I’m thrilled and grateful to announce that we finally have my newest book, HOMESTEAD TSUNAMI: Good for Country, Critters, and Kids, in hand and ready to go.

I’ll sign the first 1,000 and we’re running a $5 off until October 1.  It will not be released to Amazon until Jan. 1.  Cover price is $30.

Here is the preface, just to offer a taste of what the book is about.  Thank you for sharing the heart of this movement.

America is undergoing a profound homestead tsunami.  Families are pouring out of cities seeking small acreages in the country.  Podcasts speaking into this space have hundreds of thousands of followers.
Homestead conferences now fill my speaking schedule, and they’re all over the country.  You can find a homestead conference to attend virtually every month of the year.  In the last couple of years, a steady stream of visitors, many in rented motor homes, have stopped at our farm to walk our fields and dream.  Their most common reason: “we’re escaping and heading for the country.  We don’t know where we’ll land, but we’re getting out.”

A shaky economy, crime-ridden cities, fragile supply chains, empty supermarket shelves, increasingly invasive government regulations, dysfunctional mental health, kids addicted to social media—all these things make thinking people want to disentangle from the system.  Stalwart American institutions, both public and private, are no longer trustworthy.  Corruption, cronyism, and crisis screams from media headlines—or gets censored.

Wanting out when you feel chased and strangled is a strong incentive.  An even stronger incentive is wanting something better.  Wanting out and wanting in are two sides of the same coin.  You can’t flee without something to embrace.  Obviously if you want out, the question is: where will you go?  What are you going to do?  You can’t leave without going somewhere.  You can’t escape without a safe haven.

In 2020, 1 million backyard flocks of laying chickens germinated in America.  Think of that.  Assuming an average of six birds per flock, that’s 6 million chickens.  If they laid only 50 percent, that’s 3 million eggs per day, or 250 thousand dozen.  In a country of 100 million households, that’s enough eggs to supply a dozen a week to a quarter of the nation’s households.  That doesn’t seem like much, unless you’re the only family with eggs.  Or the family that can eat eggs for $2 a dozen when the stores charge $7.

In 2020, seed companies sold out.  Canning lid inventories vanished.  The number one Googled recipe in October 2020 was how to make sourdough bread.  When the foundations of society crack, from political corruption to social media contamination, more and more people want to return to sanity and simplicity.  Most people share a deep intuitive belief that if things go down, they don’t want to be stuck in the city.

Throughout history, disintegrating societies de-urbanize as people head for the hills. As society collapses, you want to be near creeks, springs, trees, fields, wildlife (to eat when things get really tough) and away from attractive targets for bad guys, be they domestic or foreign.  In especially dire circumstances, the countryside offers caves and coves in which to hide and disappear from chaos. Under political tyranny or social pressure, families who espouse non-mainstream beliefs and who want to protect their children from indoctrination seek solace in country solitude.

To be sure, not everyone can move to the country right now.  Fortunately, we’ve never had as many gadgets and tools to grow things in the urban sector.  I applaud every effort to engage with self-reliant living in the city.  This book is not disrespectful to folks who, for whatever reason, opt to stay in urban settings.  And I’m certainly not under any illusion that this book will suddenly collapse our cities.  My whole objective is to offer reasons to make a change.  Most won’t.  But some can and should.

Seeing the handwriting on the wall, many of us sense a historic inflection point in the world.  When we see the World Economic Forum agenda, we tremble.  This agenda is not a friendly agenda toward freedom and personal opportunity.  Tracking your every move.  No private property ownership. Government intervention in every aspect of life. People being fired from their jobs for not getting the COVID jab.  Fake meat.  Fake money.  Defund the police.  Teen depression and suicide. We can list plenty of things to be concerned about, even to be angry about.  

This book is about taking all that frustration and anger and turning it from negative energy into inspiring positive energy.  The objective is clear:  when society becomes hopeless and helpless, some of us who build an ark will provide hope and help.  We’ll offer havens of protection and nourishment to lead our culture into stable families, fertile soil, nourishing food, working faith, and overall health.

Many families have already taken the plunge.  They’ve invested in a homestead and are now in the throes of learning about chickens, weeds, and tomatoes.  Many others are watching YouTube videos, listening to podcasts, and having long discussions deep into the night about whether they should pull up stakes and head for the hills.  Others want to make a change but friends and family deride them, telling them they can’t have a decent future living out with cows and pigs, beyond pizza delivery.

I’m writing this book to three groups of people.
1. The folks teetering on the precipice, trying to decide whether to jump.
2. The folks who jumped a year or two ago and are now discouraged because their visions of happy animals and flourishing vegetables turned into wayward critters and wilting cucumbers.
3. The folks who think all of this fleeing talk is nonsense.  America is a land of plenty; why do you think things could go downhill?  We’ve always been on top of the world. Live conveniently, and all will be well.

As I write, I imagine a representative of each of these three people sitting across the desk from me.  Throughout the book, you’ll see me address one of these people particularly from time to time.  I’m trying to keep eye contact, make sure nobody misses the point, and bring the discussion along with relevance and clarity.

Homesteaders aren’t normal.  They don’t whine; they get going.  They don’t wait for someone else; they take leadership.  They don’t compete; they share.  They’re interested in anything that makes life more self-reliant and independent from nefarious agendas.  For the most part, they’re enjoyable and productive neighbors.

Homesteaders don’t buy fashion magazines; they buy journals that explain root cellars and herbal therapies.  They don’t go to movies; they build campfires by the pond and watch the moon rise on summer nights.  They don’t watch TV all evening; they can tomatoes and chase fireflies in the meadow.  They don’t spend all day playing video games; they gather eggs and fill their nostrils with the sweet aroma of fresh hay.

A couple of years ago, after being besieged by questions about raising livestock on a small scale, I wrote POLYFACE MICRO:  Success with Livestock on a Homestead Scale.  That was my how-to contribution to this wonderful movement.  Since then, the movement trickle has turned into a tsunami.  The first responders didn’t need a lot of prodding.  They’d always thought this way, and circumstances convened to push them over the edge.  But the next wave mostly is coming with fewer roots in the thinking and foundation of homesteading.

These newcomers need a why.  Many have zero rural experience, connections, or history.  For the record, I’m thrilled with these urban transplants who have said “enough” and invested their nest egg in a country acreage.  Many, many more need to follow.  We need more people in rural America to make a critical mass that will keep the livestock, equipment, and feed suppliers in business.  Industrial agriculture is killing authentic farming and land stewardship as much as food processors and bureaucrats.  

This new generation of homesteaders is a shot in the arm for rural communities.  Old ecological farmer geezers like me see these newcomers as the most exciting thing to happen in a long time.  As a fulltime commercial farmer that doesn’t use chemicals, who fertilizes with home-made compost, and believes pigs should express their pigness, I get no embrace from the conventional commercial farming community.  On the other hand, most city folks generally love me but don’t understand my world or want to immerse in it.  That’s okay.  They make great patron saints to buy authentic food and keep me in business.

Oh, but these homesteaders.  They get it.  They’re like sponges, soaking up everything they can learn.  They’ve run away, yes, but more than that, they’ve run toward.  They’re embracing a new life.  For them, as well as those who need to follow and those who don’t get it yet, I’ve written this book to express the why of this modern homesteading tsunami.  After letting me visit with you through these pages, I hope you’ll either want to jump, rekindle your first love by being reminded of why you jumped, or know why your friends are packing.  Now let’s visit.