Homesteading On an extreme budget

>>9450350

Treat grass the way we treat corn and I guarantee you that you can get more feed calories per acre from the grass field than a corn field of one harvest a year. Because guess what, grass is a fuckload of weeds. Drop mono'culture plowing and you up the yield per acre by an significant amount. Mix in goats with cow herds and open up fields so herds can roam naturally and the acre yields become insane. And this is before you account for food / feed trees mixed into a field as well.

But mono crop / herd farming is scaleable and more profitable since a few less people per thousand acres. Profit for share holders over all after all.

Corn is shit tier for calories per acre if you look at the reality. But corporations will not accept reality because looking at anything but cost differentials on a spreadsheet is hard. So no big corp will do it, and no bank will help finance unless you toe the line.

Also grass fed is more lean and flavorful, a moving herd also creates even leaner meat and healthier herds by far. The larger the herd the better the land produces as well so long as the herd eats and moves constantly and doesn't stay in one area all year long. Mixed herds causes the land to produce even more after just a few years because shit tier food grasses for one type of animal is not selected for, causing ranchers to periodically plow and utterly wreck the ecosystem locally, ruining its production value per acre both short and especially long term. Incorporate controlled burns rather than brush cutting and feed calories per acre increase yet again. But all of this requires close management, forethought, and significant support. Much easier to buy McMansanto Feed Inc. Poison for your cows and force hormones down their throat so they get big (i.e. sloppy fat) fast and you make the sale fast reducing feed cost (because fuck letting em out of one pasture to feed) per head. If you wanna just get the maximum lbs of meat per lbs of feed in the fastest speed possible corn works. But fuck long term viability tho m I rite?

>>9452781

And doing this staggered mix herd setup increases yield long term, but the yield of meat becomes far more varied and intermittent than is currently the case. Some years you can only really cull the heads that are already injured, other years you get bumper culls. A years long boom bust cycle that looks horrid on paper to an idiot in an office, but actually out paces the year over year production systems needed now to pay off financing or stock holders. This is how many of the old cattle ranches managed to get so fucking massive once upon a time. Lean years they sold only the dregs of the herd or their sub herds of goats / sheep / horses / pigs and let the herd grow even larger until the time is right. While smaller ranches had to sell a certain amount every year no matter what to meet the demands place upon them by outside forces less forgiving than the weather itself. Eventually the cumulative effects of constant drains would catch up to virtually all small ranches when something big comes along.

Not to say there are not still small ranches and herders around. But many people now are either mega ranches of one type or another, or investor ranchers looking for an more solid thing to have invested in with decent returns. Virtually nobody has generations long ranches, and many ranches go wild for years when the old owners go bust since industrial type cow raising requires high investment initially to start producing fast enough to warrant the investment cost. Again, high demand for quick turnover fucks the reality of what is best for both the cows and land much less the calorie per acre argument.

>>8075250

>>8075250

You far out from "civilization" anon? How do you get internet? I work as a freelancer and it offers me a lot of freedom from where I work. I've dreamed of building something out on some land somewhere with a nice view. And if I'm gonna be out in the sticks, I gotta be able to shitpost. Also how do you deal with food storage/making sure you don't go hungry?

It makes me sad too though, I'm a big fan of traditional building. People think that if you don't get it from Home Depot or whatever that it's no good. The shit from Home Depot is cheap garbage designed to fall apart in 10-20 years. Look at all the shit that was built before electricity. Built to last, and many old buildings look beautiful even as ruins. You can build a home from earth, rock, or wood (or all 3) and have a beautiful home worth being proud of that will last for generations, without paying for a single board or brick. It blows my mind that people get into insane amounts of debt for houses that look like shit, are flimsy as shit, and age like shit.

As the quality of housing drops, you feel like more and more of a slave. Your "property" is just a thinly veiled flimsy glorified slave hut.

I can't wait to see the unpozzed architecture of the future once we MAGA. I think archeo-futurism is a very interesting direction to move towards. Houses growing their own food, heating themselves, generating their own power, with lower/removed upkeep costs. Freedom.

tfw no cozy off-grid shitposting cabin/ranch/fortress

>>8073085

a LOT of it is situational. the first thing you need to do is look at the land near you available for sale. if your family is near you, it's unlikely that you're going to want to move too far away, so you're basically going to have to deal with the land quality near you.

near me, land has problem with getting waterlogged. there's not enough sand and whatnot in the soil for water to run through easily. why does this matter? because it affects wells, farming and building.

