Ken Jorgustin at Modern Survival Blog takes up the question of whether it’s worth it to invest in self-reliance. He looks at various types of home production, such as raising your own chickens, growing your own garden, or even switching to solar energy all cost money, and often those same products can be obtained commercially for less.

During the process of building their palace, I’ve thought about the money it took to get this done. As well as the ongoing costs of maintaining the small flock, and feeding them. Let me put it this way. You might get depressed to realize the ultimate cost per dozen eggs output compared to the money input!

Ken Jorgustin

I’ve noticed that with gardening. In both places we’ve lived our irrigation and gardening water comes from the same water as our culinary and hygienic water, and the cost can more than double during the summer months. Whatever money we save by growing our own vegetables is more than eaten up in the water, seeds, tools, and fertilizer needed to grow them. We ultimately decided it simply wasn’t worthwhile to try to grow our own potatoes in Idaho.

We also looked at solar power ourselves a few years ago and realized that in spite of what the salesman told us, the system would never pay for itself, even if the power company paid for any excess electricity we generated–which they stopped doing within a few years. While we would like to have been able to do more to reduce pollution and our own energy dependence we just couldn’t justify the expense.

It can all be enough to make you step back and wonder if it’s really worthwhile to take a different path. But, as Jorgustin explains, the answer will be different for everyone. For some people cost is the only consideration, and they’ll likely not bother with many self-reliance measures. For my wife and I, we find home-grown food is usually healthier and better tasting. What’s more, there may be rough times ahead–times when the stores won’t be able to get the stock they usually get. We may very well need to supplement our food supply from our own yard. In the middle of the crisis is not the time to be learning what grows and what doesn’t, or how to lay out your garden, your watering, etc. And as we’ve seen, the price of things can increase quickly when it’s in short supply.

A considerable part of self-reliance, and especially emergency preparedness, is not just having the things you need when things go wrong, but knowing what to do with them. Maybe not everything we can do we should do, but it is worthwhile to consider what things you want to be able to do. And sometimes it just feels good to do it.