Whenever someone dreams of having a farm you always hear them say things like, “if only I could move to a farm with 40 acres.” Nothing makes me roll my eyes more than someone that doesn’t know what they’re doing think they need an excessive amount of land. You don’t have to have 40 acres to have the farm of your dreams! We were house hunting during the mass exodus of 2020, when everyone was leaving cities and it was difficult to find even a single acre. We found our dream home on 3 acres and that was that, we were going to start our little farm.
Note that, you also don’t need to look for a farm to start farming, just find a house with land or find an untouched piece of land. Our land was untouched minus the house (well, school house) smack dab in the middle, and it was a lot of work, it still is a lot of work! I think finding land with a house on it is about a million times easier, but if the dream is land, go for it! I’m all for living out your dreams anyway possible. We turned a crappy little one car garage into a barn, we tilled a giant garden. We made so many pastures. I can’t imagine doing all of that plus building a house. You can do so many things with a little bit of acreage.
The wild thing is, we don’t even use all of our acreage! We have goats, pigs, chickens, and rabbits. We have a garden big enough to feed our family of 5 all year long and then some. Our home takes up a big part of the footprint of our land, because it was an old school. The back half of our property is all wooded, and we don’t want to change that because it makes for great hunting. We even kept a large area untouched so our kids can have a space to play. Honestly though, they would rather hang out in the garden or by the animals.
It’s possible to do so many things on a little bit of acreage. If we had 40 acres we probably wouldn’t use a lot of it. We honestly have everything we need on 3 acres. We grow our own food in the garden, our cellar and freezers are full of tomatoes, corn, carrots, potatoes, onions, broccoli, peas and green beans. We produce our own eggs and dairy. We even harvest our own meat, we have pigs that we’ll breed and some that we’ll butcher. Rabbits that we plan on harvesting. Plus, we raised a years worth of meat chickens.
Do we run into issues with how much land we have? Not really, the biggest problem we have is that we have to be pretty creative on where to put pastures, that’s for sure. It would be nice to have space for a bigger barn. It would be awesome to raise cows. I would love to have fields of lush alfalfa to feed all of our animals all winter, but honestly I love the scale we’re at. It’s a very manageable little farm for our family of 5, I couldn’t imagine anything bigger right now while chasing toddlers.
Written by, Brittany, the geek behind the blog. Sharing tips and stories from the trenches on navigating life homeschooling and homesteading as a stay at home mom.