Hello! Welcome to the ridge.
My name is Molly and my husband’s name is Ben. We live off-grid in the high desert of New Mexico, and love the idea of self-sufficiency. Our family is ever working to have a zero-inputs homestead.
We moved up here five years ago, and since then it has been a constant adventure. From having no running water and no fridge, to facing snowstorms with miles of a dirt road between us and town, our life has not been short of excitement!
Each year gets easier, and as it does, we pile on more projects. I am always working in the home, teaching my children, caring for the livestock, and continuously working on an array of various projects to bring us one step closer to self-sufficiency and a simple life.
Our goal is self-sufficiency.
While I would love to say that we plan to reach a level of self-sufficiency where Ben no longer has to work outside the home, that’s not likely. In fact, we would be surprised if we were able to achieve that.
What self-sufficiency means to us is independence, especially with food.
When push comes to shove, we want to be able to survive off our land entirely, even if we don’t and maybe won’t unless we really needed to.
Self-sufficiency means freedom.
Because we grow our own food, we know what’s in it. We hope that makes us healthier in the long run and better able to take care of our family.
Our hope is to cut down financially on mere survival, and find a way to invest toward a future where we thrive.
We work hard on food independence, but a huge aspect of this is our desire to live a simple life.
If we lived a consumer-driven lifestyle, we would never be able to afford gardening and raising animals. This is not just because life is expensive, but the traditional form of farming is such a money-suck.
To us, the only way to be truly self-sufficient is to find every way possible to make our life simple, and our homestead zero inputs.
Because we live in the high desert, this means our greatest focus right now is to heal the land. We want to reverse the effects of desertification on our property. This would make it a habitable place for more ruminants, the center of a zero-inputs system.
Our focus is on properly managing animal impact on our soil, bringing life and nutrition back. This will hopefully create food from the land for our animals in the future.
