Back to the Land

A lot of people are understandably concerned about the outcome of the U.S. presidential election here in 2024. A small number of folks are saying (usually half-jokingly) that they want to run off and start a farm in the country in response to it, which is a totally understandable response to existential threat in my opinion. I've written versions of this post in response to the 2016 election and during COVID in 2020, which are lost to the aether now, but I've given it a lot of thought and hope that my observations may help folks who are considering such a move to do so in a more informed way than I did.

A bunch of this is basic stuff, but I find that when I'm having Big Feels I sometimes am willing to jump over the basics just to be doing something. Take what you like, and feel free to tell me where I'm wrong over on Mastodon.

My background and biases

Context about myself and my life that are relevant to this writing...

I'm an intersex man in my early 50s at the time of this writing. I have grown children, and have worked in tech for the last 26 years. I've lived in MA, CT, RI, FL, CA, WA, and am currently on a rural 50 acre homestead in central NY. I've lived in large cities, cute suburbs, rural horse farms, and run down semi-urban sprawl. I've also been on-the-streets homeless, lived out of a car, gone bankrupt, and been kicked out of my home by family.

I have roots in the queer, kink, pagan, open source, and labor communities but am not very active in any of them. My partner is a retired trauma therapist who is able to work full time on the homestead due to my tech salary, which is paid by an open source non-profit. My kids are all over the queer/trans/audhd spectrums. I moved here 11 years ago, due to more personal catastrophes than the current public ones, but I think the drive boils down to the same thing. I have several friends and family members who have made similar moves with greater or lesser success, and who I have talked to extensively about this.

Most of my adult life has been in the northeast. I grew up in primarily suburban, middle-class, areas so that will skew many of my thoughts. I'm white, and have almost always passed for male. Those privileges will undoubtedly shine through here. I'm a college dropout with ADHD.

Run to the hills

I haven't made a study of why people in general want to go to the country when things get scary. My own internal investigations find the roots in my trauma. I don't trust people (individually, by especially in groups) when they get scared, and I want to be in control of my food situation. I get overwhelmed by lots of sensory inputs, so end up self-medicating with tons of distractions when I live in busy areas. Being away from large groups of people has always been relaxing for me, so living that way seemed like a very natural thing to do. There is also the element of perceived simplicity. Life's problems are so huge and complex sometimes, and it seems like having a smaller, more localized, source of problems will be fun and quaint by comparison.

For us I think it was definitely running toward the illusion of safety and trying to jump start excitement about life again after some really tough times. We wanted to get away from the anxieties of our lives in Boston, and try to get my kids a fresh start. Not just running away, but also running towards some things - my partner always wanted to have horses. I always wanted to have private woods to run around in.

Some of those things panned out, some didn't. Most fall in the fat part of the bell curve.

The good

Being away from large groups of people is good for my mental health, full stop. I am surprisingly into growing my own food, or at least assisting my partner in doing so. I absolutely love having sheep. Sitting by the pond, watching a camp fire is a balm for the soul. I like having big dogs and the space for them to run around.

Having animals gets me out of bed on days when I'd much rather just stay put and rot. Especially now that the kids are grown, it's really helpful to feel needed. I'm driven by a desire to be useful. I feel the same way about the land. Where we live has been under European-style cultivation for 200 yrs. Fighting back the noxious weeds, letting the native plants put down deep roots to break up the hard pan from plowing, re-wilding acres and acres of close cut grass and seeing the land come back to life... these things feel fulfilling and useful to me.

It's nice to live in a pretty rural place and still see visibly queer people, gender non-conforming people, people of color, polyamorous bumper stickers, and disabled folks. Many of these people seem to be thriving, others are just getting by like anywhere else. It breaks up my stereotypes about my neighbors and sings out the beautiful mantra "we are everywhere" almost every time we go to town.

People we actually interact with are almost always pleasant and helpful if help is needed. Not what I'd call friendly, we still haven't met some of our neighbors after a decade here, but honestly that's a plus in my book.

My spirituality is tied to the land, the seasons, the fundamental connections between ourselves and the rest of the living world. It nourishes me to be in such an abundant place.

The meh

If you are anxious in the city, you will be anxious in the country. This thought is what caused me to write this whole thing again. It's just true. It may be better in some ways, and some specific triggers may be avoided entirely, but moving doesn't re-wire you.

I am better here, but my stress about keeping the neighbors from complaining about my landscaping (or lack there of) has just transmuted into stress about keeping an old farmhouse from crumbling underneath us. My stress about gunshots in the city is replaced with... stress about gunshots in the country. My stress about the car getting broken into again is replaced with stress about the sheep getting sick again. You get the idea.

