Homesteading can bring families closer together. Spending your days chopping wood, tending to livestock, or repairing equipment together will help you bond and create new skills.

It’s important to remember that a full-blown homestead isn’t for everyone. If you’re unsure about making big changes, take it slow and start by adding one thing at a time.

Hey everyone! I just wanted to share the story of how my game, Cornucopia, came to be.

It all started when I was a kid and I became obsessed with farming games like Harvest Moon 64 and Harvest Moon: Back to Nature. I spent hours upon hours playing them and learning everything I could about farming. And as I grew older, I became more and more determined to bring that passion to life.

So, I packed up my bags and headed off to the middle of nowhere in Canada to homestead for three long years. It was an incredible (and slightly insane) experience. I raised a jersey cow, bred pigs, hatched chickens, and even had two dogs (including a bulldog that is your dog in the game!!). And yes, before you ask, I was a vegan at the time and refused to eat any of the animals I was raising. It was a strange time in my life, but I was determined to live out my farming dreams to the fullest.

But let me tell you, living in the middle of nowhere in Canada has its challenges, especially during the winter. It was brutally cold, with temperatures dropping to a bone-chilling -45 degrees. I almost froze to death on more than one occasion, I don’t know how wild animals can survive in such intense cold!

But it wasn’t just the cold that presented challenges on the farm. I also had to deal with the occasional animal predator. For a while, I had a few chickens and ducks that kept disappearing, and I would find blood everywhere on the grass outside. I eventually figured out that it must be a fox or a coyote that was causing the trouble, so I bought a cruelty-free box trap and set it out. And sure enough, I caught the culprit – a sly fox.

I knew I couldn’t just leave the fox to suffer in the trap, so I decided to drive it far away and release it back into the wild.

It was just one of the many unique and interesting experiences I had during my homesteading adventures.

In addition to raising chickens, ducks, guinea fowl, a cow, goats and more, I also had 13 bee colonies on the farm. I spent a lot of time caring for the bees and harvesting their honey, which I sold at the local farmers market. It was a lot of work, but I loved every minute of it.

However, not everyone at the farmers market was a fan of my honey. There was an angry old honey seller who tried to drive me out of business, even though I wasn’t really making a profit. On one occasion he got right in my face and tried to intimidate me, and I think even got his elderly friends too as well. But I stuck to my guns and continued to sell my honey.

It was experiences like these that inspired the creation of Cornucopia. I used my custom game engine to develop early prototypes of the game while I was out on the farm. And as I went about my daily tasks, I met a wide range of quirky and diverse individuals who eventually inspired some of the characters in the game.

But the cast of characters in Cornucopia isn’t limited to just those I met on the farm. I also drew inspiration from family members and people I met throughout my life. So in addition to the quirky farmers and homesteaders, you’ll also find a cast of lovable (and sometimes eccentric) family members and friends.

Now, I bring my passion and expertise to Cornucopia, a game that allows players to experience the joys (and struggles) of farming firsthand. And if you’re a vegan like I was at the time, don’t worry, you won’t have to worry about eating any of your virtual farm animals either.

I hope you enjoyed hearing about my journey with Cornucopia. After my experiences I moved to Vancouver, Canada and have been loving the city life. It’s been a wild ride, and I can’t wait to see where the game takes me next.

Thank you for helping make this game a reality by wishlisting and telling your friends. You don’t know how much we appreciate your support <3

Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1681600/Cornucopia/

Discord community: https://discord.gg/cornucopia

Check out the trailer below for a sneak peek at what’s to come in the Demo:

Source: gamedev.net

Benefits of Homesteading

If you want to live a more self-sufficient life, you should consider becoming a homesteader. It can help you cut costs, be more environmentally sustainable and live closer to nature.

Homesteading can also bring your family closer together. It can allow you to spend more time with your loved ones and work side-by-side without the distraction of a busy life.

If you’re in the farming world and your phone algorithm is paying attention, then at some point you have probably been guided via articles or recommended reading suggestions into the “homesteading corner” of the internet.

It is a fascinating place to be, y’all.

There are videos, photos, reels, YouTube tutorials and TikTok personalities that all revolve around content focused on getting away from the conveniences of modern life, the grid and the “industrialized system” (which is then, ironically, posted on the internet).

