Thanks for sharing experiences, everyone.
Ferne had a good point - it doesn't just matter whether women can do it, it matters whether YOU can do it - and whether you will WANT to do it once you are there.
If you have your farm, but feel afraid or lonely sometimes, will you feel triumphant and brave because you are doing it anyway?
Or will you feel like the experience is being spoiled by the worry?
I think if you are coming from the city, your sense of the threat from other people will be much higher there than in the country.
In the country, it's more likely for people to help each other, because there are other dangers that take cooperation: weather, beasts, sickness; things that you could ignore in the city.
You do hear about burglaries - but I heard about them a lot more in the city, where my grandma's neighbor was still talking 20 years later about how they had to put in locking mailboxes because someone kept stealing mail. My grandma said it was 1 year, someone's teenager started doing that, they caught him, and it stopped. But the neighbor is still talking about it. Deeper in the city, there is petty theft all the time - shoplifting and such - and way more people, so way more creeps and criminals too. It's just arithmetic.
Way out in the country, we did have some theft from our rural mailboxes this year at Christmas - one thing that got stolen from us was a bag of library
books, probably because it looked like a bank bag. But as for approaching an occupied property, and attacking someone in person because they are known to be alone - that's rare. Around here most people assume that the person in the house has a gun, man or woman; even the ambulance and fire crews don't expect a welcome every time they arrive.
It's much easier to burglarize when nobody is home. Around here the most common theft is people stealing from a vacation home when someone is not there.
This is one reason the dogs are so handy; they can make it harder to tell when you are not home, and harder to sneak in.
Same as leaving different lights on, or having a timer, in the city if you go on vacation. You do a little camoflage. You will hear a lot of stories about the bad stuff, way more than you will ever actually experience.
I suppose someone who was perceived as "rich," or had made enemies, might be a tempting target. And you can always offend the wrong person, even just by seeing them (as someone mentioned about drug gangs).
But more often, thieves are not that smart, and pick easy targets, until they get caught.
As far as attacks that might be more likely because you are a woman - most people who choose a woman to attack are looking for an easy target.
(People who choose to confront a man are more likely to be looking for a fight, if there's no other motive.)
So as a woman, you don't need to be the toughest person in a fight - you just have to make yourself not an "easy" target. Just walking tall, or spreading a rumor about your martial arts practice, can be enough to give an opportunistic criminal second thoughts before they confront you.
It will be harder as a foreigner in a strange land - you will not have as strong a social safety net, so you may have to build up a little better defences (or impression of defences) than a local might need.
If you can go somewhere you already know people, or join a group that gives you local friends very quickly, that would help.
As a stranger it's hard to know exactly who to make friends. You could offer a stranger a meal and they turn out to be the local law, or a local drug cartel - and either way, you are now friends with one side (and enemies with the other, if they find out).
I would like to mention that the one case I know, of someone getting attacked at their farm, was an American friend who moved to Nicaragua.
He did not really want to be like the locals, who all have guns, and run beef
cattle; he thought that was kinda dumb and violent.
He wanted to do permaculture in a place where he could grow mangoes, and be a peaceful capitalist. He started trying to do food forests, and did a half-baked "3 sisters" (squash and corn, no beans, hard to harvest - I think he planted the squash throughout instead of just at the edges). He is really smart in some ways, but kinda dumb in others.
Anyway, his Spanish was pretty rough, and there were probably some misunderstandings. He hired a beggar girl to teach him Spanish, at her house, because he did not believe in just giving away money but he was happy to pay for work. (What do you think his Latin neighbors thought about a single man visiting a 12-year-old girl? I don't know if it occurred to him to consider that.)
I don't know if he offended someone, or just seemed like an easy target, or if it was just bad luck or blind prejudice. But one night, people attacked him in the dark with machetes. I don't remember whether he fought them off and got help, or if a neighbor helped him, but he survived. I don't know if there was any robbery - it seemed more like someone was angry and wanted to send a message. After he recovered in the US, he sold the farm, and moved on. Last I heard he married a woman from the Pacific Islands, and now lives there with her family. So he can grow mangoes, in a culture that is a lot more relaxed and peaceful for the most part; and he doesn't have to do it alone.
It seems like if you research the climate and land prices, but not the culture, you can get into some big trouble.
