it doesn't. A garden big enough to feed any significant percent of your yearly calorie needs and cows (let let multiple animal types) is a full time job. you will eventually burn out of 80 or 90 hour weeks and ultimately quit one of the full time jobs. Ideally you'll get SM going so you can profit off the LARP views and use that money to be self sufficient without a regular job, just homesteading. and with a kid. good luck.

if you take "homestead" to mean you grow a small and easy garden and raise chickens for eggs but realistically you're no where near self sufficient, then yeah a stay at home wife can do that in a couple hours a day.

>>2799814
You wont have the time nor the energy. There's good reasons why this only worked for whole communities and farming/husbandry was their full-time job. Just get a small garden for small stuff and perhaps chickens or rabbits, anything else is too much. Source: lived 23 years on a farm

>>2799956
Must you be such a dick?

>>2799973
Yes.

>>2799972
It works here in Norway. Cows are easy to keep, for a living even.
You can become a millionaire with just a fishing boat.

>>2799997
If you're such an expert why are you asking us?

>>2799814
Read Ruth Stout's "No Work Garden Book" and R Rush Wayne's "Growing Mushrooms the Easy Way" and you'll have a good start. You probably will not be able to grow enough food to feed your livestock and your family, but it can still be profitable to buy feed for your livestock. Whatever animals you get you should add 2% crushed lump charcoal to their feed by weight. They will be healthier and smell a lot better.

>>2799997
The cow thread is the other thread
Youre getting your larps mixed up

What happened to the homestead general?

>>2801132
they all fucking died from work exhaustion or had to admit they couldn't do this anymore and quit.

there is a reason only trustfund kids do this shit and succeed.

>>2801132
Like most larp threads on /out/ it eventually died out, because it's just not sustainable to keep pretending to do something without actually going out and doing the damn thing.

>>2801139
>>2801141
I really want to do it though

>>2799972
>23 years on a farm
Don't forget you're tied to it. You're not going on vacation with livestock to tend to, unless you want to pay your neighbors to cover for you and hopefully they don't fuck it up.

>>2801276
Be prepared to never come back on the internet or watch tv or play video games ever again.

Farming is effectively playing Factorio IRL.
>there is always something to do
>I need to improve something
>How can I utilize this to save precious dollars
For reference I keep a small number of animals.
>12 chickens
>4 Sheep
>4 Goats
On 3 acres, altogether.
The sheep eat the grass, the goats eat all the shrubs, the chickens eat all the bugs.
Just these few animals take about an hour out of my day.
This is not production and the animals quite literally only make a profit for their own care.
To make a profit for anything more, I would need effectively double the animals.
Since a lot of the cost is communal cost (rebuilding, food, etc).
If you want to compost, you have to buy organic which cost more, because most hay and corns and such have herbicides that last years.
Literally every penny matters, every single penny.
So if you are wasting pennies on something inefficient or doing this as a hobby. You are quite literally going bankrupt ever so slowly.

Farmers generally learn to live with less, it's not a career where you learn to live with more.
Eventually to live with more, you must begin to industrialize. Which defeats the entire purpose of homesteading to begin with.

So your choices are.
1. Be like me, not a homesteader, just a dude who keeps some animals and practices some homesteading.
2. Be a homesteader and quite literally devolve into primitive farming practices.
3. Don't be a homesteader and industrialize to maximize profits.

The only people who can do number 2 are people who already have such money amounts that it's a fucking LARP to begin with.
Those people don't have to worry about paying mortgages, those people have backup money when things go bad.
So when shit hits the fan, they can choose to bite the bullet.
Where literally 99% of actual farmers pre industrial were going bankrupt unironically.

>>2801354
You should feed your livestock crushed lump charcoal or put out charred logs for them to pick at

>>2801354
>Farming is effectively playing Factorio IRL
JFC imagine typing this
You're terminal

>>2801483
There is a fire pit and the charcoal systemically releases into the nearby vegetation.

>>2801484
>give people relevancy so they can relate
>some faggot on /out/ gets upset by this
Why are you the way that you are?

