The GOAT goat thread (Lizard blogs their farming adventure)

I get most of my spinning fiber from Paradise Fibers, although I also enjoy browsing Etsy for it.

And I learned good things from your blog post!

 

Oh no, Etsy fibers are dangerous to my wallet.

I follow Yarnshine's Tumblr and good lord the pretties.

 

and then you send them to me and make ME drool too >:| absolutely terrible

 

I cannot be the only one suffering, I just can't.

 

SHE LIVES!!

 

Went and walked around on the Ritchey Road property and. It has potential.. I love the pond. It already has a well, it's on a paved road. But the land to either side is definitely already owned and lived on, and it's very, "we parked a cheap single wide and built a bunch of sheds from pallet wood" aesthetic. I legit do not mind that at all, but then I start thinking about if I want one of our property's future income avenues to be agro-tourism, then I have to think about that sort of thing. the other thing is that there's definitely no t going to be any option to buy more land and expand. It's long and skinny shape, and the land itself is hilly. But it's a FSBO and the owner is willing to do carry the financing.



Compared to the Richard Lane one. Slightly bigger but comparable (10 acres vs 9.77). No improvements, but the well logs for the two neighbors show them pulling 20 - 30 GPM at 80 ft. It's down a gravel easement which is itself down a gravel road and there's a CC&R for maintenance of it. It's a perfect square, more treed, and private, the neighbors houses are actually closer together, nice double wides, and the most important one to me is that the identical 10 parcel next to it is undeveloped. that one is not currently for sale, but according to county records the person who owns it bought it at the same time as the for sale one (literally closed within a couple months of each other) and for about the same price. And recorded owner's actual address is listed in Montana. I think it would be extremely easy to toss an offer out later after buying this for sale one and end up with a total 20 acres all to ourselves. This property is currently listed for $1k more than the Ritchey road one, but I'm thinking we could actually use that as leverage? "Hey, you want more than these guys that have a well and a pond on their 10 acres that's on a paved road. We're going to offer you about $10K less. actually."



So then the question is: which is better for us? Convenience, or potential?

 

is Richard Lane flatter/less hilly?

i know when lebesgue and i finally buy our property, i'm looking for flattish land than can be easily built on, because we're going to do a hydroponic greenhouse farming system (~1/3 acre hydroponic greenhouse garden can produce ~12 acres worth of produce in a growing season, so about twice a year. roughly. source: the lettuce lady in the dc area. actually met her and toured her farm once). so for us land that's good for building on is an important consideration - the first property wouldn't be a good choice for us, because the cost of preparing the land to put in our house and the greenhouse would almost certainly be cost prohibitive. not that you're going to do a huge greenhouse, but if there's more than one building you plan on, having an idea of the cost difference for building on the two properties is good to keep in mind.

a quick google search tells me that it's probably more expensive to level the land in prep for building than to remove the trees in prep for building, but you'd want an actual contractor to comment. (you have mostly light tree cover on Richard Lane, which is 500-3000$ per acre cleared. it's ~$40k to grade an acre of land in prep for foundation - but you'd probably need to grade less than that. average lot size for a house is 1/5 an acre, so ~8000$? and you'd still have to do some grading on the Richard Lane property, so if you can get a contractor to fold the grading expenses into overall foundation expenses, it might be cheaper. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

do you plan on keeping animals? which one is better suited for that? how much does that matter? (how much are you willing to spend on feed, basically)

i know i look at what you've laid out, and my preference is for the Richard Lane. the ability to expand is particularly enticing. other than potential for agro tourism (which i think leans towards Richard Lane then), i'm not entirely sure what your laundry lists of needs and wants for your property so. i listed what my considerations are, and why, and i hope that helps?

 

I guess I haven't really detailed The Plan yet here, so might as well.

Our goal is to have a permaculture homestead and food forest with animal and plant systems feeding each other. Currently I have egg laying chicken flock which will be expanded, and added to that a yearly (probably twice yearly) meat flock raised John Suscovich mobile pastured operation style. Eris also wants to raise turkeys (Narraganset heritage turkeys). Other animals would be goats, pigs, and eventually alpaca. Liam has said he wants a horse, but that would be later down the road (though I could justifying it if I get a draft horse and learn to drive and replace our reliance on several fuel burning pieces of equipment. Either way we would need to wait until goats and pigs and lumber harvesting have cleared out land for more pasture). This in addition to garden space for annual crops, and then another acre dedicated to food forest/orchard and the rest of the property will be managed wood lot.

