That's when things will get interesting.

There is a reason why my farming ancestors had huge families. You bring together enough families with 8+ kids each and pretty soon you've got enough hands for all the work that needs to be done, day care & schooling for the younger kids, a wide selection of crops between the group, and a group sufficiently large to rotate the night watch.

I'm rural too. We moved to SW MO in '04, rats fleeing a sinking CA RE market and ultimately an oil induced depression. We looked all over the US and decided on the Ozark plateau mainly for distance from big city, low cost, 45" of rain and 200 growing days/yr.

Like I said in the Urban thread, my WAG is the biggest threat is economic, and since you can get by in the country with little money if you own your land that's our plan. So my first rule is Don't Buy! Really, getting used to not running to the store is surprisingly hard even if you are frugal DIYers like we've always been.

Of course along with don't buy is don't borrow but also you gotta look at the other side of the ledger, Don't Specialize. Again this is opposite of the city where the more you specialize the more you earn. If you are a specialist in the country you are really just a suburbanite with a longer than average commute. I do freelance print graphics - Desk Top Publishing, as my main "job". Our secondary income (some years our primary) is raising bottle calves. I also do some outside feeding and chores at a neighboring dairy a couple of hours a day and when things are really slow I try to scrounge up some handiman type jobs, building/repairing furniture, chicken coops and whatever. My hourly can go anywhere from $7/hour or less to $100/hour depending on which hat but the best part is the hats aren't anything alike.

Raising bottle calves is a good way to earn some dollars on a small property. We have 40 acres of pretty deep topsoil so we can grow pretty well anything we want but grass is the least hard on the land. I plant oats as a nurse crop over alfalfa which I leave it for 3-4 years then winter wheat/corn for a season, then to grass for 4-5 years.

The main advantage to being rural is you are not forced to be dependent on public infrastructure and in turn aren't required to make a big cash income. Of course you always need some cash and it can be hard to come by. The other thing about living a frugal life in the sticks is you really need the want-to and the aptitude, if you don't know how to swing a hammer and straighten a nail, thread a pipe or patch a roof maybe it would be best to stay in town.

Oh, and the whole Barefooted And Starving Soccer Moms from Hell raiding my punkin patch is just some more silliness. Yes a group of desperadoes could come by some morning and gun me down while I drink my coffee. Not surprisingly I've heard the same story on every BBS since I bought my first 1200k modem 20 years ago when we lived i the Sierra Nevadas - obviously I ain't dead yet. On the other hand I haven't had a Regular Job in about the same period of time and never look over my shoulder at night.

Some more food for thought,

I'm fairly rural being miles from several small cities. I've enjoyed reading the fantesys of living off the land and mostly agree with the ecology proposed. That is, the humans will die off from deprivation and the wild species will reestablish and stableize their populations. The humans who are prepared; smart AND lucky will probably decend into a wild west type of existence.

Heres the rub. Life expectancy will probably dive into the teens IF the human race is lucky. Remember the TV series "Life After People" or something like that? I don't ever remember them dealing with the consequences of all the failing Nuclear Power Plants together with the commercial, military, research and other Nuclear Reactors together with the Nuclear Waste sites and ALL THE WEAPONS DUMPS. All of these are going to require millenia of constant maintenance by someone (highly skilled) just to contain their deadly contents. Of course this is not going to happen because of the dependance of the Nuclear Industry on the Petroleum Industry. One by one, the Nukes will release their deadly radiological poisons into the atmosphere, surface and underground. This is inevitable. The closer one lives to the source, the more merciful their death. Eventually the whole of former civilization will be exposed to [life shortening] radioactive contamination and evolution will be reset.

Before Video stores go the way of the dinosaur and mastodon, rent "ON THE BEACH" (both editions) and "THE ROAD". Then it will become obvious why you need not waste your money on more than one bullet per person in your homestead.

The Nuclear Industry has created a Global "Kill Switch". Lose control of it for a moment and there will be NO going back to nature.