I don't know which part of Latin America you are thinking about, or what kind of research you've already done, so please forgive me if I cover things you've already thought about.
There was a radio program recently where a journalist working in Mexico talked about reading between the lines: "I found a pattern where in the areas with the worst drug problems, the local government would put these really gorgeous pictures in the airline magazines saying what a great place it was for tourism. Like, they didn't know what to do, so they would pretend things were great. I could find the places with the dirtiest stories by looking for the newest tourist ads." (Maybe also the drug people like to
sell drugs to tourists?)
It can be hard to spot patterns like that, and 'decode' what things mean in a different culture, if you don't understand the reality behind the words.
A really racist town in America might talk about its "strong family values" or "traditional values," or "knights of ___". Religious language sometimes correlates with racism, or 'secret societies' like the KKK.
And we've all learned to mistrust the word "fundamentalist" lately. It can apply to plenty of other religions besides Islam.
It is often used by people who believe that complicated problems are best solved with simple violence, or simplified religious rules (enforced by coercion or violence).
It's kind of sad, because there are tons of people who do deeply believe in old-fashioned religious values like love and hospitality, or traditional values like hard work and fairness and honesty, without being racist or cruel or exclusionary.
Some groups will call whatever their leader says, or their parents say, "traditional," without really knowing just how young their ideas are. Like bashing gays while living in a grand old house modeled on Greek classical architecture (classical Greek literature had a lot of references to beautiful boys and love between warriors).
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In any permaculture homestead, you want to know the area pretty well before you start planning operations.
Homesteading is not just about sitting alone or feeding yourself - you will need things like parts, fuel, seed, and if it's a working farm you'll need to be able to transport and sell products of some kind. And for that, you will need at least some local connections and resources.
I would look very carefully at how the culture treats women, women in business, and Asian women in particular (if that's your appearance, coming from HK). Or foreigners generally.
If it is a culture where a woman living alone and trying to run a business is seen as "offending" male pride, then you may have a lot more to worry about.
(It may be totally fine - rural areas can be surprisingly practical about such things, and if you make friends with some of the community leaders or the grandmother with the most kids in the area, you may be seen as an asset rather than an intruder.)
There is also the possibility to make an enemy by coming from 'far away' with money, and buying land that someone else wanted. We still have some trouble here on our mountain because my father in law bought a desirable property with a small
pond, before some of the neighbors even knew it was for sale - and nobody had lived on it before; the whole neighborhood was accustomed to using the
pond as a common area. Getting them to stop coming over and picking mushrooms, or not to cut trees by the side of the road, has gotten him on the bad side of some neighbors who otherwise might have been OK to get along with.
Again, this kind of thing will vary a lot. Some people will be delighted to finally have a neighbor.
It's important to talk to the neighbors when looking at rural property. They may know things about the water supply, the weather, and the crime level that an outsider would not know (and the seller would not tell if they are eager to sell).
I would say you would be MUCH safer if you go in person to inspect some properties, and make a point to meet ALL the neighbors, at least the closest 2 or 3, before buying. You can also go find the nearest business(es) owned by a woman (maybe a shop or food stall), and ask her for the details on how it is for a woman trying to run her own life.
Have an exit plan - a way to get back to a place where you feel safe, if things don't work out well.
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How many skills do you have that will transfer to farm work? Do you know for sure that the work itself will suit you?
Are you able to bake, or cook, or make wonderful sauces, or do plumbing, or electrical work, or repair tractors, or have veterinary or first aid experience, even marketing connections or website design?
If you can offer something other than money when making friends, you can get valuable local knowledge without getting a reputation as a stand-offish rich person.
My first serious adventure in agriculture was a year of
WWOOFing and farm internships in New Zealand, with some factory work in the winter.
It was amazing. I learned a lot - not just about farming, but about myself, the country I came from, and the possibilities for how people can live and work together. And that was in a country whose climate, history, and population mix is not that different from my own (45 S instead of 45 N).
