How I Afford To Homestead Full Time

I've Been a Full-Time Farmer for Over a Decade. Here's How:

Illustrations by Emma Dibben from my book One Woman Farm.

As I started writing about this topic, I quickly realized how much of my story isn’t a guide for others to follow, but the result of bad decisions, coincidences, timing, and other lucks that landed me on this farm in upstate New York.

This is my 15th year here, and I wanted to explain to new readers the origin story of how a corporate graphic designer ended up quitting her “real” job to work full time as a homesteader and a writer.

I managed to buy my farm before I turned 30 without help from my parents, with a salary under 40k, and no down payment. I was not rich. I didn’t win the lottery. I was not loaned tens of thousands of dollars. I was living paycheck to paycheck renting a cabin in Vermont when I was given the notice my rental wouldn’t be available in 6 months. At the time I had gardens, sheep, chickens, geese, two dogs, rabbits, and a goat. Not exactly the crew new landlords are excited to hear about…

So I bought a farm.

Most of the last decade was (and still is) scrambling to hold onto my home with uncompromising stubbornness at the cost of normalcy, dignity, and security. But it makes for one hell of a story. For those of you who recently found me, I’d like to explain how Cold Antler Farm happened.

It’s too much for one long post (substack has a limit, I tried) so instead, I’m going to share this story in three parts (probably not sequentially.) This part is about my young life before I made the decisions that changed it forever. The parts will go as follows:

• Past: What kind of person even does this and how I bought a farm alone at 27

• Present: My everyday life on the farm and how I make the income to keep it

• Endgame: What my plans are for the future and what I’m working towards

My story is a tornado of quick decisions and regret management. And before I can go into detail about how I barely manage to live full-time on my own mountain farm as a hay-tossing word slinger, you need to understand how I got in this position in the first place.

By the way darling, I do not recommend any of this. But if you’re reading this under the age of 30, and anything like me, you’re too busy flooring it through the fences to hear wise warnings or care. It’s a trait I admire still, because I have always been more interested in forgiveness than permission. Permission kills.

So this essay will be a lot less of a guide of how to quit your job and buy a farm, and more about why I quit my job and how I bought my farm. So, take all of this with a grain of salt. This is one person’s story of falling out of the world to find her place in it. And it’s still very likely to have a horrible ending.

Don’t compare your story to mine.
Don’t feel like you missed opportunities I took.
Life isn’t good or bad. It’s just different choices.

---

So, What Do You Do?

Soap, meat, eggs & words can shape a whole life if you’re not fancy about it.

When people introduce themselves one of the first questions asked after your name and where you’re from is “What do you do?” and what they mean by that is: what do you do… for money.

In my experience, most people asking about your job aren’t interested in your homeroom or waiting room; they want to categorize your class and status. They want to know if they are talking to a cellist for the city orchestra or a plumber with a phone number on her van. It’s no different than labradoodles smelling butts at the dog park.

I usually say I’m a farmer. It’s the most accurate way to explain my lifestyle and role in my community. I rarely tell people I’m a writer, and I never tell people I’m an author. I mainly write memoir and essay. Which means I would be introducing myself by saying I’m professionally myself?! This would not make sense to anyone smelling my butt, so to speak. It’s also a lot easier sliding into conversations about deer season than explaining I publish a weekly essay/podcast series about homosexuality and my yard.

I make a living the way millions of other creative professionals do today; through stubbornness, the internet, and a collection of smaller income streams that hodgepodge a living. The only difference between me and your niece in Bushwick is all my hired work happens on my farm instead of inside a city apartment, driving an Uber, or designing logos at a Starbucks.

Cold Antler Farm is half 20th-century farm labor and half the online gig economy, but with regular deworming. Honestly, that’s what homesteading has always been. People willing to risk everything to independently work, live, and farm their own land until they make it sing.

These days I earn just enough to barely remain housed and keep my animals fed. I am rarely working for the present. Instead of saving money, I am still trying to catch up from the month’s previous bills. That has been my everyday for almost four years. I earn just enough doing this to never shake off the low hum of anxiety that keeps me going.

That isn’t a complaint, by the way. Anxiety has done as much good for me as bad. And never feeling safe is probably why I never let my guard down enough to give up. I almost did though.

---

Four years ago the person I thought I was going to marry left me. Had I had more experience with relationships, or had any experience with myself in relationships, I would have seen that train coming but at the time it came out of nowhere.

This was for the best, but it did leave me with one unpredictable income right before the the worst inflation I’ve ever experienced, a tax assessment upping my mortgage 25%, and a bought of depression so bad I thought I was going crazy.

It’s a small miracle I’ve managed to live and farm here since 2012. And over the course of this series about how it all happened, I hope you notice how doing this so long has changed how I feel about myself, my esteem, my worth, and my address.

So when people ask what I do, I say I farm. That’s who I am. The farm is more of my identity than any book or relationship. It’s my passion. It’s my choice. It’s my one and only investment, and I thought for years it was a mistake, but not anymore. Thanks to medication, therapy, and the hardest I’ve worked in my entire life - this farm might just turn it all around.

It’s unclear, because you’re reading this right toward the end of Act 2. I have no idea what Act 3 will bring. It’s a tossup between happily ever after and eating my own thigh meat under a bridge.

This farm helped me become the person I am today, which is a hell of a lot better than the terrified girl baring her soul on blogs. But hey, if you’re not looking at your past with mortified nostalgia, then you’re probably not the kind of person who will like hearing about how I kept tripping uphill until I owned property.

Fast Decisions, Privilege, & Everyday Choices

All of this happened because of big decisions I made alone in my twenties. And I’m sure I wouldn’t have made them the same way had I been in a relationship, or planning a family, or been straight, or any other number of different circumstances that would have changed the trajectory of a woman’s life.