Living off the land is not a simple thing. It's not always easy, because let me tell you Mother Nature doesn't always cooperate. But it is rewarding. I don't know about you but pulling something out of the ground that I helped create, grow, nourish gives me a warm tingly feeling in my heart.
That's what we do here on our farm the Rolling K. We try to live off the land. I say try because we don't always succeed and things don't always go according to plan. We try as best we can to roll with whatever mother nature throws at us.
Ok so lets start with some background information. Let me say up front though that I understand not everyone is in the same position that we are, so the information I share isn't going to be useful to everyone, I just want to share what we have and utilize to make our life work for us.
We live in West Michigan on an 80 acre farm that has sandy, clay and rocky soil and more swamp land than any one person needs to see in their lifetime. With four distinct seasons there is always a lot happening on our farm. We spend a majority of our time getting ready for winter, because if you know anything about the Great Lakes state than you know we spend a majority of our time covered in snow. We typically have at least 100 chickens, though we do pare down in the winter, pigs and cows in terms of livestock. We have your typical large old style farm barn where we store equipment and hay in the fall and winter as well as our cows, as well as a large chicken barn were our girls, and their 3 fellas reside. Our pigs have a separate pen, but this area is something that we are currently in the process of renovating. We have numerous tractors and other necessary farm implements. Each spring we plant field corn, potatoes, soy beans, oats and a large garden. We use most of our crops to create our own feed ration for our animals, though we usually still need to have something added at the farmers elevator to make it complete. Our main goal is to become a closed system- meaning that we would not need to leave the farm for anything that the farm itself would need, in terms of feed and livestock etc.... Obviously we'll have to still run to town to get gasoline and diesel and whatnot.
All of that seems like a lot when you write it down on paper but in reality we are not rich. At least now in cash money. A, my partner in crime and I both have full time jobs off the farm in order to get by. He works for a company that manufactures custom birdhouses and I work for a small bakery as their executive baker. I also run a custom cake and baking business out of our home. Having that many irons in the fire along with the farm makes us very busy people. Especially given the fact that we do as much as we can by ourselves. If hay needs to be done this weekend than A hops on the tractor and I jump on the wagon and we head out to the field and bale hay. Honestly though this suits us. We love the fact that at the end of the day we can look at everything we've done and truly feel accomplished. Living a homesteading life is our passion. That doesn't mean we take it to the extreme and make our own fuel and clothing, although we have a lot of respect for the people who do live a life like that, that takes some gusto people. We just make it work for us. We eat from our pantry and freezers as much as we can. We spend the summer and fall putting away food for the winter and spring. But, we also go out to dinner sometimes (this is getting less and less often lately) and we have debt, quite a bit of it actually in the form of a house, and a tractor. It might not seem like a lot compared to most American's but its almost more than we can handle, especially given the fact that I make just a little bit over minimum wage. That's forced us to get.... creative with our money, I plan to get more into that in later posts so stay tuned.
So what is this blog going to be about? Well A and I both feel like we have a lot of knowledge to give. On how to run a farm, the most efficient and cost effective ways to tackle big projects and how we make homesteading work for us. And I needed a creative outlet to share what I'm making, reading, creating etc...
We're a small family working hard at making this one life our best life! I hope you'll follow along on our adventure and hopefully learn something you didn't know you could do!