According to Wikipedia, “Modern-day homesteading is a lifestyle of self-sufficiency. It is characterized by subsistence agriculture, home preservation of food, and may also involve the small-scale production of textiles, clothing and craft work for household use or sale.”

Happihomemade.com says, “The whole idea of modern homesteading comes from people’s desire to reconnect with their food source and live a more self-sufficient lifestyle. You don’t have to own a big piece of land, or raise your own animals to be a homesteader. You must simply have a desire to live more simply!”

Sounds familiar, right? So, is a farm a homestead? Is a homestead a farm?

It can be, but also, it can be different.

Additionally, there are “degrees” of homesteading, or as some say, “levels of crunchiness.”

Jason Strange, author of the book, “Shelter from the Machine: Homesteaders in the Age of Capitalism,” said in the article, “Homesteading: The Old Practice Makes a Comeback During Pandemic,” that he grew up around homesteading and has spent years researching it.

“Homesteading is a hard thing to define,” Strange said. “It’s one of those things where there’s a whole range of folks that homestead. Some have a little backyard garden, and others built their own house and have a big garden and grow all their own food. There are people who have definitely engaged in homesteading even if they haven’t gone whole-hog into it. Some homesteaders would disagree; they think you have to really go for it. But the only definition I could come up with that made sense is one where it’s just sort of degrees of engagement. That’s what you actually see people doing. There’s a whole range of things.”

So, normal things that you might find being done on a farm, like a compost pile, a garden, a few chickens for fresh eggs, pickling and canning are considered homesteading. Mention those activities to any self-avowed homesteader and they are going to wholeheartedly agree.

On the flip side though, other normal things that might be done on the farm — such as spraying for bugs or weeds, planting hundreds of acres of corn or wheat, and using modern-day precision ag — those are things that most homesteaders would agree do not jive with the homesteading lifestyle.

While the original homesteaders were farmers (see the Homestead Act of 1862), through improvements in technology that have been adapted onto the farm, farmers are now considered to be doing farming that is too advanced to fit the modern-day homesteaders’ desire to return to “simplicity.” Isn’t it ironic?

I watch these homesteading folks with fascination because half of me wants to dive right in there with them.

Bake my own bread? Yes, I do that! But only when I have some extra time, which is like, maybe a dozen times a year, certainly not weekly.

Compost? Sure, that’s easy. Check!

Thrift or buy second-hand? I love doing that! But only if I have the time to drive around and look in thrift stores for what I need. Otherwise, Amazon Prime will have it here tomorrow when I really need it.

Grow (some) of our own food? Yes, we can do that! But, between the farms, both full-time jobs and the family, we have the bandwidth to grow exactly three vegetables in any given year.

And, this is where the homesteading lifestyle breaks down for me. While I want to do all these good and wholesome things … who has the time for this? I am not asking ironically or sarcastically — I promise that this is a genuinely heartfelt question.

These homesteading activities are more homegrown and homemade, and while they are simple in their end product perhaps, they are not simple in execution. They take a commodity that the world demands of us that we can’t regenerate, and that’s “time.”

Time, unfortunately, is money in a lot of instances, and I have bills to pay. No matter how far from the U.S. capital your farm is, living is not cheap, and here we have to work for an income, on and off the farm. I mean, I do love my job, but it’s not just a passion project, it’s also a necessity.

It takes two incomes and two people to run our tiny household, pay the bills, clean, grocery shop, cook, maintain the yard, and do all the other things needed to decently survive, and at the end of the day, who has time for homesteading? For consistently making our own bread, and our own candles, and our own aprons, and socks, and scarves? Who are all these homesteading women online? Are they stay-at-home wives, or do they have careers that allow them flexibility to be at home with enough time to plant organic vegetables and hand-make shirts?

It is ironic, again, that what is supposed to be a return to simplicity seems to me like an actual luxury.

I guess I will just keep ogling walk-in pantries. My tiny cottage house has a shelf above the washer-dryer, housed in the closet that operates as our pantry (no walk-in pantries with custom-built shelves here) full of perfectly symmetrical jars of canned goods, catching the light just so on Instagram, while I wait for the 90-second rice to cook in the microwave and continue to wonder.

