What’s the hardest part of starting a homestead?
Some ideas might come to mind like learning how to take care of animals, figuring out how to grow your own food, or finding enough land. Those are all important, but really they’re not that hard in terms of the process. You just have to learn how to do them. Once you’ve gotten over the learning curve, the daily tasks aren’t that demanding. Finding land or figuring out how to use the space you have can be difficult, but once you solve the problem it’s not something that you have to keep dealing with. This isn’t to downplay the difficulty of these or other problems that come up, but to highlight the surprising challenge that continually comes up when starting a homestead: burn out.
Before I started homesteading/farming I listend to lots of podcasts, read books, and watched youtube videos to help prepare me for what was to come. Everytime the subject of burn out came up, I would roll my eyes and skip the subject. “I’m not going to get burnt out” I would tell myself, “at least not for a long time.” With all of my interests over the years I’ve always been able to fully dive into it and emerse myself in the subject and not get burnt out for a long time. Usually at least a year or two before I start to hit a wall. I’ve done this with football, coding, work, video games, music, and all sorts of other things. I would get interested in a topic and just attack it head on, learning everything I could as fast as possible. The learning and growing is really what drove me. I love the process of learning new things and if there’s still more for me to learn then I’m still motivated and the burn out doesn’t come. But once I plateau, I start to dwindle and get bogged down by the mundaine and lose interest and that’s when I start to get burned out.
For some reason, farming is different. Just two months in I started feeling emense burn out like I haven’t felt before. It was frustrating.
“Why is this happening?”
“There’s still so much for me to learn and I have infinite things that need done that I enjoy, why I am I feeling like this? ”
“I can’t afford to be burnt out, there’s so much to do.”
At first, I didn’t even recognize it was burn out. I just thought I was sick, or having a hard time mentally. It made me frustrated with myself and I tried to just force my way through it and tell myself I should be enjoying this. I told myself I should be grateful for this opportunity and that feeling like this is wrong because of how blessed I am. All these thoughts just made it worse instead of better. I started feeling less and less joy with what I was doing. It made me doubt myself and my ability. When things went wrong, like animals dying, or my seed starts failing, or my cover crops taking longer than they should to sprout, I would take it personally and have to fight of negative thoughts about myself and try not to get too stressed or frustrated. I would have to talk to myself to try and get an objective perspective of what was going on and determine what was my fault and what was out of my control. I then had to forgive myself for my mistakes and let myself off the hook.
I think there’s two reasons why farming and homesteading are so different in terms of burn out. First, farming involves life and death. When you have animals die, and even plans, it can be demoralizing for so many reasons. Even if you take the emotional attachment out of it, when something dies you lose all that you’ve invested in it. All the hard work, the money, the time; it’s all feels wasted at that moment. Your brain remembers the sweat and blood you’ve poured to get to this point, and in an instant it can all be washed away. That’s very hard to deal with. Especially if this is your first time doing it. I’ve been around more death than the average person I think, at least in regards to animal death. I don’t have a lot of emotional damage when an animal dies, at least in terms of the connection with the animal. I’m very aware that things die and I’m able to put the death in perspective initially. But that feeling of waste, and failure… that’s hard to overcome and I wasn’t prepared for it.
That leads to the second reason which is that farming is physical. It takes a lot of physical effort to start a homestead and that can take a toll on your body. Especially when there’s other health factors in play. One of the main reasons, if not the number one reason, I wanted to start growing my own food is for my health. At 30 years old I have a lot of damage from bad habits, not eating well, not having access to good wholesome food, and other factors. I have multiple health conditions that I’m working on including severe allergies. Allergies and farming don’t mix too well. But as Justin Rhodes likes to say, the problem is the seed to the solution. I think that’s the saying. But basically my allergies are going to get better when I’m able to eat clean food and cultivate things like honey and golden rod that are good for my allergies. Ironically, I work at an allergy clinic which means I have access to allergy treatment but also I am exposed to a lot of allergens when I allergy test or mix allergy vials. The point is there are physical limitations that we all have and when we reach our limit it is inevitabbly going to lead to burn out. It’s hard to admit I’m not as resiliant as I used to be and take my limitations into account. That’s something I’ve had to learn.
So how do we combat burn out?
I don’t know yet. There’s lots of things I could repeat here that I’ve heard, like make sure you’re getting rest and taking time off and all that. But I don’t have enough experience yet to know what actually works vs what people say works. Right now, I think the most important thing is to always keep my priorities front and center and make sure I am cultivating joy. I am really focusing on joy right now and figuring out how I can make sure I don’t lose that. The best way to do that is to spend quality time with my wife and kids. I have to make time for it and not let my drive to be successful at this over shadow what’s really important. Another thing I have to continually do is let go. Let go of my mistakes, let go of my short comings, let go of the things I can’t control.
Overcoming mistakes has been suprisingly hard. It’s hard for me to be nice to myself. When I’m down to 3 turkeys out of the 10 I started with it’s diffucult not to beat myself up and feel like a failure. I actually feel emberassed and insecure about it. I worry about what people will think. Even though there’s no one watching me. That’s one reason I have a lot of respect for content creators in this space, especially ones who purposely show their mistakes. You have to be secure in who you are and what you’re doing to share that with the world. I want to get to that point.
Well, thanks for reading my thoughts on this matter. Hopefully you can relate to something here. Feel free to comment and let me know!
-Clay