Iβm yearning for the country side
I want that farm life more than ever
Discussion
You must visit your country cousin at once!
- Aesop
It's overly romantacised.
It's a lot of hard work and dedication unless you have the money to buy everything outright and employ people.
But even if you're dirt poor and struggling it's still worth the effort.
Nothing is more rewarding than watching your work pay off in such a meaningful way.
And if you are smart mother nature does most of the work for you.
If you're serious, start studying keyline agriculture, permaculture, biodynamics, generative farming, natural sequence farming, indigenous land management (especially regarding the area you intend to farm)
Read "water for every farm" by yeoman
When you do acquire land to farm you will have a huge head start on the required knowledge to do it effectively at low cost.
And if you have access to any kind of garden now do not take that for granted.
And figure out what kind of farm you want to run now.
Orchard, livestock, vegetables, grains, diversified mixture of the different things.
You need to know this before you acquire the land and make sure the land is suitable.
If you want to raise cattle my advice is get in contact with a small dairy farm(many small dairy farms will breed beef bulls over their dairy cows so that the calves they sell get a slightly better meat price when they are not breeding for new dairy cows)
Buy some half and half dairy beef heifers from the closest small dairy you can find.
You will never have any issues with calving that way.
Your cattle may look boney and get low prices initially but after a few generations of breeding beef studs over those cows you'll end up getting the best prices for at the market while maintaining the dairy ease of birth.
I started with two heifers. An ausline red Angus /Friesian jersey
And a Murray Grey/Friesian
Neighbours stud Hereford bulls.
My next step now is going to be selling the larger Herefords and inseminating with lowline Angus until my own bulls are stud quality
https://cdn.nostrcheck.me/2b98658c99fd096b138afe80dcc3a1e89baa86ed0b55b16283f41caa5d0a5506.webp
The first two generations were Hereford stud bulls and since then it has been Hereford/Angus bulls
The Australian Herefords are hardy and stay fertile a lot longer than other breeds, the Angus are good milkers and birthers with good meat quality that can handle the cold winters we get here, in my area the majority of the cattle are this mixture.
Angus are especially good for the fact that they only sexually mature after they are physically big enough enough to calve.
so immature pregnancy is extremely rare.
I'm also really interested in Park, like tipped park in particular, one of my neighbours has speckled park.
One of my cows jumped the fence to get to their bull a year ago but did not end up getting pregnant from the encounter.
Soil that drains well (alluvial, for example) is FAR more useful than hills and plateaus with a view (and wind). I have the latter, but I would have preferred the former. I'm not changing now though.
Hopefully when I get my brain chip implant it can replace the surrounding concrete hellscape we will build for ourselves with some nice green rolling hills in my vision.