Douglas Alpenstock wrote:Lovely photos.
I think you need to indicate where this semitropical forest is located.
Why are people so desperate to sell?
There is more to this than meets the eye. My 2c.
Honestly, I'm not sure they're desperate to sell. A problem here is that people often set an extremely over-inflated asking price and then sit back for years almost like they'd be better off playing the lottery. They don't adjust the price even after a couple years with no one interested. I've seen that a lot. My earlier comment was based on the fact that the people who run cattle on the surrounding pastures have all but eliminated their forested areas, and they won't be able to keep changing fence posts in the future. They're too cheap to buy good wood at market price, so they just keep destroying their forests until there's nothing left. Many neighbors are old, their kids aren't interested, etc. i.e. the usual story. Without fencing, they won't be able to keep running cattle, and these people certainly aren't going to invest the time, effort and money required to reforest the landscape. You'd think they'd just invest in T-posts, but those don't even exist here, almost like it's the stone age. I give it 5-10 years tops and all the neighbors here will be throwing in the towel. It's already at the point where we've had to call the authorities on them to change their fences. One neighboring property had cows enter almost one year ago, and we notified the owner. Well here we are 9 months later and we finally had to get the authorities involved so that they would do something about all their fence posts that have been totally rotten for at least one year now.
More than meets the eye, eh? Yeah it's certainly not Hawaii or the Bahamas. These people also aren't exactly Greg Judy either, so you inherit decades of ecological degradation, which probably affects the soil most harshly. Think very high aluminum saturation, zero topsoil, low pH, and most macro & micronutrients being deficient. The people don't ever irrigate or fertilize their pastures and they only supplement their cows with cheap table salt. That's the other factor. We had a dry year, and their pastures stopped growing, the cows don't have any shade in the pastures. Their water source is often the public creek or water way, and such public resources are going to be a hot topic in the future for law enforcement efforts due to the ecological importance of maintaining riparian buffers. The riparian buffers have pretty much been reduced to zero on many of the neighboring properties. During droughts like the record-breaker we're going through this year, some properties have very little water, and the cows basically congregate near stagnant muddy ponds. You do the math. Pretty hard to sustain that kind of operation.
Basically it's the sort of opportunity for a younger permulculturist who is willing to live off-grid and understands the costs and difficulties involved. Especially for someone who has always dreamt of owning a decent chunk of land but has felt pushed out of the market by the exorbitant real estate prices in their home country. I wouldn't recommend the area for someone who needs their creature comforts, but we do live pretty comfortably off-grid with our house having most of the amenities you'd expect from the suburbs of a country like the USA. If you're willing to jump in, it's essentially raw land. No plumbing, no access, no structures.
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