/k/ - Weapons

Sad post don't read.

Friend tried homesteading and barely got out of it with her skin intact. If I recall she purchased an acre for $50,000, paid another $75,000 to make it liveable and dig wells, pens, do the driveway etc, then bought $15k worth of livestock, seeds and equipment. Things weren't that bad for a few months, it looked serviceable…. but then in the first year her crops failed due to early frost, she only got the second growth season on some vegetables to work. And then her goats got some weird viral disease and had to be put down. Year two crops failed because soil was waterlogged from larger than average melts, which also damaged the well. By this point she was about $300k in debt, managed to unload the homestead on some family for $200k and is now stuck with the remainder of debt working it off at a tim hortons.

You need to know what you're doing, and I mean you need to KNOW. You need to be raised from birth to age eighteen on a farm, and then you need to spend five years in a place just to learn if the land is good enough to buy. Homesteading isn't for the faint hearted, you're going to spend your entire life elbow deep in shit without any light at the end of the tunnel…. there's a reason all the immigrants stick around cities and buy $500,000 properties despite there being plenty of cheap land out there.

You need to pretty much run your first growth season on wheat and then plow to make the land ready to accept anything more worthwhile.

What if I will get a 500sqm piece of land with a house, and will start with mowing lawn, then moving to planting a couple of fruit trees and berry bushes, then full size gardening (potatoes, cabbage, onions, etc) and top it off with a couple of hens once I got gardening figured out?

Should be enough for one family. I would be able to handle everything except hens (I know they stink and shit everything up but that's it)

>>599131

>Friend tried homesteading and barely got out of it with her skin intact. If I recall she purchased an acre for $50,000,

Mistake #1. You can get a hundred acres out in the boonies (but still adjacent to a paved road) in Manitoba or Sask for that. (Though you don't need/want that much for homesteading). Paying $50,000 even in Canada tokens, for a single acre was a huge fuck-up.

>paid another $75,000 to make it liveable and dig wells, pens, do the driveway etc,

Mistake #2. At that price, she can't have done most of the work herself. She paid other people to do it. Not much of a homesteader ethic.

>then bought $15k worth of livestock, seeds and equipment.

Mistake #3. Most homesteaders start with no livestock, or very little, precisely because they're a huge investment.

Your friend sounds less like a homesteader and more like someone who tried (and failed) to get into small-scale traditional farming. She's a cautionary tale, sure, but only for fellow idiots.

>>599114

>So, I want to do some prep work so that I can go homesteading in a few years, in Alaska or a similar state.

There are no similar states to Alaska. And Alaska is huge and diverse, with everything from temperate rainforests, to places that are brutally cold but get almost no snowfall, to places that get 20'+ snow and snowdrifts. So a lot depends on where in Alaska you'd want to live and what kind of lifestyle (which would be determined largely by where you lived). But, in general:

>I want to work out a list of skills,

<tracking

<trapping

<fishing

<hunting

<skinning and processing carcasses and skins

<meat preservation

<firearm use and maintenance (everything from .22lr to larger caliber hunting rifles to shotguns to large-caliber pistols

<sharpening and maintenance of blades and tools

<logging and tree/lumber processing

<carpentry

<first aid

<firestarting

<soapmaking

<sewing and leatherwork

>equipment

<everything you'd need for the above, so:

<firearms and appropriate tools for their cleaning and maintenance, axes, saws, skinning knives, cleavers, sharpening equipment, hand tools, traps, fishing equipment

Depending on where you live, you might also need/want to know things like boating or growing crops.

Think about all of the things that you do that require electricity and figure out how to either do them without, or abandon them. Because you're either going to be off the grid with no electricity, or off the grid with limited electricity from solar or, very occasionally, a generator.

>>599148

Homesteading is subsistence farming. You can't survive on air alone my martian friend.

>>599191

You misunderstand. Subsistence farming is exactly what your friend should have stuck to, but didn't. No subsistence farmer starts out buying thousands of dollars worth of livestock. She tried–and failed at–traditional commodity farming, i.e. taking on debt in order to acquire land, infrastructure, livestock, and agricultural equipment for the production of agricultural goods as commodities, which she presumably intended to sell to pay off her debts. That's standard modern agribusiness (albeit at a very small scale), not subsistence farming or homesteading. The fact that she probably planned to provide much of her own food doesn't make her a subsistence farmer.