for wells, if topsoil (literally the top of the soil, the part you see) retains water, less passes through to the groundwater so your wells recharge slower. which means you either need a deeper well or multiple wells if it's too low. OR you could collect rainwater to supplement it, depending upon the laws for that in your area.

for farming, it means you have to add aggregate to your soil. which literally is just shit like sand, gravel, etc. so water can get to roots and so plants don't drown in it when it does get to it. waterlogged soil = moldy plants. but your soil might have different problems. personally, i learned through trial and error trying to grow food in my apartment in a plastic tote filled with soil i collected from outside. i studied the problems the plants had, documented them. by the time i saved up enough money, i was aware of everything i needed to know. i recommend you do the same. i would say "read a fucking book" but if you're working that much, you honestly won't have time. or what time you will have, you'll rather spend doing things you enjoy.

for building, it means i had to waterproof my shit. you should waterproof it anyway, but if i didn't then i would 100% get flooding based on my house design.

so to reiterate, your first step is research on your region. part of that is physically going outside, getting some soil and figuring out what the fuck you're looking at. an important note here is that NO ONE, i repeat NO ONE in normie life knows anything about any of this and will think you're fucking crazy. don't try to signal your knowledge to look cool.

step two is planning. you need to look up the cost of all your materials and over the time you're working, calibrate your design. minimize expenses. this is what sets this process apart from typical construction – usually, contractors throw together a design overnight or otherwise in a short period of time. you have a full fucking year. your result will be extremely cost and time efficient.

>>8073353

for reference, my design is a typical basement design with waterproofed outside walls. used concrete blocks (cinder blocks). any flooding i could get (never have, although it hasn't been that long) isn't coming from the soil but from the surface and i have a drainage pipe in the basement for that reason. i used a basement design because it gives the house a shitload of thermal mass, makes the house very earthquake resistant, doubles as a bunker, and is virtually free square footage because it's just built with concrete blocks. overtop, i have a fairly small wooden A-frame. my solar panels are located atop this A-frame's "roof", because it's accessible at ground level and its close proximity simplifies wiring and reduces wire costs. i live in the actual basement portion and the top is essentially storage. it's also at the top where i keep my batteries, which are lead acid, so they need to be outside the living space anyway. the inside of the A-frame has sheet insulation – the kind that comes in rolls. i pre-sized the frame way back when it was for the tent with this in mind, so it all fits perfectly. over the insulation is simple dry wall. on the outside of the frame, it's covered with wooden boards and waterproofed with tar. i don't have any siding because, like i said, it's all solar panels. i sized the solar setup enough to give me enough power at literally any fucking time. during a sunny day, it fills my batteries within a few hours. in the shittiest weather, it rarely takes more than the afternoon. the panels are a mix of poly and mono-crystalline panels that i put together myself, which is why it was so cheap. that's a whole topic in itself, though.

an important thing i had to do also was grow plants for nutrition, not for taste. by that i mean, for a little while i was eating basically just lentils, potatoes and eggs because i didn't know how to grow anything else. why lentils, potatoes and eggs? because potatoes can be grown by literal retards and i'm no farmer, lentils are very nutritious and double as chicken feed and also are easy to grow. i grew white and sweet potatoes. for calcium, i (and i still do) washed the eggs before using them, boiled after, ground them up and took 1g of the resulting powder. because eggshells are made of calcium carbonate. also, as a sidenote, if you combine calcium carbonate (eggshells work just fine) with vinegar, the acetic acid in it binds to the calcium carbonate and produces calcium acetate. which can be heated to produce acetone, or added to water pre-filter to bind to fluoride and render it biologically inactive and filterable. but that's just an aside. back on topic, today i grow a larger variety, but potatoes, lentils and eggs were my staples for many months and still are.
>>8074312

because of the design of my house, and because my living space is within the earth, winters are a breeze. lots of thermal mass. virtually all my heat is retained.

winters get very cold here, though. north eastern US.

>>8074524

see above. the house is cheap because it's basically just a basement i dug myself. literally a hole in the ground. it's got concrete walls, footer and floor. it's got a wooden roof over it in the form of an A-frame. but in the end it's just a hole.
most cost in houses go to labor and location, not materials. if you build it yourself and if you have a smart design, there's no reason for it to cost much at all.
>there is no way a durable, decent house can be built for even 100k
i certainly hope you're joking because i'm living in one for 1k right now. it's literally made of concrete. it can survive a nuclear holocaust. it will outlive generations of my family.
>>8074578
i can't speak to any of that but i find it very hard to believe that there's no cheap land. there's always cheap land.