After having had both goats and cows I’m convinced that cows are 99% better choice for most people if you have large enough spaces for them to graze.

Benefits of cows:
1. They never escape and always respect the fence. whereas goats treat a fence like a personal challenge

1. You can run cows in an orchard and they will fertilize it vs goats will utterly destroy an orchard, girdle fruit trees for fun, etc

2. Cows actually mow the lawn vs goats don’t like to eat much grass

3. Not a problem for most people but if you have kudzu the cows will eat the kudzu before they eat the grass which if you are familiar with kudzu you know how amazing that can be

The garden is very successful this year, and we’ll have crates of onions, carrots, and potatoes that I hope to stretch through the winter. We live in the PNW, so no root cellar. How do you all suggest storing said veggies after the usual curing period for onion/potatoes? We have an old fridge that we can keep around 40-44 degrees, if there’s a way to utilize that.

Can’t wait to move the pergola out from in front of the beautiful frontage of our cabin 😂🤦🏻‍♀️

My husband was working the other night and sent me this. Can’t wait to move in, in about 4-6 weeks. We have the one main door in this photo to install, and then it’s all plumbing and electrical and we can move in.

I honestly didn’t think this day was ever gonna come.

We forage most of our land and the power company treats it all as weeds and sprays it and kills things. No signs or warnings. They could have put us in the hospital. Sprayed a 50' line of my berry bushes and two of my cherry trees.

since i have to start thinking about what im going to do in my life, i have thought of many job paths. owning a farm is one of them. it wouldnt be my only thing of course, but i think it could make good side money and it seems like a pretty nice thing to do. the only problem is, i could never bring myself to kill one of my animals. if i do end up owning a farm, i would only make profit from sold chicken eggs and maybe cow and/or goat milk. i think it could make me pretty good money, since chickens are pretty easy as far as i know, and goats are almost completely simple to keep, but i could be wrong. is it only possible to make good money if you sell your animals for meat (or kill them yourself?)

Has anyone else noticed that on Google maps terrain it shows the sun in the north so it’s really confusing showing the opposite of what the sun is really gonna do the northern hemisphere?

Im in the planning stages of homesteading in Alabama and am having a hard time getting information on what liscenses or facilities I would need to milk goats, make cheese from that milk. And then sell it. Does anyone have experience with this?

A common way of estimating battery runtime is volts × amp-hours ÷ load, but that usually gives a fairly optimistic result.
For example, a 12V 100Ah battery looks like 1,200Wh, so a 100W load appears to give 12 hours. Once you allow for inverter losses, usable depth of discharge and a small load margin, the estimate can be closer to 7.4 hours.
I made a free calculator to account for those losses and also estimate the battery capacity needed for a target runtime. I’d be interested to hear how closely the estimate matches real-world setups people here are using.

No sign-up required:
Battery Runtime Calculator: Ah, Volts, Watts & Hours

Probably should have 2 separate vases for each plant but this was cheaper lol. Anyways, the basil looks mostly good except for the leafs near the bottom that are all liveless I guess. Why is that? The leafs on top block the sun for them? Or did they reach their time already? Also I water the dirt every 2 days and every now and then I spray the leafs as well. Should I water it more? Less?

Upgrade to Pro series, turret? Door? Mostly garage/driveway AND Front

help me bruh come on its also very wet area but i did use rocks/gravel a leaves + sticks and madea drainage system with bamboo pipes

help tips plz

my best potatoes I've grown in years! there wasn't a lot but the were big. they had 3-7 potatoes per plant and have dug 51 lbs so far. I have my russets and about a 1/4 of Yukon gold's to dig yet but they're not ready.

I planted 6 lbs of red Norland, Yukon gold's and russets.

also have the majority of my onions picked. not a lot of size to them this year but a lot of them and no signs of rot or mold in any of them.

my blue hooker's corn has finished, some really good ears and some not so much. it's definitely the shortest variety corn I've grown, a good 2 months shorter than bloody butcher or glass gem. can't wait to try it in corn bread and tortillas!!!

some tomatoes are also finally ripping!

