Benefits of Homesteading

If you want to live a more self-sufficient life, you should consider becoming a homesteader. It can help you cut costs, be more environmentally sustainable and live closer to nature.

Homesteading can also bring your family closer together. It can allow you to spend more time with your loved ones and work side-by-side without the distraction of a busy life.

If you’re in the farming world and your phone algorithm is paying attention, then at some point you have probably been guided via articles or recommended reading suggestions into the “homesteading corner” of the internet.

It is a fascinating place to be, y’all.

There are videos, photos, reels, YouTube tutorials and TikTok personalities that all revolve around content focused on getting away from the conveniences of modern life, the grid and the “industrialized system” (which is then, ironically, posted on the internet).

According to Wikipedia, “Modern-day homesteading is a lifestyle of self-sufficiency. It is characterized by subsistence agriculture, home preservation of food, and may also involve the small-scale production of textiles, clothing and craft work for household use or sale.”

Happihomemade.com says, “The whole idea of modern homesteading comes from people’s desire to reconnect with their food source and live a more self-sufficient lifestyle. You don’t have to own a big piece of land, or raise your own animals to be a homesteader. You must simply have a desire to live more simply!”

Sounds familiar, right? So, is a farm a homestead? Is a homestead a farm?

It can be, but also, it can be different.

Additionally, there are “degrees” of homesteading, or as some say, “levels of crunchiness.”

Jason Strange, author of the book, “Shelter from the Machine: Homesteaders in the Age of Capitalism,” said in the article, “Homesteading: The Old Practice Makes a Comeback During Pandemic,” that he grew up around homesteading and has spent years researching it.

“Homesteading is a hard thing to define,” Strange said. “It’s one of those things where there’s a whole range of folks that homestead. Some have a little backyard garden, and others built their own house and have a big garden and grow all their own food. There are people who have definitely engaged in homesteading even if they haven’t gone whole-hog into it. Some homesteaders would disagree; they think you have to really go for it. But the only definition I could come up with that made sense is one where it’s just sort of degrees of engagement. That’s what you actually see people doing. There’s a whole range of things.”

So, normal things that you might find being done on a farm, like a compost pile, a garden, a few chickens for fresh eggs, pickling and canning are considered homesteading. Mention those activities to any self-avowed homesteader and they are going to wholeheartedly agree.

On the flip side though, other normal things that might be done on the farm — such as spraying for bugs or weeds, planting hundreds of acres of corn or wheat, and using modern-day precision ag — those are things that most homesteaders would agree do not jive with the homesteading lifestyle.

While the original homesteaders were farmers (see the Homestead Act of 1862), through improvements in technology that have been adapted onto the farm, farmers are now considered to be doing farming that is too advanced to fit the modern-day homesteaders’ desire to return to “simplicity.” Isn’t it ironic?

I watch these homesteading folks with fascination because half of me wants to dive right in there with them.

Bake my own bread? Yes, I do that! But only when I have some extra time, which is like, maybe a dozen times a year, certainly not weekly.

Compost? Sure, that’s easy. Check!

Thrift or buy second-hand? I love doing that! But only if I have the time to drive around and look in thrift stores for what I need. Otherwise, Amazon Prime will have it here tomorrow when I really need it.

Grow (some) of our own food? Yes, we can do that! But, between the farms, both full-time jobs and the family, we have the bandwidth to grow exactly three vegetables in any given year.

And, this is where the homesteading lifestyle breaks down for me. While I want to do all these good and wholesome things … who has the time for this? I am not asking ironically or sarcastically — I promise that this is a genuinely heartfelt question.

These homesteading activities are more homegrown and homemade, and while they are simple in their end product perhaps, they are not simple in execution. They take a commodity that the world demands of us that we can’t regenerate, and that’s “time.”

Time, unfortunately, is money in a lot of instances, and I have bills to pay. No matter how far from the U.S. capital your farm is, living is not cheap, and here we have to work for an income, on and off the farm. I mean, I do love my job, but it’s not just a passion project, it’s also a necessity.

It takes two incomes and two people to run our tiny household, pay the bills, clean, grocery shop, cook, maintain the yard, and do all the other things needed to decently survive, and at the end of the day, who has time for homesteading? For consistently making our own bread, and our own candles, and our own aprons, and socks, and scarves? Who are all these homesteading women online? Are they stay-at-home wives, or do they have careers that allow them flexibility to be at home with enough time to plant organic vegetables and hand-make shirts?

It is ironic, again, that what is supposed to be a return to simplicity seems to me like an actual luxury.

I guess I will just keep ogling walk-in pantries. My tiny cottage house has a shelf above the washer-dryer, housed in the closet that operates as our pantry (no walk-in pantries with custom-built shelves here) full of perfectly symmetrical jars of canned goods, catching the light just so on Instagram, while I wait for the 90-second rice to cook in the microwave and continue to wonder.

Source: lancasterfarming.com