This is another “why we do what we do” post. I think these are important to not only educate people but to remind us about the important things in our lives.
I am finding that a lot of people who are not familiar with homesteading confuse us with preppers, which can be an easy thing to do. We aren’t preppers so I may get some of the prepper stuff wrong (so if I do please let me know!). We have prepper friends and we LOVE our prepper friends. They are some of the most dedicated homesteaders we know and they teach us so much. We just homestead for different reasons.
For those of you who are really confused right now and saying “what the heck is a prepper?”, here is a very general description. Preppers are homesteaders like us who are homesteading in preparation for some sort of natural disaster. They do all the same things that we do with a different end purpose. Some differences are that they don’t necessarily care about not using lab made preservative (although you can have regular homesteaders that don’t either), The main difference is that they stock pile food and guns and ammunition and anything else you may need if there was some sort of natural disaster. The preppers I know are working to have enough food to last them about 5 years (of what they can save for that long, like flour and such). Then they eat on the food for the 1st year while saving back for year 5, so they are more or less on a 5 year cycle. Now just like any other homesteaders each prepper is different in how they do things, but the end game is the same. If something happens they are prepared to survive.
We live more on the day-to-day. We are working to decrease our spending and be more self -sufficient. We grow and stock enough food to last us until the next growing season. We buy enough of the stuff we don’t grow to last us maybe a few months so that we only have to go to the grocery store once every month or two. If something were to happen we wouldn’t necessarily be prepared for it, but we would have the ability and knowledge to survive. We have guns (you really have to if you homestead), and about a box or two of ammo. I think it’s important for us to know how to shoot a gun, not just so we can hunt for some of our meat but also for protection. We have 3 small kids and at least one coywolf (a coyote/ wolf mix breed and much more dangerous than either of them because they are big like a wolf but bold like a coyote) who lives on the property. You better believe if we see that sucker near the house we are grabbing the shotgun!
Our end goal is mainly to break free from the grips of big business and coorporations that otherwise create slaves. We wont be dealing with any of the major food companies that lie to consumers about what they are eating, our food will be more nutrient rich and better for us, we wont be dealing with power companies or mortgage companies. We will maintain one credit card and one small loan at all times to keep our credit up as a “just in case” but we probably wont even need that. We go to the doctor when we need to but we just don’t get sick. Our preventative care is in the food we eat. I don’t spend money on healthcare for myself because I don’t get sick. I don’t have high blood pressure, I don’t have high cholesterol, I don’t have digestive problems anymore. I can stand to lose a few pounds, but I did also just give birth. I haven’t had to take antibiotics in almost 6 years. Basically we want to live the way they did in the late 1800’s. So instead of looking forward to what could happen you can say we are looking back at how good our past was and trying to get back to that. We are still utilizing modern conveniences, we aren’t amish, but we can still live with the same values as they did in the past while taking advantage of the modern world too.
I think it’s really important to have regular homesteaders and preppers and for the two group to work together in a homesteading community.
