Any advice i need help finding land and getting started!

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Hello people. hope ya all fine. Basically im 18 years old and i have been into this homesteading/small scale farmingthing since i was about 15 years old. Im planning on getting some land and biulding my own farm with my two hands and alot of sweat. I think i wwas born a few centuries too late like but im not a person to dwell on problems. I prefer answers. but i have a common problem as im from the UK im willing to move around and indeed emigrate **due to land prices** (uk prices are very expensive up to £2000 an acre, im not joking either)

So basically im writing this to ask if anyone know of any real estate places that offer land cheaper. Im willing to move to the back of beyond and well away from the "civilised" cities. I am going to university for 3 years in september so im basically trying to get a feel for cheap land prices and where to look in future.

I have got some money saved but not what you would call a fortune by a long shot of the imagination unless I lived somewhere like Chad or the Sudan.

I am working to save up for this. I dont mind the emigrating part as a way to moive somewhere for cheaper land. as i kinda had that set in my heart about emigrating but im open to ideas from the UK as well.

so basically people if you can help me i would be greatful and i would appreciate all the help you can provide me with.

your sincerly,

Craig

-- Craig Oliver (ruskie@absolutevodka.fsnet.co.uk), July 29, 2001

Answers

Hi Craig, boy, you are the adventurous sort of folk, aren't you??? Good for you!!! We live in the hills of southeastern Ohio, no zoning, few people (12,000 in the entire county), very moderate climate with little snow in the winter, maybe 3 inches at most, with a 6 inch snow once a year, just so we can all go sledding!

Here is a website to go to that has all sorts of very cheap land and country houses/farms for sale: www.swisslands.com They are the local realty company that is family owned and are NOT like used car salesmen, they are very nice folks and would be happy to answer any e- mail questions you might have.

-- Annie Miller in SE OH (annie@1st.net), July 29, 2001.


What does the 2000 (can't begin to know how to make your pound or whatever sign on your post :) convert to in US dollars? Just curious. Vicki

-- Vicki McGaugh TX (vickilonesomedoe@hotmail.com), July 29, 2001.

Come to Saskatchewan! As one hundred years ago, today British farmers emigrating en-mass to Saskatchewans wide open spaces. You will feel like at home here; immigrating to Canada for a British subject is a snap; in Saskatchewan you will not only find the CHEAPEST land, but also one of the best farmlands in the world. Avoid Ontario, Quebec, and eastern United States where they get four meters of snow annually. I think we could use a chap like you to fill our empty spaces...

-- Alexander Levin (morsealexlevin@hotmail.com), July 29, 2001.

Currently, 2000 British pounds = $2,846.76 (was a lot more not too many years ago). Just for fun, here is the currency conversion site: http://www.xe.com/ucc/

-- Joy F [in So. Wisconsin] (CatFlunky@excite.com), July 29, 2001.

What will you be majoring in at the university? Your interests may affect where you end up. We live in Southern Minnesota, cold winters and hot summers. We like it. Land prices vary greatly due to employment opportunities and which town you locate near. (It is still possible to buy a small house for under $20,000 in the small town nine miles south of us, while 45 miles west of us you can't touch one for under $75,000.) Congratulations for planning ahead. Good luck!

-- Nancy Bakke-McGonigle MN. Sunset (dmcgonig@smig.net), July 29, 2001.


Don't close your mind to other possibilities either. Australia or New Zealand might suit you. Make sure you do a good job on that degree, add an education diploma to it if possible and necessary, and you've got a good basis for employment - full time or casual - in a small country town where most teachers don't want to go. In particular, science and maths teachers are very thin on the ground - you could just about write your own ticket if you had a science/maths degree. That way you can get the best of both worlds - employment, regular income, and live on your own little block of land five minutes (maybe even five minutes walk) from work.

-- Don Armstrong (darmst@yahoo.com.au), July 29, 2001.

Here in the U.S. you can expect to pay anywhere from $500 to $2000 an acre for land that is suitable for starting a homestead. For that you would need to have water available and not be too far away to benefit from a little country society. It wouldn't do to have to drive an hour to the nearest store of any kind. We homesteaders are self sufficient, but few can get by being that isolated. There is land that can be had for next to nothing, but its probably out in the middle of a desert.

-- Skip in Western WA (sundaycreek@gnrac.net), July 29, 2001.

Vicki, £2000 roughly equals $3000. When we were looking for our place land was about £3000 an acre for smaller parcels of land. Alison

-- Alison Homa (alison@mullacottfarm.co.uk), July 30, 2001.

Craig, if it is raw land your looking for go to www.Ozarkland.com; their property is in Missouri, a state in lower centeral North America.

-- mitch hearn (moopups1@aol.com), July 30, 2001.

Re: Ozarkland.com

AVOID AVOID AVOID! These folks are selling small properties in and around the Missouri Ozarks for GROTESQUELY inflated prices. For example, they have 2 parcels listed in the Rolla area, 5 acres each, for $13000, or about $2600 per acre. By contrast, I paid under $18,000 for my 26 acres in S. Central MO, and the 40 acres next to me, with functional well, power available, good sized shed, chicken coop, and a foundation for a good sized home, is currently for sale for $21,000.

