Where Do I Begin: The Independent Farmer's Strategy

Find your way to independence

This is a book of strategy: how to be a yeoman farmer, wherever you are planted, urban or rural. It’s not a gardening manual. There are plenty of good ones out there, geared toward your particular needs. You don’t need another.

What you might need, however, is a guide to overall strategy, and I hope to oblige. Along with a lot of thoughts on being a yeoman farmer, I hope to help you evaluate your situation, set priorities, and get started with what matters most. It’s about getting the most for your money, starting with the easily accomplished and the most important. 

We’ll look at questions like tillage. Should I get a tractor, a walking tractor, draft animals, or dig it by hand? It all depends on your time, your physical and mechanical abilities, your fondness for animals versus machines, the scale you want to work on, whether you are providing only for yourself or for market, the climate you live in, and other factors. I’ll help you evaluate your situation. 

The theory behind being a yeoman farmer is to take control of your own needs so that an authoritarian state can’t control you through them. Grow your own food; don’t depend on the state to feed you. That generous provision of food comes at a price: the price of obedience. You don’t dare bite the hand that feeds you. You can’t provide for everything, but the more you can, the more independent you can be, and the less power they have over you. 

We have multiple needs: shelter, food, energy, manufactured goods, and services we can’t provide for ourselves, like dentistry or technical repairs, for instance. Again, you’re not going to meet all of them. But the more you can cover yourself, the more resources you’ll have left to procure the others. Let’s begin with an overview of what you’ll need, and dig deeper from there.