Do you want to be a homesteader? Or maybe you already are, but you are finding it hard to pay the bills each month. That's the position we are in, so I was very eager to read this book as soon as I heard about it.
I am familiar with Tim Young and his wife, Liz, having read his previous book, The Accidental Farmers. Tim and Liz did what a lot of us want to do. They left their big city life to start their own farm. They learned as they went, and Nature's Harmony Farm is now a successful producer of award-winning farmstead cheese. They are able to earn their living on the farm, and Tim wrote this book to teach us all how we can do the same.
I had high expectations about this book, and I was not disappointed. It is filled with great ideas for earning money from your homestead. There really is something for everyone here. I could relate to a lot of them, and some I am already working at. But there are so many other things I could be doing as well, and some I had never considered before. Some ideas are large scale, others have low start-up costs and would be suitable to augment one's current income.
My favourite feature of the book is the profiles. There are eighteen unique farms featured. Each is well described and the farmers/homesteaders talk about such things as how they earn a living, how they got to where they are, what things they would do differently, and so on. It is like being able to sit with them face to face and learn from them.
This is a book that should be on every homesteader's must read list. It inspires, encourages, and empowers the reader to turn their farm into a viable and sustainable enterprise. And it is entertaining too. What more could one ask for?
Now I am exploring the possibilities and I am confident that this book will help me find the niches that we need to make our farmstead thrive.
