Featured excerpt above: The Doable Off-Grid Homestead by Stewart and Shannon Stronger
Part of running a homestead involves a lot of daily chores. This chore load can easily overwhelm you and your family.
And that’s where automation and systems come in. When you build in automations to your homestead process, you remove the chore load from yourself.
For example, if you add an automatic chicken door to your coop, you don’t need to worry about opening and closing the door every morning and night. Combine that with bulk water and food systems and you might not need to do any chicken chores each day, but rather every other day.
The same can be done for gardening, with automatic watering. If you really want to go all out, it’s possible to eliminate most weeding by utilizing barriers or cover crops or materials.
The other key part to eliminating load is systems. When you create a system, you are creating a regular and easily repeatable process. This reduces cognitive load feeling up bandwidth for other tasks like homeschooling children.
You probably already do this with chore lists and shopping lists. It’s not easy to forget the groceries you need when you have a complete list.
The same process works for homestead chores.
Start off by create a list of all the tasks you need to do each day on your homestead. Then organize those into groups by area and task.
See if there are spaces you can overlap to work on two sides at once. For example, if you need to fill the large animal water bucket, this will likely take time. Is there a small task nearby that you can do at the same time? Hint: Tuck in a little automation with an automatic shutoff here.
Building systems also has a nifty side effect. If you ever need to take a vacation, systems allow you to pass your chores and tasks off to someone who does not know your homestead in and out. Instead of spending tons of time teaching, you can pass along your written systems for them to follow.
Systems and automation are your friends. And even from a preparedness side, you can still build in automation. There are some pretty cool mechanical automations out there. Or you can go all out Rube Goldberg style to accomplish a simple task…
The key is finding ways to free time and simplify your daily routine.