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Previously in Homesteading:

• Part 1: Why Homesteading?
  
• Part 2: If You Eat it You Should Grow it.
  
• Part 3: What is Sustainability?

In contemplating where I would turn to next in my homesteading series it hit me that one of the driving forces behind my own desire to homestead is a desire to produce and create rather than consume and throw away. I suspect that I am not alone amongst my fellow homesteader wannabes.

The Produce vs. Consume dilemma comes up every day in little and big decisions. It seems there are generally two paths:

1. Join in the money-making venture of capitalist employment, trading your time for a wage of some sort. Use the wages you have traded your time for to purchase items (food, clothing, shelter, entertainment, etc.) that have been produced by someone else who is generally trying to eek as many pennies out of you as possible.
2. Simplify your "needs", buck the time for wages trade-off, and spend your time producing those basic things that you and your family need to live.

Obviously there is some wiggle room in between these two, but the basic premise of produce vs. consume are always the common denominators.

For example, something as simple as "what will we eat for breakfast?" leads us down two paths:

1. Eat an already prepared product such as breakfast cereal & conventionally produced milk to save yourself time, but pay a higher price in both your health & your pocket book.
2. Make a breakfast out of whole foods, preferably ones grown/raised by you or a neighbor. You will spend a little bit of extra time, but you will gain financial & physical independence, along with the many benefits of being a producer rather than a consumer.

The Benefits of Being a Producer

Obviously there are a lot of benefits to being a producer rather than a consumer. Too many to list, really, so I will just name a few.

• Learning from the Process. In our industrialized society we go right from the want/need to the have, skipping the work, and therefore the spiritual & physical lessons, that come with the process of getting there.
• Seeing First Hand the Providence of God. In relation to learning from the process, we must truly know need and see the process in order to fully appreciate the fact that everything is given to us by our Creator. Paying money for a carrot does not allow us to see the full on miracle that is the production of food, let alone the sovereignty of God in the process.
• Knowing Where Things Come From. Every week I ask the question "where does your food come from?" in Food Roots. The reason I pose that question is so that we will consider how food gets to our table, who has to do the work to produce it, how none of it is possible without the hand of God. When we miss out on the origins and the journey of our food and other goods we are missing out on a key understanding of one of the first commands of God.

A Great Resource for Homesteaders

Call it what you will – homesteading, getting "back to the land", or agrarianism – in all cases we all need guidance and knowledge in order to head down that path. I would highly recommend taking a look at a book in progress titled "Surviving Off Off-Grid" by Mr. Michael Bunker. He is posting chapters, as he writes them, on his blog. He has 12 chapters up, as of this writing:

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Defining Terms
• Chapter 2: Revolution
• Chapter 3: Something Must Be Done
• Chapter 4: Debt Slavery
• Chapter 5: The Grid
• Chapter 6: Light & Heat
• Chapter 7: Cool Stuff
• Chapter 8: Land, of the Free (Land, Part 1)
• Chapter 9: Different Strokes (Land, Part 2)
• Chapter 10: Water
• Chapter 11: Food, Part 1
• Chapter 12: Food, Part 2

So, what about you… how do you choose production over consumption on a daily basis?