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  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Go ld -- feel free to ignore
  • Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 12:50:54 EST


> >

I do not know, William, if it is even possible to untangle the cross purposes
to which we are talking.

>> I have also tried homesteading without any outside income and I can tell
> you, at least for me, it was impossible.
>

The hobby homesteader is like my step-FIL who would proudly hold up a tomato
and say, "I don't mind telling you how much I've got in that tomato, it cost
me $23.75" The hobby homesteader depends on outside income to pay for
homestead expenses. Oh, he may say, "I eat my own vegetables, put up my own
meat, cut
my own wood." But if a great flow of dollars did not support the trellisis,
bedding plants, fertilizer, tractor, gasoline, animal feed, etc. etc. they'd
have none of those things. The homestead simply becomes a sort of money
laudering proposal where instead of buying the chicken at the super market
for $3
they spend $11 each on chicks, feeders, waterers, purchased feed, medicine,
etc.
and then say "See, grew it myself... I'm ready for any emergency!"

Also I have to explain (apparently) that homestead doesn't mean miniature
farmer. You can use whatever definition you like, of course, but the way I
am
using the word homesteading is the model of a direct use economy with very
little or no outside input.

For some people the notion of homesteading necessitates earning all you cash
for non-homestead needs by commercial farming. To those people I say, show
me
the paradigm in practice. Where in history or the world is the model of a
micro-farm supporting vehicle costs, utilities, eating out, televisions,
electric dish washers, etc. etc.?? When we seek that we are sorely mixing
metaphors.

So in my use of the term 'homestead', I mean a self-sustaining economic unit
able to continue unabated with very little or preferably no outside input.

Now, see if you think this sounds like a hobby homestead: If you cut the
electric and phone lines (the only utilities we have) and locked the front
gates
of this homestead, we could eat and have fuel for cooking and heating for at
least five years if not indefinately. The clothes and tools and such we have
now would do us fine in that time or longer.

Oh, we use electicity, but we don't depend on it. It has actually gone out
for hours and nobody noticed. All work is manual or animal, there are no
machines here. We save seeds, propogate our animals, and the whole place is
a
symbiosis of fertility,

Instead of going out and getting a job or plying a trade for our food and
fuel and housing, we chose to do it ourselves, directly, with no inputs.

Draw a line there.

If we want something besides food and fuel and such, the things a homestead
provides for us directly, we ply some trade or the other and purchase them.
Some people's trade is rasing cows or raising fruit. Any cows or fruit you
need
beyond your own means are, by my definition, not homestead products or
homestead enterprises, but rather commercial farming products. The only
difference
between what you are doing and what I am doing is that I work wood for my
cash
and you sell fruit. Both are equally commercial enterprises and both equally
have nothing whatever to do with homesteading.

A hobby homestead is one in which the person could live as well or better on
the cash income they spend on the homestead if they just stayed in the city.

The amount of money I spend on the homestead is generally .... zero.


James




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