Will We All Be Homesteaders Soon?

Civil War? Climate Change? Financial Collapse? Is the World Ending?!

Photo of me taken by Dona McAdams

A Country Boy Can Survive

Recently I was explaining what I did for a living to another farmer. That I don’t go to markets or work with local retailers because nearly all of my sales come from online; either from people who buy farm goods (meat, fleeces, wool, eggs, soap, etc) or choose to pay for my writing about my farm life.

His response was, “Okay, but what will you do when the internet breaks down and no one can get online?” I told him if the internet truly breaks down, paying bills will be the least of our worries. That the internet suddenly not working across the nation would be far worse, scarier, and affect more people than any tornado or flood ever could. At least I’m not in the middle of some city and know how to shoot a rifle, garden, hunt, fish and butcher a chicken. To this he nodded. He and I may agree on very little when it comes to politics or plowing, but we both know a country boy can survive.

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We’re all tightrope walking these days. Things don’t feel right. You can blame it on politics, culture, or the economy; but at the heart of it all we’ve become nervous about the state of the world. And even if your life is great and you never worry about your next meal or next month’s rent, I bet you can still feel that low hum of uncertainty. The water shaking in the glass as a T-Rex stomps past…

I don’t think it’s that complicated. We’re anxious because our entire lives are so complicated and interconnected. Using that internet example. Imagine how different our lives would be if we lost the ability to log on, instantly?

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Story Time

Imagine you’re at work and have an hour commute home from the outskirts of a small midwestern city. You’ve been sent home because of the chaos in the office around the internet suddenly crashing at 2:37 PM. Since everyone communicates online, all day, no one knew what to do and the cell networks quickly jammed with people trying to communicate before they stopped working entirely. Only a few coworkers got through to their family members, and only by text.

All you know is that the local college, the hospital your sister-in-law works at, and the gas station across the street are offline too. This could be the whole state? You may not have enough gas to get home, but at least your car is an older model hybrid electric and may have enough charge to make it? The people with Teslas can’t get in their cars or start them, their apps aren’t working on their phones.

Are satellites down? Is this a terrorist attack? Is this a government attack!? You decide to stop pacing and just leave, knowing the roads will be packed with other early commuters and worried people trying to get home.

As you’re driving you remember your car has a radio, something you usually never even think about with Spotify and podcasts instantly playing soon as you start the engine. You turn on the local NPR station because it’s the only one playing news and not Top 40 or Morgan Wallen.

News is interrupted by the serrated blast of the National Emergency Alert System. It fills your car and head with fear. You discover this is nation-wide. The President is issuing civilians orders to stay home and not panic until more information is available.

More cars are starting to fill the highway. Some cars are stuck on the sides, some really nice cars. You don’t stop like you usually would because you need to get home to your family. At least you live on a small country road, far from people pacing outside Teslas in industrial parking lots.

You get home first. Your wife is still at work at a dental office. Your daughter got a text through before the phones died that she is leaving her car at the nearby community college because she’s out of gas and borrowed a bike from a friend. The dog seems unbothered and just happy to see you. The first pleasant experience in the past two hours.

Banks, pharmacies, schools, businesses, airplanes, trains… all of it using online services to communicate and move money around, screeched to a halt. They aren’t crashing out of the sky, but they are grounding and folks stuck in airports or destinations far from home are not able to attempt travel at this time. You were in Kansas City last week for work? If this happened then…

You want to know more but your tv is all through streaming services and you don’t have cable, but you do have a dusty 2003 boombox in the garage and bring it into the kitchen to play the news. You discover that there has been a rolling failure of your country’s communications and it was just starting with the internet. Now panic truly sets in… If something is happening, you’re not ready.

There isn’t enough food. At least you don’t think so? You always restock on weekend grocery shopping but it’s Friday? You don’t have anything in the fridge but 3-day old Chinese take out, condiments, a half empty bottle of white, and your daughter’s eye mask for some reason. You remember the pantry and see there’s some cans of soup and vegetables, maybe 6 or 7? Pasta, some cans of sauce, and random vinegars and olive oils and spices, but your family always shops on the weekends and had this been a Sunday night you’d have a stocked fridge but right now…

Then the power shuts off. Another alert blares across the radio, the electrical grid is down. The car you plugged in isn’t charging. The house goes dim without the gentle lighting from lamps and recessed bulbs. Only the radio remains since it’s working on crusty C batteries. Did you even have a spare set of C batteries? Who the fuck has C batteries in their house anymore these days?!

