What Does it Take to Become a Homesteader?

Probably the first thing that comes to your mind is “money”—lot’s of it!  While a sufficient amount of money can certainly buy you some property, I’m going to suggest that the best answer to this question is “access to land” and “the right perspective”.

In our school system, we indoctrinate our children from a very young age to believe that anything they should want or need can be bought.  “Money” is the almighty king!  Young people quickly learn that they need to get a “career” so that they can earn “money”, and that they will likely need to move to a location where there is an “industry” that supports an “economy” which will provide them with the work they need to make that money.  This is an extremely narrow perspective on life.  It was the world view that I was taught as a child, and it was a failure.  I spent ten years going to university to get a career, and then was unsuccessful in getting the work for which I had trained.  I ended up doing something totally different that I wasn’t particularly good at (sound familiar?), but which paid the bills—not very satisfying or romantic!  Sometime later, my partner and I started our own business.  However, it was not the success of this business that financed our homestead; rather it was its near bankruptcy that convinced us that we could not afford the life we were living.  As it turns out, it’s not how much money you make that is the most important factor in life—it’s how much money you spend.  If we have any regrets about taking up the homesteading life, it is that we didn’t start ten years earlier!

The question then becomes “How do you access land?”  Admittedly, land has become much more expensive in the eleven years since we bought our property.  We were lucky, although nearly red-lining, we were able to sell our house and some business assets, downsized dramatically, and were just able to squeak the cost of the land and a small cabin.  After that, we learned how to live without spending much money!  Currently, however, British Columbia has a housing and land crisis … essentially there are more people needing homes than there is housing or land for them.  This is an artificial situation, as there is more than sufficient land should the crown decide to make it available, but good king Money sits upon his throne, and access is denied—an ugly pimple that I think will burst sometime in the near future.  In the meanwhile, private land remains outrageously expensive and access to crown land is almost impossible.  There are still a couple legal ways to gain access to homesteading properties—look for aging homesteaders who are willing to consider succession or find a position as a caretaker for the current crop of absentee land owners who are sitting on many of the available private lots.

What does succession involve?  In my mind, I see it as a two-pronged process:

1. 1. Connecting elder homesteaders with younger people who want to take up homesteading. This is already being done, but very poorly, by several other organizations, which can serve as good examples of what works, and what doesn’t.

• • • Young Agrarians has been frequently recommended to me. They’re great people.  I’ve worked with them.  The biggest problem is that they are set up for commercial agriculture, and the young people they attract are looking for an immediately viable, intensively productive farm, often in the ALR.  Sadly, very few places in British Columbia actually meet this criterion.  Most homesteaders I know live on marginal land with small agricultural footprints, and the communities of which they are a part make their living through diverse, and often multiple, means (e.g., combining fishing with local food production, or silviculture with fishing, or tourism with fishing, etc.).
    • com has taken the initiative to train potential homesteader candidates, through a program called SKIP, and connect them to homesteaders needing assistance/succession, who are referred to as Otises. This is a great program … however, very few match-ups have been made.  Also, it is thoroughly American, although it does allow Canadian homesteaders to join as we have done.

1. 2. Revising and recreating what it means to live in a small community. We need to re-educate peoples’ expectations, teaching them

• • • how to live in a rural or remote or possibly off-grid environment
    • self-sufficiency and all the old skills that go with this
    • how to live simply and avoid the money trap
    • how to create self-employment (e.g., how do I make money out there …), possibly through multiple, diverse streams

One of the keys to successful homesteading, therefore, is healthy communities.  Sadly, the “money is king” perspective is killing our small communities, as industry exhausts the land and resources on which they were built and moves on to new locations to “reap and pillage”.  The key to keeping towns and villages alive is to make them as self-sufficient and self-sustaining as possible.  Excessive reliance on external resources (including industrial greed) can leave a community vulnerable to sudden collapse when that resource is no longer available.  Diversity, creativity, resilience, and flexibility are necessary for both individual, as well as community, success and survival.

