Thinking of bugging out to the country? Think again.

All sounded so easy, then you tried it. Good luck, keep the learning curve active. If you made it two years you will make it.

Yeah, I know farmers too. They have seeds costs, herbicides, tractors, diesel, irrigation, etc. Some do well, some don't. Wonder how much of the 996k was profit?

Put your money where your mouth is. Come out here and try to survive. You'll be crying for your conditioned cocoon in days.

flatlander

All sounded so easy, then you tried it. Good luck, keep the learning curve active. If you made it two years you will make it.

Unless you grew up here to begin with, you just don't have the mindset to truly make it. You have very little concept of how subsidized, pampered and protected your lifestyle is. You can't just pop out for any given need when you inhabit the boonies. Cops and ambulances can take hours to respond. Heat in the form of wood is dirty and dangerous from the point of felling to combustion, especially if you don't grasp the difference between soft and hard woods. Say goodbye to clean clothes, daily chores are not forgiving. Food? Hah! You have no idea how cheap your food is. You will spend more time raising crops and livestock than you ever did pushing pixels, and for not profit, but just to cover a per person 2000Kcal/day diet.

Speaking of which, how are you going to pay taxes and licenses? Your opportunity to earn in the sticks is severely limited, and you will be in competition from natives for what jobs exist; not something you want to bring on yourself. You think you hate immigrants? Flatlanders are not welcomed with open arms, even if you are white as the driven snow.

Why? Because of the attitudes you bring. I own over a 100 acres. However, the town now has a health ordinance making it illegal for me to own more than 20 pigs. This was shoved through by transplants. Now I do not use pigs as an income source, and have never kept more than one breeding pair, but just who do you think you are telling me what I can and can not keep in terms of livestock? It hasn't stopped there. There are now laws limiting the use of outdoor boilers to between October and April, and you can't just have any old boiler, it has to be the most complex one. Bullshit. It can take decades for the locals to trust you if ever, all because of the previous high minded urban refugees.

Life is not easy out here. Unless you are used to hard physical labor for much of the day, you don't stand a chance out here. Some make it. More than that have come and gone within a year or two. The bucolic country side looks mighty appealing from the outside, but unless you are ready for the commitment of your life to provide as much as you can for yourself, and do without, you are in for a rude awakening. Forget about discretionary spending on new fangled gadgets. Your budget will predominately be chewed up by the insatiable appetite of your implements and inputs for plantings and livestock.

Then there is the land. Few have any clue as to how many acres it takes to support livestock and crops. Realistically, the bare minimum to start a self sufficient holding for a family is 10-15 acres per person. Livestock need huge amounts of pasture in the summer and grain for the winter. You will also need a wood lot and crop land.

It is great to carp and dream, but get a clue; bugging out to the country is not all milk and honey. In the end you probably are better off lumping up with the rest of the urbanites in the coming fedghettos.

and your a hick

Therein lies the rub. It does sound easy from an armchair within walking distance from a grocery store/coffee shop/cineplex etc. The devil is in the details. Mucking pigs with the flu isn't anything but trying, but it has to be done; unless you want sick pigs as well. Keeping ice off the water pans is almost rocket science, but if you don't mind dehydrated livestock that keel over it's no big deal. Any one single part of substance living is approachable. It is the whole catastrophe of having to take care of yourself that proves to be a bit more than most realize...

2000 is a bare minimum with the amount of labor that I do. You can get by on 600 if all you do is push pixels. Try farming and see what happens on that little of an input...

I'm pretty much talking about all scenarios here. Don't think for a minute you can just walk out the door with a bug out bag and head to the countryside. Any place that might be reasonable to inhabit probably already is someones landholding, and if it is not, the outsider just showing up and 'squatting' is not going to be welcomed.

As for going it on a couple of acres, I beg to differ. Let's say you can survive off just potatoes and a ruck sack of vitamins. Figured out how many acres of potatoes are required to feed one person for one year? The answer is not comforting. Then there is the wood lot for cooking fire, heating source and to build a shelter.

The whole notion of countryfication is phantasmagorical at best for most sub/urbanites.

Unless you grew up here to begin with, you just don't have the mindset to truly make it. You have very little concept of how subsidized, pampered and protected your lifestyle is. You can't just pop out for any given need when you inhabit the boonies. Cops and ambulances can take hours to respond. Heat in the form of wood is dirty and dangerous from the point of felling to combustion, especially if you don't grasp the difference between soft and hard woods. Say goodbye to clean clothes, daily chores are not forgiving. Food? Hah! You have no idea how cheap your food is. You will spend more time raising crops and livestock than you ever did pushing pixels, and for not profit, but just to cover a per person 2000Kcal/day diet.

