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!"
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.
I buy chicken feed because people won't keep their dogs up. I can't
The amount of money I spend on the homestead is generally .... zero.
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