Land Shares and Homesteading

I found a great article on Homegrown.org recently that really highlighted for me the problems we (as a family as well as a society) are facing right now. I'll try to pull up a link, because I think it is important to share it. Essentially, we have been trying to figure out a way to buy property so we can homestead on it, without really having any extra money to put towards it. We DO already own a house, a decent enough one in the suburbs, but in a town we don't want to live in. With no room to breathe and space to call our own. We could sell the house, but would then be homeless, without the excellent credit needed these days to get another mortgage. But if we sold it, we might have enough to put towards the property we want. A conundrum for certain. Here is a link to the article. I think you will find it interesting.

One idea we had to resolve our dilemma was to put out essentially a wanted ad for a farm or land that someone had that wasn't currently using it. Does that make sense? We are farmers without land, looking for a farm without a farmer. I did a lot of digging around the interwebs, and discovered some promising programs for people like us, but there is no quick fix. We were hoping to find someone that had land we could use to grow some crops for the animals and veggies for ourselves and the land owner to share. This way we all benefit - their land gets used creatively and sustainably, and we get the experience and products of our labor. It has been variously called a land share or garden share, and is a great way to bring people together for their mutual benefit.

And in a roundabout way, we may have actually found someone to land share with us. We are currently working out the details, but I am pretty hopeful we will get something going in the next week. If I can find some other folks to form a co-op to help us out and work the land as a larger collective, it will be even better. This will hopefully (fingers crossed) be a good intermediate step for us while we figure out the monetary issues for funding our own homestead in the hills.