>>2801276
This guy >>2801354 pretty much has it right. You are wanting to commit to something that takes a lot of recurring time, and to reach full self-sufficiency basically means a job unless you spend 40 years developing wizard tricks. If your wife is not on board it won't work unless you're happy to work two jobs, period.

I've got three dairy goats and 7 laying hens (rough winter) and on a cost basis it breaks down like this: I average 5/dozen for the eggs, structures not factored in, and I average 6/gallon on the milk, structures not factored in. No labor factored, either. I like chickens, and I like goats. This summer I'm adding raised garden beds - that whole project will probably come out to 60 hours to install including the time I spent sourcing soil and manure last summer. Once they're in, it's a recurring time cost to operate. The cost will come out to about the same as grocery store produce for the first three years (I'm in AK, this is more bleak in the lower 48).

You can monetize. Success varies based on local conditions. I'll be dipping my toes into herdshare with the goats this year because I accidentally'd all three does instead of the planned two. In my area I can functionally demand and get 18/gallon on the milk because I'll be the only supplier in an area of about 100k people, but when you factor in labor it comes out to less than 20 an hour.

Like >>2801354 says, it's cash tight. We do it on an income of 30k a year, but that is exceptional. I'm fiddling with BSF composting for the animal waste because I figure it'll eke out another 200-300 in product per year per goat (which I'll use on premises instead, I know it). What's my time worth? I don't really care - I do it because I enjoy it and could happily drink half a gallon of raw goat milk every day for the rest of my life, and I can't buy that. Ultimately the side-apartment on the house that I'm converting to a rental will pay for this extremely labor intensive hobby.

>>2801276
>>2801604

And like >>2801344 says, once you've got livestock it is very hard to travel. I'm stupid enough that I've taken injured chickens camping innabush just so I can keep providing care (partly because it's funny), but once you've moved from poultry to larger animals it's not really simple to get somebody to step in while you're gone. You can give them a task list and basic direction, but a goat gets bloat while you're not there? R I P

Be really honest with yourself. Do you love this idea enough to center your, and your family's, entire life around it? Does your wife love the idea that much too? Are you willing to put literal 10,000 hours into it in the first five years? Are you willing to see spent hours and dollars go to waste because you fucked something up through ignorance, learn from it, and keep plowing on? I'm going through this with my ghetto-nigger greenhouse right now - a fundamental design flaw meant I couldn't take the plastic off for winter and the whole thing exploded under snow weight before I could rectify it. Well, time for a re-design. I had a hundred hours and $1500 dollars in the thing, and it's mostly salvageable, but if you can't stare a dead animal, a failed design, a failed crop in the face and continue on, you're NGMI.

The best advice I can give is this. I started playing with gardening over 15 years ago. I started keeping hobby chickens 12 years ago. I only started seriously building out a hobby homestead a year ago. If you want to do this, don't rush. Think of everything you might want on your homestead, pick the one that is your favorite or nearly favorite and doesn't require a huge amount of time or capital. Do that for a year. Ruminate on it. Does it satisfy you? Do you enjoy it? Are you really, really itching to add something next to it? If you realize you don't like it, you've lost very little and learned a lot. If you realize you really do like it, you've spent a little and learned a hell of a lot.

>>2801276
>>2801607

You also need to realize that the most vital changes to make the whole thing viable come before you ever start your first plants or get your first animals. You are going to have to live frugally, fixing your own shit, owing little to nothing to the bank, cooking all your own meals, for it to work.

Examples:
>save 2500 a year hauling my own heating fuel
>save 4000 a year repairing my own shit (and as every year goes by it becomes more shit, I promise)
>save 3000 a year cooking every meal (thank you wife)
>total expenditure: 400+ man hours, a lot less electric dopamine

All that requires skill sets and equipment that you probably don't have yet. To be that self-sufficient and frugal takes skills on skills on skills. You'll come home from work and get to work. I come home from work at 630, spend my time with the kids until bed at 8, then work for another 2-3 hours most nights.

I wish you the best. It's doable as a labor of love. But, think long and hard and start slow.

