The Prosperous Homesteader

As far as I know there are no LDS Christians living an Amish lifestyle out there. That reflects badly on us.

Here is a book review of a secularish man who decided to try it, and succeeded.

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The Prosperous Homesteader, Gregory Jeffers
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This is a short 124-page book. The point is to persuade you to live materially like the Amish and to give you an approach and some starter tips on how to do it.

He complains a lot about the difficulty of finding good information. He said everything you read about homesteading and self-sufficiency is either put out by University agricultural research establishments with agribusiness in mind, or are larpy Hippy propaganda about permaculture and so on that may not even work and isn’t really done with cost in mind. Yep. That’s my experience. Every successfull permaculturist appears to be actually running a permaculture advice business and does the farming on the side just as a demo. (Though I notice that Jeffers himself is also following the model of selling books for income).

As a result, he rejects the advice books altogether and just imitates the Amish (he calls them the Plain People and is including Old Order Mennonites and another group or two I forget. I’ll just say Amish for convenience). What I have found is that some of the permaculture/hippy advice actually works, but you don’t know unless by trial and error, and even then there are often hidden downsides that aren’t apparent, or else you’ll try something everybody touts and its perfectly useless, then a few years later you are talking to someone and that person is like, oh, but when you did it you didn’t do X? Always do X. So you try it again with X and it works perfectly. I still believe there are nuggets out there, I don’t believe that Amish-style agriculture is the best that can be done. But for Jeffers, you need to start with a proven model. So his advice is almost entirely based on what he did himself and what he has seen his Amish neighbors do. He advocates leaning heavily for advice on established non-hobby homesteaders in your area and also on the county extension services. The latter, in my experience, are a great resource but sometimes extremely dogmatically conventional in their thinking and often working in a very narrow band. But for the specific info about soil and sod that he suggests using them for, they are probably quite good. He is also a big fan of instructional youtube videos, amen to that.

However, this is not a detailed advice book. He is giving you an approach, not a program. He does suggest a few advice books along the way. His goal is for you to feed yourself and supply your needs without needing outside input from the global economy as much as possible.
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the meat of Jeffers method
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Work like a devil to get a grubstake sufficient to buy a big homestead and the stock and equipment you need to run it. Be debt free. Any debt will kill you. (He makes an exception for a young couple in their 20s who are willing to scramble. Apparently the Amish will do partial mortgages to purchase their places when they are starting out).

To start– You need at least 40 acres, well watered and drained. The ability to construct some kind of minimum housing if there isn’t any already (and he does mean minimum). A good quality barn if there isn’t one already. Stock, especially including draft horses and haying equipment. Enough fencing for your pastures. Wood or a kerosene burner to get you by. A source of water already worked out and thought through. Seasoned wood or a kerosene burner. Canning supplies. Everything else is luxury or can be added later. He doesn’t have this list in anyone place, but its not hard to read through and pick out what he considers to be the essentials.

He reckons the land will cost you $100,000 – $150,000. He doesn’t have an estimate for the other stuff, but I’d say it would be at least $20,000-$25,000, more if there is not already a barn or a well on the place. My guess is that you are looking at $150,000 – $200,000 total.

Update: he costs it out on his blog and comes to a figure of $200-$250k.

Make your homestead supply itself as much as possible. Model yourself on the Amish. Use draft horses and horse-drawn equipment instead of tractors and power tools. Do without electricity and gas altogether if you can. Use wood stoves for cooking and hot water. Simplify your expectations. Kerosene lamps for light. Solar is a luxury. No or minimal refrigeration. Can everything. Feed your family and your stock almost entirely using your land. Beef and milk and eggs and chicken and goat and potatoes and vegetables and corn are what his family lived on.

Cut all cash expenses to the bare minimum you possibly can.

Have one or more marketable outside skills you do part time. You will NOT earn income from your homestead, not for awhile, and perhaps not ever. Be flexible. He recommends Rowe’s Dirty Jobs, but also says that he knows successful homesteaders who are programmers or who are consultants about something or other. From his fiction, I gather that he and his wife worked as remote math tutors or English tutors for Chinese kids or something.

Get better at your homestead over time and gradually start expanding your herd and/or your holdings.

Have a good number of kids and help set them up also with their own homesteads so they will support you later in life. One of them will take over your spread and be your mainstay.
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Evaluation
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He never made a good argument for why homesteading. He talked a lot about independence from the system. But he is also very clear that you still need outside income. My thought is that if you have around $200k in cash and have marketable skills of various kinds and an entrepeneurial attitude, you can probably be independent without the homestead. He talks about homesteading as freeing you from spending all that money you have to in suburbia. But based on his figures, he went from a big city UMC lifestyle to homesteading directly. I don’t spend anything at all like what he spent. Living thrifty is a mindset, it doesn’t require a homestead. He also mentions living in nature and living healthy as advantages in passing and I’ll give him that. Also in passing, but I think this is the big one–homesteading is a lifestyle that encourages having children because they are an asset. Implied but not mentioned is that homesteading gives you a certain amount of illegibility to the government and insulation from various kinds of emergencies.

I generally trust his numbers, though he may not realize how specific they are to his region.
He is ideologically opposed to any form of government assistance. But it occurred to me while reading his book that his method would allow you to farm the government pretty intensively. You would almost certainly meet the requirements for foodstamps and Medicare and earned income credit and so on.

He hasn’t fully walked the walk. A number of cost-cutting measures he advocates he hasn’t done himself. Don’t get me wrong. He appears to be living on a farm that he farms himself using draft horses, that he feeds his family from, and that he heats using wood. But he has a number of things in his book that he says you could or should do without, mentions that he doesn’t do without them, but says he barely uses them and is thinking of getting rid of them. Even bigger, his method is really an intergenerational method. It’s about creating separation from the system for your kids and passing down your way to them. But he hasn’t done this yet and admits that he isn’t sure it will happen without the religious imperative that the Amish have. He makes the point that homesteading is pretty precarious once you get old if you don’t have younger people around. I’m not sure what the Amish are doing works without a community. My evaluation is that Jeffers’ full program would require a number of like-minded people all doing the same thing.

Generally the book is about retreating from a damaged world. Benedict-option type stuff. Fair enough. But the intergenerational ambition is bolf in scope, and I think there could be ways of doing his project without quitting the fight. But you would have to modify the approach or at least think it through.

P.S. Something he mentioned about the Amish has been on my mind. He said they stop schooling at age 14 and start working full time to accumulate funds to buy their own place. Which he said they do early to mid 20s. They live at home so all their money goes to savings. That is an incredible model. Grubstake of $150k by the time you are ready to get married makes one heckuva difference.