Tag: living off grid in maine

Living Off Grid | Shifting Gears, Starting A Small Maine Farm

In 1810, 84% of folks in the USA were farmers

Today one American farmer feeds 165 people. Our country has a cheap food policy and the grower, whoever raises your food gets about 16 cents from every dollar spent on whatever a farm produces. Roughly 2% of our national population are farmers, ranchers. Like many things, bigger happened to squeeze out the family farm way of life.

Maine Is Real, Peaceful, Not Crowded. One Of The Lowest Crime States.

Consolidation, volume production because the food prices do not keep pace with inflation, and the higher cost of farming made the lifestyle not so economically attractive. Most would agree the work ethic learned on a farm is a valuable lesson. But few are so positive that breaking even is considered a good year and just being excited to get to farm again come spring just won’t cut it.

So if eight out of ten people live in the city, if small rural populations are shrinking, what causes the longing for living off grid, for starting a small farm?

Ask yourself if you live in an urban center what you don’t like about your lifestyle. Too much commuting or time wasted trying to get from “A” to “B”. Fear of personal safety because the nightly news has some pretty gruesome stuff flashed before the audience tuning in to learn “that’s the way it is” for another day. Noise, high cost of housing, fast paced living that robs personal satisfaction and just lacking the freedom to be your own boss.

But being a farmer, living off the land is no picnic.

Work around the clock, hard labor and set backs due to the weather, poor markets or your own personal health. Physical labor helps you get in shape, sleep better nights when you shut off the lamp on the nightstand. But worry about staying on that family farm can cause nightmares. Farming can be a lot like gambling when you blow on the dice and hope for snake eyes or whatever is needed to come out on top to win the wager. More on living off grid.

Day Is Done, Cue The Stars, Crickets, Mister Moon.

Living off grid… is power that expensive or is the idea of not being plugged into a utility for juice part of the independence? Is burning a renewable natural resource like wood from your own land, cut and gathered and split, stacked to heat your home part of the attraction? To get away on dependency on foreign oil or natural gas? We’ve blogged about heating your Maine home with wood before and know the merits of being a son of a birch. Could you build your own cabin to live off the land?

Is living off grid a bit of a knee jerk over reaction to the pressure cooker of city living?

Is the romance of working the land, building your own home, the out buildings to go around the farmstead like a drug? Something to dream about to help fulfill the empty spot in a life that is lived but not rich or rewarding or natural. Being resourceful, learning new skills that have been untapped because you specialize in one and only one thing. And hire out pretty much everything else that depends on the credit card or write a check.

Simpler living means removing the money needed to keep it complicated. When it is a personal choice to step back, buy the Maine land and plan you cutting ties with the city to make the leap to work the dirt is not as scary because it is self inflicted. When the Great Depression caused drought, a dust bowl where nothing grew and the locals packed up to move away with little hope in their sails, the need to create a living besides farming meant industrial jobs, learning a trade besides the managing acreage.

How much land do you need to start a Maine farm?

Once fertile acre of Caribou loan will grow 32,000 pounds of food. That’s a square just shy of 208′ x 208′ and Maine land is cheap. Small rural Maine is the 4th lowest for crime statistics. Your fun is low or no cost when the outdoors with fresh air, clean water and missing the wall to wall sea of unknown faces city dwellers maneuver around daily. Would it be a shock to the system? Do you easily make the transition to small country living without much thought when it is your kids welfare that gets considered as the most important goal in your life? What’s important does change when you start a family and start to study where you can do it best for your children.

What’s Brown And White And Surrounded By Green? You See Lots Of These Among Maine Farmscapes. Start Of Living Off Grid, Starting A Farmstead?

New solar lightning, advances in batteries, LED lighting that uses less energy make living off grid more feasible. Wind generators have popped up around the landscape even here in small rural Maine. By living off grid do you mean unplowed roads and stuck way up in the woods far from town? Is there a happy medium of being on a dead end road not so far from town conveniences without all the added work of making a road, maintaining it by yourself. Neighbors are not bad but keeping them at a distance helps the fondness. Don’t fence me in was not just a Western notion. Too many people too tightly jammed together is a recipe for tension, emotions to boil over and it is all due to your personal space being invaded. Feeling you have no space of your own if you share it with every Tom, Dick and Harry.

Thought more than once about easing into farming in Maine?

Feeding yourself first and just keep your expenses low to the ground. Life is more enjoyable when you are not chasing the dollar to keep the wolf from your door. Feeling satisfied with personal success raising farm field to family table is also healthy for your body. In a day and age when cancer and other diseases are prevalent, you have to wonder about the toll stress, what we eat that should not be put down the gullet causes to the body we were given to care for the best we can. Do you feel you treat yourself the healthiest way possible? Or is it give me something to forget how unhappy or empty you are? That’s medicate the symptoms but not tackling the root of the problem.

I’m Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers, ME Broker

207.532.6573 | info@mooersrealty.com |

MOOERS REALTY 69 North Street Houlton Maine 04730 USA

April 8, 2018
Moving To Maine, Living Off Grid.

The vehicle you drive is loaded to the gills, pointed north up Interstate 95.

You are headed, moving to Maine. The return address on next year’s Christmas cards is going to read somewhere in Vacationland.

The plan for the Maine move started to simply lighten the financial load.
Fresh Fish, Your Are In Maine Remember?
No more, stop the flow of small white envelopes. With the cellophane clear plastic window from utility, energy companies.

With your name peeking through and coming at you in waves. In too tall monthly or more often leaning sideways stacks. Tossed in your mom’s inherited pull down writing desk for annoying attention to the household bill paying.

