BuffaloOn Warren Pond On Warren Pond Farm near Ithaca, N.Y., aims to use alternative energy and employ environmentally friendly farming practices. They also raise buffalo.

When the economy began tumbling last fall, I immediately thought of Jill Swenson.

Jill is a friend and former college professor who, in 2002, quit her appointment teaching journalism at Ithaca College to become, along with her partner, Sam Warren, a full-time organic farmer and self-sufficient producer of power.

Over the years, Jill has kept in touch with handwritten updates on yellow-lined paper. The letters read like a farmer’s log: She described her harvest and listed the names of her newborn animals. She related how the couple subsisted on food secured by their own hands — from deer to pigs to eggs. And she sometimes wrote about Sam’s tinkering with the homegrown utilities that keep them at least partially off the grid: a gravity-fed well for water and an electric system powered by two windmills, the sun and water.

“I knew too much about the world,” Jill told me on a recent visit to the couple’s spread near Ithaca, N.Y., which they call On Warren Pond. “The more I knew, the more I wanted to control my own life,” she said.

Inside their modest cabin, which does boast some modern indulgences, including an old television and a telephone, the couple watched the evening news — laughing at a story on the stock market. “We watch the news for the weather report,” Jill said. “That is our stock market.”

Estimates on the number of people who are living either partially or wholly “off the grid” are, for obvious reasons, a bit hard to come by. The two most frequently quoted sources are Home Power Magazine, which estimated in 2006 that about 180,000 households were running on their own power; and William Kemp, the author of “The Renewable Energy Handbook,” who says the number is closer to 250,000.

Of course, that’s just a fraction of the more than 100 million households in the United States, but the number of off-grid aspirants — or at least the merely curious — is surely growing.

On Warren Pond is a three-generation family estate in Upstate New York that has been transformed into a self-sufficient farming operation — and a modest tourist attraction. Jill visits the public library every month to update a Web site she created that advertises the three cabins Sam built to host agro-tourists.

Other income is derived from the selling of animals, and from crops like yellow beans and beets, or herbs like thyme and mint. The couple spends about $600 a month, which covers their phone bill, farm insurance, and dog food for their Dalmatians.

To those Americans struggling with suffocating mortgages, wildly fluctuating fuel bills and other burdens of modern times, that might sound refreshingly simple. But neither Jill, 50, nor Sam, 57, have health insurance. (When I asked what they’ll do if they get really sick, Jill laughed. “We’ll die,” she said.)

Jill’s pension from her college career has also declined considerably. Recently, she broke with the couple’s no-debt ethos and purchased a car, to make it easier to sell her vegetables in town. Gas prices, she said, are a consistent burden.

Still, the couple has no regrets. “Why would anyone want to owe something?” asked Sam. “Don’t make no sense to me.”

This article originally published at:  http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/amid-hard-times-a-view-from-off-the-grid/