You hear your wife’s car in the driveway pull in, wheels rolling on gravel sounding like an answered prayer. Shortly after your daughter pedals up the driveway. Everyone is home, which apparently is rare for this Friday afternoon in America, if the radio has anything to say about it.

All you know now is that you’ve been told to shelter in place at home and stay off the roads. You’re just relieved everyone is home. The next hour is tense, but calm. Your daughter grabs a novel and sits in a sunny window. Your wife is trying to find flashlights with the camping stuff in the attached garage. You’ve been glued to the news, unable to do anything but absorb the circumstances.

NPR starts reporting that now that the power is off chaos and panic are erupting in cities, mostly with people desperate to get home. You’ve got very little food. The well that brings water into your house is electric and the taps are almost dry. As far as you know the only non-electric lights are an old camping lantern your wife is trying to find and an ancient Maglite that looks like a police baton (wait that might have C batteries in it!) and some candles around the house for decoration and boxed tapers for fancy holiday meals. It’s almost dark. The house is eerily silent outside the sputtering reports on the radio. You don’t know if the radio is being compromised (is that even possible?) or the batteries are failing.

You hear the shocking blast of a rifle, and when you look outside you can see your neighbor across the road just shot a doe grazing in the field from his deck. It’s 5PM on a September evening so it’s not deer season but he must be thinking about the same things? Your daughter looks nervous while she watches your neighbor drag the deer to a nearby tree to be hung and dressed. Your wife is filling up the tub with water while the faucets still have enough pressure to barely fill it halfway. You can feel your heartbeat speed up. The radio alert comes back on a third time saying to not panic, as it appears this isn’t a terror attack at all, but a solar storm that was so intense it first fried half the worlds’ satellites and then the electrical grid. It may take 2-4 years to completely restore the grid…

That’s the last thing you hear before the radio starts to putter out and you smell the battery acid killing the boombox’s efficacy. The sun sets behind the ridge and you know in a few hours it will be nearly pitch black.

What do you next?

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What you’d do next in that situation is the most telling. Some of you may have already been making a plan as you listened or read along. Some of you just listened to it like some sci-fi mental exercise or entertainment. Some of you were a solid “NOPE” and were ready to give up, pour a bottle of red wine in the largest glass possible, and wait to be saved or starve. Some of you were just arguing about my explanation of power failure in a solar storm and you nerds are missing the point, but I get that instantly finding criticisms in logic instead of dealing with the heart of the scenario is another coping mechanism.

But in a real emergency, you can’t argue your way into a better plot. Tornados destroy cities. Power outages happen. Civil unrest, pandemics, natural disasters; all of it is more common than ever before and while it seems managed and (for the most part) at bay while society marches forward. All of us can imagine a scenario where life gets smaller and harder for a rough weekend, at the least.

But this new hum of anxiety, this feeling that something big will happen we can’t control? It’s growing louder and the homesteading community is more reactive than I’ve ever seen it. There’s a boom in preparedness across the spectrum. Conservative doomsday militias and hippie communes alike are on the rise. The cost of groceries inflating since the pandemic has more people planting gardens than in recent memory. Backyard chickens, sourdough, trad wives, cottagecore, all of it is the reflection of a society that wants to feel like things are simpler, safer, and under control.

But holy shit. We were never in control.

Because all of this modernity depends on everything working as intended, forever. That isn’t going to happen. It’s basically impossible. And I’m not talking WWIII or some economic collapse crashing your stocks tomorrow. I’m talking about the inevitable complications of changing weather, stronger storms, public health issues and civil unrest. Things we see every single day on the news.

Which is why prepping, homesteading, and simple living is coming back into the mainstream again. It’s a trend that happens every 20-30 years, almost always after an economic slump or during intense social change. When things feel uncertain, we want to feel more in control. If not the world, then our small section of it.

