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[Bill Jones <billj AT harborside.com>]

I'm a snowbird.  I spend my winters writing software and tutoring 
students in math and physics, and the summer preparing raised beds and 
keeping livestock.  Buying bottle babies or weaners in springtime really 
works for us, with no baby-birthing involved.

Our operation is 99% non-fossil fuel, but we don't pretend to be able to 
produce more than what we personally will use.  We live on the edge of 
the wild, so the flood of voles (root crops), rats (peas), and raccoons 
(tomatoes) about did us in.  So now the focus has been on creating 
raised beds tall enough to discourage them.

It's hard to know what the future will bring.  As long as I can bring 
home a bale and a bag of something once a week from the (now more 
distant) feed store, we could go on almost indefinitely on very little 
outside input, and even have a milk cow.  There's no one delivering feed 
out here now at a reasonable price.  But when the day comes when we 
can't drive, it becomes more complicated.  At that point we would 
probably spend the fortune that would have gone to car insurance on 
twice-yearly deliveries and cab rides to town.  So I guess I'm preparing 
more for adversity in our golden years, than for the end of the world.

Self-sufficiency doesn't seem that hard to us, as a team effort.  If a 
person just can't stand the idea of packing home-grown cucumbers into 
jars for pickling, or feeding a bottle to a calf, or composting manure, 
then he or she won't like our lifestyle.  But since those things are fun 
to us, we've got it made, as long as we've got one toehold on the feed 
delivery scheme (and a small income to support it).

Bill
S. Oregon coast