The Homestead begins

Let me introduce myself. My name is Adam ******** (Sorry, secret information) and we live in Alberta. We're a young family, and we've got one child, a girl. This blog is all about our quest to leave the inner city and live as farmers on the land. I have no interest in growing thousands of pounds of some product and selling it for 24 cents a pound. We intend to eat this food ourselves, and maybe sell whatever surplus there happens to be.
Yesterday, we took possession of 156.8 acres of pastureland approx 1 hr from our hometown of Calgary. The dream is coming true!
I walked through some of it yesterday, setting up stakes with orange ribbons to mark where the road will be, and where the mobile is going.

The dream started in 2005, just after we bought our townhouse. With only a 10 x 20 foot backyard with a miniature garden, going outside was pointless. The neighborhood wasn't bad, but it wasn't great either. Unfortunately, it was all we could afford, so we resigned ourselves to inner city life.
We paid a great price for our townhouse, and ended up selling for a profit, not as much as I could have had a year earlier, but that's another story. We made about 50k, enough for another down payment. I could have had 100k cash in 2006, and rented it back from the buyer!

I realized that if something happened, such as, oh, the economy plane getting a hit from a flying elephant, that we would be stuck in the city with no food, no heat and no electricity. Not good. Really not good. Our neighbors would become our enemies, which they almost did anyway, and I'm sure they would shoot me in a heartbeat for the contents of my freezer if they had to!

I struggled for a long time with the details and timing. I put off selling the house, thinking that we had more time before the market tanked. Even as the American housing market blew up into a million tiny shards, I kept saying "Oh, we're good, we've got some time, maybe not very much, but we're ok." Yeah, dummy, lots of time to watch your money sail out the window.

You know what pilots say? There's two things you'll never get back. Runway behind you and altitude above you. They should add "last years home equity" to the list of things that are gone forever.

So, after a painful sale earlier in 2008, we started looking for land to move onto. I put out a couple of ads in newspapers, and got a bunch of responses that went like this
"Hi, I've got a few acres for sale about 40 minutes outside the city."
"Oh, how much?"
"Well, we're asking $375,000 for the 11 acres"
"Oh...thanks anyway"

I was perusing the MLS (Multiple Listing Service), and I stumbled across a listing for 156.8 acres, for 135,000. I thought "maybe he forgot a zero somewhere". I was sure that the gentleman had suffered massive brain damage, or maybe the land was a nuclear test site, or maybe they had filmed a movie with Pauley Shore. Nope, he just wanted to get rid of it. He had parceled out his house and a few buildings, and the rest was up for grabs.

Well, you can bet that we were out there that afternoon! We looked at it, and I said to myself "We better buy this before the seller comes to his senses and wants to sell for what its really worth!" So we did. For those who are not familiar, land around Calgary is between $5000 - 50,000 per acre up to about 40 minutes away. We're an hour away, and we're paying about $850 an acre. You do the math. We got a deal.

We got a loan without too much trouble. We should be able to pay the land loan with what money we make from selling hay or cattle. Needless to say, I've got big plans! A U-pick berry farm, melons, raspberry's, saskatoons, blueberries, trees, seeds, the sky's the limit!

Today, we made an offer on a mobile home. Rather than build a home right away, which we wanted, it's cheaper and easier to put a mobile in. We just need a woodstove, and some new appliances, a wind genny and some solar panels, and we're totally set! It should cost about 90k total for everything the house needs.

I never mentioned, but we have a family that is super good friends with us. They have 6 kids. Yikes. Anyway, this family is absolutely set on joining us on the land (we invited them), so eventually, they're going to co-own the parcel, which will reduce our loan burden, and allow us to more effectively farm the land. It's going to be great having them out there, I can hardly wait!

We have a lot of work to do. We're going to build a cement cistern for water storage, and a large shed for our accumulated possessions, also known as "junk". I'm going to rip out the toilets, and replace them with composting ones. Then we're going to put all of our greywater out into drainage basins, eliminating the need for a septic system. It's almost all planned out, but we just need to convince inspectors, planners and other officials that this is a good idea!

Eventually, we plan to have a strawbale home with a masonry heater, in a Victorian style, but first things first. Let's get out of the inner city, where sirens, gunshots and prostitutes rule the streets, and let's get out where we belong!