithing is a similar thing. If one person really wanted to make the investment to get all the equipment, and a forge, and a supply of steel, and all the other stuff you need, then I can see where having a blacksmith in the community would be a great benefit. But is everyone going to do this? It wouldn't make sense for everyone to do it. I think Blacksmithing will be a specialty skill that maybe one or two people might want to get into. It will be very expensive to get into it, and the only way it will ever pay off is if the person doing it wants to market products and services to outsiders for profit. I'm all for learning these skills, but I don't think the average homesteader ought to make them a priority. My point is that it is good to want to learn something and to want to acquire a skill, but every thing we learn and do ought to have a payoff towards our success, survival, satisfaction, peace, etc. We ought to have a plan for everything we do.

My personal experience after several years of helping and watching many people (singles, couples, and families) get into this lifestyle is this... those who have the least to start with pull the trigger the fastest, and end up learning the necessary skills the fastest. They may have less land, and less of everything else, but they learn the things they need to learn the fastest. The slowest off-grid Agrarians are those who have money and means when they start out. They cling to the old ways the longest, they do things on a bigger scale, and they move a lot slower. The young couples who have had to do this with virtually no money and almost no income have been the quickest to learn the necessary Agrarian skills, quickest to get gardens and animals started and producing, and they have been more successful much earlier. This contradicts the idea that you aren't ready to pull the trigger and move into an off-grid life yet, because this counter-intuitive truth shows me that the longer you take to prepare and save up for your Off-Grid Agrarian adventure, the slower you will move into it, and the slower you will learn what you need to learn to succeed at it. Those who are probably the most able to move into this life (because of their current situation) are the ones who will most likely never, ever do it. Think about it, who has the most to "lose"? People who now own their home in a comfortable suburb, or who have equity in property, and who have "stuff" - these are the people who will most likely never do it, because they have the most to lose, and because they fear losing the comforts of their current life. They dream too grandly, and when they cannot see how to purchase the dream right off (instead of working to build it) they never do it at all. If I am corresponding with a homeless guy and a suburban accountant, I would put my money on the homeless guy being more successful in moving off-grid and in creating and living a successful off-grid Agrarian life.

Now you know why I don't listen to excuses when it comes to people saying they want to live this life.

So, the point of part 6? Don't let the giants in the land... or anything else, stop you from pulling the trigger on the life you know you should lead. Don't get yourself overwhelmed by thoughts of what you don't know, or in worrying about what you don't have. All that stuff will come in time, and you will do just fine IF you will just do it. You don't have to be Martha Stewart or Carla Emery or Davy Crockett to survive and thrive as an off-grid Agrarian. If you will just do it, and then, if you will keep doing it long enough - you and your family will probably far surpass those folks in just a single generation. And that is my encouraging thought for the day.

I am your servant in Christ Jesus,

Michael Bunker