An online home
computer is a rural person’s friend. Whether you’re looking up the
dosage of penicillin to give a feverish goat, finding planting tips for
State Fair-worthy eggplants, or finding employment, the answers are truly
right there in front of us. Everyone knows SOMEONE who works from
home with the help of his or her computer. The work may be
repetitive and mind numbingly boring, but if you can put in your hours and
get the work done, some character on your farm will be happy to liven
things up a bit for you- there are fences to jump over or get hung up in,
other characters to be fought with, courted inappropriately, or eaten, and
general mayhem waiting to occur at any given moment. It continually
amazes me that my animal family is so devoted to making sure that I’m
never bored, and it’s brought a tear to my eye more than once.
Really.
Obviously, anything
promising many dollars for little work should be researched with extreme
caution, or avoided altogether.
While most folks have
a goal of making their farm a Working Venture, the truth is that it takes
time, trial and error and money to achieve this in any way, form or
manner.
Can you eventually
make your living from dairy goats, fiber animals, free-range hens, grass
fed beef and organic produce? Yes. No. Maybe. The
hard fact is that there’s a learning curve to all the above, and all the
above need to be approached in a tiny way at first- these are living
things who will depend on you for everything they have including the
quality of their very lives, even
the plants.
And
even IF there is a ready market for
piebald miniature llamas in your
area this year, there may not be next year. But I’ll bet dollars to
donuts that your own operating expenses will still be there, up to and
including X number of sacks of Llama Chow every week.
Be very, very sure of
your consumer base.
Start small, no
matter how excited you are to start.
Grow slowly, no
matter how excited you are to grow.
And always, always
have a Plan B for the rainy day when the bottom falls out and pulls out
the rug under your feet with it.
Having to have a
"real job" does not mean you are a failure at Homesteading. All it means
is that right now, at this moment, your goal of a successful homestead
requires this of you. It’s to your credit that your homestead means
enough for you to do what you need to do to attain and maintain it.
The only real failure
is not to try at all.
The silver lining of
having to work off the farm is that while you are stuck in traffic or your
cubicle, when you get (poofed) to that idyllic scenario in your head, it’s
not just a dream- if you can keep from throttling the copy machine, your
co-workers or disgruntled customers for just a few more hours, you WILL be
sitting in your rocking chair with your cat in your lap, listening to the
rain pitter patter on the roof. Inhale. Exhale. Repeat.
Smile.
