About Us

Who are we?

We are Mandi and Jordan, a young couple just starting to dabble in homesteading and the rural lifestyle.  We recently purchased a 40 acre farm, and we hope to become at least partially self-sufficient.  The farm was named before we bought it, and we were delighted to be able to keep the name.



Want to get in touch?  You can email us at lonepinefarmbc[at]gmail[dot]com.

Our animals

We moved here with our two cats, Molly and Anomander, and our dog, Zim.

Molly is on the left, and Mander is on the right.  They're sitting on our propane fireplace.

Zim, helping Mandi crochet dishrags by holding the cotton.
How did we get here?

One evening, many moons ago, we started vaguely discussing becoming more self-sufficient.  Jordan was the one who brought it up, and the more we talked about it, the more I liked the idea of growing our own food and purchasing less 'stuff'.  I started doing some research and found Rhonda at Down to Earth, and by reading her blog I discovered: yes, this is doable; yes, we can start by making small changes in how we live and consume; and no, we aren't crazy!  As we discussed this idea of simple living, we decided to get a farm and try to make it as much of a closed system as possible: grow our own food, grow the food for our critters, and leave the rat race of mass consumerism behind.  This was mighty hard to do renting in the city, and still difficult while renting in the country (though our landlady let us plant things in her garden, which we accepted, and offered us the use of her chicken coop, which we declined).  We were finally able to scrape together enough that it started to look like a down payment, so we popped in to see a mortgage broker, 'just to see what we could get'.  This looked promising, so we found a realtor and started looking at rural properties.  Most places we looked at were mediocre trailers or run-down houses on 5 acres.  We had already decided that we needed at least 10 to 15 acres if we were to harvest our own hay, so we were starting to feel very discouraged and thinking of plan b: purchasing a multi-family home and becoming landlords until we had a bigger down payment and more income to purchase a farm.  Then one day, Jordan texted me "I just found the perfect place online, you have to check it out!  I'm going to call the realtor and see if we can view it."  I took a peek at the online listing, and yes, it was exactly what we were looking for, and only a bit out of our price range.  So with some re-jigging of the numbers, the support of our parents, and a phone call to the broker, ta-da! it now looked possible!  We viewed the farm, learned a bit about it's history (the house is built from logs harvested while clearing the property; it was originally set up to be a multi-purpose farm with pigs, cows, chickens, other small livestock, and hay), and decided it was perfect!  Two months of overwhelming stress later, we got the keys!  Hooray!!

Since we moved in, we've been focusing on fixing up the house and the outbuildings, and trying to come up with a plan for the future.  We know that ideally, we would like to somehow make enough income from 'farming' that at least one of us could stay home and farm full time.  We had no idea how to go about achieving this until we attended the Barnyard Business workshop, and we've since decided to become an organic veggie farm.  So now we have a goal; we just need to sort out how to get there!

Check out the first blog post here for a further overview of our farm :)