Homestead Goal Setting: A Step-by-Step Guide

Setting goals for your homestead helps you use your time and resources wisely. Whether you live in the city, suburbs, or countryside, clear goals keep you focused and productive. This guide will show you how to set simple, practical goals that fit your situation.

Hi, I’m Melissa. My husband Daniel and I began our homesteading journey in 2005 after his diagnosis with ankylosing spondylitis. This and other challenges, including a flood in 2011 and job loss in 2013, reshaped our lives. Those losses, however, became a blessing, pushing me to pursue blogging full-time. By 2023, through health challenges and support, we realized the importance of sustainable living. This journey taught us the power of mindset and self-sufficiency.

Why Set Homestead Goals?

Setting goals gives you a clear direction for your homestead. Without them, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed or distracted. Goals help you focus, track progress, and feel proud of what you accomplish.

Homesteading involves many tasks like gardening, caring for animals, preserving food, and sustainability projects. Having a plan helps prevent burnout and keeps things balanced. It’s also a great way to get the whole family involved in homesteading activities.

Step 1: Evaluate Your Homestead

Before setting goals, assess your situation and note your property’s strengths and challenges. You can homestead in the city, though it looks different than rural homesteading. In urban or suburban areas, “Backyard Homesteading” includes growing vegetables and herbs in raised beds or containers, keeping small animals like chickens or rabbits, composting kitchen scraps, and using sustainable energy solutions like solar panels. Despite limited space, with creativity and planning, you can still embrace homesteading principles.

On larger rural homesteads, distance between buildings and fields, along with upkeep, can pose challenges. Long travel times for tasks like feeding animals or tending gardens can be time-consuming, and maintaining infrastructure like fences and water systems requires ongoing attention and resources.

Key Evaluation Questions:

How much time can you spend each week?
Consider your daily routine, work, and other responsibilities. Be realistic about your free time. Even 5-10 hours a week can have a big impact if you focus your efforts. If time is limited, choose low-maintenance projects like container gardening or setting up automated watering or feeding systems.

What resources do you have?
Assess your land, tools, and budget. In suburban areas, vertical gardening or multipurpose tools can maximize small spaces. In rural areas, check the condition of barns, fences, and water systems, and work on getting the essentials gradually.

What skills do you need?
Homesteading involves skills like gardening, animal care, carpentry, and food preservation. Identify what you need to learn or improve. Explore workshops, online tutorials, or library resources to build your knowledge and focus on skills for immediate and long-term goals.

Write it all down.
Documenting your time, resources, and skill gaps helps you track your progress and stay on target.

Step 2: Define Your Vision

What does your ideal homestead look like? Visualizing the end goal helps you set priorities.

Ideas for Urban/Suburban Homesteads:

Backyard homesteading is possible even with limited space. Start by growing vegetables in raised beds or containers to maximize space and improve soil drainage. Add a small flock of backyard chickens (if zoned) for fresh eggs, natural pest control, and nutrient-rich compost. With careful planning, even a small yard can provide fresh produce, protein, and promote sustainable living.
Beekeeping is another great addition. Bees produce honey and beeswax while pollinating your garden to boost vegetable and fruit yields.
Start a compost system to recycle kitchen scraps and yard waste into nutrient-rich soil. Use materials like vegetable peels, coffee grounds, and grass clippings. Choose a composting method that fits your space, such as indoor bin, outdoor bin or pile, and turn it regularly to speed up decomposition for high-quality compost.

Goal Ideas for Larger Rural Homesteads:

Planting an orchard or expanding gardens for self-sufficiency: Add fruit trees like apples, pears, and cherries, along with perennial vegetables to ensure a steady supply of food throughout the seasons, reducing your reliance on external sources.
Raising diverse livestock like goats, cows, or pigs: Diversify your livestock to include goats for milk and cheese, cows for milk and meat, and pigs for pork, creating a well-rounded food system that supports both your nutritional and financial needs.
Creating a renewable energy system with solar panels: Install solar panels to harness the power of the sun, providing sustainable energy for your homestead. This can reduce electricity costs and make your homestead more energy independent, especially in remote locations.

Write down your vision in detail. Be specific about what you want to achieve.

Step 3: Break Down Homestead Goals by Timeframe

Divide your goals into short-term, medium-term, and long-term categories for your homesteading journey. This structure helps you focus on immediate needs while keeping the big picture in mind.

Short-Term Goals (1-6 Months):

Start a container garden. In a month, you can begin growing easy-to-care-for vegetables or herbs like tomatoes, lettuce, and basil in containers on a balcony, porch, or windowsill.
Build raised garden beds to improve soil drainage, deter pests, and prepare for productive spring planting.
Research local laws and regulations regarding backyard chickens, including permits, zoning, and coop requirements, before starting your flock.
Install a rain barrel to collect and store rainwater, providing an eco-friendly solution for watering your garden.

