I Grew Up Living Off the Land. That's Why I Built GoOffGrid.
By Tyler Robinson ·
I remember going through a phase when I was little where I’d wake up and run to the garden to check on the carrots. I'd pull one out to see how much it had grown overnight, and cover it up again. I did this for weeks. Nobody told me that pulling out a carrot to check on it every day is how you keep a carrot from ever becoming one. I just wanted to watch it grow. I think I was already curious, even that young, about how the land and the food and the people living on it were all part of one thing.
I grew up on Kauaʻi. Our house was a one-bedroom A-frame my dad built. We didn't have much money, so we used whatever we could get our hands on. One of my favourite parts of the house was the hardwood floors which were old bowling alley lanes he had salvaged. The house was where you slept. Everything else happened outside. The forest, the river, and the ocean were better than any big house with all the rooms in the world.
We grew our food and raised chickens. I learned to forage what was in season and to read the ocean. The people who taught me most weren't blood. On Kauaʻi you call almost everyone close to you auntie or uncle, and mine taught me how to spearfish, how to move over coral without tearing it up, how to listen to the land. The Hawaiians in my life taught me the language of the land. ʻĀina, the word for land, means "that which feeds." Mālama ʻāina means to care for it. It is a simple idea but it shaped me early in life. The land feeds you, so you take care of it. You belong to it as much as it belongs to you.
We moved to the city when I was older. There were jobs there, and better schools for my brother and me, and those are important things. But the hardest part was saying goodbye to the people who had become family, and how far from the land I suddenly felt.
I have spent a lot of years since then trying to find my way back. I want to grow my own food again and make my own power from the sun. I want to live somewhere where if we end up with too many avocados, I can walk a bag of them down to a neighbor, and maybe they have sweet potatoes to spare. If I am lucky enough to have kids, I want their classroom to be a mango tree and a tide pool, the way mine was.
What surprised me is how much of getting there is math. To live with the land you have to understand the land: what it can hold, what it can grow, whether it has the water to get you through a dry season. I found I had been doing this by instinct on every property listing I opened, running the numbers in my head as I read the description and looked at the photos.
One of them was a parcel in Northern California. It was beautiful in the photos but it told me almost nothing I needed to know. How much rain falls there in a year, enough to catch and store? Is rainwater capture even legal on that land? Which way does the slope face, and what does that do to the solar I would depend on? Will the soil actually grow food? The answers were out there, scattered across government databases but even once you found them, you still had to know how to interpret the information for a homestead. It was hours of work to half-answer a question I should have been able to ask in a minute.
So I built the thing I wished I'd had. At first only for me, a way to point at a piece of land and get a read on whether it could support the life I'm after. Then it occurred to me that I'm probably not the only one to need something like this. If you have ever looked at a listing and felt that pull toward a homestead life, or just a quieter one, then run into how hard it is to know anything real about the dirt under the price, this is for you too.
When I picture myself back on the land, what I feel mostly is quiet. Less noise, less speed, less of my attention going to things that won't matter in a year. I also want more of my life in my own hands. Food I grew instead of food I drove to the store for. Power I made from the sun instead of fuel shipped in from far away. That self-sufficiency is the best kind of freedom.
Mālama ʻāina, the Hawaiians who taught me would say. Care for the land that feeds you. That is hard to do with land you can't understand. GoOffGrid started as my own way to learn about a piece of land before I invest in it, and I'm sharing it in case it's helpful for you too.