Homesteading with a Planet on Fire

The role of hobby farming in a greater agricultural context

My grandfather was the type of farmer we imagine when we place farmers on a pedestal; he managed several acres of olives and grape vineyards on the Achilles heel that is the boot of Italy. He worked the land with pieced-together equipment, and the home my father was born in lurched into the hillside itself, a stone building more of the landscape than civilization.

A nondescript building built into the hillside where generations have been born before, including my father and his before him.

It was hard, thankless work; his harvests would be delivered to the cooperative, which operated as an intermediary between growers and processors. As a child, I stared at his thick, calloused hands, which had caused his fingers to swell and thicken in ways I always had associated as part of becoming a man. My father eventually shared those same traits, a rite of passage that I both feared and deeply revered.

My grandfather died young, by today’s standards, his body broken from the toll of the physical labor of farming and then working as a laborer in road construction when arriving here in the United States. His identity as a farmer never left; the postage stamp that was the house he spent most of his life in the United States residing within left little space to waste. The driveway was dressed in grape vines, and a massive apple tree shielded the northern side of the cape from the winds that cut through the neighborhood, which was largely two-family tenement homes. It was his sanctuary in the new world.

His shift towards subsistence farming from conventional agriculture was marked by an increased interest in specialty selections and cultivars; he grew heritage beans and tomatoes from seeds he had brought from Italy. The squash cucuzzi was one of his favorites to grow, and having glanced at the current world record for longest squash, I don’t doubt he likely should be in the books instead.

There were towers of vines everywhere in the garden.

We grew lupini beans, pressed grapes, and made jam and all of the conventional homesteading activities, partly to afford to raise eight children on one laborer’s salary and as a reminder of his roots. A reminder for his children of the land where they were born before America would fully take their identities. As the first generation born here in the United States, I watched the practices he had refined to their simplest forms. He shared his secrets, broken between two languages, broken between two worlds and three generations, secrets I didn’t fully understand or absorb or even fully comprehend. While I forgot most of what he taught me, I believe it was just as important to him, dying of cancer and his children busy feeding their children and chasing the American dream, to express his thoughts and processes— his philosophy and his hopes for his lineage. He worked through the garden, his hands running through the dirt and leaves with the smoothness of a nun’s fingers running across rosary beads

lupini fruiting.

When we boil down the philosophies around homesteading, we choose healthier food, healthier lifestyles, and a disdain for vapid, consumptive society. While homesteading has darker and messier roots that need reckoning, there’s invariably a kernel of truth to the concerns that homesteaders coalesce around— the way we live just isn’t working. The challenge, however, is that as I watched my grandfather, a man whose death carried the loss of agricultural knowledge of dozens of generations, he was no closer to ‘self-sufficiency’ than nearly every homesteader, including those with promises of feeding your family with a few hours of work a week. So what’s the point?

The three-headed beast of climate change, ecological collapse, and fascism leave those of us in this space at a unique crossroads. We can narrow this intersection by borrowing an idea uttered first by Russell Lord and later by Murray Bookchin— that ecological problems are, in fact, social problems. In other words, we cannot address fascism without also addressing ecological collapse, which we cannot address without also wrestling with the reality of climate change. These are all one and the same in many ways.

When we look at how the first two problems accelerate the latter, it’s no surprise then that it wasn’t until the German & English Industrial Revolutions of the late 18th and early 19th century which gave rise to the first inklings of fascism through the conservative movement, led by folks like Ernst Arndt and more (we’ve discussed the rise of the fascism movement in homesteading at length here, here, here, and here). The alienation of industrialism led to the rise of the reactionary politics that has plagued society since. That’s not to say extraction, exploitation, and destruction of ecological sites wholesale didn’t happen before— whether it was the Maya metropolises that demanded clearcutting of forests, which ultimately led to drought and collapse, or the folding of the Mesopotamian empire from land mismanagement— destruction and collapse have existed as long as humans have organized into civilizations.

Most of my summers as a kid were sitting beneath these grape vines.

Homesteading may be a response to increasing alienation, industrialization, and the extractive relationship of commodity society, but it’s not a solution, either. To my first point, even people with know-how struggle to do so, and that’s ignoring the massive input requirements of tools, fuel, and more. In short, if homesteading won’t solve our problems of ecological destruction and isn’t a tool to “unplug” from society, what does it offer us?

It's important to provide context to fully understand what we’re talking about. Without context, we drift untethered, without understanding how or why things are the way they are. In many ways, this is where homesteading falls flat. Our practices of growing food exist within a modern, globalized context, one that flattens our history and trades exotic fruits, roots, and vegetables like collector cards. This isn’t to say we cannot grow tomatoes, potatoes, or lettuce, but rather ask ourselves a better question: Why are we growing these plants, and what might be worth adding, considering where I live today?

But what makes sense? Asking for a lifeline without context is akin to asking for a key in a hotel with endless floors and rooms; the key is only as valuable as its potential. I hope to continue using this metaphor to help you find the right floor. There will be more questions than answers, but you’ll know which questions to ask and where to find those answers. While there are hundreds of books to tell you about square-foot gardening, raised bed gardens, straw bale gardening, food forests, and more, these prescriptive solutions leave little to tether the gardener to the context of their garden– the landscape and greater ecosystem around them, nor does it contextualize why and how the landscape once fed people for thousands of years.

