Has anyone ever become (or tried to become) self sufficient? Am I too much of a dreamer?

[WelliesAndPyjamas]

We moved abroad and a major part of this jump in to the unknown was to 'live the dream' (sorry - it's corny but true!) and become as self sufficient as possible.

So far, after about 18 months we have one season under our belts of growing veg/fruit and of keeping chickens. We now want to go further - a couple of goats for milk and meat, a pig for meat, a new orchard for more fruit, and more chickens. We have an acre and own our own house and land so no mortgage. We run our own safaris company but it isn't a full time job all year - DH is away a lot as the guide in the summer and we both work year round on promoting the safaris. I have been teaching part time to keep the bills paid while the safari thing was taking off, and after our first attempt at growing our own food, we have done pretty well at keeping the food bills nice and low.

The dream idea is that with the safaris well established I can give up the teaching (which I find very boring tbh) and vastly increase the amount of work that goes in to the future smallholding, to the point that our only real expenses should be electric, the occasional gas bottle, and animal feed (although we would also look to grow as much of this as possible), and coffee!

I'm imagining that with goats' milk I would have enough milk for us to drink and to make cheese/yogurt. A pig and the chickens would provide us with meat and chickens year round. And if we plant a third more than we did last year then we should also have enough fruit and veg to keep us fed. We have good storage facilities under the house and it has worked admirably in keeping everything edible so far.

Longer term, more livestock would be a consideration, as would be alternative energy and trying to find a water source on our land, even if it is only for the veg and animals.

I know I am going on a bit so apologies for that and thanks for following so far. I would really love to hear from anyone who is/has doing/done this. Or anyone with experience of keeping any of the above livestock who could advise me whether I am being realistic? And whether there is more we could be doing?

Should I 'gor for it'?

No practical advice but another well wisher here Wellies, hope it all works out for you.

Triathlete your memories triggered one of mine. We had goats in a rather small garden in an inner city area, although my dad had an allotment too so would take the goat along with him fairly frequently. The kids on the street would call him the 'goat man' whenever they saw him coming along.

It's taken me a while to get back to my ethical roots... I don't have animals or even an allotment yet, but I do grow veg in pots in my garden .

Triathlete, totally agree about the names and also if you ever name an animal after a friend DO NOT TELL THEM.

I named our cockerell after a gay friend because he wasnt interested in er... doing the business with the hens and said friend was quite chuffed. But he got very upset when cockerell ended up as coq au vin !!!

i mean the cockerell wasnt interested in doing the business with the hens, not my friend !!!!

we might be a bit heartless then because we name most of the chickens and still eat them when necessary. But saying that the names are very boring and practical, just to help us tell them apart - blackie, brownie, hopalong, blondie, whitie, pheasant girl, etc, you get the gist. And whenever we have had to eat one we haven't kept it a secret from DS that he is eating one of them. Personally I don't think that's a bad thing and he's been very cool with it. What do you guys do about that sort of thing?

i definitely think they need to know where their food comes from, i think it helps them to respect and care for animals.

we used to run a holiday let and some of the reactions of the parents when they realised we ate the chickens were amazing, probably 85% of them asked us not to tell their children that chicken came from chickens!

amazing, and sad

I've heard that the whole HFW chicken thing has been huge over there. Wonder if that'll help people accept where their food comes from.

When the orchard is established you could keep a couple of pigs on the same land. You may need to move them when it's wet because the amount of mud pigs cause is unbelievable!

Cows/sheep on 1 acre isn't realistic. Could you rent extra grazing locally (and cheaply)?

You could certainly add to the poultry keeping - quail, duck, geese or turkeys. Though the latter create a lot of sloppy poo!

I will follow this with interest...!

We always named the meat animals (lambs, male kids, calves, pigs etc), but it was always very clear to me from a young age that we would be eating them. My fathers favourite phrase is 'when you have livestock, inevitably you have deadstock', by which he meant that we were responsible for every part of our animals life, so I had to take the meat lambs to the abbatoir with him and then joint them at home. This had built up from disposing of the excess males in my bantam flock aged 6 or so.

When a non meat goat had to be killed due to bad joints, he thought that we'd use her as meat. That meat sat in the freezer for months until he swapped it with someone else. And my Dad is a countryman through and through !