A lot of Japanese and Europeans go there for working holidays, to pick fruit and travel around, and it's not hard to get a working holiday visa where you can legally work. So you could do some farm practice in a little variety of climates, and potentially earn money as you go, so it would not cut into your land budget. If you are the sort of person who will do well on a homestead, you will make a good impression with the farmers, and they will make sure that you have work (if they run out of fruit to pick, a few times someone would offer to hook me up on a friend's vinyard, or they would have me help with the B&B laundry, or trim the rosebushes). I don't think it would prepare you for Latin America, but it would be a safe place to get a feel for farming, from some very good farmers. They don't have agricultural subsidies anymore, so basically the only people farming are those who love it, and those who are good at it (usually both).
There are probably similar places you could go in Latin America, on a working holiday visa, to stay with local farmers and expatriot farm owners, while looking for your future farm.
If you turn out to not like working that hard, physically, that would be good to find out before buying the land. You can have a much smaller place if you want to do some other kind of work for income, and just have a little garden for yourself and go hiking or help during big harvest events on other farms.
It seems important to learn this before you buy land, especially if you are the only person who is making the decision. (I got "landed" on a homestead I didn't pick out, and that's a different situation altogether.)
If you don't want to be dealing with xenophobic or romantic attention (whether you want it or not, some Latin men don't believe that a woman can be single by choice, and some men in the West have weird fetishes about Asian women) you might want to find a community that has more experience with foreigners.
I might look for an existing foreign business community, or expatriot farmers, or even Asian ethnic restaurants. Even if you are comfortable standing alone by yourself most of the time, it's nice to be able to 'blend in' somewhere once in a while, and relax, where nobody is staring at you particularly.
(You don't have to be best friends with other foreigners there. Part of the purposes of not being the only foreigner is that locals start to see you as different, individual people. You could be the Nice Asian, or the Tough Asian Lady, or the Weird Lady Who Feeds Her Sheep Turpentine, not just "the foreigner." )
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My experience: As I said, I traveled in NZ for a year, and I traveled alone.
I got tired of being asked, "Aren't you afraid to travel alone as a woman?"
(What do you say to that? "I don't know, I thought about becoming a man in order to travel, but it seemed expensive..."
"what do you think, should I just get a fake beard or something? Or would some socks down my pants make me safer?
This is funny if you know my figure, the only way I could pretend to be a man would be to be a VERY fat man, with enough padding to hide my prominent girl parts. Maybe if I swagger a lot in a really bulky coat...)
I do not like it when everyone says the same thing to me. It makes me feel stuck in a box.
So I studied a little bit of self-defense before I started. (I actually did a few different courses at different times - that's where I got the general rule about people attacking women for an "easy target" and men if they are "looking for a fight.")
Then I found a wonderful aikido dojo and kept studying martial arts while I was traveling. When I went to a new city, the people from the aikido dojo where I studied in the small town knew the ones in the new city - a nice safety net for a traveler. I gained a nice social life with good people, and some skills that might conceivably help with self defence if I found myself being harassed alone in the woods.
But more important for me, when someone who was not part of the dojo found out, instead of saying "Aren't you afraid to travel alone, as a woman," they would say, "We better watch out for you!"
It was funny (and it got old, too) because as a first-year student of martial arts, I was really not any more dangerous than I had been before. Before travel, I had played some sports in school, and was accustomed to working with tools and so on. I was always a pretty strong woman, and I also have the willpower not to let a situation get out of hand. Aikido is a very peaceful martial
art, in some ways I did more rough play when I played basketball. But it gave me a thing to say, and a way to walk, that made me feel confident.
(Another time, I went to Australia, and one of the Chinese women from the factory where I worked helped set me up to meet a friend of hers, from a family that ran a Chinese restaurant. I didn't stay with them, but they gave me a ride from the airport to my hostel, and their son was getting ready to study in the US and was kind enough to show me around - the cheap city ferry instead of the tourist boats, the koala-cuddling park, the university where he studied. Sometimes you get lucky and meet someone really nice when you arrange friends-of-friends. Sometimes it's just awful - my first job in NZ was with a friend's aunt and we did not get along well at all. It's a crapshoot. But it does make me feel safer to have a local phone number I can call, and maybe a local name to say if I get lost and need help to find a safe spot. I have been that "emergency phone number in the States" for a few different young friends from New Zealand - they don't have to visit, but if they did get into some kind of bad trouble, I could maybe do something for them that would be hard for their parents to do from across the world.)
