What Are The Benefits of Living On a Homestead?

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We began wondering if the benefits of homesteading were in alignment with the way we felt. As soon as the opportunity to homestead came along, we said yes, and gave it a go. Now? We no longer have the interest to go back to the prior way of life. We’ve grown in a new direction.

Homesteads, also known as self-sufficient establishments, can save you money, keep you physically active, protect you from instabilities of life, and help preserve a human-suitable environment.

Words that sum up these benefits could be; purposefully building a strong way of life!

In this article, we will cover the strength opportunities a homestead can provide for several facets of living. They may just make you want to take the plunge to get started on a homestead way of life.

With varied tasks at hand, your time is freer to choose

In our former life, before we lived on a homestead, we had to be committed to full-time jobs to afford a convenient way of life. It was the only life we knew.

On a homestead, there are endless tasks you can make for yourself. It is all available for your choosing!

Our reality is that your time can make you money, but money can’t buy you more time. So how do you want to spend your time?

When a choice to plant a seed, feel the ferns, adopt a chicken, or forage some food in the forest is all available when you please, there is a sense of freedom.

The seasons do supply time limitations to do certain activities. Although it does provide a push of accountability to get things done while you can, the ultimate demand to do anything depends on what you need! Not what your boss needs you to get done, by today.

Time is freedom (not money!)

The time it takes to produce plenty has a preserved value

If time is money, it’s devalued money at best.

A homestead provides more options for direct-value trade. Currencies have proven to depreciate with time. As time goes on, we are increasingly spending more time for less money.

Today it represents the devaluing of our life-energy in action; tomorrow it reveals the loss of resources for habitation. These are losses of value.

How can we preserve and grow value?

Local trade; it’s built on relational trust!

Where I live, we owe a tax every time we need to use a currency for buying what we need. Even if you pay someone in cash, you still got dinged when you earned it to begin with. Taxation was created with good intent, but its function is highly neglected; it’s actively misused.

On a homestead, you regain the power of responsible resource management. If you see a problem in a system; youre able to take it upon yourself to create something that isn’t that problem.

Primarily today, what we buy with cash is usually produced far away. Sourced from the global trade system. This system is entirely reliant on cheap energy and money trust to operate. Why is it that we opt for buying cheaply?

Through our homestead experience so far, we’ve been able to realize just how cheap all convenient goods are. We also see how cheap means empty; less valuable.

Demanded products and excessive items we often see for sale lack intrinsic purpose. Is the function of the item necessary for your well-being? More disturbingly, globally traded food lacks nutritional value. Nutritious fuel for a fruitful body is the purpose of food!

Your quality of life depends on realizing the function of high-value relationships; it’s why you don’t want cheap things.

It isn’t cheap on our physical energy to grow good soil for nutritious food, but we want to do it because it’s what will fuel our state of well-being and longevity.

When your hard work renders an overwhelming surplus of fresh nutritious food; it creates an opportunity for our neighbors to help us with harvesting more for a share.

No loss occurs between direct relational exchanges. The middleman can be gone! We not only benefit from our neighbor’s help, but during our purposeful gathering, we all gain familiarity and trust with each other.

Related post: Why are neighbors important?

Reconnection with nature; discovering ourselves

We are told to reduce our impact, use less, eat less, be less, exhale less, and get to net zero. What good will becoming nothing be?

What we really need is to rediscover our purpose. Harness our skills. Become beneficial for all our relationships.

New forms of value we each offer differently are waiting to be made by you. You are a formation of the earth in action.

You are not with us to be zero emissions. You are with us to be the air trees exchange breath. To drink the water and turn it into soil’s gold. To be nourished by plants and compost your resources.

On a homestead, you discover what you truly need from the environment we are given. What we need from our environment is precisely what our environment needs from us.

How can we help?

Mutally beneficial relationships with our resources is the essence of homesteading and the key to a quality life.

Related post: How To Become Self-Sustaining (Plus 10 Ways to Transition)

Freedom of actionable authenticity renders no regrets

In the constructs of a city we are limited to the resources that are there. What did you put there?

Big-city living doesn’t generally allow us to tap into our full-selves because the environments are literally demanding of you. When we are limited to shaping our minds and bodies inside an environment that is designed to tell us what to do and who we need to be; we feel lost. Lost in the noise of everyone else. No wonder fulfillment is hard to find!

What if your environment was a different noise, the noise of a forest, a true display of independence of all who take part. No one is here to extract you, instead we are all here to grow for ourselves for the benefit of all.

The birds might sing to you, but they don’t demand you to go fetch the worms. You’ve got your own food to fry. Who are you more likely to discover when doing your own things? Being your own rule?

To live original lives; we would do well without the shadow of others’ insistence looming over you. No judegment around to veil the value of your expressions.

Time away from others’ influences and a quiet environment to focus on what you need sprouts greater value. As being told what to do disappears; your true expression has room to shine its brightest.

Making your own choices can be difficult, but they are more likely to result successful self-preservation. Allowing others’ choices to dictate who you are is more likely to result in their ability to pervert their own self-preservation.

When we rely upon ourselves there is little room for perversion to occur.

