Starting A Homestead in the Military | FoodsOfOurLives.com
Hello there!
I’ve been wanting to write a short series about our experience with setting up a small ‘homestead’, as people call it these days, when you know you are only going to be living in a location for a relatively short period of time, like 3-4 years.
Due to my husbands job we move all over the country, only staying in one location for about 3-4 years. When we decided my husband was going to go back to school and get a Ph.D. and subsequently decided he was going to go to Montana to do so, I put my foot down and announced I wanted dairy goats.
And chickens.
And maybe ducks.
If I’m gonna live in Montana, I’m gonna LIVE in Montana. You know what I mean? Mountains. That’s what.
I wanted to get the full experience and I really missed having livestock, I grew up with cows, horses, bucking hay and pickin’ chickens and I wanted to go back.
I wanted to raise our own food.
So we started looking for the right location for this to happen.
I think the trickiest part to moving often and trying to homestead is finding a house in which to accomplish this. We prefer to rent, since there is less risk involved financially and it can be challenging to find a landlord who will allow you have a bunch of crazy farm animals. We always have buying on the backup plan though, just in case we can’t find a suitable rental. We were extremely blessed when we moved here and although it wasn’t easy to find (at one point my husband asked if I would be terribly upset if it didn’t work out and I said yes. I will spend the next 3 years in a very bad mood), thankfully we did eventually come across this amazing house with 10 acres and a super chill landlord who was excited to see the land get used.
Obviously this is going to be a lot harder if you are moving closer to a large city or an area where large lots just aren’t close to work (which is what we are looking at for our next move…). But we always make the most of where we live and I think if you go into it with the right mindset and knowing what you want, there’s a good chance of achieving it.
You really need to first consider exactly what you want to accomplish. Meaning, what sorts of animals do you want to have? Deciding that early on helps with making a housing choice. Whether you only want to get a few laying hens (or ducks) or you want to go big or go home and get chickens and goats or a cow… this will obviously affect what type of house you seek out and I think it’s nice to start the process of looking for a home that will allow for what you want, right from the get go.
So once you have found the house… moved in… unpacked a little maybe? It’s go time.
You only have a short period of time in comparison to most people who are doing this, you have to figure out what kind of chickens you want which will depend a little on where you are located, being in Montana, we needed hearty layers with small combs so as to avoid frost bite. What kinds of goats do you want? Different breeds have different flavors to their milk and different personalities to deal with (we’ll talk more about this in another post). Having this kind of thing already in the back of your mind is necessary so you can dive in ASAP.
When we moved to this house, we were super fortunate my husband’s brother and his wife drove out to help us. I had just had our 4th child, she was only a month old when we jumped on this homesteading train which was probably a little crazy on my part but I am goal oriented and wanted to get going and you just don’t mess with a goal oriented red head. As Andrea and I worked on unpacking, our husbands were outside building our first ‘shed’ which was a goat house and chicken coop combo. We eventually outgrew it and added 3 more sheds so I recommend either going big in the beginning (which was what I recommended to the building team in the first place but we don’t know to get into the whole, who’s right or who’s wrong conversation…) or controlling yourself when it comes to having cute little baby animals around. At any rate, within 48 hours of moving in, we had ourselves a goat house, a chicken coop, a small fenced pen and a dairy goat and kid.
Oh yes, we actually got our first goat within 48 hours.
We move quickly.
Unfortunately in our rush for our quest for milk we bought a wretched goat who was terrible to milk. I figured I knew farm animals, I’ve trained lots of horses, I’m good. I can tame her. But Muffin was special. And after several SPECIAL milking sessions that took over AN HOUR and me having a newborn in the house and trying to unpack and I was having milk supply issues myself, gah! I was not a happy camper. I ended up returning darling Muffin and her kid to the people I bought them from (who coincidentally have ended up being friends of ours). So moral of the story? Hurry, but don’t buy a bad goat!!! There is nothing out there that can make your life more miserable than a nasty goat who is hell bent on NOT being milked.
So what do you do when you get to your new awesome place and you are ready to acquire your creatures?
Well the obvious first place to check is your local craigslist. Even though we didn’t end up getting anything initially from there, we have had great success since then in finding goats, ducks and chickens, turkeys…you name it. The second year we were here my husband somehow managed to collect over 40 ducks and lots of roosters for free through craigslist… hence why you see a lot of duck recipes on this site. We slaughtered all of them. Free meat. We also got one of my favorite dairy goats through craigslist. So that is a great source for animals.
The way we initially got started with goats and chickens was to head over to the county fair which we happened to roll into town just in time for. I grew up in 4-H so I was pretty comfortable with how things go at the fair, so we waltzed into the goat barn and started asking around for goats for sale. Did the same in the chicken barn and….
A couple weeks later we had our little startup farm. 5 chickens and 3 goats.
As far as the chickens (knowing what I know now), I don’t recommend going that route. It worked and it was a good way to try a couple different varieties and we got eggs pretty much right away, sort of, which is the point, right? But we agree, we should have just ordered chicks from the hatchery. It would have been cheaper and we would have gotten more birds sooner. As it was, we ended up loosing two of the initial chickens (the ones who were already laying… naturally) and then the other 3 took a couple months to start laying. Then a couple months later we decided we needed more than 3 eggs a day and ordered chicks from the hatchery. And a few token ducks to try out. Which we love.
I highly recommend ducks, they really are better layers then chickens and are more fun to have around.
All in all, getting started seemed like kind of a crap shoot but we just jumped in head first and went for it and I think that is really key here. Figuring out how you want to do things and what you want to do, unfortunately, only really comes once you are already trying things.
We started with thinking we just wanted a few eggs and some milk and we ended with wanting (and getting) so much more! Last summer was our peak of production (it was awesome) and we had 3 bottle lambs we got for free to slaughter, we had 4 dairy goats in milk and their kids to slaughter, we had about 7 laying ducks and two hatched ducklings so now we have 13 layers and some drakes and were able to give a few ducks to our friends (who we got the initial naughty goat from), I have no idea how many chickens we have, around 30?
So in the end we raised all our milk, meat and eggs for the most of the time we have lived here. We get our veggies from our friends who have the ducks as they do CSA shares so about all I buy from the store is snacks and fruit and few dairy products that involve cream (like butter) since goats don’t really produce any cream.
I hope this helps and helps to know it CAN be done if you really want it. You have to be resourceful and energetic and willing to try some new things and put yourself out there. The first year we slaughtered animals, we had no idea what the heck we were doing (except the chickens since I had done that before) so we watched youtube videos! Yup, I have learned how to frost wedding cakes and butcher a goat from youtube. But by last fall, we slaughtered 3 sheep, 5 goats and butchered out 2 deer in my kitchen, so you never know how things are going to turn out when you go down this road but we have had such a blast with it and learned my husband and I can actually work together on some things (we both like to lead and it can be a problem sometimes, lol!)
He still isn’t allowed to cook anything though. He totally burned my lard when he was trying to make wings for himself… not cool. We decided last year that we had arrived when there was a German exchange student hanging around our church and we were asked if he could come out to our house for ‘a real Montana experience’ by people who were actually from Montana. HA!
I guess we did it right.
Have you tried to set up a homestead for a short period of time? What kinds of things did you do? What animals did you get? Or do you want to set one up? I’d love to hear from you! Ask questions or tell us about it.
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