Whether you are an individual or a community, I think that living in a resilient, self-sustaining manner involves two interconnected aspects:

1. 1. Learning to live simply. This means figuring out what you need to survive, and what you don’t.  It requires differentiating between needs and wants.  It is not such a terrible thing to want something, but it is important to realize that needs come before wants, and to organize your energies and resources efficiently on this basis.  Living simply means de-programming ourselves from the modern propaganda put forth by industry in order to make rich people richer.  Many of the things we have been told that we need are not actually necessary to right living and a good life.  Simple living requires developing the skill to think critically about our situation and society as a whole.
   2. Learning how to get what you need. As you start to live more simply, your needs decrease (often surprisingly).  However, there will always be some things that you will still need.  Can you learn the skills necessary to meet some of these needs?  For example, growing a garden can significantly reduce the amount of money you need to spend on groceries.  Learning to fix equipment can reduce repair costs.  Making the things that you need for yourself is not only a fulfilling task, it also reduces the amount of money that you need to earn in order to survive, and decreases your dependency on the “economy” (which can be subject to significant crashes).  Can you trade crafts and skills with your neighbors, thus keeping the “community” more localized and self-sustaining?  Can you find a creative way of earning what little cash you need from the land itself, or from within the local community?

It’s the “learning how to get what you need” aspect of this process that most people struggle with.  Often people simply want a job handed to them … someone to tell them what to do and pay them for doing it.  However, it seldom works that way in a traditional homestead.  Sometimes, a person needs to work at two or three different tasks at different times of the year to make the necessary “money” they require.

So, the next question becomes “How do you make a living on a homestead?”  Here are a few possible “money-making” opportunities that would be a good fit for our concept of a remote sustainable homesteading community:

• • Doing creative work from home (e.g., writing, painting, carving, webpage designing, computer programming, etc.).
  • Developing a career that allows you to work from home (e.g., book-keeping, insurance agent, real estate agent, etc.). Since COVID, a number of work places are allowing their employees to work from home.
  • Harvesting and processing high value products from the land. We do not recommend trying to grow perishable produce, as we are too far from markets.  However, products with long shelf-lives and which do not require refrigeration or freezing would be viable (e.g. dried wild harvest berries, mushrooms, and herbs, wild berry jams, etc.).  Ideally, produce would be harvested and processed on site, then transported in its processed state (now stable, much lighter, and not requiring refrigeration) during the “off-season” when growers on Vancouver Island are not generating fresh produce, so that markets for dried produce, jams, etc. would be much greater (and you could hit the “Christmas” season, when such specialty items often sell as gifts, etc.).  Please note that we have not done a market analysis on any of these concepts, and one would need to be done before embarking on them.  Some examples are:
    • Enhancement and wild harvest of non-timber forestry resources such as berries (e.g., blueberries), edible mushrooms (e.g., shitake, oyster, chicken of the woods), and medicinal plants (e.g., turkey’s tails, elderflower, etc.).
    • Planting, growing, and harvesting nuts as a component of a food forest.
    • Planting, growing, harvesting, and processing fruit (e.g., dehydrating or producing jams and jellies) as a component of a food forest.
    • Growing permaculture plants for sale from seeds/cuttings.

We do not recommend tourism on our site.  The remote nature of our location makes it hard to get medical assistance should problems arise with clients.  Also, obtaining insurance, which would be needed on boats, docks, floats, and buildings, is difficult, if not impossible, in remote areas.  Furthermore, the expense of insurances, licenses, certificates, etc. often far outweighs the income generated in an already oversaturated market.

It is also possible, as has been done in past generations, to combine homesteading with sustainable fishing or forestry activities in the community.

When we are describing “money-making” products, we are thinking about it from the perspective of the three permaculture ethics:

• • Ethic 1: Care of the earth
  • Ethic 2: Care of the people
  • Ethic 3: Reinvest surplus into the earth and the people and limit consumption

The focus here is on self-sustainability by growing and foraging your own food and only excess “product” is available for sale or trade (e.g., taking your excess product to the farmer’s market to sell for cash).  This is not the typical “commercial” perspective, where money is generated by resource harvesting and then that money is used to feed oneself (e.g., these two concepts operate in reverse).

