Over the summer I am selling the old family homestead. After some 170 plus years I am being driven to move by the ever increasing urbanization.
Three years ago the township I live in sued me to prevent me from having farm animals on 53 acres on the East side of Battle Creek Michigan. They had unknown to my family and I re-zoned the land as residential and although My family had been here since well before the American Civil War of the 1860's , even before Michigan was incorporated as a state from the territory back in the late 1820's, As the township lawyer once taunted me "We can keep suing you till you run out of money." I did. and so after some 170 years of history, I will be selling and looking for new land to farm and put down rots, hopefully far enough out that the government won't come to harass and bother me too much and I can in peace raise cattle and sheep and trees.
I want to practice what I call "Deep Survival" setting up to use Restorative and permacultural agricultural systems to build a productive sustainable and enjoyable landscape and extended family in rural Michigan.
I will be posting from today forward on the adventure that awaits as I build a new future, first fining the land and then building a farm on that land with a community on it and from it.
I grew up on the old farm here in South Central Michigan, We had cattle and sheep and goats, pigs and chickens rabbits and ducks and geese. We fished from the river every spring before the Enbridge oil spill of August 2010, polluted the Kalamazoo River. It was a Idyllic life.
We had a huge garden, canned and dried and preserved a good deal of our foods and After my Dad died when I was 12 my Maternal Grandfather and Uncles and Great-Uncles taught me about the old ways of living of the land of hunting and farming and fishing and surviving.
I am looking forward to once building a sustainable life on land not surrounded by the burgeoning suburban development that has overtaken my old family home.
I will keep you posted on our activities as we seek and find and develop What I intend to call Green-Hills, The New Farm.
