Most preppers dream of being able to set themselves up to be 100% self-sufficient. This is the next ultimate step beyond simply being stocked up to the rafters. Where you can source sufficient protein, vegetables, water, and other essentials for living without having to resort to other means.
It sounds great on paper. The idea of pulling water out of a well, tending a beautiful garden and playfully scattering cracked corn for your beloved flock of chickens might sound perfect.
In a previous chapter of my life, I was able to do this for up to 6 months at a time. So, I can tell you that there’s a dark side to being self-sufficient that people don’t always talk about. There’s a lot of back-breaking labour that goes into being self-sufficient, not to mention a fair amount of risk. Even getting started takes a pile of cash that’s often hard to get your hands on.
To help keep you from running blindly into a bucolic nightmare, I thought I’d shine a light on some of the dark spots and trouble areas of being self-sufficient.
The Heavy Workload & Daily Grind
There is a lot of daily grind to being self-sufficient that no one talks about. The tasks change day-to-day, week-to-week, and season-to-season. So, there’s no set routine, like you get with sedentary office jobs.
Spring and fall tend to be the most frenetic, and there’s a real risk of burnout. You have to account for that and plan strategically.
In the spring you have to bust your tail getting everything planted, which could be a challenge if it was a long winter. Then there will be days when you worked tirelessly to get everything in the ground. Only to have a freak frost warning pop up just as you’re getting ready to relax in the evening. Then you have to go out to cover all the tender plants in what a massive garden is ultimately.
In late summer and early fall, you have the reverse problem.
You have to harvest all the things you planted and make sure they’re properly preserved for the long winter ahead. If a freak frost is in the forecast, you have to run back out again and cover all those squash plants and tender vegetables that are on the verge of ripening. What you could do instead is add this easy-to-build cellar to your backyard.
Then when winter does hit, not only do you have to battle snow, wind, and freezing rain. You have to make sure your livestock can take them too. You spend a lot of time in the barn wrestling heavy things like bales of hay and keeping water troughs from freezing.
Get sick, Mother Nature doesn’t care. Sprain an ankle or pull a muscle in your back, and you’ve still got to push through the pain to get the job done.
When you go to a country bar, there’s a reason why you don’t see any fat farmers on the dance floor. So, if you’re out of shape now, you need to get physically fit enough to handle the daily grind of maintaining a self-sufficient homestead.
Loneliness & Lack of a Social Life
The time constraints of all the hard work that goes into being self-sufficient also limit your social interactions. When you get to the end of a long day, you just want to take a shower and melt into a comfortable chair. The last thing you want to do is hop in the truck, drive 20 miles to town, and spend an hour sitting in a bar hoping to run into someone you know.
Also, if your homestead is very far out, you might not have good internet access. This can limit the availability of social media, and even phone reception. This lack of social life and persistent loneliness, on top of the exhaustion of so much hard work, is one of the several reasons why farmers have some of the highest suicide rates of any profession.
So, before you go all in on buying that self-sufficient piece of property, make sure that you have strong social connections. Being married helps and having a group of friends that you can reach out to when you’re feeling down will matter more than you realize.
The Caprices of Nature
Mother nature can be a cruel and unpredictable mistress, which makes self-sufficiency extremely challenging. Especially these days with the effects of climate change assaulting the land at every angle.
This starts with a freak frost striking in spring right after you have all your tender vegetables planted, or your first seedlings are coming up in the cornfield. All it takes is 10 minutes of frost-like conditions to completely decimate a week’s work.
Then in summer, torrential rains or punishing drought can stress crops. Even if it doesn’t result in total crop failure, you might have to put in a staggering amount of work to do things like drain fields, install culverts near the garden, or run irrigation lines.
Then in fall, a freak frost can strike damaging the vegetables you need to ripen to put up for winter. All it takes is one frosty night uncovered, to kill an entire field of vines with 75% ripened winter squash.
When winter comes, you’ve got all those animals to worry about. A flock of chickens can get frozen solid in a simple uninsulated chicken coop. Pigs and cattle can suffer severe frostbite that leads to life-threatening infections.
