Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

I've read the histories of many intentional communities and seen a few first 
hand.  Two kinds, says I, endure much beyond the pipe dream stage.  I call 
these the Amish-type and the Benedictine-type.

The Amish-type are communities where everyone independently owns their own 
means with the other members of the community assuring that each independent 
person's assets and opportunities are protected and maximized.  In the 
Amish-type 
community decisions are made by consensus.

The Benedictine-type community is where all things are held in common.  No 
one owns anything peronally.  The members of the community work to protect 
and 
maximize the assets of the community which in turn supports each member.  In 
Benedictine-type communities decisions are made by one authority (the abbot) 
and 
all other members are subordinate to him (or her, the abbess).

As far as I have seen, the mixing of the metaphors of these two types of 
communities sows the seeds of its own disaster.  A community where everyone 
owns 
his own assets and yet a guru intends to dictate how those assets are managed 
is just blow-up waiting to happen.  Likewise a community where all things 
(most 
things, even some things) are held in common and yet decisions are made 
independently or by vote is just a thin prelude to fisticuffs.

There is a koan and a paradox about communities, and the same thing could be 
said for most apprenticeship programs.  It's like the old one-liner 
commedians 
used to employ, "I am highly suspicious of any club that would have me as a 
member!"  People who have the perseverence, work hardness, intelligence, and 
turn of nature to succeed in a commune are in all likelihood already 
succeeding 
on their own.  Likewise, the person who is likely to wash ashore on your 
homestead, given their current circumstances, is unlikely to contribute the 
120% of 
the effort needed to meet their own share of the needs of a homestead.

I have always urged those contemplating homesteading to sort out the two 
components of a small holding:

1. The direct use component
2.  The money economy component

The direct use component is what I refer to when I use the term 
'homesteading' (so long as I let you know that ahead of time).  It is the 
production of 
food, fuel, buildings, clothing, tools, fencing, etc. with as little input 
from 
outside the homestead as is possible or practical.  Food is the most obvious 
so 
in those terms the direct use economy is producing the food you eat.  Once 
that's done and you barter or sell any other food that is produced, your 
'farming' now has a market component, or money economy component beyond the 
direct 
use component.

Times and our conditioning being what they are, it is all too easy to slip 
over into the mini-agribusiness model when dealing with the market component 
of 
our farming.  And yet, I must needs ask myself, can I find an example 
anywhere 
that this has worked?   I meet the cash needs of this homestead selling 
things made of wood.  Can I find examples of people who (being more 
industrious 
than I) have accumulated cash assets or paid off tens of thousands in debt 
making 
wood products and selling them?  Yes.  I know quite a few of them.  Realty, 
banking, construction, lawn care, day care, auto repair, cooking or catering, 
.... list could go on and on .... do I know of people who have done these 
things and made money, a living, and/or paid back substantial debt with them? 
 Yes.

But what about someone who has four acres of raspberries, or sixty head of 
cattle, or three acres of market garden.  Do I know or know of anyone who has 
ever paid off a mortgage with these enterprises?  No.  Not one.  Many people, 
like the Nearings, paid their property taxes, bought seed and a few tools.  
But 
that's about it.  In a film documentary of the Nearings Helen is picking 
blueberries in their planting of over 1000 bushes.  She said selling the 
blueberries paid the taxes and incidentals, but adds as an afterthough .... 
'It wouldn't 
pay for a truck.'   How much less then would it pay a mortgage?

Therefore I have always said that expecting a smallholding to pay a heavy 
indebtedness such as a mortgage is unrealistic and unprecedented.  It is an 
economically dangerous mix of metaphors.

Which leads me round about to what I really want to say.  In my view there's 
no such thing as being too old, too alone, to decrepit, too anything to 
homestead.  That is, as I look here on Solstice day at the remainder of the 
agricultural year, I have X amount of garden (pasture, orchard, etc.) land, Y 
number 
of weeks, and the willingness to ability to do Z amount of work about it.  
Whatever I get done, that's what we get.  If I had twice the space under 
cultivation, was half my age, had two more adults to help work it, and it was 
March 
instead of June, I could get more produced.  It isn't.  I'm not.  They 
aren't.  
So what we get is what we get.

If you are 93, in poor health,  and have 50 square feet of garden, you can 
homestead it.  Use it to directly provide as much of your sustenance as you 
can.

But if one's idea (or ideal) of a homestead is fixed with the homesteader 
having to expand to fit it, rather than the homestead shrink to fit the 
homesteader, then I suppose it's possible to not be able to do it.   </HTML>