If you have no experience raising livestock or gardening, you should try the whole “homesteading” lifestyle before you decide to jump straight into trying to make farming your source of income. For one thing, unless you have a Top Tier Green Thumb and a quarter of an acre in the middle of a large city, it is difficult to make a living as a small scale farmer. Unfortunately, this is an objective truth. Legislation and “big agriculture” have more or less stacked the deck in their favor for the last hundred years.

It’s not impossible, but it’s hard. Make sure you enjoy the work first.

Homesteading, a History

Yes, I definitely just made a really bad reference to Harry Potter, and I’m not sorry. Instead of attempting to give a full lecture on the history of homesteading, I’m just going to gesture wildly at the entirety of pre-industrial human history. With that out of the way, how about a definition? Traditionally, to homestead would be to buy or be granted land from the government with the intention of building a home. Modern Homesteading is a slightly cliché name for trying to maintain a traditional, self-sustaining way of life in the current times.

What if I just want to own a farm and not homestead?

Ok, uhh… I’ll admit I’m not prepared for this question. That sounds really expensive.

Homesteading goes with the territory. If you garden, why wouldn’t you eat the food you grow? If you rear livestock, why wouldn’t you use the meat you harvest? I guess I can see how farming and homesteading are both rather labor intensive…so yeah, you do you. Feel free to skip the homesteading bit.

How to Start Homesteading

There are so many different ways to start homesteading. I suggest you find a traditional self-sufficiency skill that interests you: food preservation, raising livestock, gardening, making household supplies instead of buying them. For most things, you can start no matter where you live.

Maybe you would enjoy canning. Wait for strawberries to go on sale in July, pick up a few quart boxes and a packet of pectin, and make some jam. Go to the National Center for Home Food Preservation and give it a shot. This is an incredibly easy recipe to follow, results in a fantastic product, doesn’t need any fancy equipment, and was basically my gateway drug to canning.

If canning isn’t your thing, how about dehydrating? Hit up Darcy at The Purposeful Pantry to find out almost everything there is to know about using a dehydrator.

No to those? Alright, plant a tomato in a pot on your porch. Snag a small plant (preferably of a determinant, pot-friendly variety like “Patio Tomato”) at your local farm/garden/diy store and give it a little care every now and again and enjoy the literal fruit of your labor.

Get a trio of rabbits if you’re more of an animal-type. Rabbits are usually legal to keep, even in the city, and are considered a good starting point to learn how to raise your own meat by basically the entire homesteading community. They make multiple products (meat, pelt, and fertilizer) with minimum effort and aren’t particularly expensive.

It’s ok if you’re not ready to really take the plunge in any of those categories. Try MAKING YOUR OWN LAUNDRY DETERGENT. Initially buying the ingredients for 8 months of homemade laundry detergent was the same price as buying 1 jug of detergent that would only last my family a month.

Grow at Your Own Pace

You’ll find your gateway drug. Take the joy it brings and run with it. Our farm started in 2019 with a single rabbit and the desire to not be able see our neighbors. Look at us now. There is no best path, no correct roadmap, no perfect set of instructions. If it works for you, then you did it right.

Dun dun DUNNNNNN!

I’m just kidding. Sorta.

Look, starting a business is expensive. Any business. All businesses. Start-up costs are a real thing–that’s why it has its own name. If you have already been subsistence farming, then you fully know just how expensive it is to farm. Anyone who tells you that it is cheaper to garden than it is to shop at Walmart is lying to you. At the very least, they aren’t telling you the whole story.

Maybe after your third or fourth year of having a successful garden, you can finally start saying your produce was cheaper to grow than it would have been to purchase at the big box store. Not before then though.

“But Crysta, a pack of carrot seeds cost $1.99 and has like 400 seeds in it!”

Assuming you’re right, because I haven’t counted how many seeds are in the cheap packs at Lowe’s (which I absolutely buy, by the way), you’re missing a few points: the costs involved with getting your soil ready to grow said carrots; the germination rate of the pack; potential needs for fertilizer; and the fact that your first couple of years attempting to grow carrots aren’t going to result in a bumper crop. Basically, 400 seeds does not equal 400 well-developed carrots with no other costs.

If your business plan involves gardening, you need gardening experience before you start marketing. I used carrots in that example because they are notoriously tricky to learn to grow. Once you unlock the code, you’ll start raking in a good crop every year, barring unforeseeable circumstances.

Don’t Let Murphy’s Law Get in Your Way

Whatever can go wrong will go wrong. You don’t have all the answers. I don’t have all the answers. No one has all the answers. No matter how much research you do, no matter what expert’s advice you take, no matter how good your intentions are, something is going to go wrong. If you’re anything like me, you’re looking for the best possible starting point or the most efficient path to take.

Stop.

That’s a fairy tale. Farmers with 30 years of experience are still experimenting. There are simply too many variables–many of which we humans aren’t even aware of. Even if someone does manage to miraculously come across the absolute perfect system, said system probably won’t work for his next-door neighbor. I wish this was a hyperbole.

Get some practice in what you want to turn into a business. Once you’re confident, and you can prove that confidence on paper, start your farm business.