If you want to Start A Mini-Farm (like us) you’ll find encouragement here. Or, if you are just curious about why anyone would choose this lifestyle, read on.

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READ: A Trip Down Memory Lane – Tales From A Farm Kid

Why Start A Mini-Farm

Homestead life is not for everyone. We chose to start our homestead for several reasons. I am sharing why in this article.

Building a mini-farm out of “nothing” (simple house + land) has pros and cons. The biggest con is that you are building your farm/homestead from the ground up and the biggest pro is that you get to set things up how you like them.

Buying a run-down, neglected property with no fencing, barns, animal shelters, gardens, or anything else required for raising animals and growing food means you have a lot of work ahead of you. When the house is a major fixer (but with a solid foundation, praise the Lord) on top of it all, then your work is doubled. READ: 1965 Fixer Upper Bathroom Remodel

But, all of that usually means you get a decent deal on the place. That is the situation we found ourselves in when we purchased our 1 acre in the spring of 2019.

Homesteading (or having a mini-farm) has been a dream of ours. The goal is to raise our vegetables, fruits, herbs, eggs, and meat to replace most of what we buy from the commercial food industry – and maybe some of our clothing, too – eek.

We are just one year in and are still learning every day. We are not experts but we are putting all of our time & effort into living the homestead dream … here is why.

Mini-Farm & Homestead Resources

The Elliott Homestead: From Scratch: Traditional, whole-foods dishes for easy, everyday meals
From France to the Farm: Blending Generational Favorites with French Flair
Maximizing Your Mini Farm: Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre
Backyard Homesteading: A Back-to-Basics Guide to Self-Sufficiency (Gardening)
The Backyard Homestead Guide to Raising Farm Animals
We Are the Gardeners

Blessings from a Mini-Farm

• lifestyle change – raising a serious amount of food of any kind requires a lot of commitment and hard work which means time revolves around all things homesteading. It was a lifestyle change we wanted after seemingly wasting our time away in the city for 8 years. READ: Our Journey Home
• self-sufficiency – imagine stepping out your door to fresh food or taking home-preserved foods from your pantry rather than driving to the grocery store daily/weekly/ or even monthly to buy all of the (plastic-packaged) things. READ: Homemaker’s Backyard Garden 
• stay at home easier – we need to stay at home more often than not due to our health conditions so anything that makes that lifestyle simpler is always a positive thing for us! READ: Accepting The Stay At Home Life
• more purposeful living – less time doing frivolous things and more time doing meaningful things, as a family, because there is always something productive that needs to be done on a homestead.
• work ethic – teaching our children a good work ethic, by example.
• lifestyle of learning opportunity – we love learning, and farming/homesteading from scratch requires us to learn something new every day. READ: Farm Homeschool
• satisfaction in hard work – it is a satisfying (and humbling) experience to eat food you were fully responsible for from start to finish.
• health reasons – homesteading means you are physically more active and eating food you know is straight from the farmer, you know exactly how the food was grown/raised and how it was processed, plus more land means your children have more room to run, too! READ: Best Ways To Support Female Health Naturally

More to Come

In the future, I will share more about the meat animals, egg producers, & food production efforts on our mini-farm. A one-acre homestead is quite limited in what it can produce, so it requires us to think small & be efficient in all ways. It has been a challenge – as well as an adventure – that we are thoroughly enjoying!

Do you have any questions about the homestead/mini-farm life? Ask away!

If you want to use a homeschool curriculum to teach homesteading skills then you will want to check out Homestead Science! It is NOT Christian (they claim to be neutral, but the curriculum is “old-earth”). However, it teaches a lot of basic and practical homesteading skills. My son started this when he was 13; it has been a good fit for him. It is a unit study on homesteading that incorporates many subjects but is heavy on science. They have textbooks for children in preschool through middle school! I recommend it to anyone wanting to learn all about homesteading. It would make a great family study! LEARN MORE HERE

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