Last weekend I enjoyed speaking at the second Homestead Festival in Columbia, Tennessee, hosted at Rory Feek’s farm.  The first year, last year, they had about 4,000 and 100 vendors.  This year, they had nearly 5,000 and 160 vendors.  Rory said he thought they could handle 7,000 at max.  Maybe they’ll hit that next year.

            I did a chicken butchering demonstration with David Schafer of Featherman Plucker fame and he asked the crowd of 300-plus assembled to watch us:  “How many of you wanted to be homesteaders when you were a teenager?”  I counted three hands.

            That’s astounding.  What it means is that this current homestead tsunami is a later-life phenomenon.  In general, it comes after marriage and kids.  It also comes after two things become painfully apparent:

            1.  City jobs/careers aren’t as fulfilling as school guidance counselors and job fair recruiters promised.

            2.  With additional responsibility and life experience common sense and wisdom breaking down our willingness to trust and depend on supposedly sacrosanct institutions. 

            These 30-something and 40-something homesteaders largely come to a point in life where they abandon the narratives fed to them by orthodox institutional experts and counselors during their formative years.  Gradually, they want to disentangle instead of embrace.  They want basic participation instead of withdrawal and convenience.  They want resilience instead of efficiency.

            It makes me wonder when the lights will go on for the current teenagers, growing up on TikTok and more violent, absurd video games than today’s 40-somethings imagined.  If it took that long to recognize mainstream fallacy for the previous generation, how long will it take now?

            When I asked the group: “How many of you have never butchered a chicken before?” about half the hands went up.  This is delightfully heartening to an old war horse like me, waiting for folks to embrace participation.  How wonderful that this festival provided a platform to empower folks to get in on life’s foundation game.  They just need a bit of coaching.

            I’m delighted with this new interest in self-sufficiency.  I hope it’s a wave that continues throughout the culture, creating new infrastructure businesses and defunding Coca-Cola, Velveeta, Lunchables and Hot Pockets.  Bring it on.  As David Schafer says, “we need as many backyard chicken pluckers as lawnmowers.”  Amen.

            What was your “come to homesteading” moment?