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General / Re: Become disenchanted with tax sales

« on: November 22, 2006, 08:27:52 PM »

Maybe you are thinking of the wrong type of farming. There is alternative farming, such as chickens and windmills.

Chickens tend to need something to eat and you aren't going to raise much food for them on hardpan clay.  Furthermore, there's only so many chickens I want to eat... an all-chicken diet is terribly boring, even if you eat eggs too.

And windmills require the land to have wires run to it if you're going to sell it.  Given that I don't even want electricity on the land for my own use, a windmill farm isn't terribly interesting to me. 

The original poster said he wanted to farm as a *retirement*.  To me, that he could make money raising chickens or with a windmill farm is pretty irrelevant - farming as a retirement isn't about bringing crops to market. 

Retirement isn't about making a living, but doing the actual *living.*  Having the life you want to live.  What good is *any* amount of money-making if you never get to have the life you want?

I dunno about the original poster, but I'm getting disenchanted too.  I've been following the sales a bit over 2 years now.  Similarly, we are looking for land to retire on. 

I am interested in about 10 acres with no services, remote, but not much beyond zone 4.  It'd be ideal if it were half-wooded, but I'm not opposed to clearing it ourselves if it were entirely wooded.  I want access to the land, but no roads terribly nearby, ideal would be 3-season access on a dirt or gravel road many miles from the nearest paved road.  And certainly no town within visual distance - I want to see stars at night until I die.

It is specifically important to me that the land I buy and surrounding land never be worth anything in my lifetime as I plan to stay there.  Increasing value does me no good, it just means my property taxes go up.  And increases the chances of me having to see a Walmart in my neighborhood. 

I don't want land, I want a *home* - a permanent home.  And farming is of critical importance, not for money-making, but for survival.  It can't be all hard clay or all rock, it at least has to be suitable for a few acres of pasture.  With pasture, I can grow something that produces manure and eventually have a good garden, but pasture must be at least minimally possible to even begin.

I also want to be relatively close to my family, so I have a limited area to choose from. 

It's difficult enough to find something suitable as it is, but it's also kind of difficult and frustrating competing with investors. 

It's like... when we go to auctions and I'm trying to buy a crock to make pickles in, but have to compete with some antique dealer who can pay ten times what I can and then will sell it for triple that to some restaurant who will hang it on a wall as a decoration.  It works that way with pretty much nearly everything useful that we need - a meat grinder, a foley mill, a hand-cranked ice cream maker, good hand tools, a scythe, etc.  We have often joked that the best way to outfit a farm would be a crime-spree that involved burgling restaurants.

And thus far, the hunt for land has been more of the same.  Competing against people who don't even *want* the thing you do is frustrating as heck.

All the *other* things one can do with properties bought via tax sales aren't interesting to me at all... I don't *want* to make money.  I want specifically to retire and never have to make money again!