Back to the concept of succession … one of the questions we get asked is “What would succession look like on your homestead?”  This is something of a personal view on succession, as I think that each homestead that engages in succession will probably do it slightly differently.  So, here are our thoughts:

• • When we refer to succession, we are not talking about a commune. We are trying to recreate the process that once used to happen when land passed from parents to children.  Unfortunately, since we have no children, we will have to “adopt” our successors.  Financially, the land would become theirs in the end (so single family ownership, not multiple shared ownership).
  • Initially, we would go through a period of “getting to know each other” with a potential succession candidate(s). We recommend a site visit to get to know the place.  Ideally, the person(s) should spend some time at the site, living in temporary accommodations (e.g., in the summer, as a minimum) to test things out and see if the like the lifestyle.
  • If the situation turns out to be right for everyone involved, there are a number of legal ways in which succession can be set up … the specific method would depend on the specific conditions of those involved. We’ve looked into a few of these ways, and can discuss them with a potential candidate(s).
  • Depending on the individuals involved, another household on the property could live either independently at a separate site on the land, while sharing the responsibilities of the property, or they could live within the current footprint of our homestead. We have sites on our property where a completely independent homestead could be developed.  Our zoning allows for two buildings … a large house and a smaller guest cottage.  Our current home (a 20’x20′ cabin) qualifies as the smaller guest cottage.  Alternately, it is also possible for us to combine efforts with a “family” and work on expanding our current homestead site, adding more gardens and orchard, a second cabin, and possibly areas (including outbuildings and fields) for raising animals (e.g., chickens and goats/sheep for milk).  My partner and I have discussed both options in quite some detail, so we are prepared to look at either choice.  At the moment, I think we are leaning just slightly more towards the joint concept, but again, that really depends on the people we attract.
  • Succession is something that takes place over a significant period of time. Initially, we would act mostly as mentors with the “family”, teaching them what we know of the land.  During that initial phase, assuming it happens in the relatively near future, we would also be able to help them build and clear the land.  Our needs at that point would be relatively minor … a little “homestead sitting” while we were away getting groceries, appointments, etc., maybe a hand on a difficult project, like roof repairs.  As we age (now looking beyond the five to ten year range), we would need a little more help on heavier tasks … wood cutting, yard mowing, heavy gardening.  This would probably not be terrible extensive, as both my partner and I are quite independent.  As we get into our 80s and 90s, assuming no health crises—these things can never be predicted, but we are essentially quite healthy at the moment—we would need more assistance, and possibly some care-taking as we reached the end of our lives.  We would like to age in place, and our preference would be to pass peacefully on the land that we love.

In the end, I believe that homesteading in a remote off-grid environment is what each and every person makes of it … it’s a reciprocal relationship with the land, and the time and energy you put into the process is repaid by what you receive in return from the land.  It is definitely possible to live happily and sustainably on such a homestead, but it may take a change of perspective about what a good life should be.  The degree to which a homesteader relies on “external” materials and support to maintain their homestead is really a personal perspective as well, a world view, and not an absolute.  I could, for example, with the wilderness training and experience I have, live completely off the land through foraging and primitive survival skills with no additional supplies.  This is, of course, not what we intend to do.  We enjoy our luxuries, but we also live very simply and know what we need and how to obtain that.  We are in control of how many supplies we have to get externally.  This is the entire point of living off-grid and remotely … the freedom to choose how much, and how little, we “drink” from the “chalice” of modern civilization.  This is as much a spiritual perspective as a real lived experience.  Our goal has been to live a simpler life that is much closer to the land … what could be called “primitive” living by some (although it is not, as here I am typing on my computer using a satellite dish for communications).  There have always been people who have lived at the edges of civilization (we have been called “hermits”, although most of us are very sociable), and we are such people.  Hopefully, there are others like us who want to share our wonderful way of life!