Humor will not be tolerated!! -Portia

#62135

So, I have no personal experience. However, I've done a heck of a lot of research on backyard homesteading. So while I'm not qualified to answer, here's the borrowed wisdom of a hundred authors that are. Basically, I just wanted to give you hope that you can actually live your dreams. Self-sufficiency farming can actually be fiscally rewarding, but only if you scale your dreams to the requirements of a family. You can't compete with the market prices of an economy of scale by trying to sell your abundance, but you can save on your own food costs. Here are a few things you should look into:

Small breed milk goats (African pygmies or Nubians) are about the size of a large dog and eat about as much while producing a max of about 3.5 gallons a week. That's a much more useable amount for drinking, cheese, butter, and yogurt making than what a cow would give you. (As a plus African pygmy goats' milk is actually fattier than regular goats and so will naturally separate in the fridge-- whereas you'll need a separator for full-sized goats due to the homogenized nature of goat milk) However, keep in mind that goats need a herd-mate, whether another goat, a horse, or a friendly dog that's penned with them.

If you're looking for meat production research Boer goats or Muscovy ducks. The Khaki Campbell duck is also a great choice if you want a mix of meat and eggs. They're half the size of Muscovies but they lay almost as many eggs as a chicken, and they are gorgeous...in a I'm-a-farm-nerd kind of way. I've gotten the general impression that ducks are the easiest poultry to care for, but chickens are obviously much more popular, so there's more local availability and expertise to help you.

Raised bed gardening is a great way to get more food from less acreage, and is perfectly suited for your dream set up. Especially look into fruit vines and dwarf trees. We spend more money on fruit than on vegetables to feed our families, so fruit will have a greater return on investment than just an annual vegetable garden. Homegrown strawberries are also more delicious than anything you can buy at a store. Even if you don't really care about organic, I'd also check out organic farming techniques because they are generally geared to supe up production with limited space and equipment. Plus, if you do want to market your produce, organic is much more lucrative.

Most of the books except Mr. Jeavons, who is an idealist, don't encourage you to grow wheat as it is always going to be cheaper to buy wheat than to grow, thresh, and grind your own. But that's not the case for almost any other crop you want to grow, at least in a quality per penny sort of way.

I highly recommend the following books:
***Mini-Farming: Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre- Brett Markham ****
How to Grow More Vegetables [...] on less Land than You Can Imagine- John Jeavons ( the grand-daddy of intensive farming. The center section explains how to achieve self-sufficiency in 200 sq-ft per person)
The New Organic Grower- Eliot Coleman (which should've really been called "the Five-Acre Farm")
Barnyard in Your Backyard- Gail Damerow (every animal you might've considered raising but llamas. I love this book)
Raising the home duck flock- Dave Holderread (by far the best book on ducks but you can get a lot of the same information by googling the author)
Beekeeping for Dummies- Howland Blackiston ( I know there was no mention of having an apiary in your dream farm, but bees are highly productive, and have extremely low annual costs. It's actually pretty easy for you get enough honey for sell on top of feeding you every year since there's always a market for raw, local honey. You also get 10,000 critters in almost no space at all)

And a couple of good websites:
urbanhomestead.org --they feed four people on 1/5 an acre
backyardfarming.blogspot.com ---great chicken raising advice

One day,
Ineffable

This would make a great comment on that question. Have you submitted it?

This is kind of my dream. But not really Yellow's. So we'll probably end up compromising and having a windmill or solar panels, maybe chickens, and a large garden. And probably do our own composting. Oh, and have a garden. And probably fruit trees. But probably not a cow (though I'd love a local source of raw milk. Maybe the OP would like to be my neighbor?). And probably not fields.

I'm surprised no one has brought up zoning laws; most residential areas will not allow you to have farm animals. So this relegates you to living in a rural community if you want animals.

I do plan to do most everything else; solar panels, vegetable gardens, fruit trees, maybe some corn, and definitely an herb garden.

I want to grow strawberries! I loved the short time when we had strawberries growing in front of our house, even though we didn't take care of them so they were tiny things that often got eaten by birds.

Bob, that's because they were wild strawberries. The strawberries from the supermarket are hundreds of times the size of wild strawberries, and that's because they've cross-bred them that way.

I know they weren't supposed to be that large. I was talking more about not having water or room to grow.

This reminds me of when I was in a middle school class about life and family and things and we were doing a unit on occupations. We first chose the house, clothing, food, transportation, toys, and recreational things we wanted, and then were assigned a job and had to reconcile our income with the lifestyle we wanted. The jobs were handed out to a chorus of groans; everyone had chosen a lifestyle that was four or five times more than what they were making. Except for me. I had insisted that I would live on a farm, use my horse as my main transportation, have sturdy but inexpensive clothing, grow most of my own food, and spend my recreational time mostly with my family at home instead of out boating on lakes or something. And I don't know why I was so set on farming. I have to this day never really been to a farm (though I live across the street from several), none of my family has been in farming for generations, and the most aspirations my parents have had is to clean up a corner of our yard to grow a little garden.

I submitted a shorter comment to the question then directed them here for the whole spiel.

Dragon Lady: yep, same here. I love the farm thing, but I really like living close to a hospital/ church/ friends. But I'm inspired by how much you can do in small spaces. Edible landscaping can be really lovely... My dream is to have an outside dining room under a huge perugola covered in grape vines, and rows of lavender in my front yard.

Yeah, obviously I'm definitely prone to the over-romantization of farm life, but one of my good friends have been large-scale gardening and keeping chickens for a decade and she's still in love with it (She's actually one of the writers for the backyardfarming blog....but cross my heart I really would've recommended it even if I didn't know her).

Marduk: Most residential areas will let you keep chickens since somehow chickens usually don't count as livestock according to zoning, I don't really get it, but that's what they say. Some neighborhoods even allow goats as "pets". But a lot of the people I've read just relied on being really good neighbors, telling them all of their plans to take care of noise and smell, and offering them the occasional basket of eggs, etc. So when they asked their neighbors to sign a petition for them, their neighbors did and no one bothered to evict their chickens. Not keeping roosters is a good start.

I grew up in a farming and ranching community, and while we were not farmers, many of my friends were. I can say that I would not want to have my livelihood depend on farming. A spring flood or hailstorm has the potential to wipe out your income for an entire year. You can get crop insurance, but like any other insurance, but it doesn't always help. And it really is a family job. There were kids who would miss weeks of school during harvest. But obviously the entire year isn't as busy as planting time and harvest time, and most people who do it really enjoy it.

But that's commercial farming. The type of farming the questioner is asking about is obviously a bit different. Probably there are many of the same challenges, but it might not be quite as much work and stress if you are just trying to grow enough food to provide for your family instead of growing enough wheat to sell to get a year's worth of income for your family. But you probably can't get crop insurance for your family "garden", so you would want to make sure you had food storage and an alternate source of income. From what I've seen, I think farming can be a great lifestyle if you go into it with realistic expectations. And start off slowly and gradually add to what you're growing it until you're at the point where you want to be.