If you haven’t noticed my compulsive linking of mentioned products in each of my blog posts, particularly the tutorial-oriented ones, I can explain.

Its mostly for me!

I hope in the future to be able to organize many of the thoughts shared here into a book on starting a farmstead and various ways to supplement farm income. Both successes and failures yield much to learn.

My main goal with such a publication would be to give a no-frills, “this is the exact amount of money you should expect to spend to start ______ without any shortcuts”. The blank can be filled in with things like: pasturing poultry, raising beef cattle, making fence posts, making soap, making beer, etc. I want to give the complete picture. Of course I will recommend ways to save money, but I realize not many people will already possess self-milled lumber, craigslist market access for rain barrels or even many common tools.

I feel the best way to give a universal manual on entering various enterprises is to price it out from scratch. So those posts where I link to a $1 wooden spoon like the soap making tutorial, or a $.20 washer (future post on my automatic hog waterer build) serve the purpose of tracking everything required to complete the task from scratch.