Finding land with a good source of water is essential.  Whether it is spring, creek, rain or well, without your own water supply you and your loved ones will be at the mercy of the Beast. 

 If land does not have water, do not try to rationalize how you can make it work. Unless you are prepared to spend a tremendous amount of money on finding, developing, and maintaining a substandard well, move on to the next property on your list.

If the land does have water, how do you plan to extract the water? Will you select a hand pump or an electric pump? Will you be using solar? Do you know the difference?

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Once extracted, how do you plan to filter and purify the water to use for drinking, cooking, bathing, and general cleaning purposes? Bottled water is nice, but eventually you will not be able to buy it.

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A soil test is extremely important to determine what amendments you may have to add to make your soil appropriate for growing your food.  Food is essential and growing your own can not be overemphasized.  If soil has a lot of rocks, consider how long it will take you to have rocks enough of them removed from the area that you intend to plant in to make it worth your while.  While using hay can improve you soil and compensate for the rocks, that can take 2-3 years to happen, and you will need quite a bit of hay. If you purchase a piece of land that is rocky, you will have to purchase hay that takes approximately a year to decompose.  This will help your soil texture, color, and build up to reduce the impact of rocks in your soil, but, since time is not on our side, consider your options and look at another property. Also, planting trees is essential as well, most fruit trees take ~2-3 years to produce fruit. If your land does not already have trees, plant them as soon as you make a purchase. Poor soil will also impact the time frame for tree growth.

Look to see how approximately many trees are on the property.  Trees will be your source of fuel for heating and also cooking.  You will need to have hardwoods (Oak, Hickory, Elm, Beech, and Ash) to insure that you can properly keep your family warm during late fall and the winter months. 

Trees are a crop in and of themselves.  Just as you plan your garden from year to year, having a plan for how you will harvest your trees is important as well. Most hardwoods take 1-3 years to reach the optimum 15% humidity ratio.  This means that in order for a tree to produce the maximum BTUs, it must have the lowest possible moisture content.  Too much moisture and most of your fire will be spent heating wet or moist wood.

Proper storage of wood is parampount to your surviving a cold winter.