It is much easier to clear trees than it is to level land, and more importantly, we can do that bit ourselves. Hell, if I wanted to drop a couple thousand in an investment, I could conceivably buy a portable mill and process my own lumber, both for our use on the homestead and for sale to outside parties. Can also just sell logs unprocessed, but either way clearing trees for home and barn becomes at the very least a greatly reduced expense if not an actual early income. I think we're both leaning more heavily toward the Richard lane property, even if we never expand into the second lot. It's more work, but I think over all the better option.

 

okay! yeah, i think the Richard Lane property is the better bet then. :)

 

Found a website called Hipcamp! It's really neat, and there seems to be a lot of people using it near by already. I might contact some of them and ask them about their experiences using it so far.

Thinking seriously about actually hosting people camping on our property and what kind of amenities I'd need to provide for something like that reminded me of some people who offer homestead tours will have those coin operated feed dispensers so their guests will feed their animals for them and also recoup the cost of the feed a little bit.

Then found doggy treat dispensers online and now I'm softly squeeing over the idea of having treat dispensers for guests who bring their pets and filling them with home baked happy puppy goodness.

 

Trying to figure out exactly how to finance is. Interesting. Bare land is harder than a traditional house on a city lot. Banks don't want to lend on it because it's a bigger risk. Traditional lending usually demands a 20% down and that's a lot of cash to have on hand. We have about $10k to work with right now, so if we offer $45k on it and they go for it that would eat up most of it. We could do a USDA Rural Development loan which is no money down and that leaves us with a larger monthly payment (not like it's huge, maybe a couple hundred bucks a month) but then that leaves the question of how are we going to finance anything else? The hardest part I think is that we want to put a mobile home on a basement foundation. Again, a lot of places are eeeeh about financing mobile homes and land, but I think if we have the land first and develop (well, septic) then there are a lot of options open. But we definitely can't do both in one year on our own.

I am very seriously considering at this point buying an RV and rough camping for a year or two on the land. First thing is land purchase. Second is RV purchase and moving out. Third is the well. Septic can wait til next year (I know how to make a DIY composting toilet, and while that's not by any means fun, it's workable as a short term thing).

The other thing though, is that my mom has been making noises about helping fund things if she sells this or that, but I'm. Wary for multiple reasons. She's never given out anything that didn't come with strings attached. I don't want her to be able to hold this over my head at all. If she's going to actually help as a gift of her own free will without expecting to treat it like an investment that she'll have any say in or control over then fine, but fuck her if she thinks she can stick her fingers into my dream.

 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XHLVY6Y/ref=dp_prsubs_1

:thinking:

 

Richards lane is still really up there but this just popped up
https://www.landwatch.com/default.a..._content=e15ee0da-85a1-40d8-932c-eefa0d8ebc9e
Same price, 5 more acres. I need to look up the state well report map and see what the area looks like.

 

Would help if the county tax map was working so I could figure out which parcel it is....

 

Published a second blog post on Community Chickens!

https://www.communitychickens.com/stealing-from-snakes/

 

Today is apparently national farm animals day! I will tell my chickens.

In sort of related news, I got both a return email from an application I submitted for a remote work from home position wanting to do a video interview, and an ad email from my credit union advertising their new low RV rates. I'm not generally a signs and portents person, but it is at the very least, a lot of things lining up favorably.

 

Heeeeeey PSA for this Easter: don't bring home new to you animals before doing research on their basic care requirements, and don't buy animals as gifts for people without discussing it with all parties potentially involved in their care. Preferably while sober.

This message brought to you by: I now have two new chicks because co-worker's neighbors impulse bought them for their daughter and

Spoiler: Animal abuse

The daughter's husband threatened that he would cut their heads off if the chicks came into their house.

So then these people were left holding onto these chicks and trying to find them homes. They didn't have proper food or heat source for them (Idk what they were thinking that the daughter would just magically appearify that stuff out of thin air? They bought the chicks but zero food or equipment to go with them???) and by the time I got the chicks they had runny poop and one of them had pastey butt (where the fecal matter collects around the vent and can cause potentially life threatening blockage).

I had actually taken all my chick brooder stuff down and packed it away. Figured it would help to resist temptation of buying any more new babies and told myself if I wanted more chicks I'd wait till the weather warmed up and see if a chicken went broody on her own or trick one into going broody. Ah, foolish I.

The dumbshits had named the chicks Beavis and Butthead, but spouse has renamed them Easter and April.

 

Winnerest!
(Though WRT spoiler, what is WRONG with that guy?)

 

I don't know, but good god. Red flag to the daughter, get the hell away from that man. I hope they don't have any kids.

 

i'm glad the chicks had someone willing to take them in!

the spoiler is scary