In the past when I have checked into properties they have for sale, there have been significant restrictions on certain of the properties, disallowing most livestock and sometimes also disallowing mobile homes and trailer homes. Often there is limited access to some of these properties. Usually the land is hilly and rough, with poor, thin soil, a common problem with land in the Ozarks. This is PROBABLY not a problem with the 2 parcels near Rolla, but there's another problem with land in the Rolla area - lead mining. Can't say if those particular parcels are in an area affected by lead mining, but you would be WELL advised to keep it in mind.

The price alone is exorbitant for land in the Missouri Ozarks. I strongly recommend that you NOT buy land from these folks.

-- Sojourner (notime4@summer.spam), July 30, 2001.



You have to live where you can earn a living. Driving an hour to work and an hour home each day adds up to 2 hours of driving and non-productive time. Thinking during those 2 hours is ok, but the work back on the farm still has to be done! Be prepared to purchase a car every couple of years, the wear and tear on them is great. New tires twice a year is nothing.

Weather is another factor that needs to be considered. If you are not used to driving in snow then you need a car that is capable of doing that, and be sure to add extra time to you daily commute. Weather also plays an important role in how much gardening or farming that can be done. As I couldn't ever see myself in the Northern Part of America where people get a million feet of snow and their summers are so short, others can't understand how I love my 100^ summers (no humidity) and mild winters (oh my a snowflake! can't drive in snow) and would hate it..perhaps. But I can farm year round, if water wasn't so expensive or the electricity to generate it anyway. Which brings me to Alternative energy.

Solar is great if you have sunshine most of the year and wind generators are also wonderful and combining the two you have the best of both worlds! If you happen to live where you don't get much sun or wind and have a stream that too can generate power.

Natural disasters are another consideration. Again I can't imagine living where people have such cold weather that they have ice storms, or hurricanes, or tornadoes! but then we have earthquakes, so it is really what you are used to I guess.

Salaries will go up and down depending on the cost of living in the area you live. Also another consideration is TAXES!!! argh! nice that some states don't have a state tax but then they tax you for having a Shovel, rake, hoe, tractor! unless of course you live in Nevada and they flat out don't have state tax!

If you are coming from the UK, you need to familiarize yourself with our medical system.

just a few more things to add to your list of things to think about :)

-- westbrook (westbrook_farms@yahoo.com), July 30, 2001.


Maybe I should have said - the teachers I was thinking of, small country town in Australia, acreages five minutes from work - I know them. They're both men, members of my family's church, both primary school teachers. One - deputy principal - lives a couple of miles out of town, five minute's drive to school. Other one lives on the outskirts of town, five minute's walk to school. There's another woman - high school maths/science teacher, moved there last year. Similar setup, live further out, more land. She was born Australian, married a US marine, engineer, when his time was up they moved to Australia. There's another woman primary teacher in a small two- teacher country school - they have ten acres way out in the country - she's the income earner - he's a former public servant, made redundant, they've put his money into the place, he's a house-husband and farms the place and looks after the young children and does some part-time internet training. There are others, wives of farmers, who do casual on-call teaching. Another teacher, principal of the high school, has elected to live in town, but even there they have quarter- acre house blocks - you could rent that sort of setup and grow vegetable gardens while you looked around and got used to the climate. This is by no means the biggest church - guess they've been blessed with the people they've had as members.

This sort of situation, you could get cheap rental and save a LOT for six months or a year, enough to have a deposit on a block of land plus legal expenses. Get to know the place, figure out whether that's the place you want to live. If so, go for it. If not, go on saving while you test somewhere else. It's possible to move into a decent place to live on 10% deposit (plus $5,000 costs) - suburban or rural - and pay it off in five to seven years if you really lean into it - less if you have two incomes. There's no pressure to do that - the lending institutions expect and hope you'll go on paying them interest for twenty or twenty-five years. However if you elect not to live that long purely to benefit them, then you can live most of the time to benefit yourself instead.

That's central-western New South Wales - summers can be hotter than you're used to, although I think it's fine - low humidity. However, you could get climate closer to what you're used to in Tasmania, or (shock, horror!!) New Zealand.

Either country would probably have social practices and expectations and medical services closer to what you're used to than does the USA.

-- Don Armstrong (darmst@yahoo.com.au), July 30, 2001.


Hi Craig, I won't pretend that land is cheap in NZ, except for the bits that no one wants but Don is right about the climate and at least you can still watch Coronation Street here!

Generally speaking though, anyone who is prepared to apply themselves can become land owners especially if they start young.

From your point of view there may be little to choose between Aus and NZ except that the climate here is more like UK. Aus is a hugely different scale of things and if you are set on making 10 million quid, instead of just one million, you may be beter able to achieve it there. In Aus they will drive 10 hours to go to a party, here you would run out of country first!

My great grandfather might have been able to take an axe and chop a dairy farm out of virgin rain forest but the greenies tend to frown on that sort of thing nowadays but if that is the sort of life you fancy you could likely buy a rundown farmlet for not much more than a year or so of UK average income. The NZ$ is now just 26pence or so.

