Evaluate My Land series – Grow Your Own Food
You want to grow your own food. You want your own land. The first step – Identify your goals.
With all the craziness in the world, you want to get out of the city, grow your own food, and perhaps have one of those food forests or orchards that you’ve been reading about.
For some of you, the seed has been planted by podcasts, friends, or the Internet. It resonates with you and something in you cries out that “something in my life has got to change.”
You are beginning your search and you have several properties in mind. How do you pick out the best one? Start with your vision and goals.
Take a Deep Breath
First of all, take a deep breath. You are going to need it. Many people dive into a land search and get so caught up in it that they get invested in “I want this land!” and they start to make compromises or overlook the shortcomings or pitfalls. This can lead to surprises and later to Type 1 errors that are difficult to recover from.
Some people jump right to “Would we buy this land?” or “How would we use this land?” but they haven’t spent the time defining their Values, Vision, and Goals.
What is Your Story?
What is Your Story? Take a few moments to think about it. Because your Story drives your Values, Vision, and Goals.
My story was that we were living in a townhouse in town. The rent went up 10% each year. We were boarding our horse at a stable. Although this was before Covid, we were already starting to see unrest: climate protesters blocking a main intersection in Kansas City. And we were sent home early from work because the nearby park in downtown Kansas City was being used for a major protest. My friend started talking about prepping. A few podcasts later and we were resolutely looking for our own land.
What Are Your Values?
Start by making a list (probably the first of many lists in this exercise). You may do it on paper or perhaps you like an on-screen bulleted list. Or maybe you “think out loud” better than writing the list. If that is you, then dictate it into your phone. Whatever works for you.
Don’t edit it yet. Just brain dump. If you immediately go into edit mode then you are correcting yourself. There will be time for refining or editing your Values, Vision, and Goals later.
First, let’s dive in.
List your Values. “What is important to me?”
For me it was:
- Growing my own food
- Quiet (or more quiet than now)
- Ownership
- Freedom to do what I want on my own place (maybe you are currently living in town or in an HOA).
- Safety (or safer, at least)
- Keeping my animals on-site (when we were looking for land we were boarding our horse at a stable).
- Exercise and health. (surely having a homestead will be more exercise and healthy?)
- Family – a place where we can get together and do things together.
Your Values drive into your Vision and Goals.
Identify Your Vision and Goals – What Does “Life” Look Like on your Homestead Property?
Building on the Values you have already captured, let’s flesh them out some more.
Ask yourself clarifying questions. Using my examples above, I would ask these clarifying questions:
- Ownership, Safety, and (more) Quiet are important to me. Where do I want to live? What does my “Life” look like in that place?
- Growing my own food is important to me. What do I want to/like to eat?
- I want to have my animals on-site. What does that look like?
- How much space do I need?
- Structures
- Water
Why did I combine Vision and Goals? Because they frequently run together or bleed into each other.
If you live in town, you may not have the “vocabulary”, for lack of a better word, for what you want yet.
For example, when I was growing up I could still see the stars and the Milky Way from my backyard (and I wasn’t even on the outskirts of town!). I had seen the stars and the constellations while camping. There was something that stirred deep inside me in those times. Like Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” says: the animals were made gazing at the ground, but Man(kind) was made to look up at the skies, from whence he came:
“While the mute creation downward bend their sight, and to their earthly mother tend,
Man looks aloft, and with erected eyes beholds his hereditary skies”.
Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”
Depending on how much you have been exposed to, you may already have already jumped to: “I want a food forest like the Permaculture Orchard guy”, or “I want a chestnut silvopasture like Mark Shepard”, or “I want chickens and gardens like that guy on YouTube” (Justin Rhodes). That is jumping to the design and solutions. Don’t jump to the solution yet. We’ll get there, I promise.
Tip: Use the 8 Forms of Capital to Help Define Your Goals
Going back to Thriving the Future Podcast Episode 3, these are the 8 Forms of Capital:
- Financial Capital
- Material Capital – What resources do you have?
- Living Capital
- Social Capital – How does this “feed” your family or group?
- Cultural Capital – What do you value as a community? What do you pass on to others in tyhe group or other generations?
- Intellectual Capital
- Experiential Capital – What experience do you gain?
- Spiritual Capital – How does it feed your soul?
Be Careful What You Wish For
I had listed Exercise and Health in my list of Values. There is no lack of exercise on my homestead!
So much exercise that I had to refine my goals 7+ years into it, and moved more toward perennials over annuals, and more dependence on a food forest, as you can hear in Thriving the Future Podcast Ep. 82 – This Year it’s Perennials Over Annuals.
“There are no Solutions, Only Tradeoffs”
The famous Thomas Sowell quote.
You most likely won’t find the PERFECT land. You will have to make some tradeoffs. Some things (such as Infrastructure) you will develop over time as you have more experience, money, etc.
Goals – Where do you see yourself in…?
Now we can get down to defining some goals.
Time: Where do you see yourself in five or ten years? How about twenty? (if you are thinking really long term). That may sound like a job interview question, but it really fits in here.
How do your plans for this land fit into those Time goals?
Use: Will this property be your homestead, a farmstead, a getaway (maybe you live in town and can’t move and this land will be your out of town place to grow food and develop skills), a bug-out property?
Will this be your retirement property?
Check out the next step in the Evaluate My Land series: How to Pick your Homestead Property: Meet the Neighbors
How Can I Help You with Your Vision and Land Search?
If you like this approach and would like a second set of eyes to look at your property, check out my options below:
Discovery call with you to help you identify and refine your goals.
Remote site consult:
Can you really objectively look at a property once you get into buy mode – “I want this property”? It’s hard, because you may overlook things and downplay the negatives. You need a second set of eyes to look at it, or at least give you an overview site consult.
If you have a property picked out, after a Discovery call I do the research for you (rainfall, land contour, water, soil type, climate, possible microclimates) and give you a report that you can use to make your decisions.
On-site pre-purchase property walk:
All of the above plus an on-site property walk (up to 10 acres).
The best way to evaluate is to an on-site property walk. But location may be a limiting factor.
Available in the Eastern half of Kansas, Western Missouri up to the Iowa border. Or I will hook you up with one of my affiliates in other parts of the country (if available in your region/area).
Contact me at [email protected]
If you like this article, you will like the NEW 2024 Homesteading Bundle from Permies, which has 35 e-books, courses, videos.
What I really liked:
- The Backyard Forest Garden e-book
- Agroforestry
- Restoration Agriculture: Designing Your Perennial Farm presentation from Permaculture Voices by Mark Shepard
- Permaculture Thorns, A Book About Trying to Build Permaculture Community, by Paul Wheaton.
- Plus 2 books by Nicole Sauce.