Medium-Term Goals (6 Months – 2 Years):

Expand your garden to include fruits like berries and apples, along with versatile herbs such as basil, mint, and rosemary.
Cultivate medicinal herbs as part of a homestead apothecary to create natural remedies for common ailments. Include plants like chamomile for teas, echinacea for immune support, and calendula for soothing skin salves.
Learn essential food preservation techniques, including water bath canning, pressure canning, and freeze-drying, to make the most of your harvests.
Build or upgrade animal shelters to ensure your livestock stays safe and comfortable year-round, no matter the weather.

Long-Term Goals (2+ Years):

Transition to a completely self-sustaining food system by growing your own produce, raising livestock, and preserving seasonal harvests for year-round use.
Install solar panels or wind turbines to generate renewable energy, reducing reliance on external power sources and lowering utility costs.
Cultivate a forest garden featuring perennial plants, fruit trees, nut trees, and medicinal herbs for continuous and diverse harvests.

Step 4: Make Homestead Goals SMART

SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Vague goals like “Grow more food” don’t provide clear direction.

Example of SMART Goals:

Urban/Suburban Homestead: “Plant three types of vegetables on a patio or in raised beds by April.”
Rural Homestead: “Raise two dairy goats and build a milking station by next spring.”

This framework ensures your goals are practical and actionable.

Step 5: Prioritize Your Goals

Not all goals need immediate action. Prioritize based on urgency, available resources, and impact.

Tips for Prioritizing:

Focus on money-saving or efficiency-boosting tasks.
Start projects that cut costs or simplify work, like composting to replace store-bought fertilizer or installing rainwater systems to lower water bills. Efficiency upgrades, such as automated chicken coop doors or drip irrigation, save time and effort.
Align tasks with the seasons.
Timing is key in homesteading. Plant gardens in spring for a full growing season. Use winter for planning, seed starting, or skill-building. Tackle outdoor projects in summer and focus on preservation tasks like canning in fall. Seasonal planning ensures productivity.
Prioritize essential infrastructure.
Strong infrastructure supports your homestead. Secure fencing protects gardens and livestock. Reliable water access, via wells, rain barrels, or irrigation, keeps everything thriving. Build infrastructure to meet immediate needs, like a barn for livestock or raised beds for gardening.

For uban and suburban homesteaders, prioritize space-saving techniques. Rural homesteaders can focus on long-term investments like barns, irrigation, or orchards.

Step 6: Create a Homesteading Action Plan

Break each homesteading goal into smaller, actionable steps. A step-by-step plan makes large projects manageable.

Example Action Plan for Building a Garden:

Measure and mark the garden area based on the type of garden you are planning.
Purchase soil, seeds, and tools.
Build raised beds or prepare the ground based on your soil.
Plant seeds according to seasonal guidelines for your area.

Assign deadlines to each step. Celebrate milestones to stay motivated.

Step 7: Involve the Family

Make Learning Fun and Hands-On
Part of your goals in homesteading is having chances to learn as well as teach. When collecting eggs, explain how chickens help the environment. While planting seeds, talk about how plants grow, the weather, or soil health. Building a rain barrel or raised bed can spark interest in engineering and nature. Adding stories, songs, or games to chores makes learning fun and exciting.

Mentorship Builds Lifelong Skills
Adults can guide kids in learning new skills, like carpentry, cooking, or preserving food. Teaching these skills helps the homestead run smoothly and gives kids the knowledge they can use as adults. Encourage kids to ask questions, try new things, and find solutions, which helps build problem-solving and critical thinking skills.

Strengthen Family Bonds with Shared Goals
Working together on homesteading projects builds communication and teamwork. Setting goals, like building a chicken coop or growing enough food to preserve, gives everyone a shared purpose. Celebrate the small wins, like collecting the first egg or having a big harvest, to enjoy the rewards of teamwork and effort.

Prepare Kids for the Future
Homesteading teaches kids important skills like time management, resourcefulness, and adaptability—skills they’ll use for life. It also helps them appreciate nature, sustainability, and being self-sufficient. Working as a family, you’re not only running a homestead but raising capable, caring kids ready to succeed in any situation.

Step 8: Track Your Progress

Regularly evaluate your progress. Keep a journal or spreadsheet to document achievements and lessons learned as you set your homestead goals.

