![]() Growing and eating your own food is healthy and delicious!.Low-density population in rural areas conserves our depleting water supply.Purchasing (or not selling) land keeps it safe from development and environmental damage.The benefits of owning a farm, even if you never make a penny in monetary profit: This is where you come in, whether you’re moving from a job in the city, supporting an established farm through an internship, buying a week-end house in the country, or you’ve inherited a chunk of land. Whether you have money or not, you as a willing participant are valuable farm capital that will help farms grow and thrive. While we have not yet reached true pay parity, many of us now have the economic and educational means to reinvest in the land, either with actual money or our unique perspective. Women have made great strides in corporate America. Rural America needs the money that fled years ago to return and invest. Even if you do not make one penny on your farm, you are doing a tremendous service to your community just by caring for it. ![]() The economics, and especially the culture, are turning once again to favor the local, and farms are reinventing themselves. National chain grocery stores forced out small independent markets and the food system consolidated, much the same way small bookstores, toy stores, hardware stores, and other independent businesses have been under threat.īut like the 18-year cycle of cicadas that we have here in the mid-Atlantic, every living thing has a cycle. As the result of decades of mechanization of our farming, government subsidies that favor the big food corporations and the industrialization of our food system, many small farms that relied on solid, local customer bases to sell their products dried up. ![]() It’s no secret that farming has been a tough business for many years. They employed a spirit of discovery to their needs and learned from others with more experience how to take care of themselves in the natural world over time. The pioneer women (and men) before you were not born knowing the skills to be self-sufficient. Remind yourself that you are a modern pioneer woman. And you will certainly encounter your share of self-doubt that is inevitable when embarking on an uncommon path. But so is being a teacher, bookstore owner, or anyone else in a profession that provides more than monetary rewards.Ĭlearly defining your goals will help you face doubt from others as well as yourself. There’s a pervasive idea that anyone, especially a woman, getting into farming is a dreamer, naive to the point of self-destruction.įarming is hard and costly and risky - everyone knows that. Don’t you know it costs $64 to grow a tomato?” There will be endless stories about an uncle, or a second cousin, or friend of a mother-in-law who moved to the country only to dig themselves a grave of toil, or lose a hand in a combine accident or throw away every penny of their savings on a money pit. How will you do it?” or “Farms are not profitable. You will hear, “Living on a farm is so much work. So, try not to limit your future options. The spirit to adopt when you begin searching for a farm or taking over the operation of a farm is the same one that British and American women coined when creating the Women’s Land Army and the Victory Garden movement that both fed nations and lifted women’s work up to the level of national patriotism - they cheered the slogan “Dig for Victory!” You will certainly be doing plenty of digging in the literal sense, but you will also be digging to find your own way of life.īut there will be obstacles, both physical and emotional. Whenever people, especially women, decide on a course that’s unconventional, they are met with suspicion of their motives and outright jealousy. The farm or land you choose should fit your goals - but don’t forget that goals change. Or do you want to be a professional and pursue farming as a career?.Are you looking for an investment for your money?.Do you plan to be a subsistence farmer or homesteader to independently provide for your family’s needs?.Questions to ask yourself when buying a farm When embarking on your own path, it’s important to clearly define your goals. There are as many reasons to own or work on a farm as there are farmers. ManualAutoCompleteList=(Command=”FreezeAt”,Desc=”Locks the player view and rendering time.To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. ManualAutoCompleteList=(Command=”DebugCreatePlayer 1″,Desc=””) ManualAutoCompleteList=(Command=”Exit”,Desc=”Exit (Exits the game)”) ![]() These are the commands I found while snooping in game files that seem to work.
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