Homesteading : A key to food security

Hey everyone, it's another wonderful day again for the #celestialchallenge initiated by @sirknight and today is about Agriculture.

So I came across a recent post by @beautifulbullies talking about the crops she grew at home and the joy she had from cooking with her own ingredients and then a thought came to me, why not share with steemit what you know about having a little farm at home.

What is home steading?

In the simplest of terms, homesteading is carrying out small scale subsistence agriculture at home. Yes that is my definition because it mostly involves the cultivation of crops and rearing of animals at home.

My homesteading life

I and my family have always being into small scale agriculture. We used to have a farmland that was quite far away from home but we stopped, a major reason being the large distance between our home and the farm.
After a while we decided to have a little farm just behind the house where we grew ground nuts, vegetables, pepper, tomatoes and garden eggs. We also built pens for chickens after which we expanded overtime into a big poultry farm. We later added turkey to the poultry list and since then things have being great.

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Effects on finance

Being a homesteader has been really awesome. We do not really spend on food items when we go to the market. We only buy food items we do not have. We do not have to buy eggs or chicken meat as we already have these. We do not have to spend on fruits and vegetables except we need them.
We also sell the chickens and turkeys and their eggs too. So this brings in extra money to be spent on other things.
We sell the poultry feed bags too and the best part is that we sell the poultry waste to farmers too!
So homesteading cuts cash spent on food and can also be a source of revenue for the family.

Are there losses?

Of course yes there are losses, if not properly managed. In @beautifulbullies post, she mentioned how she spent a lot of water growing her crops but ended up harvesting too much and couldn't use all in the end. This means she lost some amount of money spent on water.
Over the years we have made losses too. There were times when the Newcastle disease hit our poultry farm killing almost half of the birds. We made a huge loss that year. Also there are times when the layer birds (chickens that lay eggs) get infections that do not allow them lay eggs as expected. This means the money spent on feeding them was wasted and the feeds are quite expensive.
Thing is there are always losses but the most important thing is how you manage the loss so that it doesn't affect you in the next season.

Are there benefits?

The benefits of homesteading are clearly spelt out.
You get to save money from spending less on food items bought at the market.
You get fresh food stuff whenever you want.
You get to have control over the quality of food you consume and you get to generate income from selling food items if you want to.

Final conclusions

After all being said from my experiences and from the experiences of others around me and the experiences of people I have met on steemit I can say that homesteading is a key to food security.
If everyone were to grow crops behind their homes there would surely be enough food to go around and also to share with those that may not be fortunate to have some.
Since i joined steemit I've heard of countries where the law doesn't permit them to have farms at home.
I do not know the law in you country but I advise you get yourself a little garden and grow some crops.

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A big thank you to @sirknight for initiating the #celestialchallenge. This has really helped me show my creativity here on steemit.

A big thank you to @papa-pepper for his awesome homestead posts, I learn alot from him and also a big thank you to @blocktrades, the supporter of homesteaders.

Thanks for reading. Please upvote and resteem if you liked this.

All images here are my original works of some of my farm produce.
happy 2k18 ♡