First Time Farm Buyer's Checklist

If your barn looks like this, you might need some insurance... 
First time farm buying? We are. Heck, it’s pretty much the first time we’ve bought anything. We bought one car and a couple college educations, but that’s about it in terms of valuable assets, and only one of those is tangible. We don’t even have the car anymore. So buying a house and bunch of land was quite an experience. We won’t officially close until the end of next week, but everything is all lined up and now we just gotta show up and sign the dotted lines.

This type of stuff might be old-hat for many of our readers, but for all you out there wanting to buy a farm one day, here’s a few little nuances that might help: 
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Unearthing the Dream

Each Monday at Noon I'll be posting over on the Farm Dreams site as "The Aspiring Farmer". Every other weekday you'll find posts on homesteading, cheesemaking and more. Here's a glimpse at the first post. If you haven't scoped out the new site yet, go check it out!

The Aspiring Farmer Blog


We’re closing on a farm in two weeks. Wow. That’s a huge deal. So how did we end up owning land and a house in rural Tennessee?

At 26 years old I hadn’t dedicated much thought to the future. I had a good job, paid off my student loans, lived in the biggest city in America, and was generally pretty carefree. That was two years ago.
 
It was around then that I set my sights set on marriage. Once the prospect of matrimony became a reality I felt a strong sense of responsibility to take my family’s future into deeper consideration. The chief concern in my mind was knowing that we would lead happy and fulfilled lives. The normal 9 to 5 (or 8 to 7 in my case) wasn’t cutting it and I knew it would only get harder to leave if we didn’t cut the cord soon.
 

Will the Small Farm "Boom" Go "Bust"?

Small Farm Explosion, courtesy of www.plbg.com
This question’s been posed to me by numerous existing farmers and aspiring farmers, and I think it’s a great question to ask. Any entrepreneur should contemplate those big picture questions before leaping into a new venture. My response is that we’re only at the tip of the iceberg. This trend will be sustainable in the long-term. I honestly think that the resurgence in knowing where food comes from and who produces it will stick around forever.
 
Why? Because it’s the right answer to a very serious problem. Our society is completely detached from its food system and it’s a food system that has been proven time and again to create illness and serious health problems among the populace (see this article and its bibliography).
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