Keeping the food bills down

Can a smallholding be a lifeline in a tough economy?

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"Do you know the secret of becoming a millionaire smallholder? Start off as a billionaire!"

Okay it's an old joke but even Smallholder Guru, John Seymour acknowledged in his book "The Smallholder" that most of us don't earn enough from smallholding to buy our place, pay our bills and taxes, save for a pension and buy a new vehicle. However, we firmly believe that as prices rise faster than incomes our smallholding is a fantastic, money saving, asset.

OUR MONEY SAVING APPROACH

When we bought our place, we knew that, given its size of 1 acre, we would never make a huge income from it. Our previous jobs in IT and finance allow us to take temporary contracts when we need money, but we want to minimise time away from each other and our home - we love our life here! It's all a balancing act and we don't need lots of income if we can reduce our out-goings. No-one in life is ever completely self-sufficient (unless they mine the steel to forge themselves a new saw), but we do set out to be as self-supporting as possible and produce as much of what we need as we can. In the current situation of prices rising faster income, the ability to produce rather than purchase, a lot of what we need cushions us from economic hardship. Of course, there are as many approaches to smallholding as there are smallholders, but in this short series of articles we plan to set out how we keep our expenses low in a variety of areas starting this month with an expense that we all face, the food bill.

HOW NOT TO REDUCE A FOOD BILL