OUR FARM: An Off-the-Grid Homestead

I got beat up Pretty badly during the Great Recession of 2008.

In 2006, I bought a $300K stone cabin in the mountains near Lake Tahoe, California that needed a complete overhaul. At 25 years old, I was so excited to trade my sweat equity and carpentry skills to make some money and get ahead. As soon as I got the keys, I moved in, gutted the house, and then the stock market crashed. All the sudden, I was completely upside down with a crippling mortgage and very little work to help make those huge payments. The house, at that point, was only a shell of a structure. The roof kept me from getting buried under feet of snow up on Donner Pass, but I could see my breath every morning I woke up in the winter. I spent the next 3 years struggling to make payments on the mortgage and spent all my free time fixing up the house - only to sell it for a $50,000 loss.

I was beat up, burnt out, and ready to find a new way. A life without the crippling debt of a 30 year mortgage. So I swore off debt and decided to start a homestead where I could live a more simple self-sufficient life. Build my own house. And create the systems I need to raise food, collect and filter water, and compost our waste, and build rich soil to grow more food for generations to come.

THIS is OUR FARM: Persimmon Ridge. Our mission is to develop and deliver practical solutions for homestead-scale food, water and building systems.

I committed to building my own home, using only natural and local materials. Committed to figuring out a way to filter and store rainwater using only gravity (no pumps or fragile equipment). And embracing technology by Generating electricity with solar panels, I could deliver pressurized water for drinking, bathing, and irrigation. My goal is to develop simple, replicable ways to live a modern life off the land.