I don’t think I’d have the stomach to use human shit for fertilizer lol but I will read about it and maybe they can convince me
the author IS from PA himself, and yes, he will convince you. off the grid means nothing goes to waste. everything is recycled/reused. the less technologic crap, the better, because an EMP will render all of it useless (unless you properly insulate it and take other precautions, but who knows the extent of black government projects).
once you narrow down the plot choices for your, youll have to walk the entire piece. pay VERY close attention to what is growing where. every plant is growing in a location fo a reason-- if you have a open field, just looking at what is growing (and NOT growing) can tell you everything you need to know about soil fertility, pH, and soil moisture. this will determine where you may want to plant certain things.
the house location: situate the house in a spot that gives you a good view of the property and ideally is in a more centralized location (if possible). youll be splitting the land up into zones 1-4. zone 1, around the house, will naturally have the most attention. zone 4 will be visited the least frequent, and thats usually reserved for cutting firewood or as a buffer zone from a neighbor. the trick is to keep the plants and animals at a distance from your house so that you dont have a lot of extra walking and moving to do. garden and chickens, for example, will be zone 1. zone 2 is fruit trees.
if youre going to have sheep or cows, youll situate the house in one spot (ideally-- depends on the land) and have radial spokes for paddocks as you move them from one grazing paddock to the next until they come full circle where the grass has grown back again. in the center of the circle will be your milking station, so you can just herd them in for milking and then usher them back into their paddock. itll save a lot of time giving them water, as well. each cow will need about an acre of grassland thats rotated. if you go with a good foraging breed (jerseys or guernseys), you dont need 100% grassland for them. they can forage and eat tree leaves and weeds.
having a pond would be a very good idea, so you ought to bring in a track hoe and dig one or two. aside from the aestetics and wildlife habitat, youll be able to catch fish and youll attract ducks and geese (or have a place for keeping them, although they dont need it, theyre much happier with a place to swim). you can also harvest cattails in a food shortage. i remember reading a bill mollison book (permaculture guy) where he designed ponds with lots of peninsulas for more coastline and had trellises for grapes (you can do hardy kiwi, too) hanging over, so that the person on the canoe/boat harvested them easily. he also integrated it with pigs, where the pigs would walk up a ramp to eat some of the fruit and then poop into the pond and the fish would eat it.
if you can locate the pond up on a higher elevation, you can gravity feed water down to your house/barn/buildings. you can forget about that hand pump well watering something up on a hill.
if you have a fast moving stream, you can capture the water and air mixture in a large steel tank/cylinder and purge out the water, leaving highly pressurized air inside. with a little work, you can run pipes down to the house filled with this pressurized air and either power pneumatic tools or open up a valve in the house and have very cold air in the hotter months (might not apply to north PA). its regular air, so its not explosive, of course.
wherever you decide, you ought to take a VERY good look around and see what the neighbors are growing and raising. thatll be the majority of what youll be doing, because what theyre doing is tried and tested and those animals/plants are well adapted for that location. theres no sense in reinventing the wheel experimenting with too much exotic stuff (although you will be adding in things (aronia, schisandra, etc.) that will grow in that hardiness zone, yet the locals probably arent hip to it.
