What to do With Your Homestead – Beginner to Experienced

New Homesteader

This is when you are in your first or second year of homesteading (or a large increase). Maybe you haven’t broken ground on a garden yet, or have barns and outbuildings but you aren’t sure what you should put in them. And more specifically, your sourdough has died twice! This is a crucial time because you can either flourish or burn out here. 

Here are some steps you can take to jumpstart without burnout:

• Make a list of everything you hope to one day accomplish on your homestead. 
• Review your list and put them into three categories
  • Items you easily accomplish your first year as a homesteader both physically and financially (ie. starting sourdough, getting chickens, doing a small garden)
  • Items you can plan/prep for during year two of homesteading (ie. a large garden with irrigation, raising livestock that need to mature before breeding, or starting to bee keep that needs to be ordered)
  • Items that may take a large investment or time to obtain (grass-fed beef operation, building a barn, or creating a certified kitchen)
• Take this list and choose 3-5 items from the year one. Start researching them, setting up, and investing. I usually suggest focusing on one thing from each category of kitchen, animals, or gardens (insert orchards or prepping or soap making). 
• Then take one thing from the other two lists and start preparing. As an example, if you want a grass-fed beef operation, start by planning, budgeting, and building the fencing you need. If your property already has that, start planning where you are going to get your stock and feed. 
• Don’t try to do everything – this is just asking for burnout.
• Put the list away and next year, refer to it and add to it!

If you need ideas, reach out to me, or if you want a whole consult consider my business coaching (not just for businesses)!

Established Homesteaders

How exciting that you are established and working all your systems. At this point you have two options. Maintain and improve your homestead or scale it. If you’re interested in scaling or becoming a commercial homestead, go to the next section. 

As an established homesteaders, you know that the work is never done. There is always something to fix, something to maintain, or someone in labor. But the key is that you must stay on top of you homestead so that you don’t end up with catastrophic repairs from neglected buildings and equipment. Now, we always are wanting to add something to our homestead or master a new skill. I think that’s just in our nature, but we still need to be intentional about our goals. 

Just like a new homesteader, sit down at the beginning of each year (maybe each season) with your spouse, kids, or favorite far, dog and list your goals. These need to include your dreams, yearly maintenance of equipment (get my free preventative maintenance log here), and one big undertaking. What should that undertaking be? It should be the building, fence, or garden bed that has been the most neglected. Make a plan to organize, clean, and repair that item. You might have to budget or hire someone. But you absolutely want to do this before you end up with an emergency and massive loss. 

Homesteaders that are Ready to Scale (Commercial Homesteaders)

This is where I sit most of the time and it can be tricky to give advice about specific products in a few generic paragraphs. But what I do want to point out is that to scale effectively and efficiently, you don’t want to think like a small-scale homesteader anymore to some extent. You especially don’t want to think like a homesteader when you are sourcing your supplies. 

What I mean by this, is that you won’t ever see a profit if you’re always buying you seed starting pots and your animal feed from the local hardware store. You need to be sourcing these things like a commercial farmer. I’m not trying to throw up red flags (we all know how we feel about big ag). It is possible though to source wholesale supplies and then raise your products like a homestead (ethically, organically, grass-fed, etc). Once you start sourcing at wholesale, you’re going to reduce your cost margins in a serious way.

Embracing a New Mindset

Now that you have tweaked your mindset, let’s talk planning. This is no longer about just trying and see what happens or getting your feet wet. You are starting a business. Even if you aren’t selling a single product, the time and money you are investing with the expectation of non-monetary income in the form of food needs to be set up like a business. This means that you are thinking about your end product and working backwards from there. 

If you are want to raise pork, you need decide when you want you product available and when it can be butchered, then count backwards 8-9 months for large breeds and that’s when they need to be born, count back another 4 months, and that’s when they need to be bred. At this date, do you have your fences and shelter in place, do you have your breeding stock, do you have plans for sourcing bulk feed at a sustainable price?

Once you have your final date set for product to be available, you need to find a market for that now. You need to be getting customers excited about your product or putting together a waitlist. Or if this is for yourself, do you have freezer space, what are you going to budget each month to afford the pig feed until you have pork to replace that expense? 

When it comes to marketing and covering your expenses, you have to remember that your end product is not your only product. I’d you have a littler of piglets, sell a couple of weaner piglets to cover your feed costs. Have one person buy a whole hog to cover the butcher costs of the meat you want to sell as retail cuts. Everything is marketable!