About the only bad thing about NZ is that the only way out is 3 hours on a plane and then you find you are in Australia! (I put that in for Don's benefit! :-) )

-- john hill (john@cnd.co.nz), July 31, 2001.


Thank you all so very much for your imput. I have taken everything on board with what you have said and i do appreciate it alot.

I have been looking into the options that you have put forward.

I greatly appreciate all your help.

By the way Im going to study agriculture at university with a honours in business management. Im planning on doing a teachers Qualification for teaching, afterwards. This hopefully will provide me with the qualifications to achieve a reasonable income before I could set out to achieve my dream.

Ive read so much about people who are doing what they want to do with their lives instead of working for the banks. They say you only live once, and while flinging myself of a bridge bungee jumping my not appeal to me as it does to my friends, Im willing to do almost any job to achieve what i wish of my life, I also think its a duty of mine to be able to bring up my own kids (not planned for an awful long time! **need a nice lady first**) in an environment that i could only wish I was brought up in.

I think the US dollar, is exchanged at a rate of 1.4 to the UK sterling (£) pound.

thanks again people.

-- Craig Oliver (Ruskie@absolutevodka.fsnet.co.uk), July 31, 2001.


That's even better. If you have Agricultural Science, you've got both science and agriculture subjects covered, and I assume you'd have some first-year math or statistics as well. Best science teacher I ever had was a B.Ag.Sc. Add the business management, and you also get into the business/economics side of things. You'd be invaluable to any small country high school, even if eventually you only wanted to make yourself available to fill casual vacancies. That's the way I'd go in your situation, most particularly because school finishes earlier than other jobs - not shorter hours, you've still got to do lesson prep and marking and so forth, but you can farm in daylight, and do the rest after dark. However, there are a lot of rural produce suppliers and even large agricultural complexes (read superfarms) who are hiring agronomists and rural advisers as well.

Mind you, you've still got to pass. Agricultural Science, at least as they teach it here, is a REALLY heavy subject. Lot of deep science, but it's spread across a wide range of diverse subjects as well. Basic chemistry and physics and biology and maths, inorganic and organic chemistry, biochemisty, soil physics, statistics, zoology, botany, microbiology and mycology, veterinary science, management, agronomy, animal husbandry, agricultural engineering, agicultural economics, et cet era et cet era et cet era. Head down, bum up, shoulder to the wheel, nose to the grindstone, put your back into it, and then you've still got to work in that position - for several years.

-- Don Armstrong (from Australia) (darmst@yahoo.com.au), July 31, 2001.



Yeah my necks killing me at the thought of that position for the next 3 years. It is supposed to be hard but Its something i really would like to do, so im not going to go about it half heartly as people do when they arent bothered. Thanks for your info, Don May i ask a question do you know where i would be able to find information about emigrating and getting a job in either Australia, Canada, USA or New Zealand?

thanks again,

yours sincerly, Craig.

-- Craig Oliver (ruskie@absolutevodka.fsnet.co.uk), August 01, 2001.


Craig, I'll post this in the new thread Ken started as well. Basically I'd suggest two web sites to start with.

One is www.gov.au - it serves as a portal to all Australian government sites - Commonwealth and State. From there you'd just need to puddle around - each government "thread" will have it's own structure. Get to a government home page (e.g www.nsw.gov.au) and then follow through for their Education Department. Also look into whatever department handles "TAFE" (Technical and Further Education - sort of intermediate between high school and university - maybe a "junior college" in USA terms, but also teaching technical skills (e.g. carpenters, motor mechanics; but also laboratory technicians, pathology)). Tafe colleges are good because they do a lot of after- hours training, so you can pick up after-dark employment, either as full-time income or as a supplement. You can also treat them as a full-time employer like a regular school, but unfortunately they don't close as early in the day. Also at a government home page use their search facility to check on relevant subjects (e.g. "teacher employment").

Either through the commonwealth or state sites you should also be able to track down information on climate, and find information on local government areas as well.

The other site I suggest is http://www.apcstart.com/ . This is a portal page provided by Australian Personal Computer magazine. It has a section on search engines, many of which are Australian or Australia/New Zealand oriented. I favour Web Wombat, but each has its strengths, and it's worth puddling around there for a while.

Thre's no hurry - gather information as you can over 12 or 24 or even 36 months before you start firming up your intentions. The one thing I'd advise is that when thinking about something like a post-graduate education course, you make sure in advance that it would qualify you in the countries to which you're thinking of going - this could be a potential problem area in some states of Australia. I don't imagine there'd be any problems with a qualification from the UK, but make sure in advance anyway.

-- Don Armstrong (darmst@yahoo.com.au), August 01, 2001.


Hi Craig I am not close enough to the teaching scene to give you any useful information off the top of my head but the immigration policy of NZ is well spelled out on several web sites. Just do a search for 'immigration' and 'NZ'. Unfortunately UK citizens do not now have any special priviledges that I know of and all immigrants are asessed on a 'points' basis. You should check the web sites where you will find a few that outline how the points systems works.

Good Luck

-- john hill (john@cnd.co.nz), August 02, 2001.


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