Is it possible to be completely self-sufficient?

People love the idea of being completely self-sufficient, and why wouldn’t they? Going out into the crop section of your garden in the morning to collect fresh eggs and vegetables before a peaceful breakfast in your solar-powered home. But there is a huge difference between living this way and being 100% self-sufficient.

What does being 100% self-sufficient mean?

There are various definitions of what 100% self-sufficiency actually is, and includes things like being able to meet all of your needs through money earned yourself, so simply having a good job and being able to afford all your bills is classed by some as being 100% self-sufficient. When it comes to people looking to produce all of the things they need by themselves, this is simply not going to happen and shouldn’t even be attempted.

It doesn’t matter how much land you have or what’s on it, there will still be a massive amount of things it won’t be possible to produce and you won’t have any other option than to buy them.

The closest thing you could get to living a 100% self-sufficient lifestyle would be comparable to peasant life during the 1700s. All your clothes would be made from itchy flax fibers you’d have to spin yourself, and food would have to be dried and salted to preserve it, with salt you had to produce yourself from seawater. Even if you started with wind turbines and solar panels, at some point they are going to need new parts to maintain them, or even something as simple as axel grease for a wind turbine rotor would be out of the question.

So how close to 100% self-sufficiency can you get?

That would depend on your definition of being self-sufficient. A good example would be someone with a good wage who can pay all of their bills and provide everything they need for themselves and their family. Even though the person in question isn’t physically making things themself, they can be self-sufficient by providing everything they need.

As for providing everything for yourself from things you have grown or made, for most people, it’s limited to little more than your home, power, and food. Anything that requires circuits, metalworking, plastic, medicine, chemicals, and basically anything you can’t grow will be out of reach, giving you the choice of either going without all these things or accepting you can’t live a 100% self-sufficient life.

Remember this – The percentage of how self-sufficient you are is irrelevant if you are happy

When it comes to retreating into the countryside to live on your little slice of heaven, the goal is to create a place that you love, and also your own classification of what it means to be self-sufficient shouldn’t impact what you have. Take a look at the home below, which has been fitted out with all kinds of self-sufficient devices. It can filter its own water, create its own power, and has enough land to grow more food than you’d need, but when the people living there need new clothes or anything other than food, they have to go to the shops like everyone else.

This doesn’t make it any less amazing to live there though, and one thing you can do to cover all of your costs is to use your land to produce a cash crop. What you choose to grow should depend on a huge amount of research, but covering all of your other costs by selling something you produce yourself is the closest thing to being 100% self-sufficient as you can get.

Unfortunately, you will always need to pay for something, no matter how good your setup is

Even if you make a huge initial investment and build a homestead that doesn’t have to worry about food, water, or power, things like medicine and tools will still be out of reach, and then there’s the added living costs of simply being in a country like the UK, or anywhere else for that matter. You will still be expected to pay the equivalent of council tax and whatever “rates” there are for living where you do, so early retirement to provide for yourself won’t be as easy and cheap as you think to maintain.

A good example of people who live close to 100 self-sufficiency are the Amish. These people are a religious group that is famously known for not adopting modern technology and is against anything that replaces face-to-face conversations like mobile phones. They live a lifestyle that is the closest thing to being 100% self-sufficient, but even they need the benefits of modern living sometimes.

In an Amish community, certain technologies are banned, and no one has game consoles, computers, or phones, and they spend their free time in each other’s company instead of staring at a screen. They use nonmechanical farm machinery which is pulled by horses and even grow plants to make their own clothes from, but this is something they have developed over a long period.

The only reason all of this works is because they work together as a community and have people dedicated to specific things. When someone’s field needs to be cleared, the whole community will work on it together to get the job done quickly, and they are also unmatched at farmyard carpentry. 50 people who all know exactly what they are doing and working together can build a large barn in a single day, something that would be impossible for a couple on their own small holding.

As impressive as they are, even the Amish can’t escape having to use products of the modern era. Medicine is always something that people won’t be able to make themselves, with the most advanced thing people can produce on their own being penicillin. They are also forced to use planes or modern vehicles when traveling long distances, and products like salt still have to be paid for.

The way they afford things is from the sale of crops like tobacco which they also make into cigars, and the sale of various products they have made from the things they’ve grown. With the lack of modern technology in their communities and also being completely self-sufficient when it comes to food, there isn’t much to spend money on.