Thursday, October 30, 2014

Tim Youngs written a new farming/homesteading book. Help review it

Tim Young over at Natures Harmony Farm has an opinion about farming and over the years he hasn't been shy about sharing it with people.  After a while, he goes and deletes everything he says and hopes that people forget about it, and it's a little funny.  Well, he's at it again, this time in book form.

He wrote this book a couple of years ago under a pseudonym, and it struck me at the time as being a little like one of those ads you saw in the paper.  "Send me $10 and I'll send you the secret to being rich!".  The secret, of course, being that if you put an advertisement out that says "send me $10..." you'll get rich.  So one of the ways to make money homesteading, clearly, is to write about making money homesteading.  Stands to reason, right?
By "dusty bottoms", Tim Young 
Tim (Can I call you that, Tim?) has rehashed something he wrote a couple of years ago called "the farm dreams guide to profitable homesteading", and re-issued it as
The cover is better, and he's getting better at marketing
He's got his farm and cheese business up for sale, and he's closed down his retail store and after trying to raise virtually every animal you could sell to the public, he's closed that down too.

But with all of that said, maybe if the farm sells and he can get out from under that being an author is a good call for this guy.

Here's a link to the current book offering.  Feel free to read the reviews, and if you find one that helps you make a purchase decision, by all means give it your vote.  



2 comments:

George said...

While I appreciate the time and effort it takes to write a book.. maybe that labor should be spent on making his farm.. ya know.. profitable. I can't stand hypocrites who write books and can't practice what they preach... and there's a LOT of that in the AG world. Any farmer worth their salt would never have let all those animals die their first few years farming. I just can't get over that fact, which is why I will not support anything these farmers do. Period.

Lee Johnson said...

It didn't take me too many years of "homesteading" to realize that the only way to make money homesteading is to sell books about it. There's almost nothing you can grow or raise on a small low-tech scale that will pay for the enormous expense of buying and maintaining land and structures. Even the property taxes would be a stretch.

Either you sell the "ideal" to somebody in book form or you provide an actual on-farm experience to city tourists. Even farmers markets feel like a variation on the same concept.