Been getting serious now about disappearing from society. Could be politics, the weather, the economy, or just plain loving the show Yellowstone.But I need to do more then “own land”, buy survival food, and guns.In the coming 2-3 years my land will be paid off and should have enough funds to build the cabin without taking a mortgage.Kids will be in 10th grade/7th grade. Perfect time to get them working on the land during the summer.The land is permitted 1 well for the cabin and 1 for ag use. I’m studying the soil to see what I would need to go to sustain some type of farming.But my ultimate goal is to have enough animals to sustain my family. The good news is while my land is 35 acres, I have access to 6000 acres for free grazing.
It’s why my property taxes are $10 a year (I prepaid taxes thru 2030)So to my point:For those who have done the research or live the life.should I count on this list as a good start to researching what I need? I think it's a pretty decent list. I also think a lot depends on what you want to do, and the lifestyle you want to lead.An illustration: I know a family that decided to become prepper-type folks. They 'woke up' and went kind of crazy, selling their house in town, moving to the country put in a 250' x 250' garden, bought goats, ducks, chickens and rabbits.Maybe it's because they were new, maybe it was just their personality, but it was my observation that they were essentially slaves to the place they built. First, the garden went completely to heck, because the enthusiasm of putting in and all the beautiful photos in the seed catalogs waned, and the drudgery of day-to-day weeding, watering, pruning, etc. Remained.Then, they couldn't leave over night: They had to rotate frozen 2 liter bottles of water into the rabbit hutches so the rabbits didn't overheat and die (in the summer).
Food Self-Sufficiency & Animals I received a lot of excellent comments on my 'The Economics of Food Self-Sufficiency' post. Most of you, like me, see a definite benefit to growing your own food, but don't see a significant savings monetarily. You'll be harvesting the fruits of your labor very soon if you pick some animals from our list of 8 best, cheapest animal to raise for meat and self.
The fish fit into my system in aquaponics. My Greenhouse is going to be about 70% aquaponics. My initial thoughts are to get six of the big Square totes and utilize them for the fish breeding apparatus has. I might be in way over my head, but it seems like a fairly easy source of protein and good nutrients for your vegetables.
Right now I'm just buying shit like mad. I'm trying to get everything I could think of together up front and if the economy blows up on me where my income is probably going to be some of the first to go, I'll have plenty of projects with minimal cash outlay. At least that's the plan in the thought. The fish fit into my system in aquaponics. My Greenhouse is going to be about 70% aquaponics. My initial thoughts are to get six of the big Square totes and utilize them for the fish breeding apparatus has. I might be in way over my head, but it seems like a fairly easy source of protein and good nutrients for your vegetables.
Right now I'm just buying shit like mad. I'm trying to get everything I could think of together up front and if the economy blows up on me where my income is probably going to be some of the first to go, I'll have plenty of projects with minimal cash outlay. At least that's the plan in the thought. Depending on your setup and ambition, my thought would be to try whatever it is now.Experiment. Better to find out now than later what works and what doesn’t.Farmers are slaves to the land, yes, but well fed slaves they be.At the end of the day that livestock is going to go into the pot. And that’s if everything goes well.We need to know now if we can care for that livestock properly. Can slaughter and process it.
Then be able to store it correctly for future use.Will older folks be able to do those things?If you need to go somewhere for any reason then who will care for your animals?What happens if you don’t make it back?Just saying. Chickens are a no-brainer. They're easy unless you live in an extremely hot or extremely cold environment. We barely feed ours at all. They're also cheap for if/when you need to replace them.And free bug control!Rabbits.
Are harder than they appear. They're fairly delecate, and will die in severe heat or cold fairly quickly. They'll breed like crazy though. Sure your family is OK eating them?Ducks are iffy, too.Fish are a no brainer unless you overstock and have to feed them.Goats are pretty easy.
They just don't taste very good, at least to most folks. Goat meat and milk is an acquired taste. Keep the male away from the females if you're going to eat the meat or drink the milk! We don't do goats anymore, but I know a lot of folks that do.Cattle. It's only been a handful of years in my life that I haven't been around cattle.Hardier breeds are great. There's a reason I and my family do longhorns and black Angus.
They're tough and low maintenance. Especially the longhorns.You do have to build up some infrastructure for them.
Gotta have a corral area with a chute for loading them into a trailer and also for shots. Fencing has to be decent, at least.Gotta be able to haul in a bunch of round bales for the winter or lay someone to do it. Good thing is it doesn't have to be horse quality hay, so you can cheat a little and get the cheap stuff.Cattle don't have to be fed grains and such too often. We usually give them 20% cubes maybe once a week, or more frequently if they're pregnant or nursing. We also finish them off on stocker right before slaughter. You don't have to do any of that if you have good grass (which we do) but it'll give them a little boost.They don't get many diseases, especially when they're beyond a year old or so, but the calves will sometimes.
In that case, you need to be able to pen em and give them shots or pour medicine of various types along their spines on the surface.Gotta turn those bull calves into steer calves too. They don't like that much and it takes some figuring out.If you're running them on a large chunk of land, you either need to routinely feed them cubes in a corral so you can catch them when you need to or get a 4-wheeler or a horse to round them up with. I typically just feed mine cubes. Horses are a whole different story and a headache.Overall cattle are not difficult and you can have beef for around a buck a pound for the rest of your life, but there is something of a learning curve.If you have detailed questions on cattle, let me know and I'll help all I can!
