rodeogirl's journey to being self-sufficient

[flowerbug]

So I'm trying to convince my boyfriend that we should buy a house and I think I almost have him. We where originally wanting to wait until we could get the house out of town like we wanted but I'm getting impatient. And the 3 houses I'm looking at are in a town over and alow livestock except pigs (one person messed it up for everyone they let the pigs get too stinky and someone complained.)

that's really easy to do. we have neighbors to the east of us that have them and any time the wind shifts you can smell 'em. i do not mind horses, cows, sheep and light chicken runs, but once you get above a certain population of chickens, ducks, turkeys and pigs they all just have too much of a stench to them. a very low number done on a good rotation would probably be acceptable to people, but i'm pretty sure most farmers would not consider it economical... the other neighbors to the SE of us had chickens in very tight quarters they raised for meat and if the wind shifted to come from that direction it did really stink bad. pack people in like that and we'd stink bad too. just not right IMO as stink in general means that nutrients are being lost (evaporative and likely any extra water soaking into the groundwater will have way too many nutrients too). this is also why i think that clovers and other nitrogen fixing plants need to be used in moderation as excess nutrients are just going to be leaching away instead of being used by the soil community.

the ideas of carrying capacity have a lot to do also with the soil type you have and your local geology and water table and such.

it's really all worthy of a lot of thought and study as is waste handling in general from the perspective of a septic system but also the idea of polluting perfectly good water with wastes just to carry them away. perhaps it makes a lot more sense to use a dry compost system and to not have to treat that much water or to then have to deal with treating all that water to get the wastes back out again... in the bigger cities is is also just plain wrong to combine human or organic wastes with any kind of industrial wastes. all those metals and chemicals are often exactly what a farmer would not want to apply to any fields. so wrong... and then there are issues of pharmaceuticals/hormones and even radioisotopes and other chemotherapeutic agents that you really don't want in the waste system at all...

um, sorry, i can wander a bit..., but all these things are kinda all mashed together in the end (or out the end...)...

what happened in our neighborhood when i was growing up was the neighboring dairy farmer decided to get about 150 pigs one year and after that he was told rather bluntly that, no, that wasn't going to happen again... we were all used to the small dairy farm and the smells of that and i'm ok with those. horse and cow, ok... sileage ok. pig, um, nope, just not good... it really stunk bad...

 

[rodeogirl]

So we found the perfect house 4 bed 2 bath fenced yard, recently remodeled. And of cores it is under contract. Am I a bad person hoping that it falls through so we can get it.

 

[Britesea]

If you keep praying, the perfect place will show up.

 

[farmerjan]

Has taken me alot longer than I thought to find a place and it is all falling into place. The good thing is that the mortgage rates are SOOOOOO low that it is silly to pay rent unless you know you are only going to be there a very short while. I will be paying $150 a month less in a mortgage payment.... that is with the taxes and insurance included, than I am paying in rent.... with the freedom to have what I want and do what I want since there are no restrictions. You will be building equity.... The right place will come along.... and even if it isn't your forever home, it will give you something to use as equity to get a better,bigger, more suitable place in the future.
Don't wish for bad luck for someone else, but be very ready if things don't work out for them.

 

[Chic Rustler]

real estate is tough right now. best advise I can give is get qualified from the bank, comtact a realtor, and if you see something you like make an offer right then.

 

[rodeogirl]

Well we went camping this last weekend and had a fun time. That is if you don't count my truck acting up and us having to pull the trailer up the hill in 4 wheel drive. The transmission stopped working about halfway up the mountain it just got too hot and wouldn't engage. But my truck is fine we just need to get my old girl a tune up before we go next time. (My truck is a 1994 so she needs some love.) Saturday morning we had 3 moose in camp and Sunday morning 4 elk. And Frank and his new buddy had the time of there lives playing and eating moose poop. (Although Frank didn't like what happens when we come home and he needs to take a bath to get the marshmallow off of his fur.) My little angle had a lot of fun she was really mad when we had to come down. We did leave our camper on the mountain and are going back up this weekend too. ( We didn't want to push my truck too hard coming down and lose the transmission.)

 

[frustratedearthmother]

Beautiful setting and it looks like ya'll had a blast!

 

[rodeogirl]

 

[rodeogirl]

Beautiful setting and it looks like ya'll had a blast!

We had a lot of fun and can't wait to go back this weekend. We want to get to the point that we are going up every other weekend but that is going to take a bit.

 

[wyoDreamer]

I miss the ability to do the dispersed camping in Wyoming forest-lands. There were a couple of placed that we really liked to go. Back here in WI, you have to park in a campground.