Source: lancasterfarming.com

How valuable were these homestead tracts that the U.S. government was giving away? I did a little math to put the production capacity into meaningful terms. Let’s say a homesteader could plant the whole 160 acres to corn, growing 22.7 bushels per acre in 1913 and receiving $0.78 per bushel for that corn. The quarter of land would then bring in $2,833 in annual revenue — equivalent to $86,063 per year in today’s dollars — not bad! These are totally unreasonable assumptions (one family couldn’t really plant and harvest 160 acres of corn by hand, and they’d need some of the acres for buildings and livestock anyway, and some of this homesteaded land was likely too arid to grow average-yielding corn, plus none of this even begins to consider the costs of production), but as a benchmark, it works to show the general earning potential of a “free” quarter of land in 1913, the peak year of U.S. homesteading claims.

It’s not far off from the earning potential of a quarter of land today, in some market circumstances. With today’s corn yields and prices (172.3 bushels per acre U.S. average and $6.70 per bushel), 160 acres can bring in $184,497 in annual revenue. But if we assume the long-term price of corn drops to $3.15 (very possible!), then the annual revenue from 160 acres today is right in line with the equivalent dollars from 1913. There would be less physical labor involved and better insurance opportunities, but approximately the same amount of revenue.

When I asked Rayma Volkmer, a ranger at the Homestead National Historical Park near Beatrice, Nebraska, what the equivalent offer today would have to be to match the government’s homesteading offer back in the 1800s, she seemed a little horrified by my mercenary obsession with the economics of the deal. “When they filed a claim, settlers weren’t rubbing their hands together thinking ‘I’ll be rich,'” Volkmer assured me. “They were simply drawn by the opportunity to have something that’s ‘yours.’ It wasn’t the number of acres, it was the idea of having something to call your own, coming from parts of the world where that was never possible.”

In fact, not even the government was thinking about the economics — at least not originally. Apparently, no one in Washington sat down and calculated whether the expected agricultural production off of 160 acres would be enough to send a family into prosperity … or poverty. It just happened to be the number of acres in one-fourth of one square mile, and they just wanted to get some population scattered around across the landscape. When, as it turned out, 160 acres wasn’t enough land to support a family in the Sandhills of Nebraska, for instance, or to support a stock-raising ranch, Congress passed several homesteading amendment acts to grant settlers 640 acres instead of 160.

Not everyone was successful, but many were. More than half of the homesteaders who filed a claim ultimately proved up on their land, and eventually 10% of U.S. land was given away under the Homestead Act.

There’s nothing similar that could be offered today (except maybe the Mars challenge), and if it were, it may not get the same results. “People themselves have changed,” Volkmer reminded me. “We’re not the people our ancestors were — for good and bad.” But if an offer like this was made today, we’d need to remember that there’s more to it than just the money. “Why in the world would you want to drag your family out to live in the middle of nowhere without electricity? You have to consider not only where the settlers were going to, but more importantly, where they were coming from. It must have been a more attractive proposition than staying where they were.”

I asked Volkmer if she would do it; would she hack a living out of the bare earth for five years in exchange for “free” land? “Me personally, I would jump at the opportunity. I would do it in a minute. I wouldn’t care that I was getting ‘only’ 160 acres. It would be more about the sense of adventure.”

Well, as for me, I maintain that it would take a lot more than a single quarter of western rangeland to tempt me out amid the wolves, mountain lions, prairie fires and blizzards for five straight years without the aid of diesel machinery or established roads and utilities, but that may just be because I’m too fixated on the math and the money. And it may be because my baseline alternative life right now is too cushy to send me off looking for something better. I’m not sure what the number of acres would have to be for me, but it’d have to be a little more than that.

I will say this much, as a December storm swirls outside my window, I am deeply grateful to my own ancestors for each and every tree they’ve planted over the past 120 years since filing a homestead claim right here. I am grateful for the chance to wake up each morning and do this work on this particular slice of the planet, even on the days when the weather is interesting … or maybe “especially” on the days when the weather is interesting.

Elaine Kub, CFA is the author of “Mastering the Grain Markets: How Profits Are Really Made” and can be reached at masteringthegrainmarkets@gmail.com or on Twitter @elainekub.

Source: dtnpf.com