I also got some tips from my sister about traveling, like "keep your foot on your bag, especially if somebody is doing something really distracting that could be on purpose" and "most theft is not planned, but crimes of opportunity. Don't be the opportunity." And "if you do get robbed and need help, it's important to be able to give something to the person who helps you. Even if it's not much. Or if you ask for directions, or take someone's picture. The idea of reciprocity is important."
If you do a small thing for people (like cook for an old bachelor, or a young family where the lady just had a new baby) all other things being equal, they will look out for you, and give you a lot of protection.
And I found out, as many travelers do, that being a foreign migrant worker depending on others for your livelihood is different than being a tourist. I myself act differently when I feel threatened in different ways, or when I feel new kinds of stress. Physical injury was really scary once I was making a living by the speed of my hands and the spring in my knees.
One evening I went on a date with a near-stranger, and I asked another woman in the same hostel to be my "Friend" who was "expecting me back around 11." So if I didn't come back, she would call me, then presumably raise an alarm. somehow. Anyway, I called her to check in at 11. Sometimes just a real voice on the other end of the phone is all you need.
The Latin culture is strongly focused on family; if you try to keep a hired man around as a single woman, someone may get the wrong idea. In some places it would be fine; in others, it could be a temptation to further violations of local decency standards. A strong connection with a savvy local matriarch is good protection: everyone's grandmother or a strong church-lady can give you good advice about how to reach your goals while not getting tripped up by local cultural issues.
You might even look for a place with a women farmers' co-op, and find out how they feel about foreign land owners coming in and joining their circle. If you have skills they can use, it could be a great way to have instant cultural support. Or it could be exclusive and you would always be an outsider.
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As for homesteading - I do not pretend that I am homesteading, really, let alone by myself.
I do not live alone - my husband and I live on his father and stepmother's property - but I am the only person who here is not legally disabled.
The other three are very competent people, and Ernie and his dad are physically sort of superhuman, but they have good days and bad days, and have to be careful not to over-extend themselves or they can get seriously unwell.
I have to admit that the boys do almost all the snow-plowing. I am very traditional, and bake them things.
But I am the one who joined the fire department, because it seemed like somebody has to do it. We have had very bad fires the last couple of years, and some close calls nearer to home.
I make my money with off-site work and consulting, sometimes take a little work locally, but mostly out of town.
I do my farming on someone else's farm, where it gets watered when I'm gone on business.
I do occasionally shovel snow, plant cover crops and perennials, work on the buildings, bring in the
firewood, each year another experiment in "killing trees" as Tyler put it.
(With
hugel beds you start out with them already dead, saves a lot of time!)
But instead of investing in crops I am not here to tend, I spend more time learning which native plants are edible, and slowly, slowly building up the options for how to live better in this particular place.
Because we have income from the outside work, and from disability, and because I get access to more fresh food than we have time to pick down on my friends' farm, I can afford to kill a few trees, and enjoy watching the deer and moose snack on my latest projects. Eventually I hope to find enough plants that take care of themselves - and enough easy tricks for caring for the other ones - that I can spend more time up here and less time working. I love the quiet, the snow, being able to play with the dogs and hear ravens and birds. I love the different colors of wild flowers and grass and sunsets. I love having some time between frantic business projects to weave a wicker fence panel (although I should admit that sometimes I just take the time, and let the business slide a little bit more).
But I also think that if I had to live somewhere alone, I would pick somewhere easier.
I don't like being dependent on long, hard-to-maintain roads to get to friends or town. I would like to be able to bicycle to town and back without having to haul my supplies up a 2,000-foot elevation on icy switchbacks. (We live about 1000 meters above sea level, with the valley floor at about a third of that elevation). My "local" friends are about an hour round-trip to go see them, 20 to 45 minutes each way, except for a few neighbors up here that I am finally getting to know, who I can see by walking or biking. (But it's also not culturally expected to walk or bike - people hitch, but there are a lot of disabled and retired people swinging their pickups around blind corners at 40 miles an hour, driving faster than they can see). I was quite happy gardening on 2 acres very near Portland, OR, and teaching craft classes, while my husband felt super-crowded there. Now he feels a little more relaxed, and I feel isolated. I'm slowly building up enough friends to stay healthy, but I can go a week without seeing anybody.
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In short - Visit the place for long enough that you know how people live there.