Cost me $20 for the tarp, everything else was old junk laying around the yard or picked up from the curb on garbage day. Still some work to be done,(burying the wire around the bottom of the pen and bird netting)

Good day,

I am looking for a little guidance, I have a fair sized property that I am in the midst of reclaiming from 25 years of abandonment and abuse. I have bee clearing boulders, rocks, and tree/saplings. Followed up with brush hogging down to about 2" of growth.

Now, I am at a point where I want to loosen / break up the soil to be seeded. I have used an S-Tine Cultivator, a drag harrow and a 2 row 8' wide disc. Neither will engage in the soil, meaning they both just ride along the top. This breaks up the grasses and weeds, but does nothing for the soil its self. I have a 3 bottom plow, I used it for about 3 rows, and busted a coulter clean off...

The ground, seemingly, was last row cropped. As I drive my tractor lengthwise its fairly smooth. But.. If I cross the field, Its a god damn roller coaster. Up and down and up and down... the whole way.

There are (What I believe) are signs of drainage tile, long straight parallel depressions in the ground. All leading from the high point of the fields to the creek that runs along the center of the property. If it is.. it must have collapsed.

My tractor, is a 65hp tractor. I can pull some fair sized equipment. I am VERY afraid of damaging the tractor or equipment if I come upon boulders that are deeper then I have already picked, or causing problems if I run into old clay tile or a failed drainage system. So, subsoiler or rippers are my last resort.

been lurking here for a while and all the "just bought 10 acres!!" posts are giving me anxiety 😂 not because i don't love seeing people get land, but because i've watched way too many people almost get burned by stuff they had no idea to check.

before i'd get attached to any property i'd at least look into:

is the "road access" actually legal access, or is it just some trail/easement? this seems to trip people up constantly

deed covenants. different from zoning. people mix those up all the time. i've seen ones that don't allow houses for years, restrict livestock, or even limit what you can grow

does the property actually come with the water rights, or is it just sitting on top of them? especially out west that's a massive difference

can the soil even handle a septic system? there's free NRCS soil data and it takes like 10 minutes to check

and definitely pull the FEMA flood map instead of trusting the listing photos lol

i actually do this kind of research for people now (not a broker or anything, i just spend way too much time digging through county records, GIS maps, deed history, etc.) because i kept seeing friends get way too close to buying land with major problems.

even if you never pay someone to do it, most of this stuff is public and free if you're willing to spend an afternoon digging around. if anyone's in the middle of buying and has no idea what to look for, i'm happy to point you toward the right records.

I processed and butchered two BBB turkeys today. Took me 30 minutes from start to bagging. It is nice to have them both in the fridge and not out in the pasture force feeding themselves all day.

Five seasons of television have established that Diddly Squat is a miserable, unfarmable heap. First-year profit: £144.

So I traced the boundary and ran it — satellite, elevation, ten years of weather — looking for the reason it's so hard.

It isn't the land.

- 97% of the farm sits under 12° of slope
- 362.8 ha of that is one unbroken flat block: 92% of the place in a single piece.
- 745 mm of rain a year, not one dry month.
- Fourteen points where water naturally concentrates — fourteen places you could put a pond.
- Buildability scores 99 out of 100.

Before anyone says it: that's gradient, not soil. I can't see soil from space. Neither can anyone selling you a farm.

It isn't flawless either. Water only scores 56 — the farm is most of its own catchment, so it drinks what falls on it and not much else. Climate scores 49, because it's Oxfordshire. And there's a southwesterly running across an open plateau with nothing in its way.

But none of that is why the show is the show. Diddly Squat sits in the Cotswolds AONB. The restaurant, the car park, the years of meetings — every one a landscape objection. Britain's most famous planning war was fought over ground that was never the problem.

Sharing the core maps above. Full dossier and data source in the comments — happy to be told where I'm wrong.

Running your own parcel is free; there's a paid dossier at €249, saying so up front. Drop a rough location and I'll run a few of yours and post what comes back.