Skip to main content

The Next Chapter

Well, I am about three years from retirement and we (Terri and myself) have decided it is time to prepare for when we get out and have decided that we (this part is mostly myself) will start up a homestead near her parents in the Crookston, Mn area.  Her parents have agreed to give us some land to put the homestead on.  The USDA has a lot of programs out there to help a Veteran Farmer get started with much more potential help then I ever imagined for what I planned on doing anyway.

My vision for the homestead is to create a homestead that will produce a majority of what we need for ourselves, close family and our livestock with enough left over to cover the basic expenses of the homestead.  All while doing it in a organic and environmental sustainable manner (rotational grazing, rotational crops, pasture feed livestock)

My initial plan (and this is initial, sure it will change) is to start with 4 pigs (three breeder and one feeder, more on this later), a hand full of cattle (again more on this soon), and about 50 baby chicks (more again later).  I foresee about 15 acres in crops, 5 acres in dent corn (feed), 5 in alfalfa(Cattle protein), 3 in beans (probably chick peas for chicken and pig protein) and 2 in mixed veggies.  In addition we will also have various nut and fruit trees that will serve multiple purposes such as wind/snow breaks, food for us and the excess going towards animal feed. Well this is the first blog! We will see where it goes from here!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

April is Gonna Suck, Embrace the Suck!!

Well this week’s blog is more a personal update then the last few have been.  It is about 7 weeks until I start my terminal leave from the Army, I will leave the Army for home for the last time on Good Friday and get home right before Easter.  The timing is not lost on me that my next chapter will start in full on Easter.  We started doing our taxes today and part of that was figuring out how much we have already put into the farm, not including property or the truck we are over $35K in and that does not even count most of the livestock which we will not have  or purchase until this year.  That is buying mostly second-hand equipment folks and I still have some major pieces to buy, farming ain’t cheap. That being said, I am still confident this was the right move.  I ran into one of my former NCOs from when I was a detachment Sgt in Korea for lunch this week, he was one of three buck Sergeants I had, who basically made my job easy there (except they cou...

Long over due update! We added livestock (and poultry)!

Non-gas operated lawn mowers! It is hard to believe I am so far behind on my blog posts.   Spring is a busy time on the homestead, especially a first spring!   Two and a half inches of rain last night in about a two hour period has given me some time this morning to write as it is too wet to get much done!   So much has happened in the last two months, I will probably on touch on most of it in an attempt keep this post readable!   First, we lost our bee hive from last year, the bees ate the stores in the middle of the hive, all the way to the top, but did not eat the outermost combs.   From the looks of it they ended up starving themselves out because they moved too far from the edges for them to reach them with the cold weather.   We were able to salvage about 15 lbs of honey and a pound or so of wax out of the dead hive. We also managed to harvest a couple containers of virgin honey comb. This years honey harvest In this picture you can re...

Fruit Trees

Fruit Trees Well in the last three posts I have talked about some of the different livestock we will have on the homestead but it takes more then meat and eggs to keep us going (there is probably about half the members of my family who and having serious doubts that it is really me writing that!).  We have decided to plant fruit and nut trees for various reasons, as I mentioned in an earlier post I would like everything we do have multiple uses on the homestead.  The fruit and nut trees are no exception. I am going to go off subject here to tell you about the area where we are setting up our homestead but rest assured I will circle back around.  My wife's parents have a little less then 320 acres total. We will be getting a little less then 40 acres of that.   A lot of that land years ago was farm land but there is also somewhere about 60 acres that is native prairie and woodland.  The tract that we are planning on building the homestead on...