Making Peace with the Word Homesteading
On Being a Homestead Curmudgeon.
I believe it was January of 2022 that I decided I wasn’t a homesteader. I decided this while standing in the feed room of my barn getting ready to feed the goats, sheep, and horses. I’m sure I had to walk past my ducks on the way to the barn as well. You see, my ducks like to try to convince me that they are starving and demand to be fed every time I see them. They come running if they hear their humans. Never mind that they have a half-acre pond filled with frogs and unlimited field and pasture. They suffer! But ducks, dairy goats, sheep, and horses are homesteader things, so why did I decide I wasn’t a homesteader?
There was a whole series of events that led to me making this decision in my barn and seeing rat poo on my barn window ledge was the proverbial nail in the coffin. I was recovering from Covid and still deep in the Covid brain fog. Livestock does not regard if you are sick or not- they have to be fed and watered and stalls have to be cleaned every day, no matter how you are feeling or what you are going through in life. I was slogging out to the barn at least six times every day in 34 degree rain. I couldn’t do my barn chores in the typical two or three times a day because I was so exhausted from Covid. And then I saw the rat poo.
What type of person has rat poo in their barn? Seriously, what kind of person am I to have rat poo in my barn?
Now the reality is, if you have a barn in the Pacific Wet West, chances are you have rat poo in your barn, and I don’t care how rich you are and how above rat poo you think you are. I live on the liminal space between forest and field and this is where the wood rats love to roam. Wood rats poo and I had a wood rat on my window ledge who did just that.
But what does rat poo have to do with homesteading?
In 2021 I started a blog for our brand new Mossygoat Farm website. At the time we were still figuring out a solid way to produce solid income for the farm, and I knew blogging could increase our SEO on our website. At this point in my life, I had never heard of homesteading. Maybe I had but I really never paid that much attention. As soon as I found out about this whole community, I felt kinship. I started blogging about homesteading and sharing recipes as well as holistic livestock and horse keeping tips. These were my people!
Except these people don’t have rat poo on the window ledges of their barn.
On that fateful Covid brain fog filled day, I was thinking about how Mossygoat Farm isn’t self-sufficient. We still go to the grocery store once a week like normal people. I barely canned anything in 2020 due to it being 2020. We were in-between having animals to slaughter so we didn’t have a freezer full of meat. And to top it all off, I had rat poo in my barn.
Clearly, I was a homesteading failure and wasn’t homesteader enough for the homesteader club.
Eventually my brain fog lessened, and I began to think clearly again but being disillusioned with the homesteading world never left me. I began seeing things that didn’t settle with me. I saw a homestead blog list minks as a North American marsupial. I read homestead horse keeping advice that was just plain wrong and misinformed. A big-name homestead Instagram influencer was talking about dry canning meat. There was so much wrong, and even downright dangerous, information coming from internet “homesteaders” that I instinctually wanted to distance myself from these people. Do not dry can meat people! Just…do not. And no, a mink is not a marsupial, the only native American marsupial is the Opossum.
I began to see the whole homesteader community as a pyramid scheme where the only way to make money homesteading is to create content about homesteading to lure other homesteaders in. I will talk about this in my next essay “Selling You Reality” which I wrote in May of ‘22 after the brain fog was fully gone. I was so curmudgeonly about homesteading, and still am, that I considered calling this newsletter The Homestead Curmudgeon.
I started calling things everything but homesteading:
Wild Wisdom
Rural Wisdom
Country Dweller
Agrarian Living
Seasonal Living
Making a Home in Nature
The list could go on, you get the point I’m sure.
And now fast forward to 2026 when even some big-name people in the community are stepping away from the word homesteading. Homesteading also has largely been politicized so if you admit to pulling weeds people assume you are standing there in your garden packing at least 3 guns and 6 knives wearing a MAGA hat.
How? How did we get here?
I bought my 20 acres because I wanted my horses with me and I was tired of boarding them. Boarding barns in this area are always so drama filled, and the horsemanship tends to be atrocious. I had no grand plans of being self-sufficient or anti-government sentiments or anything of the ilk. Initially, I just wanted to live with my horses and eleven years later, I just want to live with my horses, sheep and goats, raise meat that isn’t tainted, and produce wool pellets.
So, why am I using the word homesteading again if I am so anti-homesteader? The reason is because it’s so politicized. I live in Western Oregon, which is what I will call hyperpoliticized. Every.single.thing.is.political. Everything. And I mean everything.
An event happened at a fiber festival that shook me to my core in all the worst ways. I was not there, but I got the gist from social media and saw the fallout. The gist is that this fiber festival coincided with a No Kings Protest and some vendors were giving financial bonuses to those who participated. The fiber festival said no, please don’t do that because this is not a political fiber festival. The response of the vendors was telling the fiber festival that by not being political that you are being political and siding with a fascist regime.
This is ridiculous people. I refuse to participate. (Picture is from the movie The Darjeeling Limited and is roughly what is happening in my head as I say this)
It’s time we take homesteading back from the influencers and media who led this lifestyle so astray. It’s time we give homesteading back to the people who live with the land instead of those who live online. It’s time we start talking about what homesteading really looks like when you separate it from any politics or aesthetic. It’s time we start focusing on real factual information and not just parroting what other people have to say. It’s time we stop inventing crap (like dry-canning meat) just so it appears that you have something new or controversial to say.
Homesteading used to be called homemaking, back to the land, country living, hobby farming, subsistence farming, or a whole host of other names based on why you were living that way. Really, homesteading should just be called life. I personally chose to live my life with horses and sheep and apparently that makes me a homesteader. So be it.
If you ask me in real life if I am a homesteader, I will say no. But I think I have enough knowledge to add to the homesteading conversation to help steer it in a different direction, a human direction, and one based on the land and the animals we care for. Now, more than ever, is the perfect time to start living with the land and making a home in nature. My goal is to keep wild & rural wisdom alive in the age of technology. Most people call this homesteading. I’m finally at peace with that word. Let me say it again.
Homesteading.
Welcome to the Wildstead. If you enjoyed reading, please subscribe or consider buying me a cup of coffee (or a bale of hay). I appreciate you.