What to Track:

Completed goals: Document the goals you’ve successfully achieved, highlighting milestones reached and progress made along the way.
Challenges encountered: Note any obstacles or setbacks you faced, such as weather issues, resource limitations, or time constraints.
Adjustments made to plans: Record the changes you made to adapt to challenges, whether it’s modifying your approach, shifting priorities, or trying new methods to stay on track.

Tracking helps identify successful strategies and areas needing improvement. For suburban homesteads/backyard, note what works best in small spaces. For rural homesteads, document large-scale project timelines.

Step 9: Stay Flexible

Homesteading often involves surprises—weather changes, equipment failures, or financial constraints. Flexibility allows you to adapt without losing sight of your goals.

Adaptation Examples:

Adapt Quickly to Setbacks
When challenges arise, flexibility is key. If a crop fails, replant fast-growing vegetables like radishes, lettuce, or spinach to make the most of your season. Keep a stash of seeds for quick replacements, and try companion planting to improve soil health. For unexpected repairs, get creative with recycled materials—repurpose pallets for fencing, old gutters for planters, or scrap wood for structural reinforcements. Having a collection of reusable materials on hand can save money and reduce waste.
Adjust Plans as Needed
If time or funds run short, scale back projects without abandoning them. Build a smaller section of a garden bed, focus on one livestock pen, or delay non-essential features like landscaping. Breaking large tasks into manageable phases allows steady progress without overextending. Additionally, rotate crops after replanting to boost soil fertility and reduce pests, and use community resources like seed swaps or salvage yards to find affordable supplies.
Be Prepared and Resourceful
Stockpile basic tools and repair materials like nails, screws, and duct tape for quick fixes. Approach setbacks as opportunities to innovate, whether by replanting strategically, repurposing materials, or simplifying goals. Flexibility and creativity can turn challenges into opportunities for growth and sustainability.

be flexible in your goal setting and adjust plans

Goal Ideas for Different Homesteads

Small Urban/Suburban Homesteads:

Start a vertical garden to maximize space. Backyard homesteading thrives in small spaces. Vertical gardening allows you to grow more in limited areas. Use trellises, hanging pots, or stacked planters to cultivate herbs, vegetables, and even flowers.
Raise quail instead of chickens for eggs and meat. Quail require less space and are quieter than chickens. They’re an excellent option for backyard homesteading with space or noise restrictions.
Use a dehydrator for preserving food. Dehydrators are compact and energy-efficient. They’re perfect for preserving fruits, vegetables, and herbs from your garden harvest.
Install a small greenhouse for year-round growing. A greenhouse extends your growing season and allows you to grow vegetables and herbs even in colder months. Small kits are affordable and fit well in a backyard homestead.

Large Rural Homesteads:

Implement rotational grazing for healthier pastures. Rotational grazing prevents overgrazing and improves soil health. Move livestock between paddocks to allow grass recovery, ensuring better feed quality and productivity.
Build a root cellar for long-term food storage. Root cellars keep vegetables, fruits, and preserves fresh for months. They’re a valuable addition for preserving large harvests without electricity.
Experiment with agroforestry to diversify income. Agroforestry combines trees and crops or livestock on the same land. Plant nut or fruit trees alongside pasture or vegetable fields to increase productivity and income streams.
Construct a pond for irrigation and aquaculture. Ponds support irrigation systems, provide water for livestock, and allow you to raise fish like tilapia or catfish. They’re also excellent for improving local biodiversity.

Final Thoughts on Setting Homestead Goals

Setting homestead goals provide direction and help you focus on what matters. Whether you’re pursuing backyard homesteading in the city or suburbs, managing a larger rural homestead, or living off-grid, defined goals bring your vision closer to reality. Start small, prioritize meaningful tasks, and celebrate achievements to build confidence. Consistent effort, even small steps, leads to progress. Learn from mistakes—they improve your skills and decisions. Stay flexible, adapting to challenges as they come. Share the journey with loved ones to strengthen bonds and make it more rewarding. Every step brings you closer to your vision. Enjoy the process and cherish the journey.

This journey also taught us the value of self-sufficiency. We started an organic garden, made homemade laundry detergent, and preserved our food. That’s when backyard homesteading became our passion. We learned that you don’t need a big piece of land to live sustainably—it’s about mindset.

setting a goal of making Homemade laundry detergent

What began as a small Facebook group for fun has grown into a thriving community of over 1.2 million people. In 2023, we launched this blog to share our knowledge and experience.

We’re passionate about helping others live more naturally, embrace self-sufficiency, and find joy in life’s simple pleasures. Whether you’re starting your journey or looking to expand your homestead, we hope our story and resources inspire and encourage you.

Happy homesteading!

Beef Cook