You Don't Need Land to Start Living a Self Reliant Life

By Shawn James | My Self Reliance

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A lot of you have been reaching out after the last video, asking how you can actually follow this path. How to overcome your own challenges and start living a more self-reliant life? Whether that means where you are right now, or completely changing your life and moving from the city out to the country. So I want to go deeper into the whole story, because I know there are things you can learn from it. Honestly, I'm still learning from my own mistakes looking back on it.

But first, I want to talk about something very specific: what we did the moment we lost our business. Because with the way the economy is right now, especially with inflation I think it's more important than ever.

 

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When the Money Stops: Two Ways Financial Trouble Finds You

There are really two ways your financial situation can unravel. One is that your expenses simply exceed your income, either through spending habits or losing a job or a business like we did. The other is inflation quietly eroding your purchasing power over time. Even if you have a decent job, wages are not keeping pace with the cost of living. What that means, either way, is that your standard of living goes down.

You're probably feeling it right now. The rent or mortgage, the groceries, the gas.. it all keeps climbing, and your paycheque stays the same. There's less and less discretionary money left over.

When something catastrophic happened to us, we had to consciously reduce our standard of living. That meant cutting everything that was excess.

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What We Actually Did

We went through every subscription we had. We got rid of the landline. My wife sold her Buick Enclave SUV and bought a manual transmission diesel Jetta, it cost around ten or eleven thousand dollars at the time, back in early 2011. Neither of us had driven a standard transmission in over a decade, but the operating costs were extremely low. We sold the boat. I sold my truck and bought a little Nissan Sentra, a slightly embarrassing car at the time, but it was cheaper on gas.

And I swallowed my pride, called up a competitor, and asked for a job. We had been rivals when I was in business, but he recognized my skills and took me on. I was willing to do whatever it took to take care of my family.

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Growing Your Own Food — Without Owning Land

Here's the self-reliant part I think a lot of you need to hear. We couldn't afford to buy land. I couldn't move somewhere without access to that job. So we tore up the grass in the backyard, every flat, sunny spot we had and put in a garden.

I used a double dig technique to make that small space as productive as possible. I skimmed the sod off, dug down a fork's depth, moved that soil to a tarp, then dug down again to loosen everything beneath it. That gave me close to two feet of loose, workable soil before I put anything back. Then I went trout and carp fishing that spring, kept the carcasses, and buried them in trenches in the garden to provide nutrients. Sticks, decomposing organic material, anything I could find. No synthetic fertilizer. No money spent on fertilizer. Just working with what was there. And that garden was unbelievably productive.

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Finding Opportunity in Unexpected Places

My wife, meanwhile, was selling everything we didn't need while I went to work. But she also had the idea to approach our neighboring farmer and ask if we could rent a small section of land to raise some livestock — pigs, chickens, maybe some Dexter cattle.

They said yes, but then pointed us to something even better. Across the little village from us, about four or five hundred yards away, there was an investor from the city who had bought 118 acres with an old farmstead, a rundown house, an old dairy barn, 18 acres of cleared land, and about a hundred acres of dense swamp.

We approached him. He was happy to have someone look after the property, keep it attractive, stop people from abusing it, and give him a nice place to come visit with his wife. So I ran electric fence around a nine-acre parcel, dug up the fields by hand and planted gardens, and used a little $3,000 ATV to harrow and seed field peas, barley, wheat, and oats to feed the livestock.

We bought half a dozen Berkshire pigs, a small herd of registered Dexter cattle including a little bull, and I raised a hundred meat chickens at a time in chicken tractors (eight or ten-foot frames on two wheels) that I dragged across the pasture every single day so the birds had access to fresh grass, weeds, and bugs. We had egg laying chickens in the backyard, rabbits, quail. We ate those eggs, sold some, ate the meat. We set up a little stand at the road, then built a website and started selling organic meat online.

Was it financially the most efficient use of my time compared to getting a higher paying job? Probably not. But I loved every bit of it. I loved it when I was young, and I loved getting back to it then. I still love it now. That's why I'm here.

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The Point: Be Innovative

You don't need to own land. You don't need to quit your job, move to the country, and find yourself a 100 acre spread with pastures and barns. If you can't afford that, be creative.

Look around you. There are investors, farmers, and homeowners with more land than they can manage who would genuinely welcome someone willing to work it. Low risk, low liability, and a real connection with people who share the same values. Those opportunities exist.  I've seen them, and I've lived them.

If you're serious about making a change in your life, you'll find a way. You'll get creative, and the path will open up.

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In a future video, I'm going to lay out the three main paths to self reliance from the bare bones, practically free approach I took when I was twenty, right through to buying raw land and building on it. I'll also be getting into the real numbers: what it actually costs, how long it takes, and what I've learned doing it four different ways.

If that's something you want to follow, stick around. There's a lot more coming.

Take care, and I'll see you back here at the cabin.

Shawn

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