News from our farmstead #22

One year without a job...

This month’s is going to be a slightly different from our normal updates and I’m mostly going to be pondering my lack of a (conventional) job. If you are looking for farm and renovation updates, I’ll be back to that next week (and of course these are always the videos!)

So March marks a whole year since I left my job as a software developer to focus full time on whatever this hodge-podge of activities is that I find myself doing now… building, growing food, renovating, making videos, creating “content”, raising animals, trying to turn our garden into a farm. To be honest I didn’t think I’d make it a year. I thought I’d get nervous after about six months and start looking for another job to make sure I didn’t fall behind in the fast paced world of software. Going from past experience, this was a pretty understandable prediction. I’d actually never previously taken a break between jobs or had a gap where I wasn’t either studying or working. I think finishing school in 2009, just after the crash, entering the job market in 2012 where things still weren’t much better, and having a few truly awful jobs, set my initial expectations for the labour market. Deep down, no matter how in-demand software developers are and how confident I might be in my experience, I always felt grateful and lucky to find a job, as though the company was doing me a favour by employing me and not the other way around. Logically I know this to be untrue: any company that employs you and continues to employ you does so to their benefit but my prehistoric 2009 reptile brain felt otherwise.

It came as a surprise, then, when 6 months rolled by and I was not remotely tempted back into the world of full-time (or even part-time) working for somebody else. Nor was I particularly worried about the future. I’m really not sure what changed here - I guess just taking the leap and seeing what it would be like to have less money and less certainty, and realising that it was okay. Of course, Mauro is still working, so we can afford the bigger-ticket items that we often need to get in the course of this renovation/farm building project. We have the security that reliable money is still coming in. And building a homestead from a blank-ish slate does require money, no matter how “budget” you attempt to do everything. Of course Mauro’s job plays a huge part in my ability to not work a conventional job at the moment, and I don’t take it lightly. And we both fully envisage that it won’t always be this way around - there will be a time, somewhere down the line, where I’ll be making enough to support us for a while and Mauro can take a break, or use the time to learn a skill he’s always wanted to learn, or make a start on the ruin!

And things are moving positively in that direction. I am technically self-employed and I make enough from YouTube every month to cover my own needs, even if I can’t always contribute to the bigger purchases. This is important, because although Mauro would happily just split his salary with me, it just feels better to me to be able to pay my own way. YouTube is very variable though, unless you do sponsored content which I guess guarantees you a certain payment for each sponsored video so you can have more of an idea of what you’re likely to earn in a year. I don’t do that at the moment, but it’s an option on the table. But whist the videos keep me not in a constant state of panic, I have the breathing space to figure out alternative ways of making money here on the land and in the local area (or realise I need to go back to a normal job). To be honest I haven’t done much of that yet, although I do have a growing clientele of folks who buy our fresh farm eggs (the best eggs in Castellón - I promise!). The priority for us is still building infrastructure, learning, and getting our house & living space a bit more comfortable. But hopefully at some point, once the kitchen is done, the balance will shift a little and I can start experimenting with expanding our egg enterprise (ha) and growing more of the stuff people seem to want from us.

To be honest, though, selling farm produce is likely to always be a small part of what we do. Not least because I don’t actually want farming or market gardening to be my full time job. I want to continue to enjoy growing food, and do it alongside a range of other varied activities. I’d love to have a micro veg box scheme running through several months of the year, something small enough to leave time to do other things. And we have lots of ideas for what those “other things” could be but we need time to try things out.

I don’t want to sound too optimistic because it’s hard to make money living in the campo, from the campo. That’s why everyone left. Lots of people start out with high hopes and ambitions, and little practical and local know-how. Many activities have high start up costs, no local market, or rely on attracting tourists or visitors from elsewhere to consume whatever it is you’re offering. Some things may have negative impacts on the local community, economy and culture, which we believe must also be taken into consideration. Some things are just unpleasant/back-breaking jobs which it’s no wonder people ran away from. Or are no longer economical to do at a human scale, with traditional livelihoods overtaken by industrial processes and mechanisation. We’re still figuring this out whilst we go along and don’t have a clear long-term plan, but that’s okay. However, I truly believe that there is work to be done our here in the countryside. People need and want things just like they do in the city, stuff needs building, fixing, maintaining… people need feeding, caring for, educating… land needs tending, goats need herding… there is no shortage of stuff to be done if we’re willing to try new things and be creative. I do believe we will figure it out.

It might seem scary from the outside to live with this kind of uncertainty, but I really think that these days, almost everyone has a number of different “careers” ahead of them, not just the one they trained for or have right now. You probably have no idea what those other careers might be, you might think the idea of doing something different is totally far-fetched, but I think a lot of us will be surprised. So we’re really in no different a position to anyone else, we’re waiting to see what we end up doing for a living next.

Lots of people ask how we could be brave enough to make the leap and give it all up to live out here off-grid on this little patch of land. But hopefully you’ve seen by now that we didn’t have to be that brave at all, and it wasn’t much of a leap. Maybe it doesn’t make for such an exciting story, but what we’re actually doing, and what we’ve been doing for the last 4 years or so, is making small steps which were always undo-able, slowly edging closer to our dream. The very first step was me getting a fully remote job (pre-covid) which was the job that carried me across our country move and allowed me to work out here in the first place, with 4G and a rickety old kitchen table repurposed as a desk (our only item of furniture). And the final step… who knows? It all feels very calculated when I look back at it, although at lots of points we didn’t actually know what we were aiming for, and I guess we still don’t. But the point is, there was no big “leap into the unknown” moment. The uncertainty we live with now is really no biggie, given that we still have one foot in the software world, and plenty of time on our side.

I make this final point not because I want to shatter anyone’s illusion of what it’s like to “quit the rat race” or start an “off-grid journey”. But because hopefully it makes it seem more possible. We are still very much attached to the rat race and our laptops and the need to earn actual money (although bartering is really nice). And most likely we always will be, unless society completely collapses in the next 50 years… which we’re only half joking when we say we’re planning for!

So yeah, those are my thoughts on a year without a (conventional) job. Who knows where we’ll be in a year’s time. But hopefully you’ll stick around and see!

Sorry, no pictures in this newsletter. It turns out people don’t take many photos sitting at their desk, working, which was the kind of illustrative photo I was thinking would fit in nicely. You’ll just have to imagine it. However, I do need some kind of image to use as the cover picture so here’s a photo of me pressing some flowers, the kind of whimsical activity I now spend my days doing…

Anyway, until next time,

Harriet