So, Do We All Have To Homestead?

It may feel that way. At least if you’re plugged into the same algorithm I am (which is heavily tilted towards environmental, political, and agricultural news worldwide). Things ARE more fraught. And fringe sections of the internet are encouraging everything from preparing for an impending civil war to trying to romanticize the gender aesthetics of 1950s, as if buying a $700 portable charging station or making fruit loops from scratch will save you from Younger Dryas 2.0.

You’re still going to see a big upswing in folks starting to take back some basic food production in the coming years, especially 2025. It’s not because something bad is going to happen. It’s because people are scared something bad will happen. Because it feels like any day three hurricanes could wipe out three coastal cities, or a heatwave could cook Texas into mass casualties, or a mass shooters coordinate three Walmarts in three cities at the same time making people too scared to shop in person. Our civility, the machinations of our entire system, is a truly delicate and connected web. It feels more fragile than ever, even if things are and will be okay. Because our news, our social media feeds, our clicks, are all based on fear and outrage. You can doom scroll your way into a panic attack on a 70° summer afternoon before book club.

So people are ramping up their preparedness as practical therapy. And I think a lot of that preparation is silly and selfish and not even helpful in bad situations. So I want to explain my thoughts on disaster prep and what all of us should actually be doing. Because while I don’t expect a Carrington Event to occur tomorrow, I do expect a future of stronger storms, more radical temperature swings, and less dependable communications as we head into the unknown.

So here are my thoughts on “The Apocalypse” and what everyone should be doing to feel a little better going into this winter.

Do I think the world is ending? No. Do I think you should be ready for a hard month, an isolated weekend, or long-term power outage. Yes.

I Don’t Believe in the Fast Apocalypse

American Gardening Propaganda from the 1940s. Overalls for VICTORY!

I don’t believe that in a matter of days the entire country will descend into piles of zombies, financial collapse, or civil war. I don’t even worry about natural disasters that much but there are plenty of people who do. That’s because they spend all their time online in very reactive communities where everyone is validating their paranoia and looking for reasons to be terrified. We’re all too online and in our own little bubbles.

To me, this swirl of doom and gloom is a self-fulling prophecy, fueled by isolating fringe politics (left and right). Expect the world to end tomorrow? Then it is. Excited to go buy an ice cream cone tomorrow? Soft serve machines are still working, and if you’re already comfortable enough income wise to buy ice cream whenever you want, you probably aren’t waking up worried about an EMP knocking out electronics world wide. You’re probably just finding a clever way to ask for even more peanuts.

What is happening, is things are markably different than they were before the pandemic. If things are going to get worse, they will do so slowly. And I do believe everyone will have time to adjust and catch up. I really do.

I don’t think there will be a rush for guns for middle school teachers and a mass exodus to the countryside. I do think a lot more people will be gardening at home, very much like the 1940’s push for Victory Gardens.

During WWII twenty million new gardens started in peoples backyards and they produced 40% of domestic produce. I don’t think we’ll be growing our own lettuce for another world war tomorrow, but it’s not like populations all over the world haven’t had to struggle to feed themselves every decade of recorded history on this planet. If it’s not poverty or war, it’s economics or climate. Our fantasy of everything working swell forever is just that, a fantasy.

Does this mean you should buy vacuum-sealed seeds and soil bags tacked in the garage for next spring because the grocery shelves will be barren? No, darling. But I do encourage anyone with the backyard space, pots on porches, or windowsills to grow some of your own food. You don’t have to buy a farm, but personally, it sure is nice walking outside and seeing all this on an August morning outside my door:

The more people that take back any form of food production at home, the more safe and stable your community will be in a crisis. Historically, people stay calmer in disasters if they are fed and sheltered. And if even four houses on your town block of 10 houses have chickens, gardens, stored food, a water filter, and a good relationship; you’re basically a tiny commune by default. If you work together everyone could be just fine. And I want my readers to be part of the population that is ready to help, heal, and sustain their neighborhoods. Nothing is more important when shit goes wrong.