To restore that relationship with the landscape, we will have to look beyond the borders of our property lines and reconsider what it means to grow food within a greater context alongside our friends and neighbors. If our ancestors grew food alongside the ecology and in the community, what lessons can we learn from those hard-learned practices and incorporate them into the way we grow food today?

When we choose to plant a garden, we choose to make a statement, whether we intend to or not. That statement acknowledges that our food must come from somewhere and that choosing one selection of tomato, potato, or lettuce over another means choosing the legacy of someone else’s work. We are, knowingly or not, tying ourselves into a greater narrative of that plant, of that selection or cultivar, and accounting for our own sustainability within our sights. This may mean losing space for our pets to run around or our perfectly manicured grass has ceded ground. It may mean an area of unmanaged weeds has been cleared for use. These decisions come with their own ramifications, from the bacteria and fungi in the soil to the entire food web that relies on their reciprocal relationship with the plants sprouting from that section of the earth. Our gardens come with consequences, positive and negative.

I think it’s worth acknowledging a few things before we go any further. The first is that there is zero evidence that backyard gardens have any meaningful impact on our global food production. What I mean by that is that your decision to grow food because you don’t want to contribute to the damaging ways food is mass-produced doesn’t have any consequence. Food production has not changed because of home gardens– at least not in places where these gardens aren’t normalized (I’m looking at you, Americans). The one hundred tomatoes you’ve produced have not reduced the amount of tomatoes produced by mass producers by a single tomato.

The second is that there is zero evidence that home gardens improve ecological function, again, in places where gardens aren’t a normal part of our cultural identity (ahem). I bring up this point because gardens are quite the opposite in places where gardens are part of cultural practice. For example, home gardens are hotbeds of biodiversity and ecological activity in much of Central America, South America, and Africa. In fact, they carry huge ecological and cultural importance in these regions, regardless of whether they are urban or rural.¹

So what’s the difference? Why are some home gardens incredibly ecologically valuable, and why are others not? It’s quite simple– and it’s the reason they’re also culturally significant. They’re part of a greater context. Their gardens are tied to a longer gardening history in these regions; the crops have often been selected from wild relatives in the region and, in many cases, are still considered wild plants or simply in the early stages of becoming domesticated. The plants have historical and cultural value to the gardeners. They pass on traditions and lessons about land management and identity. The gardens provide food and security for their owners and reinforce the health of the greater ecological community, creating a win-win-win situation; the ecology becomes a little bit more resilient, the stewards have better (physical & mental) health, and their stories and life-ways continue. These gardens and their cultural context are not isolated pockets but part of a greater community for humans and non-humans alike.

Homesteading offers a unique opportunity to reimagine our food system. I don’t mean in some “let’s imagine in some solarpunk utopia sense” but instead “how can we support important but not financially feasible initiatives?” What I mean is, “What does it look like to begin the early stages of breeding with historically important and new crops that are climate resilient and ecologically appropriate?” Instead of asking ourselves, “How do we make corn and wheat more resilient?” we should instead ask, “What meaningful, joyful work can we do in our own backyards that will showcase what a future diet might look like?”

We’re not naive— we’re not under any misunderstandings that this work will be slow, will lead to some dead ends, and will not produce materially significant crops in any near future. Our responsibility as land stewards is to improve the landscape, to support native ecologies under the bludgeon of climate change, and to offer respite for native diversity under our careful watch. We may be making simple changes or complex ones. This might be as simple as choosing mountain mint over spearmint in the garden— it may be as complex as developing polycultures of native crops and proto-crops under an open canopy of native trees.

So, what is the role of homesteaders in the early stages of climate, ecological, and economic collapse? It is to provide sanctuary—not to us but to the ecology and future generations. It is to sift through what exists and separate the seed from the chaff. It’s to build a foundation for future systems, for new knowledge, and to rebuild the knowledge lost in a new context, one that carries more weight with every decision made, simply because the ecology demands it— we’ve already stressed the ecological system to its limit, and the luxury of choosing to ignore these issues in our gardens is now gone.²

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t grow tomatoes, lettuce, or kale. What I’m asking instead is to find ways we can integrate native plants into these gardens and ways we can begin the very complex challenge of shifting what the food we desire looks like for the sake of future generations. Like any other new challenge, cold turkey won’t work. If you enjoy walnuts— try black walnuts. Try one new native crop a season. Learn its nuances and how it reacts to different processing and cooking methods. How can we better understand the ways in which we can substitute sumac for lemon? How can we honor the history of these plants on the landscape and make it so that our ways of living demand that they continue to exist on the landscape? How do we make our landscape's flavor reflect our palate's desires in new and exciting ways?

There are more questions than answers here, and that’s a good thing—it means there are infinite ways for you to engage with how we build a better future. But the first step is to learn the landscape around you.

Grow food, take a hike. Embed yourself within the greater ecosystem and find your niche.

1. Galluzzi, G., Eyzaguirre, P. & Negri, V. Home gardens: neglected hotspots of agro-biodiversity and cultural diversity. Biodivers Conserv 19, 3635–3654 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-010-9919-5

2. See basically any Doug Tallamy book or research paper.