Some of your friends wonder if you are on medication. Or should be. If they have the meds mixed up and ask are you feeling alright? You smile. Say nothing. But have done your home work. Before pulling, yanking hard on the three prong grounded plug. Setting up the living off grid by double clutching. Shifting into a lower, slower life gear. 10-4 good buddy. Wait and see. Give me a little time to lay the ground work in Maine. Then come visit and see who’s crazy. Like a fox. Change their tune 180 degrees.

Become more self reliant, very sufficient living off grid in Maine.

You still have juice, just not the kind Public Utilities Commission (PUC) boards regulate. With no more bang bang bang systematic rate hikes to stomach. Like it or not. Living without the corporate profits, surcharges, transmission and extra tax feeincreases is what you dream about, see. All to reduce your carbon footprint.
Aroostook County, Northern Maine. Ideal For Off Grid Living.

Thirty percent of your power consumption is lighting. Build your new energy efficient home with the southern exposure for free solar heat, an even lighting sun or not. You’ll be hanging out clothes on a line to air dry. Or placed on large wooded racks in front of a winter wood stove to dry, get some needed inside air moisture.

Heating with birch, beech, maple, ash, other natural hand split, you stack, pack, you deliver fuel.

From your Maine land wooded sections. No oil truck going beep beep backing in the drive way. With a guy leaping out to hook up, screw on the hose for Texas or wherever it came from fossil tea to flow at four dollars a precious gallon.

Self inflicted pulling the plug. Not forced on you makes it a challenge, sport, passion, obsession. Not a lament, curse or anything to cause anger. Because done by choice, with a sound mind. Lots of careful planning, timing.

Also the living off grid does not mean you are anti-social, a hermit, recluse or a loose canon that should be worried about, watched closely. Lots of folks are already doing it. Heck before those high power lines, everyone lived quite nicely without the 120 AC DC hooked to the house.

Not going undercover for an illegal wacky tobbacky below radar grow or as a member of the witness protection group.

That’s not the reason for the pulling away from all those plug in outlets. The gadgets, some you keep, just not sitting around on all the time. Parked, wasting fuel you have to pay dearly for is the big twist.

Here are 10 off grid homes. Or take a gander, gawk at this extra 15 homes for off grid living.
Your Neighbors Four Legged, Furry, Curious, Shy.

Maybe living on a Maine island, self sufficiently is more the solitude, protection of natural beauty you crave.

Growing your own Maine food. Selling the surplus. Raising meat, collecting eggs, the hands up and down moving, squeezing for the milk. An army of one or couple of peas in the same pod.

Reading up on blog posts about which direction the wind blows in your life. To know how best for you to approach the exercise, transition. To give up, cut one by one the strings of dependency that web more and more around all of us today.

Leaning on local Maine Amish settlements for guidance and to observe so this is how it is done huh?

Raising kids on the off grid Maine spread where simple living is the common denominator on every decision you make. For the grand scheme to be free, less complicated and more enriching, empowering. Maybe in retirement in Maine after your family is raised. Have flapped their wings hard to move away from the nest.

I’m Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers, ME Broker
207.532.6573
info@mooersrealty.com

March 19, 2014
Living Off Grid In Maine, Anywhere.

Maine Wind Generation.

You don’t get a monthly power utility bill when you live off grid in Maine.

Your lifestyle changes in a good way and it is a decision, self inflicted choice these days. In Daniel Boone’s era or when Martha and George Washington sat down for dinner at the White house with candle light, it was not.

Living off grid has many meanings, suggests many different images, designs on how to achieve it in a person’s head. Some folks gasp, flinch and are horrified to think of not just plugging in the curling iron, firing up the dryer to fluff up those towels.

Others think better for the earth, less carbon and new ways to save money and get pretty much the same results. Independence from their old habit of power consumption. Now way more aware of what it costs, how to get it cheapest. Wind generation is big in Maine. On large and small scale. I have sold Maine land to folks that wanted to be on a dead end road without power as they thought of this lack of juice as a plus. But knowing others would consider it a negative.

Less people around you means more space, less what did I do wrong now or have to stop in your opinion.

Not anti-social, just enjoying your own company and not wanting to bother anyone else. And vice versa.

Heating with wood since Maine is 91 percent forested is a given and requires no electricity.

Little gas for the chainsaw to cut the trees, yard them out or maybe for a wood splitter.

But there, got heat covered. Automatic heat like a gas wall unit makes it possible to zip down to visit family, shop out of town too.

Southern orientation to capture the sunlight and heat is like having lights turned on in every room courtesy of the sun. Smaller watt flourescents use little energy that can be collected with solar panels, generator charging batteries on dark days, water wheels in brooks or rivers if riparian rights exist. Or a little Whisper class, type wind generator.

Had a fellow that worked at the Houlton Maine post office who had several batteries in his car that charged on the way to and from work. In winter he could use the colder temperatures outside for food refrigeration. But told me in spring, summer, fall, he would stop at the market on the way home. Pick up whatever he needed for the family meal, combined with garden grown vegetables, fruits from the open land he cleared around his Maine log home.

Raising beef, critters that you name and expect to slaughter to put on the table is hard though.

Had two pigs growing up that Dad convinced the four boys that they were not the same ones we fed, chased around the barn and had been swapped.

We would never have knowingly munched on, ate a friend, pet. No matter how hungry.

More living off grid in Maine, anywhere resources if this lifestyle has you thinking about reducing overhead, living healthier, happier. Maine homesteading, living off the grid, being self sufficient is very doable. How do you think our earlier generations, relatives did it on the farm?

I’m Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers
207.532.6573

December 18, 2010