Making mistakes is not the seed of regretful thinking.

The most valuable thing you can make is a mistake. Without them; you couldn’t learn.

Letting others lead your life to cater to their own excessive gain; empties you of life experience and strength, which is regrettable.

A homestead becomes encompassed by your lead of decisions, experiments, and mistakes. As it builds, it grows to be your life the way you need it; the way it needs you.

Related post: How hard is it to become self sufficient talks further about how to become self-sufficient without a job and how to be self-sufficient without money.

Reduces conformity and its risks

As described above, conforming; is following, is living through others; it’s risky as it gives your power away. Away to people who don’t know you.

With each persons surrender for comforts; the power to misuse becomes available; the perversion of resources multiplies, and the perversion of people begins.

Power originates in you.

Distractions from making effort in our own lives certainly make it hard to embody it.

“Power of the people”

But will they use it?

Who do you give power to? Whose life will you live?

On a homestead, there is room to make effort to live your life alongside every other critter who responsibly lives their own. In this setting, you are more likely to find a community of people who also live their own. For the benefit of all; you gain the opportunities to source dependencies on those who have no room to misues their resources.

You keep your power. The power to trust people who personally know you, know themselves, love you, and love themselves.

Related post: Do you need a community to be self-sufficient?

An effective way to decentralize

Cryptocurrency might be one way to decentralize our choices, but the intrinsic way to decentralize is to lead our own homes and govern good use of resources for the benefit of all.

On a homestead, we produce more for ourself so that others don’t have to produce it for us. This takes mundane jobs away while replacing creative freedom onto us! Onto you.

Less outsourcing in some ways can be less limiting. Being produced for can be quite limiting. As much as enjoying bananas and oranges from the other side seems like less limitation; there are many offerings in our own area that we are no longer aware about. The diversity of what we know about our smaller worlds has declined; therefore as a whole we are more limited than before.

When we rediscover the plethora our unique environments offer; more local opportunity arises.

In homestead communities, resources are more likely to be proportionally sustained in the hands of many highly-valued efforts.

With sustained surpluses; opportunities arise for our neighbors.

Related post: Best tips for building a tight homestead community

Personalized standards of living for less stress

When living according to your standard you are less stressed about impressing other people. Trying to impress and live up to others’ expectation of you is a stressful way to be.

It’s like an allowance you give others to extract your life energy.

How about not giving that allowance? What was it even for?

It was the opposite of necessary for your well-being.

Personalized stardard of living involve what you really need to live well.

Nourishing foods found nowhere else

Eating low quality food is a form is starvation to the bacteria who give our health vitality.

Successful grocery stores don’t have much choice but to offer food void of life. They rely on the stability of sterilization such as canned goods, sprayed produce, early picked fruitless fruit that had to be treated for transportation.

On homegrown foods picked right outside the door, vast life forms that we cannot see are present and alive, ready to feed our life-giving gut biology.

Super foods grow in nutrient dense establishments such as well cared for homesteads or natively occuring forests.

Diverse foods are preserved when homesteads establish food forests with a mix of native perennials and perhaps non-invasive non-natives too.

A few of our latest favourite finds have been: turkey tail tea, nettles, wild blackberries, morel mushrooms, yellow dandelion safe from city sprays, fiddle head ferns, and oyster mushrooms.

With native diveristy to discover, you can create a unique life, unique food, and unique relationships that don’t exist everywhere else.

Feeling fulfilled over a long period of health

With the consequence of disease; the mass trades wellness for comfort, effort for cheapness.

Since comfort relies on cheap energy and cheap energy is unsustainable; comfort eventually becomes difficult; dis-ease. This creates suffering of our time.

Facing our challenges leads to fulfillment when accomplished and ultimately creates ease in life. Being at ease in life nourishes health, wellness, and security. When we slow down to feed our lives well we experience the joy of health over our time.

On a homestead you can trade cheapness for effort and comfort for wellness with purpose for all three dimensional realities. Your mind, body, and environment get to be shaped by you.

Shaping a strongly sustainable future for your family

Homesteaders often like to stretch the time between needing to go to the store in town. The way we increase the duration is by actively building our homesteads to become a human sustaining environment. A human sustaining environment involves relations with all resources; the land, the neighbors, and ourselves.

Basic human-scale dependencies use less resources. Using less resources results in a smaller need for replenishment; a replenishable amount we can successfully support without relying on imports.

Building and learning the skills to endure such a life is of pure benefit to your family and their future ability to stay alive.

Challenges provide knowledge and satisfaction

Satisfaction comes from fulfilling you and your needs. Not anyone else’s.

This isn’t a selfish way to be. Naturally; self-preservation derived from you is the most non-selfish way to be. In order to preserve yourself, you must show up to serve everything you are in relation with.

The more relationships you serve for own preservation, rather than for someone else’s preservation; the more satisfied you’ll feel.

On a homestead you have access to all kinds of relationships! You can serve your soil, which serves your plants, which serves your neighbors, which results in serving everything. Everything is you. You are the discovery on it’s way to bloom.

This article was originally published on foodforestliving.com. If it is now published on any other site, it was done without permission from the copyright owner.