Why I Won’t Use #selfsufficient
Okay, I want to have this conversation pretty early off the hop. Part of why I’m doing this is because I have a lot of feelings about the lack of inclusivity and variety within the farming/homesteading as far as people go. I also have huge issues with the excessive use of the hashtag: #selfsufficient.
Look I understand supplementing yourself; I understand the spirit of relying on your own space and home to create provisions for yourself. You can definitely aim to be more self-reliant. I know these two terms get conflated often, but they are not the same. Self-reliance uses ones skills development and learning to help meet one’s own needs without eschewing the needs/desires to connect with others. Self-sufficiency, which is more resource oriented, encourages counter-dependency. Studies show that extreme independence is often unhealthy and frequently a trauma response, meaning you’re not coming from a healthy whole hearted place.
The other place where self-sufficiency is grating is that for as long as you’re using fuel you didn’t extract, driving a vehicle you didn’t manufacture yourself, on roads you did not build, in a house you did not build (from lumber and metal you didn’t prepare yourself), off grid with solar panels and batteries you didn’t create yourself, preparing meat with salt you did not mine or purify from seawater, YOU ARE NOT SELF SUFFICIENT. There are uncontacted populations that are self-sufficient. They absolutely exist and have for a very long time and I hope they continue to if that is their desire. However, that is simply not most people’s reality. There is a need for reliance on others, on using money to buy things you cannot build. This immediately kicks you out of self-sufficiency.
Self-reliance gives you skills in order to move towards moderate self-sufficiency. It is an argument of practical skill versus resource availability. You cannot claim to have made what you’ve bought. You can build a log home, showing your self-reliance, but you did not plant, tend and grow your lumber. The land you’re on belonged to someone before you, its creation belongs to nature, not you.
The other part of it is we’re not meant to be that kind of disconnected. We are a social species. We have community. Why wouldn’t you want to honour and acknowledge that? We are moving 2000kms from everything we know. We are already connecting with people out there, and we are being supported by people here and all over the world, because we are a community species. We work with each other and the parts make the whole exponentially stronger. I can’t imagine doing what we’re doing without finding ways to love and share with others.
We rely on the land, the resources, and the weather to produce the natural resources we use. No amount of “self-sufficiency” can create water, or dirt, or air.
I will perhaps need to supplement hay and feed should something happen with my plan to pasture. I may not be able make my own hay and have to buy it. That ends my “self-sufficiency” because I am purchasing a product. Does buying hay to feed my animals and continuing to raise them happy and healthy until they are harvested mean I’m not self-reliant?
I don’t think so.
I think it means I know what I don’t know and what I don’t have and want to do the best I can, how I can. I will always acknowledge the community and support (even if I paid for it) of others around me who help me live my life and run my farm.
I have long had a goal to have a 2/3 1/3 rule on my farm (50/50 would be ideal but that seems unfair in terms of pricing). I would like for the sale of 2/3rds of my items to cover the cost of all of the items. This leaves me a third of my everything with which to sustain ourselves and to hopefully share and nurture others. I want to be able to share good, home raised, sustainable food to others around me who may be having a time of food insecurity.
This hints at my goal as a whole. I want to be able to help my community, whomever that may be, whomever may be around. Speaking of being around, this is also why we talk about wanting to build accommodations on the farm, so that we may be able to help some people make the jump to a new province without some of the hurdles we have been going through to get there.
So, is this a lot of ranting about semantics? Yes, most likely. It comes down to the “if you know you know” vibe. I know there are a lot of people who seem to see things in a similar way that I do. I started asking those who I saw not using the “self-sufficient” tag. It seems if you spend time really considering these terms there’s a pocket who see self-reliance as a really cool thing because of what it allows you to give, with the understanding that self-sufficiency as it is presented, is impossible. I know there’s a certain annoyance to some around the use of that term. Those people it seems are my kind of people.