I find myself compromising some beliefs, and facing new ethical dilemmas. I have a big truck to haul horses, sheep, bedding, hay, rocks, wood, fencing, etc. I would prefer not to have a big truck, but out here it is a compromise I make to avoid trashing a number of smaller vehicles to death or giving up on the things that make life here worthwhile. I heat a large 200yo farmhouse with a dry stacked stone foundation using a combination of oil, wood pellets, and electricity. With the kids grown I really don't need a place this large, but we have put a lot into this house and land.

I've been vegetarian and at-home vegan in the past. How do I square eating animals that I have known from birth, and in some cases have had to keep in my bed when they need round the clock feeding? I do it because it's a necessity of having the animals exist at all, but there is no denying it is an absolute sadness to bring them to slaughter. We give them the best life we can, treat their lives and deaths with respect and honor them by making every use we can of their bodies. If I'm ever not sad about it I'll know it's time to move on.

Rural areas are far from things, by definition. It means a lot of driving, which can feel wasteful. Public transit is non-existent, or not very useful. I could walk 2 miles to take a bus into town, but the bus only comes here twice a day. Having separate well, septic, heating, etc. is more wasteful than what you find in more population dense areas. It's just less efficient having people more spread out, but on the other hand no amount of urban / rooftop gardening is going to feed a city. We need rural infrastructure and people with hands in the dirt in order to survive.

People are about the same everywhere, though there has definitely been an uptick in the slightly hostile disgruntled-male demographic here in the past few years. Even those people usually just shoot an appraising look while they try to pigeon hole us in whatever human classification scheme they use. I've been hassled worse when dressed up for goth clubbing in big cities.

The ugly

Loneliness is the number one complaint I have heard, and my parner had heard when doing therapy here. People like to think that their friends and family will visit them if they move, but our experience and those of our friends and neighbors who have come to the country from the city is that such visits are rare. If you think about how hard it is to get someone in Boston to cross the Charles for a visit, you can imagine how it goes getting them to drive 6 hrs each way.

It goes both ways, once you are entrenched in a rural homestead there are unending reasons not to travel. It's planting season, it's harvesting season, it's watering season, it's snow season, the roads are bad. I don't have anyone to take care of the animals. My animal care person isn't available. I can't afford an animal care person in addition to travel, food, and lodging. Plus all the normal stuff... I have medical appointments and can't be away that long.

It can also be hard to find your people. I see a fair number of queer presenting folks, but I'm not going to walk up to them in the Tractor Supply and say hi. There may be groups getting together, but it's probably in a city an hour away, and if there's someone there who feels unsafe you're pretty limited in other options. You may get along ok with your neighbors, but are likely to have violent disagreements with them about politics or social issues so it ends up just making sense to keep people at arm's length.

Which brings me to... vulnerability. This is less of an issue in reality than it is in my head, but the things that are most comforting (being away from people, drastically reduced police presence, having no cell signal a lot of the time) are the things that stress me out the most when there are late night gunshots nearby or some random truck comes roaring into the driveway unexpectedly. "You're on your own" (positive) and "you're on your own" (negative) is a thing to balance, and probably the thing that drives people to those extreme prepping and hoarding behaviors that seem more common out here.

As I said earlier, for the most part people are fine and everyone minds their own business. People talk in a small town, though, and rumors fly. Someone on a noisy tractor once misheard me say "I write software" and somehow now people still think I'm a millionaire author. We have a pride flag out, and I know that makes us a target. When election season rolls around you see the eye-roll inducing signs all over. Then there are the people who never take the signs down or have MAGA flags / confederate flags that you have to drive by all the time. It can take a toll.

I've only been called a faggot once since I moved out here, and it was at a gas station an hour away. Still, I think about how vulnerable we are a lot, and I do own a gun which I never would have before. Mostly in case of livestock emergencies, but a tool is a tool.

Another part of life out here is needing to DIY a lot of stuff. "Redneck engineering" is just the natural way things go when you're far from a store, running low on daylight, out of money, or just need a thing done. Personally I enjoy this 90% of the time, since it feels a lot like the satisfying kludging and hacking stuff that got me into computers. However there's also technical debt in the form of your old hacks falling apart, actual debt from needing a million tools that are "cheaper than paying someone to do it", and of course the learning curve / hospital bills.

When you do need a professional to come out and do work, especially skilled labor like plumbing or electrical, they are so thin on the ground that you may not even be able to reach one for days, not get calls back, have them cancel last minute or no-show because of a worse emergency, etc. Plus they will be expensive (but worth every penny IMO, please invest in the trades). There's also a good chance your house will be full of "homeowner specials", work people have DIY'd in the past that's weird, sub-par, or outright dangerous.

If you've never lived somewhere rural before there may be a lot of surprises in a house. Like I didn't know how much electicity my well pump drew and now my emergency house battery can't handle the load and pull water when the mains are down. We've learned the hard way that you can run the entire well dry by forgetting a running hose for a few hours. Or how to care for a septic system. Or even things like dealing with shipping when the post office doesn't deliver to you.

