Posts tagged with "farm"
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How We Arranged Money To Buy Our Farm
After zoning in on the farm that we liked, we decided it was time to take the first step forward, which was to come to an agreement with the owners that we will purchase the farm within a certain duration. The way it is usually done is that we write down an agreement stating we will pay a token amount as advance, and will pay the rest before registration. Usually there will also be a time limit specified in the agreement before which the transaction has to happen. If the transaction is not completed in the stipulated time because the buyer could not arrange the money then the advance is forfeited. If the seller fails to clear their documents they will pay back the advance with interest. The trouble started right from there for us.
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A Farm By Any Other Name
I love the quote by Steve Jobs “You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. You have to believe that the dots will connect and that will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well worn path and that will make all the difference.”. We had absolutely no idea that somehow, our decision to unschool our kid, quitting the rat race, minimizing our lifestyle and retiring early will lead us to our dream of owning a farm. There are so many dots that eventually connected. But at the time when we were making those decisions which lead us off the well worn path, we had no idea that they will connect. After all the many twists and turns, we eventually found a farm that we loved and knew that it has our name written on it.
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Wisdom From Farm Owners
After having decided not to buy a managed farm and also not to buy farm as a group, we finally settled on what we want. Next we thought it would be a good idea to talk to a few owners of farms to get an idea of what we are going to deal with once we own a farm. We know a couple of folks who are unschoolers and also own a farm. We asked them if we could visit their farm and gain some wisdom. Both families graciously agreed and we visited their farms on two separate occasions and spent a lot of time understanding their philosophy, why they were doing farming, what they learned and what difficulties they faced and how they overcame them. We learned a ton, but in this post I summarize some of our learnings.
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Group Farming Option
In a previous post I mentioned that there were several options to own a farm. One of them being a managed farm. If you read that post you know why we rejected it. The other option was to go with a few like minded friends and buy a large farm where everyone can take care of it. A similar concept is group farming or community farming. Here too, a bunch of like minded unrelated people can come together, buy a farm and take care of it together. Although we were not too keen on this kind of arrangement, we tried it out. What happened next is coming up.
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Is Managed Farmland A Good Idea?
If you are a regular reader of my blog, you already know that we purchased a farmland a few months ago. I explained how we decided to go with a farm within 2-4 hours from Bangalore in a previous post. As we started our search for a farm, we figured out we could go several different ways. I explain one such method of owning a farm in this post, which is known as managed farmland. We did not go this route in the end but I just want to explain our thought process as we embarked on this journey of doing organic farming.
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Time To Take A Decision
In one of the previous posts I explained how we hoped we might buy a farm along with a friend near Thirthahalli. Thanks to COVID-19 we could not execute the plan. Whether that is good or bad we are not sure. But that trip and those discussions got us more interested in starting an organic farm of our own. We were still not clear on many aspects though. Should we go for a place that is close to where we currently live so we can frequently travel to the place and take care of it until we are ready to move. Or should we buy something far away leave it without developing it until we are ready to move. This post is all about how we made that decision.
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An Unexpected Encounter
It was January 2020 when we made an unexpected trip to Thirthahalli, a beautiful remote village in Karnataka. One of our newly made friends was born and brought up in Thirthahalli and they are planning to purchase a farmland near there. They invited us to visit their house for a fun trip and join them in their search for a farm. At this point in time, we were not even prepared to purchase a farm. We tagged along because our friends were on the search and we thought we can get some experience of the process if we ever want to go that route. But how did we meet these folks and what led us to believe we could do farming?
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Year In Review 2023
I know I am a little bit late for the “year in review” series but I was busy publishing other posts that were in backlog. Finally I got some time to reflect back on the year that has gone by. Every year at the beginning of a new year, I look back at the previous year and pen down some of the highlights and interesting events that transpired. So here goes. Last year was better than 2022 both in terms of finance and personal life. While a new war has started, it has now become a common place for wars to start and then people forgetting about it. Anyway, COVID-19 and the dark shadow it has cast on us is finally really over, although there are still some cases here and there. But those are all global events. Lets talk about what happened in my personal life.
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Our First Step Towards True Retirement - Part 2
Happy new year everyone! I want to continue where I left off in my previous post, so if you haven’t read that, I suggest you head over there first to get some context. The year was 2022, and like I mentioned in the previous post, we were thinking about farm life and were not sure if we can adapt to it after living in the city for such a long time. Since a few of our unschooling friends were living on farms far away from the city we thought it would be a good idea to visit their farm and see how they live and take care of their daily activities in such remote places. It will help us answer some long standing questions.
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Our First Step Towards True Retirement - Part 1
If you have been paying attention to the last few posts, you know that we are cutting down our sustainability efforts here at home. We first stopped rain water harvesting. Then slowly started to reduce our organic gardening footprint. None of these decisions were taken on a whim. They were deliberate and well thought out. While I mentioned some of the reasons for slowing down the projects, one reason which I did not mention was that we were not finding enough time. Yes I know, it sounds strange coming from a person who (and his better half) have completely retired and have not worked for money for more than 5 years. Yet, here we are. We finally realized our long-held dream of becoming owners of a farm and that kept us busy.
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