Dare to Live the Dream

[GardeNerd]

Like many others here at BYC, I have the same dream. However, I am of little help in the practical implementation. I think a visit to sufficientself.com is the best start.

My husband has a stable job that pays the bills, I get to stay home with the kids and other home responsibilities, we are close enough to walk to a grocery store, a library, a few restaurants, a post office, a hardware store, etc. It is like Mayberry in the big city. We live on a culdusac with many nice kids for my children to play with. Therefore, My dreams will have to wait or just continue to adapt. It will be hard to leave what we've got.

One comfort to achieving my dream is the house is almost paid for and we could sell it for a bundle when the time comes. It sounds like the proceeds could go really far in other parts of the country. In the meantime, I will continue to pretend my .14 of an acre is a urban farm by having my chickens and edible landscape. If you go to my website you can see my little yard and garden.

Best Wishes with getting your dream to come true. It sounds like it could easily be a reality for you.

 

[Rusty Hills Farm]

mrbstephens wrote:

We bought the house in 2001 when prices were still pretty low and if we sold now we could easily walk away with $150,000 in our pockets. We've been researching Maryland and may want to move there. We could buy a 10 + acre parcel of land with a house and barn with $100,000 down and be paying half the mortgage and less than half the property taxes.

When we lived in Florida, the property taxes kept going up and up and up as the costs of living went right with them. We sold a farm that we had owned for 20 years and moved here to Alabama to retire. Now we pay less in mortgage/insurance/taxes combined than we did in just real estate taxes back home. We have everything we wanted plus no close neighbors and a sense of total privacy. My biggest problem has been that I learned how to grow stuff in Florida and those rules, tricks, skills just do not apply here. I am basically starting all over in that department. I'm seriously considering joining the Master Gardener classes for this county in the hopes of finally figuring out all these new rules.

My only serious mistake is that I did not realize just how cold it really gets here. Right now it's 24!

Rusty​

 

[LizFM]

One thing I cannot stress enough, if you hope to sell ANYTHING (fruits, vegetables, eggs, handcrafted items) at a premium, you MUST MUST MUST do careful research into the area in which you plan to move. Not just the laws, but the financial demographics.

You will need to live close enough to a (most likely urban) area where people have sufficient income to pay a premium for what you produce. Find out what jobs pay in the area, even if you don't plan on getting one, because that will tell you the kind of income people are living on (you might be unpleasantly surprised).

My husband and I spent the first 10 years of our marriage farming (a commercial farm that was owned by his great-grandfather). I can tell you that the reason land and home prices are low in truly rural places, is that people don't make very much money there. I know many, many commercial farmers back home who will tell you they can't afford to grow their own food when it would cost more than buying it in the grocery store (and the cheapest stuff possible even there). Organic food is a luxury most people can't afford in really rural places...if they want it bad enough they will go to the effort of growing their own before they will pay premium prices for yours. For example, my MIL used to raise and sell fresh-dressed turkey...how much did she get for them? She charged the same as whatever Butterballs were selling for in the grocery store, because people just would not pay more.

If you plan to sell produce, eggs, etc, see how far the nearest established, well-attended farmer's market is. Visit it a few times and see what prices they are getting and how well they're selling. (where we used to farm, that would have been about 3 hours each way...as farmer's markets were what 'city people with too much money' did)

If local regulations will let you sell eggs and vegetables only from your own property without special licensing, and the median income for a household in your county is $32,500 and 12% of the population lives below the poverty line (like the county where I grew up), then you may have a hard time making sales.

You can get around some things. Handcrafted items (other than perishable food) can be sold online and shipped. If you have dairy animals you can make cheese (which has a longer shelf life than, say, radishes) or something that can be shipped, or at least keep longer than vegetables.

As one other poster mentioned, find out the soil quality of the place you're considering (sellers of ag land should have this info already, learn the soil types in the area and what they mean). Do soil tests.

The OP was talking about the heavily settled northeast (compared to the central states where we grew up), so they probably have the best-case scenario of living (especially by our standards) 'fairly close' to an urban population with money to spend on premium foods. It really sounds do-able for them, as they already have the skills and a nest egg from the sale of their home in a much more expensive area. Really, that's the only way I can see to ensure success.

For anyone else dreaming (and I still do dream about having our own small place to grow at least some of our own food), I mention the above in hopes of warning someone from making a huge mistake.