The Homestead Business

My homestead has always been a working homestead. It has provided me with most of my
food, all of my shelter and comfort and heat in the winter as well as a stout survival retreat.
To define self-sufficient today, however, the homestead must produce federal reserve notes.
Like most Americans, I relied on working for someone else to obtain federal reserve notes
to pay the bills. This is changing now with the economy. Work in my area has been severely
cut back. The last couple of years I was just able to keep up with the bills. Much of my
savings has disappeared and I'm growing a bit concerned. I know many others are in the
same situation.

When tough times hit, you can hope for the best and keep doing what you're doing or you
can adapt and innovate. In order to maintain my rural and free lifestyle I will have to adapt
and innovate. I really do not want to move into a more populous area just to find more work.
After all, there is plenty of work to do here. I just need to find a way to make that work pay
off in federal reserve notes. For me, this will be more of a fork in the road rather than an
exit into an entirely different direction. I want to eliminate some items that are brought in
from outside my homestead like most or all of my utilities and I want to start a business
utilizing products made on my homestead.

First an explanatory paragraph about my homestead. After traveling and staying with family
around the country from the southwest to the southeast, from Ohio to Montana, the
mountain west, the inland northwest and the Pacific northwest, I decided I wanted a home in
the mountains of either the mountain west or inland northwest. Cost and opportunity led me
to my homestead in the Hoodoo Mountains of the North Idaho Panhandle. Due to the cost of
purchasing prefabricated homes to place on raw land and the cost of putting in septic
systems I opted to go the cheaper route and buy a pre-existing home on a couple of acres
with access to national forest, BLM and State lands. This may not have been as convenient
and frugal as I had anticipated.

This has, unfortunately, made me very comfortable with utilities. All I need do is push a
button and I have electrical power for tools, or turn on a faucet for water or flush a toilet to
eliminate waste. This has become so convenient that I put off plans to eliminate them in
favor of systems that produce power and provide water and eliminate waste within my own
self contained and self sufficient homestead. That has now changed and I will get into this
process in future blog entries.

My main focus for the moment, which will allow me the resources to eliminate water and
electric hook-up from my homestead is in building the homestead business. My plan is to
build a business with the resources from my local area and manufacture products on my
homestead for sale all across the country. I have been working a blacksmith shop for
several years now which brings in a supplement to my income in the summer. Unfortunately,
the forge has been a summer project only. I have been saying that I'm going to build a
smithy for my forge for many years now. Last year I began on this, despite some setbacks
due to working on other projects, my forge should be running through this autumn. I will
need the smithy to work the forge in the spring, fall and winter, however, so I still have
some work to do on it. The forge will be the center of a good deal of my locally produced
products. I have been selling hand forged fireplace components to my boss for several
years. This year, I will be marketing some for myself. I already have my plain sconce listed
at my store on North Woods Traders. Knives and hawks are also going in the catalog as well
as Celtic design trivets and candle holders when traffic and purchases show that there is
interest.

To further help my store's traffic and my community, I am opening my store to those in my
community who produce their own products through activity in their hobbies. Other projects
are also definitely going to be featured, as well. I will be whipping this homestead into shape
for self-sufficiency and reporting here on my progress. I'm sure this will help other readers
along with their projects as I become much less dependent on a system that is showing
signs of collapse. Leave feedback and comments. Make this journey your journey as well.
And check out North Woods Traders' store at http://northwoodstraders.ecrater.com/