Hi All, I'm moving to rural France next year into an old farmhouse and setting up an off grid and as self sufficient as possible farmstead. Cant wait!!

Look forward to pictures and extracts on your journey

Great - all the best.

Quite a few here in Aus.... my mate has a 10 acre property about 100k's north of Melbourne (Euroa actually) that is totally off grid. No water supply, no Electricity.... He's built a massive couple of dams and also his own sewage system.... runs it with 1500kw of solar so far, but has out buildings for his kids with their own independent power supply. It's more of a weekender and a retirement project for 15 years time... I go there quite a bit. I'd say using machinery as much as you can is vital for getting yourself up and running on what I've seen. He managed to get a old massive bulldozer shipped from his family farm 3000K away in WA and thats been vital for making his land viable... in fact he illegally managed to steer all the water from the roadway onto his property and into his dams .... His got an overflow back into the road drainage system.

It would be very difficult to turn the land here into arable land though, as its very ancient compressed stuff... more like rock than soil really..... Only thing you can do is prepare very small parts at a time and add organic matter... not that he is interested in growing anything except for trees at present... I've got him onto Canary Island date palms as they are used as ornamentals, by councils, resorts, housing estates and golf courses here and if you have easy access can be sold for 400 dollars per meter height.... they'll grow in hot arid conditions as well.

Straw bale gardening could be a way of getting started with little effort and making excellent mulch... could be dosh in preparing worm farms as well.

The off grid is the easy part really.

Welcome to the forum

I trust that you have found the France section of the forum already? If you have not, then just shout and we will point you in the right direction. That's the best place for you to post and natter with others in France.

Hope it all works out.

I live in an old farmhouse and pretty much 'off grid' (although not intentionally - we never set out to do so!) in the UK, so wish you the best of luck with it.

Hope it goes well.

Good Luck to your journey
It would be great if you can share
with us your experience when you got there