Been getting serious now about disappearing from society. Could be politics, the weather, the economy, or just plain loving the show Yellowstone.But I need to do more then “own land”, buy survival food, and guns.In the coming 2-3 years my land will be paid off and should have enough funds to build the cabin without taking a mortgage.Kids will be in 10th grade/7th grade. Perfect time to get them working on the land during the summer.The land is permitted 1 well for the cabin and 1 for ag use. I’m studying the soil to see what I would need to go to sustain some type of farming.But my ultimate goal is to have enough animals to sustain my family. The good news is while my land is 35 acres, I have access to 6000 acres for free grazing. It’s why my property taxes are $10 a year (I prepaid taxes thru 2030)So to my point:For those who have done the research or live the life.should I count on this list as a good start to researching what I need?
![Self Self](/uploads/1/2/4/1/124105217/243068160.jpg)
I think it's a pretty decent list. I also think a lot depends on what you want to do, and the lifestyle you want to lead.An illustration: I know a family that decided to become prepper-type folks. They 'woke up' and went kind of crazy, selling their house in town, moving to the country put in a 250' x 250' garden, bought goats, ducks, chickens and rabbits.Maybe it's because they were new, maybe it was just their personality, but it was my observation that they were essentially slaves to the place they built.
First, the garden went completely to heck, because the enthusiasm of putting in and all the beautiful photos in the seed catalogs waned, and the drudgery of day-to-day weeding, watering, pruning, etc. Remained.Then, they couldn't leave over night: They had to rotate frozen 2 liter bottles of water into the rabbit hutches so the rabbits didn't overheat and die (in the summer).
The fish fit into my system in aquaponics. My Greenhouse is going to be about 70% aquaponics. My initial thoughts are to get six of the big Square totes and utilize them for the fish breeding apparatus has. I might be in way over my head, but it seems like a fairly easy source of protein and good nutrients for your vegetables. Right now I'm just buying shit like mad. I'm trying to get everything I could think of together up front and if the economy blows up on me where my income is probably going to be some of the first to go, I'll have plenty of projects with minimal cash outlay.
At least that's the plan in the thought. The fish fit into my system in aquaponics. My Greenhouse is going to be about 70% aquaponics. My initial thoughts are to get six of the big Square totes and utilize them for the fish breeding apparatus has.
I might be in way over my head, but it seems like a fairly easy source of protein and good nutrients for your vegetables. Right now I'm just buying shit like mad. I'm trying to get everything I could think of together up front and if the economy blows up on me where my income is probably going to be some of the first to go, I'll have plenty of projects with minimal cash outlay. At least that's the plan in the thought. Depending on your setup and ambition, my thought would be to try whatever it is now.Experiment.
Better to find out now than later what works and what doesn’t.Farmers are slaves to the land, yes, but well fed slaves they be.At the end of the day that livestock is going to go into the pot. And that’s if everything goes well.We need to know now if we can care for that livestock properly.
Can slaughter and process it. Then be able to store it correctly for future use.Will older folks be able to do those things?If you need to go somewhere for any reason then who will care for your animals?What happens if you don’t make it back?Just saying.
Chickens are a no-brainer. They're easy unless you live in an extremely hot or extremely cold environment.
We barely feed ours at all. They're also cheap for if/when you need to replace them.And free bug control!Rabbits. Are harder than they appear. They're fairly delecate, and will die in severe heat or cold fairly quickly. They'll breed like crazy though.
Sure your family is OK eating them?Ducks are iffy, too.Fish are a no brainer unless you overstock and have to feed them.Goats are pretty easy. They just don't taste very good, at least to most folks. Goat meat and milk is an acquired taste. Keep the male away from the females if you're going to eat the meat or drink the milk!
We don't do goats anymore, but I know a lot of folks that do.Cattle. It's only been a handful of years in my life that I haven't been around cattle.Hardier breeds are great. There's a reason I and my family do longhorns and black Angus. They're tough and low maintenance. Especially the longhorns.You do have to build up some infrastructure for them. Gotta have a corral area with a chute for loading them into a trailer and also for shots. Fencing has to be decent, at least.Gotta be able to haul in a bunch of round bales for the winter or lay someone to do it.
Good thing is it doesn't have to be horse quality hay, so you can cheat a little and get the cheap stuff.Cattle don't have to be fed grains and such too often. We usually give them 20% cubes maybe once a week, or more frequently if they're pregnant or nursing. We also finish them off on stocker right before slaughter. You don't have to do any of that if you have good grass (which we do) but it'll give them a little boost.They don't get many diseases, especially when they're beyond a year old or so, but the calves will sometimes. In that case, you need to be able to pen em and give them shots or pour medicine of various types along their spines on the surface.Gotta turn those bull calves into steer calves too. They don't like that much and it takes some figuring out.If you're running them on a large chunk of land, you either need to routinely feed them cubes in a corral so you can catch them when you need to or get a 4-wheeler or a horse to round them up with. I typically just feed mine cubes.
Horses are a whole different story and a headache.Overall cattle are not difficult and you can have beef for around a buck a pound for the rest of your life, but there is something of a learning curve.If you have detailed questions on cattle, let me know and I'll help all I can!