Speaking of which, how are you going to pay taxes and licenses? Your opportunity to earn in the sticks is severely limited, and you will be in competition from natives for what jobs exist; not something you want to bring on yourself. You think you hate immigrants? Flatlanders are not welcomed with open arms, even if you are white as the driven snow.

Why? Because of the attitudes you bring. I own over a 100 acres. However, the town now has a health ordinance making it illegal for me to own more than 20 pigs. This was shoved through by transplants. Now I do not use pigs as an income source, and have never kept more than one breeding pair, but just who do you think you are telling me what I can and can not keep in terms of livestock? It hasn't stopped there. There are now laws limiting the use of outdoor boilers to between October and April, and you can't just have any old boiler, it has to be the most complex one. Bullshit. It can take decades for the locals to trust you if ever, all because of the previous high minded urban refugees.

Life is not easy out here. Unless you are used to hard physical labor for much of the day, you don't stand a chance out here. Some make it. More than that have come and gone within a year or two. The bucolic country side looks mighty appealing from the outside, but unless you are ready for the commitment of your life to provide as much as you can for yourself, and do without, you are in for a rude awakening. Forget about discretionary spending on new fangled gadgets. Your budget will predominately be chewed up by the insatiable appetite of your implements and inputs for plantings and livestock.

Then there is the land. Few have any clue as to how many acres it takes to support livestock and crops. Realistically, the bare minimum to start a self sufficient holding for a family is 10-15 acres per person. Livestock need huge amounts of pasture in the summer and grain for the winter. You will also need a wood lot and crop land.

It is great to carp and dream, but get a clue; bugging out to the country is not all milk and honey. In the end you probably are better off lumping up with the rest of the urbanites in the coming fedghettos.

Maybe, but I'd bet he knows the difference between "your" and you're.

I'm ready, I've bought and watched The DVD boxed set of Green Acres

OP's right folks, If my family would'nt have been one of the first families in this area in 1800, people would not have trusted me here 2 yrs ago when i moved here. Life is hard, only 92 acres but we grow r own food garden, chickens etc. Prices at the grocery store is 5 times what it is sold for in the city. Livestock feed is also more expensive. I'm glad i moved here when i did, it would be hard for new people in a shtf situation. I can also tell u when shtf these people around here wont accept any new city slickers.

Why do so many rural people think people who live in cities are weak and stupid?! You live in a fantasy world. Plus how can 320 million people in the U.S. all live in the 'country'? How? Does the boonies have a viable economy to keep them and the U.S. afloat? Absofuckinglutely not.

And stop with the fear porn and out of control paranoia. It isn't doomsday or some post-apocalyptic place where I live [a big city], not by a long shot. We aren't all dodging bullets, foraging for food .....I mean seriously, WTF? There are obviously a lot of people in this country and elsewhere who haven't been properly socialized growing up and haven't learned to get along comfortably with millions of others of their own species. The thought of living in any place bigger than say 50,000 people scares them.It's ridiculous.

If shit happens, we deal with it just like rural people. And you should realize a lot of the shit you see on the news, TV, movies is bullshit. They HYPE fear and chaos.

I would be willing to learn and work really hard but I know that I wouldn't be able to do it alone.

Actually we calculated that 80 acres was the bare minimum here if you wanted to live off of your own land... and about 50 to 60 acres of that had to be bush that you could draw wood from for winter heat as well as year round cooking.
The garden would need to be at least 3/4 of an acre with about a third portion of that, being planted with potatoes.

Though the work is hard and needs to be done daily, it's also very soul satisfying when you sit down to a meal completely harvested from your own land, by hand. It's a feeling you have to experience to know.. very difficult to describe.

Once a perma culture set up is established, an area the size of a football field can feed 100 families for one year with one person maintaining it!

the problem with this kind of thinking is that yes, if you were to only have some chickens, that would be easy.

add to that all the other really "easy" things to do like chop haul wood, "throw seeds in the ground" (and watch the animals eat them), haul water, deal with your garbage, do the dishes, keep things sanitary, get food, grow wheat, hull wheat, grind wheat (if your wheat survives).

sure all these things are "easy" when taken on their own divorced from the reality that you will need to do at least 50 of things "easy" things per day.

day after day after day. year after year. ya, sure, chickens are easy.

i only have 5 acres and i've been working at it 2 years.
and i thought having a garden would be "easy"

all those seed packets say "easy to grow".

everything sounds so easy.

seriously people, you better start learning how to do this stuff like yesterday.

i have so much ahead of me to prepare and learn.
it's mindblowing really.

but i find it to be fun to do as i like a difficult task that takes a lot of energy.

but this is not for the weak.