I’ve been thinking more and more about the differences between homesteaders and small-scale farmers and market gardeners. While there are many similarities, usually including similar lifestyles, a love of the outdoors, and a desire for wholesome food, there are also notable differences. Small-scale farmers and market gardeners grow food and tend animals to make a profit. It is, after all, a business, meaning more stress, paperwork, and regulation. To actually make a profit, the market gardener and farmer of any scale must be efficient.
Homesteaders, on the other hand, primarily aim to provide food and security for their own families. Because we homesteaders don’t typically rely on what we produce for financial survival, the pressure to succeed is much lower. Typically, a failure on the homestead means money and time lost but doesn’t usually jeopardize our ability to continue homesteading.
As many know, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Farmers invent new ways to be efficient because the numbers don’t make sense otherwise. We homesteaders have a lot more leeway; thus, homesteaders often lack the impetus to hone their processes on the homestead. While a monetary payoff isn’t what a homesteader is typically expecting, focusing intensely on efficiency can save us time. Everyone wants more time.
The first step to an efficient homestead is planning. Homesteaders tend to plant without a well-defined plan, including seed starting and succession planting. Adopting a serious plan like that of the market gardener can enable us to produce much more food in the same space. Planning includes choosing the right location for the right project, be it the garden or the pigs. Locating things as close to the home as possible (keeping in mind some care for aesthetics) can cut back on minutes of walking every day that can easily add up to many hours over a year.
The next key to efficient homesteading is investing in the right tools. If you’re planning to grow a large fraction of your food for the year, a simple push seeder is a no-brainer investment. Further, weed fabric, though some may consider it unsightly, can save countless hours weeding, a task that in itself produces nothing for the homestead. Weeding is just a time-consuming chore that we can minimize with both the right kind of planning and the right investments. I’ll be detailing many other important tools for efficient homesteading in future posts, so be sure to subscribe for more on that.
A third key (not the last but one I’ll end this post with) is simply adopting a mindset of viewing every homestead endeavor as a new system. This system is one you will aim to optimize in terms of time-efficiency to the highest degree that your budget will allow. The adage that “time is money” is often but not always true of homesteading. By sniffing out inefficiencies on your homesteading and making plans to improve your systems, you’ll save time over the long run. An efficient homesteader will be critical of every task they put their hand to, until they find the right combination of tools, locations for various materials, and processes for handling specific tasks.
Since homesteaders are busy people, balancing dollar-making jobs with the tasks around the homestead, saving time should be a priority early on. Beginning with intelligent planning, sound investments, and a critical mindset is a great first step toward achieving greater efficiency. Keep on eye on what local farmers and market gardeners are doing, as many of them have gone to great lengths to efficiently produce wholesome food.
Never stop growing,
Christian
Born for the Barn 