The last thing I'll touch on here is an obvious one, but if you have lots of animals you will have lots of animal death. You will probably outlive nearly every critter you bring onto the land, and it can be emotionally devestating to repeatedly have to bury your friends and co-workers. Climate change brought some new worms to our fields a couple of years ago and every day for weeks I lived under the threat of finding someone dead in the field in the morning. We buried all but one of our lambs for the season, and several mamas. Last year a fox killed almost all of our 14 chickens in 2 days. It's all part of the deal.

Some suggestions

So that's a lot about us and our situation. Trying to pull threads together from other folks, here's my short list of advice if you want to move to the country and get away from it all:

Understand your "why"

Take some time to understand why you want to do it so you can make informed choices about whether you really want to or if you're just trying to do something/anything to feel better. It can also inform where you're going and what to do when you get there. It's easy for things to grow out here, including plans, costs, and responsibilities! Try to put some boundaries around what you will and won't take on for the first couple of years.

Location, location, location

Aside from the "is it close to work / family / a town with a movie theater", think about how much land you can realistically care for. Maintaining even "unused" land can be a lot of work. Think hard about where you'll find community. Even if you're done with people now, you will probably want human contact someday. It may be better to compromise on acreage to be close to a place with more like-minded people. I really wish our place was closer to Ithaca, for instance. Perhaps look for rural college towns and see what you can find near there.

Our friends who have moved to areas that are somewhere between suburb and rural, or are less than half an hour to an urban center, seem the most content with their decisions. They pay more for everything, and have a lot less land, but make up for it in restaurants and being able to find people they like.

Research the high speed internet and power situations! It's easy to take this for granted, but when I moved here I asked about high speed internet and was surprised upon moving in that it was DSL 6 megs down / 125k up. If I uploaded a video it took out the internet for everyone for several minutes. Similarly we installed enough solar and a big enough battery to generate more power than we use over a year, but we do get several multi-hour power outages per year that kill the internet. I pay for Starlink as a backup, and I hate that I have to do that.

Make sure you know about the water and sewer situations. If you want to keep livestock or even large pets you may need a new well to be able to get enough water to support them. A lot of places are running into issues with groundwater no longer being potable (or even available) as well, so make sure to do your research. Septic systems are fine, but can be super expensive to replace so it's good to know the current condition of a system before you buy.

If you have your heart set on building outbuildings, a tiny house, a chicken coop, etc. make sure you know the zoning. Where I am we can build whatever we want, but that's a pretty rare find these days. There's a huge protracted fight out toward Ithaca about proposed changes to zoning laws that really highlights the differences between idealized rural life and the realities. Search for "zoning Caroline" to see what I mean.

Learn about food the options. We don't get delivery from any restaurants here. There are some decent restaurants within an hour. We grow at least 75% of our own food, but there are a lot of rural food deserts where your best local grocery store is a Dollar General.

If you have specific hobbies that are important to you, definitely make sure you can find a community for that wherever you're looking, and preferably more than one just in case one is run by a dirtbag or whatever.

Finding land for farming / homesteading / livestock is a huge topic that many more qualified people have written whole books on. If there's any possibitlity you're ever going to do those things, take a little time to read up, it'll save a ton of heartache and wasted labor if there ends up being some issue with the soil, drainage, sunlight / length of season, etc. and you have to decide between selling and doing a ton of work and spending a ton of money to solve the issue.

Think of the children

If you have school age kids, there is likely to be culture shock. One of mine was in high school here and experienced a lot more trans hate, racism, and straight up ignorance in that school than anywhere in MA. That's in rural NY, so you can imagine. We eventually homeschooled, which has been a very mixed bag for my kids and several of our friends'. The "Little House on the Prarie" vibes one may imagine bringing up kids on the land are often dispelled by kids being themselves and wanting other things that what we may have wished for them.

All of the issues of loneliness I mentioned above are compounded for kids, and with all of the other issues in play it can be hard to know if whether the parents of a friend made at school or the library or the playground are going to welcome befriending a family who may have wildly different values. Everyone is trying to protect their kids

Try before you buy

If you're willing to trade a few hours of labor a day for food and lodging over a week or two, maybe try out WWOOFing or something similar. If you can get the time, you can try in a few places you're thinking of moving to. We've had a number of WWOOFers in the past few years, and they've all been great. There's even a filter for LGBT friendly farms. You might end up with new friends and connections in the area, or at least some hands on experience with farming stuff if you're interested in that.

You can also lease land or a place to plop down a trailer / tiny house / tent. This gets a foot in the door, but of course there's always the politics of landlords.

Hell, come visit us! There's always land for sale in the area, and we'd love more friends around, it can get lonely out here.