Don't expect it to be comfortable, or even safe, to live differently than "normal," as a stranger in a new place.
Ideally, you want to find a place where people already do the kind of farming you want to do, and raise their children to welcome strangers.
If you want to do your own thing, you need a place where people do their own thing, and look out for each other, and most everyone is OK with that.
Learn the skills you need to be confident and feel safe - whether that's self-defense, how to train a good dog, or just being a hard worker with some special skills (plumbing, cooking, etc) that can make you popular and barter for help.
It is not normal for human beings to be 100% "self-sufficient" - instead, we are often "self-reliant," taking responsibility for meeting our own needs OR trading fair value for someone else's help.
Oh, and country land is cheap - but country living/infrastructure is NOT.
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I had lived in shared houses and a city apartment before I moved to the country. There are a lot of unexpected expenses in maintaining your own property. Some of these would be new to me even if it was just the first time owning my own home, but others seem unique to country life.
It seems like every time we get a little bit ahead, there's a well that breaks, or a car that needs work, or the pipes froze and need to be replaced and buried deeper, or it would be a lot easier to keep the road safe for the cars in winter if we had a snow-blower. Any one of these projects represents about three month's living expenses - not spare money, but the money we are already using to pay the utility bills and drive and eat.
Anything you want, that is not "wilderness" itself (like clean water, and a safe place to
poop so your water stays clean, and a rain-proof shelter that doesn't get moldy, and a secure place to store your harvest, and any machines to work the farm or transport you and your harvest, and ways to stay in contact with the outside world...) you will need to build, maintain, repair, or have enough money in reserve to hire people to do those things. You will need to find out what is the fair price for skilled work, not pay too much, but not pay too little either.
If you buy cheaper stuff, and it doesn't last as long, sometimes it takes other things with it (still not sure why we did the plumbing with plastic outdoor handles, that baked into brittle broken pieces in our intense sun within 3 years, but it sure sucks to open the hose with a pliers during summer fire season).
Some things may just not be available - there are limits on rural Internet speed, for example, even if we were willing to spend more money.
Or, if money was no barrier, we could basically pay the same as an international corporation to install a whole new line... I don't know what kind of money you have, but if you do something like that in a poor rural community, you may want to keep it very, very quiet.
There are things that are more expensive, like the constantly-rising minimum fee for a power drop.
In different countries, farmers or foreign owners might also be subject to weird taxes, fees, and maintenance requirements (our local organic farmers got their "no-spray" agreements revoked without warning last year, all of them). Some parts of Latin America have a lot of corrupt officials.
I guess that relates to your original question because "thieves" are not the worst things to be afraid of in some communities. Having a problem paying your bills, or not knowing the fair price for contracting work, and getting frustrated, and yelling at the wrong person, and then everybody related to that person decides not to help you - little incidents like that can make it very hard to get along in small towns.
If you impress a few of the right people, they can introduce you to everyone reliable. If you offend the wrong person, they can call all kinds of authorities or local hoodlums to make trouble for you. Most people are not too hard to get along with, but you will need to be prepared to trade for favors and local knowledge at first. You can expect to pay money for help setting up your farm. But you can also pay for reliable information with things other than money - even some special exotic candies, or a
gift for the local school fund-raising auction, or helping someone's kid with their homework.
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It sounds like you have enjoyed being
alone in the wilderness by yourself, but I don't know how much of the rest of the package you have tried already.
Get as much of a taste as you can, by visiting other people's farms, before you choose your own land and your plan of activity to make a living there.
For myself, I remain a lot more interested in being part of a larger team - I don't need the "control" or responsibility to be awake every time the goats make noise, I am very happy to be a sometimes-substitute-goat-milker so that my neighbor can go visit her sister for the weekend once in a while.
You might really like being your own boss.
But you will learn a lot of lessons the hard way, if you don't find a way to learn them from other people before you start. Even farmers who have been doing it for many generations still take workshops from other experienced farmers to learn new skills.
So that's my recommendation: find some old farmers, and some bossy women, in the area where you want to live, and get their honest perspective.
(Be sure to offer something in return for their time - not money, unless you can do so without cultural offense - try some food treat, or buy them lunch, or even just bring them a clean bottle of water while they are working their fruit stall.)
Yours,
Erica W
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