[as-j]

I moved out to a farm in 2003, before YouTube, and grew about 90% of what we ate. We had goats for milk, rabbits, ducks, turkeys for meat, sheep for wool, etc.

We'd still go to the grocery store 1/mo to get toilet paper, etc. We still had commercial power, cars, full time tech jobs, a mortgate, some form of internet....not sure it qualifies as homesteading, but it was my time on a farm.

Yes it's a lot of work, I'd get up at 5:30 to milk the goats, and again at 6pm I'd have to be home to milk. Barns are constant work in the quiet time, and the "garden" uses up all other time in spring through fall. We didn't take a vacation for ~4 years, and then found someone who would help care for the farm and finally got a break.

All the while we worked tech job, me at a 6 person company. The experience was pretty amazing....so I don't regret that. The pay was horrible, even by standards back then. And my opportunities even worse, I was hours from Chicago so could not commute. And there was nothing else nearby, so I was hand cuffed to that job. When 2009 came by and the job ended as the economy tanked we sold the farm and moved to somewhere with a choice of jobs.

Why did we go to the farm? In our 20s we saw it was a chance to buy a house, land, and see how feed really grows. In this case we succeeded.

But the opportunity cost was huge, we could have taken jobs at the to-be FANGs back in the bay area we left. We could have paid that outrageous some of 500k or 600k for a house in Sunnyvale. We could have spent 6 years in our late 20s or 30s earning 3-4x the salary and having it grow, etc.

But hindsight is 20/20. Who would have expected the FANGs to be so successful after the .com bubble burst? Houses in the South Bay to appreciate so much? Well a lot of people by not me. ;)

Was it a mistake? I dunno.