And if an animal does get sick, or hurt you’ve got to worry about vet bills!
Financial Burden
There are a lot of upfront investments to develop a self-sufficient property. This starts with land, which you won’t be able to get financed by promising the bank payment in milk, eggs, and butternut squash.
So, unless you inherit a piece of land or you’ve been saving up to buy one cash, it means you’ll also need a full-time job to get loan approval. Remember earlier when we talked about all that back-breaking labour? Add an actual career on top of it too!
Related: The Worst States for Living Off Grid
Even if you get the land without a massive mortgage hanging over your head, you’ll still have to sink a sizeable investment in tools, equipment, seeds, livestock, well drilling, irrigation lines, and vet bills. Just to name a few.
If a crop fails, a herd dies, or a flock gets frozen into poultry popsicles, that’s money you lose in the upfront investment as well as money you’d lose out of any potential profit.
Developing a Skillset & Dealing with Knowledge Gaps
If you grew up on a farm, or you have a lot of gardening and animal husbandry experience, becoming self-sufficient can still be a challenge to start up. If you don’t have any authentic experience with these skills, filling the knowledge gap can be a major challenge.
Nature won’t give you the forgiving learning curve that your high school teachers did while you were learning algebra. If you start your seedlings too early or too late, or a freak frost hits, you’re taking a big financial loss. But there is a guy I like that writes about his experience with being self-sufficient for over 40 years. You might find a lot of interesting info and knowledge in here.
If you don’t know how to properly maintain your equipment, the repair costs alone can cripple you. Not to mention all the staggering vet bills that come from sick animals.
You might even think that you can use the internet to figure all that stuff out. Yet the internet isn’t going to tell you that if you have your chicken’s roosting poles too high in the winter birds will get bumblefoot infections from jumping down. It can’t tell you that you can use mouthwash to clear ice from a windshield in an emergency.
Even the most sophisticated AI can’t look at the western horizon and tell you for sure that it’s going to rain tonight. It certainly can’t tell you the right place to grab a steer between the nostrils to get it under control.
Of course, these are just a smidgen of the massive lexicon of skills you need to learn to be truly self-sustainable.
Health & Injury Risks
The physical strain and hard manual labour that goes with self-sustainable living increase your risks of sprains, strains, cuts, scrapes, contusions, lacerations, disastrous falls, and broken bones. All of these are even more likely to happen if you aren’t in good physical condition, or don’t know how to do a lot of jobs safely.
Of course, these injuries aren’t just about getting hurt. When you’re injured it’s much harder to get the jobs done in the barn and garden.
Yet the chicken manure will still need to be shovelled, and the weeds won’t stop growing just because you’ve got a bad back.
Access to quality health care is also a concern. A remote rural property is by definition far from even a modest clinic, let alone a hospital. If you’re severely injured, it might be too far to get proper medical assistance. I recommend you learn how to take care of at least some basic injuries in your own home. You can find some good tips and tricks from a doctor that had to deal with a lot of patients with very few medical items.
Not to mention a lot of rural community hospitals and clinics don’t provide top-notch care. They rarely have specialists, which can be a concern if you’re at high risk for developing a chronic health condition.
Now that I’ve given you a closer understanding of the dark side of being self-sustainable, let me say this. It’s absolutely worth it. I look back at the hobby farm I built from the ground up as one of my greatest lifetime achievements. I still miss my chickens, massive garden, orchard, and the hard work of butchering animals.
So, if it’s your dream to be at least modestly sustainable, don’t let these challenges kill your ambition. Just go into it with your eyes wide open.
Make sure you are physically fit enough to handle the workload, which will reduce the risk of injuries. Read as much as you can from authentic authors who’ve lived the lifestyle to give yourself a knowledge base. Then do your best to recruit neighbours and people with genuine experience to mentor you.
Even buying a farmer a pitcher of beer on a Saturday night and listening to them talk will give you lessons to help you navigate the dark side of self-sustainable living.
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