Dreaming the Farm
- stephanieandjosh
- Aug 21, 2016
- 2 min read
We had a mutual dream to buy a farm and get off-grid, but achieving that goal seemed unattainable. We lived in Calgary and were working on our own projects. I was travelling to UNBC every other week by Greyhound to work with a professor on a project that was going nowhere and Josh was finishing his electrical apprenticeship.
Then, through a part-time contract I had on a website redevelopment project, I was offered a full-time position in community development with the Town of Turner Valley. I jumped at the opportunity because it achieved two things: One, it allowed me to pursue a career making change in government which had always been my goal, and two,it allowed us to get closer to agriculture and local producers.
It accomplished the former and pushed us away from the latter to pursue our own direction rather than towing the line of the established order.
We kept working and saving and looking for alternative routes to get where we wanted to be. We found online essay contests for farms in the US, a lot of grants for existing operations, and some reasonably priced properties for sale in eastern Canada.
In August of 2015 we flew out to Ottawa, borrowed my aunt’s car and drove towards Kingston to check out a small house on 50 acres. It was in a great location and close enough to Kingston that Josh could go to university there, but the house was in rough shape and the porch looked out on a cutline of giant hydro wires. It was for sale by owner and we made an offer and conditionally bought it, but the owners were unruly and the mortgage broker couldn’t get us an interest rate we liked so we let it expire and kept looking.
We spent the next six months scouring the internet for places across Canada. We looked in BC, northern Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, and considered Atlantic Canada. In February of 2016 Josh started applying to engineering programs and was accepted at both the University of Ottawa and Carleton University so that helped narrow our search and we committed to relocating to the Ottawa area.
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