5 Tips on Homestead Ingenuity

What is Homestead Ingenuity?

The basis of homestead ingenuity is being able to work with what you have. I have seen this is action many times in my life, and I have also seen those that believe everything need to be bought brand new and only the proper everything.

Duct tape and bailing wire

My dad used to fix EVERYTHING with duct tape and bailing wire. And he didn’t just do this because it was all that he had on hand. He ran a successful ranch as well as a successful construction company. He just preferred to use these two handy tools, so the point that he had some in every vehicle and every hunting pack on the ranch. Every ranch hand was supplied with their own duct tape and bailing wire as though it was army issued. So many of the things my dad did cracked me up. But to be honest, this wasn’t the most efficient way to repair everything on a large working ranch.

Only the best of the best

On the flip side, my mom would only use the brand-new version of the item that is specifically made to repair everything. This can be the most proper way to handle things, but often can be costly or leave items in disrepair due to waiting for the funds or shipment of the appropriate item.

So which is best?

I believe that I fall somewhere between those two extremes. This is necessary not only because of funds or need to repair things quickly on our ranch, but also because we live very remotely. It is a minimum of a 30-minute drive to the closest store for us and it closes promptly at 5:30 every day and is conveniently closed on Sundays. Additionally, many of the annuities that we inherited with the purchase of our ranch were designed out of homestead ingenuity, therefore there are not cookie cutter parts to purchase when something needs to be replaced. I also don’t follow the train of thought that duct tape and bailing wire are permanent solutions.

This being said, my husband and I were at Home Depot (an hour away from home) the other day trying to piece together PVC fittings to repair the frost-free automatic livestock waterer that was hand designed by the previous owner of our ranch. Nothing seemed to fit right causing up to start talking about how we could fabricate something. In the end though, we ended up finding something that would work.

On our drive home, we started talking about ways to repair and update many of the amenities on our property. But bottom line is, we still need to make sure that we have all the necessary supplies and plans in place to “Homestead Ingenue” on the fly.