>>2799814
goats / sheep are easier than cows

>>2801604
>>2801607
One of the logical fallacies I see is that people think income comes regularly with homesteading.
People don't understand every year you automatically start out negative.
>cost to purchase land
>taxes
>cost of construction
>cost of feed until rotation stabilizes
>cost of medical care
>cost to just heat your house
>cost for you to have food
Once again literally impossible without already having money.
You just put yourself 50-200k dollars in debt and your first profit ain't even going to be seen for the next 10 years.

If you're going to homestead LARP, start with your wife or you having a full time job first and the other party doing the homestead.
Buy economically.
7 pairs of Darn Tough socks will last you numerous years and they have lifetime warranty where they give you a new pair for free.

If you can't live this way guaranteed right now, you cannot homestead in a first world country.

>>2801614
It's true. I also see people confuse homesteading with proper agriculture. The starting too large and too fast trap is about as dangerous as it gets. I've been watching this play out in a different part of the state with a guy that decided to start cattle farming in Alaska with no prior experience, and who basically immediately built out to about 150-200 head. He's now so desperate for cashflow that he took out more debt to buy one of the last remaining USDA approved meat plants in the state so he can move his own cattle and cut the older multi-decade producers out of his particular market - a rather spectacular meltdown, and I am curious to see how it ends.

But to your main point, it's a question of scale and experience. If he's already on some decent amount of land (even an acre can be productive depending on your location) then he ought to dip his toes into something small just to see how he likes the money-pit, recurring labor, and product marketing aspects of it all.

>>2801724
That's exactly how we are doing it.
My brother owns 50 acres, his father in law owns a conjoined 100 acres.
Neither of them do anything with the land, they work as owners of a construction company.

Brother and the father in law have flatly told me they are willing to sell me at any point about another 10-20 acres of the land in such a way that I can have a long rectangle pasture if I so want.
I'm probably going to double production at some point, maybe even triple. Which will provide me about three rotation grazing fields.
Or alternatively two rotational grazing fields and mini fields for containing males or sicks.
I'm like easily ten years away from that though.
I'm hesitant to expand that much and the amount of clearing work and building is something That realistically isn't sustainable at the moment.

Also no fucking barn that big enough so i'd have to build another shed. Which might be better to separate the goats and sheep anyways.
Otherwise I can't winter shear the sheep, which once again leads to another fucking loss in profit.
TN though gets as low as -15F (has been 11, 18, 14 the last three nights) Which is too cold for sheep on open plains, way too cold for goats. Both species in the wild move down to the dense forest and do rotational movements among the trees where the coldest move inwards to regain warmth and the warmest stand stoically to protect the flock.
This still results in plenty of deaths.

I just don't have the money at the moment for such expansion and no there is no market that isn't oversaturated to fucking hell.
Wool? phttt once again Darn Tough, lifetime warranty. How the fuck am I suppose to compete with that?
Let alone Etsy has 2 billion wool products from new zealand where it maintains a near constant temperature for raising such animals.

Nah, let's stay in the real world. I got bills to pay. I'm not raising a death farm for every single sheep to be slaughtered for lamb leather just for me to make a small profit.

>>2801727
What goats are you running? I am actually rather surprised to hear that is too cold for goats. Mine hang out in an unheated barn, and so far the worst stretch of this rather mild winter has been a couple weeks of -20 to -30F, otherwise mostly -10F to 15F. At -30F I'm starting to think about giving them heat, but it's not vital.

The local market is the one shining thing I have going for me. I will be the only nigger in this 100k community offering goat milk. I'm rather jealous of your land availability, though. I'm working with, functionally, about .40 acres. The old man that lives next to me won't part with his unused 4 acre lot, and let me tell you what - 4 acres is a LOT (and also nothing at all, lol). He also got it rezoned to light commercial, meaning it's pretty much useless to me for livestock (might be worthwhile if I can flesh out my experimental greenhouse concepts). Ultimately I'll be capped at about 30 animals if I expand onto the other lot adjoining me, but that's only if I can do that before the local municipality rams through their riverfront clearance nonsense. It's rather bleak. I'll functionally be capped at about 10, I think, but since I'm liable to be the only supplier around I think I can eke out about 2500 average profit per doe, so it's reasonable for my needs.

I'm envious of you guys in the south for your growing abilities, but ultimately I think there's more room for growth if I stay here where my ability to compete with larger producers is much better.