In keeping with the trend since I started this blog, I wanted to lay out our goals for the homestead over the next year. Even though we spent most of this year away from Alaska, we are excited to return to what we think of as our “real” lives. So here are our homestead goals for 2019!

Homestead Goals 2018-2019

We had a total of 8 goals we wanted to accomplish in 2018. I will move a few of these over to 2019’s goals as well, like purchasing a fishing permit so we don’t have to go to town for work. Others will be expanded on or completely removed for this coming year. Our goals for 2018 were:

1. Purchasing a Fishing Permit – DONE!

This is still our #1 goal for 2019! A fishing permit will provide us with income and food!

2. Spending More Time Hunting and Fishing

This will probably just be fishing this year, no hunting. Without a freezer, we don’t have the ability to preserve a large amount of meat quickly, so any big game like moose are out of the question. Add in that we’ll have a toddler and a newborn, on top of all our other goals, and we probably just won’t have much time for hunting.

3. Preserving More Food

This goal will also go on the back burner for 2019. Four people in a 250 sq ft house don’t leave much space for prepping and preserving. I’ll still can salmon since it’s such a staple in our diets, and maybe blueberries if this is a good year for them. Other than those two, I’m not sure what else I’ll have time and space for.

4. Getting Equipment Out To Our Place and Clearing Land

This is a two-part goal, with getting equipment out and clearing land, each being half of the goal. I have no doubt we plan to clear more land this year, but I think for now getting large equipment to do it isn’t even on our radar. Large machinery is expensive!

5. Finding Our Property Markers

On the honey do list! I believe we’re at the point where we just need to pay a surveyor to come out and remark the boundaries for us. Then we can really work on our expansion and utilizing our land. I’d hate to accidentally build a beautiful barn for the neighbors!

6. Getting a High Tunnel (Amazon link)

Definitely a goal for this year. My goal is to purchase a 20′ X 72′ one locally. It should have plenty of space for some fruit trees, garden, ducks and rabbits. Crossing my fingers we can afford this in 2019!

7. Purchasing a Beach Truck

Strike this one off the list, y’all! We’ve decided our current trusty Ford Ranger will do just fine our first year of fishing. We don’t expect to be hauling in record catches while we are still learning, and just starting out. And anyway, I don’t want to buy a nice new rig just to have the tide take it 🙄

8. Cut and Mill Lumber In Preparation for Building Our New Cabin

This goal still exists. It’ll just move a bit to incorporate breaking ground on the new cabin. This is going to be a multi-year project, and I don’t expect we’ll be moving in until mid-late 2020 (if that!). Partly because we’ll built as we can afford to, and also because it’s the proverbial “dream house” for us both. We have high expectations for ourselves and the craftsmanship that will go into this building.

New Goals for 2019

In 2017 we had 17 goals, and completed 9. We found a lot of things that worked for us, and a lot of things that didn’t. Part of that reasoning was why we had picked 8 goals to work towards in 2018. Coming back to civilization for this last year has again made us reevaluate several assumptions we had about living more simply. The dichotomy between our town lives vs our off grid lives have proven to us that living off grid in Alaska is the life for us. That means working towards longer-term goals and thinking harder about what it is we are accomplishing there. One thing we’ve realized is that along with living more simply, we want to be better stewards of our environment. This means having more environmentally friendly goals this year. Just call us Alaskan Bush Hippies   😆

Lowering Our Carbon Footprint

According to the US EPA my family’s yearly (2017) footprint is 18.94 metric tons per year, even living off grid! The average US family of 3 is at 29.77 in our zip code, so we’re already well below that. Though it will go up a bit in the coming year with the new baby.

Part of our carbon footprint is how long it takes us to get to town. Did you know rural areas actually have a higher carbon footprint than big cities due to distance traveled, public transportation use, and house size? Neither did I! Another part of our carbon footprint comes from propane use as we cook and heat water for showers with it.

Our carbon footprint is so low in part because we burn wood to heat our house. Burning wood is actually carbon neutral because wood lets off the same amount of CO2 either burning or decomposing. Using a high efficiency wood stove (like the Katydid) will help reduce overall emissions from smoke and ash as well.

Some of the ways we plan to lower our footprint include:

• Having a large organic garden – This lowers our footprint by allowing us to travel to town less. It also means we aren’t purchasing vegetables/fruit that have been trucked or barged into Alaska. What we don’t grow ourselves we will try to purchase from local growers.
• Expand on how we create electricity with wind, solar (Amazon link), and thermoelectric power – We will be able to cut our propane and generator use down to almost nothing when we have set up all these systems.
• Raising our own low footprint meat animals – Egg production has a much lower emissions rate than meat production, and smaller non-ruminant animals produce less methane. So ducks and rabbits are what we will be sticking to for a bit. Milk will come from a local dairy goat herd, large meat will come from hunting or local growers. As much as I’d like to have more pigs, pork is 4th in terms of emissions, according to this chart from The Environmental Working Group. We’ll have to think long and hard about how to offset that before raising pigs again.

• Planting trees – According to EPA calculations, I would need to plant 313 tree seedlings and allow them to grow for 10 years(!) to capture the amount of emissions my family produces in a year. While I don’t know if that is currently feasible, if we could get our carbon emissions below 10 metric tons a year, that would be closer to 130-165 trees planted. I was planning on replanting to offset the wood we have already harvested, as well as diversifying our plant life, so this fits in well with our overall property goals. We can also donate to the Arbor Foundation to have trees planted in our name. Check out their Carbon Offsets page here.
• Using natural resources when building our new house – This will help keep our emissions low by using things like a rubble trench foundation, rather than a concrete one. We’ll be using as many materials gathered from our property as possible, both to cut costs and emissions. (Cordwood Construction Best Practices, Amazon link)
• Purchasing/using energy-efficient appliances – Even though our electricity will mostly come from renewable resources, we want to make sure we are using energy-efficient appliances. This includes things like washing machines that use less water as well.

Lowering our carbon footprint is going to be a multi-year goal, that doesn’t exactly have a hard finish line. We just want to be conscientious of what we give and take from the surrounding land. One day, the homestead will be passed to our children, and we want it to be in the best condition possible when that happens.

And that’s it!

I think we’ve set some good, reasonable, and doable goals for ourselves in the coming year. Unlike when we first started out, I know better than to expect us to finish all of these by the end of the year. Even if we can just finish a few, it will be a good year of homestead progress!