The Plan

I've been trying to figure out a way new way to live. Some way that I don't overly compromise my freedom for security, personal freedom for financial freedom, and intuition over convention. I need to be able to produce wealth, not prostitute myself to corporations. There is nothing wrong with being a prostitute, but selling your body is not a path to personal freedom. Though honestly, I would love to find a nice job with a corporation.

So I'm really left with little choice but to start some form of business. My first thought was Oyster Mushrooms. However, the overhead costs involved in making it a middle-class income business where enormous. I could easily produce value, but competition from large capital has driven prices down to poverty levels on the kind of capital I could put together. So I need a "value-added" product, not a simple commodity. I'm looking to incorporate other forms of high-density farming to produce canned foods for selling on Amazon, and locally.

If I was able to rent a small light-industrial lot, preferably one with a place to live on it, could I produce enough year-round mushrooms, tomatoes, honey, broccoli, squash, and other foods to support a canned food business? They'd be specialty foods and carry a high mark-up for having a health/sustainability/family message. I haven't done the math yet, but this is were the plan is going. I'm still figuring out how big of lot will I need, what's available, capital costs for industrial canning and doing a search for investors, but it's looking pretty good right now.

Organic is a crappy term. Everything living is organic. No inorganic life has yet been discovered, though it is theorized that some aliens could be silicon-based. The term organic comes from the use of organic and in-organic fertilizers. Lots of independent testing has shown that there is little difference in the final product either way. However, in-organic fertilizers are not sustainable in the long-run. They are dependent on cheap crude oil, their source. Peak oil makes organic farming far more competitive with in-organic. It might make the world dependent again on organic methods. I want to work to solve the problems of dependence on non-local food, as well as develop methods of less climate-dependent food production.

Tomato plants will grow indoors all year round. However, they need bees to make tomatoes. Becoming a bee-keeper helps increase the number of bees out there, and learning the lessons of how to keep them will help spread the knowledge. But how many would I need to make harvesting and selling the honey profitable? It's just math. The correct balance of bees, and an indoor farm. Broccoli and some other plants can grow in very simple green houses, and I'll figure out an ultra efficient heating/cooling system for them. The mushrooms will grow on paper I can get for free, and help generate plenty of compost along with the rest of the operation. Maybe I'll add chickens and fish to help achieve an independence on in-organic fertilizers.

Many distant ideas are coming together. Now it's just math to make it work, and finding the capital to get it started. It's going to happen, I just have to figure out how and when.