In 2015, my husband and I packed up our belongings — including half a dozen geese and a library of self-sufficiency how-tos — and moved our lives from two acres in a coastal suburb to a 93-acre farm in rural Maine.
My dream was to create a self-reliant life. Having grown up on stories of rural heroes from Thoreau to the Nearings, I wanted to embody an alternative to the life paths I observed around me. I did not want to climb any corporate ladders or buy into consumer culture. Instead, I believed I could scratch a more unconventional lifestyle out of Maine’s rocky soil.
We started with chickens but realized that wouldn’t actually lower the price of eggs
Like many beginning homesteaders, I was blissfully unaware of the cost of the lifestyle. In my mind, and according to all the books I read, we could reduce our income needs by limiting our expenses and cutting out ‘wasteful’ spending, like nights out and new clothes. Our needs would be further reduced by cutting out trips to the grocery store, instead growing our own food.
I knew that we would not be immediately self-sufficient. In fact, until the pandemic made working from home a necessity, I commuted in to work on rural country roads throughout our life on the homestead.
We started with chickens, like many other homesteaders do. Chickens have always been the ‘gateway livestock’ because they are small and easy to house, it’s not hard to find someone to take care of chickens if you leave for the weekend, and chicks are relatively inexpensive at your local Tractor Supply. These days, chickens are more popular than they have ever been. With the price of eggs soaring, people believe that they can get ‘free eggs’ by putting some chickens in their backyard.
The problem is that chickens are actually a terrible way to get cheaper eggs. Over our years of homesteading, we learned that the costs to house, feed, and care for a few backyard chickens far outweigh the cost of simply paying for eggs, even at current record-breaking high prices. When we looked at our budget, we realized we were always paying more for chicken feed than we were saving on eggs.
Not only that, we quickly learned that chickens prefer to lay in spring and summer and sometimes don’t provide eggs all winter, and they seemed to be a magnet for predators that would find any crack in the coop and decimate our flock. Birds can also be a health risk — we eventually lost our flock to Avian Flu in the spring of 2022, a disease that has grown more threatening to humans over the years.
The majority of our livestock choices ran us into similar problems. In order to get milk from goats, you have to breed them. That meant that every year, our Nigerian Dwarf goat would give birth to between one and five kids, and because we did not want an ever-expanding herd, we needed to sell them. The problem was, this was always a struggle; this adorable goat breed had become very popular, and every homesteader nearby had goat kids for sale. Visits from the vet were necessary to keep our herd healthy, and fencing was an ongoing cost — the saying among farmers is that a fence that can hold water can hold a goat. Because of their escape antics, goats also proved ineffectual at clearing brush, the fringe benefit we hoped they’d offer.
It’s harder to be self-sufficient than I thought
My perspective on homesteading at the beginning may have been naive, but it was reinforced by countless homesteading writers and influencers who promote the lifestyle as sustainable. It took years for me to accept the realities of farm life. In the summer months, it was easy to replace many groceries with homegrown produce, but in winter, stored root vegetables and pickles became tiresome. While our animals did help us manage our land, they never did the work the way equipment could or saved us backbreaking labor. Few, if any, homesteads are truly self-sufficient. And those that are often only manage such a lifestyle through a radical lifestyle.
Even Thoreau — seen by many as the father of the self-reliance movement thanks to his seminal work Walden — had his mother do his laundry for him while he was living ‘self-sufficiently’ at Walden Pond. The Nearings relied on a steady stream of eager apprentices and income from books and speaking tours. A self-sufficient life did not mean frolicking with baby goats in the green fields. Instead, we learned the hard way that it looked more like spending early mornings injecting sick goats with medications, and crawling out of bed in the middle of the night to stoke the wood stove.
We had never expected it to be easy, but the continuous growth of to-do lists and tasks made it feel that for every bit of progress, there was more work to be done. Working constantly to keep up with our projects meant little time for anything else, from family and friends to pleasurable or intellectual leisure activities.
Some homesteaders I knew found lucrative side hustles, like promoting the lifestyle on social media or through writing, or happened upon another niche that provided income. For us, and most others, permaculture farm and small-scale livestock husbandry did not provide a livable wage. True self-sufficiency — the romantic vision of living off the land with little need for external income — proved to be an illusion.
Today, we still live on our remote farm. We keep a garden and even have a few goats that we neither breed nor milk but have as pets. We enjoy watching those goats kick about the yard and eat fresh fruit when it is in season, but we no longer strive to depend only on ourselves.
In the end, the real lesson of our time on the farm wasn’t how to be self-reliant, but how to balance ideals with reality. And perhaps, most importantly, it taught me that rejecting one system doesn’t mean escaping work — it just means choosing a different kind of labor.
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