It occurred to me, as I was writing this, that maybe I should be writing under a nom de plume and not reveal my location.  You see, I work at a library where we perform a service that is illegal in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and probably some other states. Luckily, we aren’t in those states… But you never know who’s gonna try to implement a law next.  It seems a library in Pennsylvania admitted to having a seed library and received a legal order to stop what they were doing.  No, we’re not talking about marijuana seeds or anything that controversial, just plain, old flower and vegetable seeds.

Legal Issues of Saving Seeds

While saving and sharing your seeds seems perfectly innocent, there are actually other libraries in the United States and other countries that have ended up in trouble with the law for such endeavors.

In 2014, a library in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania worked in partnership with the Cumberland County Commission for Women to start a seed library within their facility.  They obtained information from the Pennsylvania State Agricultural Extension office to start the program.  But then they received a letter from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture stating that they were in violation of the Seed Act of 2004.  Who knew!  First jaywalking and now this? 

But while this seems like a joking matter to some of us, the Department of Agriculture felt it was so serious that they sent a high-ranking official and lawyers to a meeting with the library.

When I first heard of this, my first thought was that this was some plot on behalf of the seed companies so that they wouldn’t lose money from so many people sharing seeds for free.  However, I found that the USDA’s fears are based on the idea of botanical bioterrorism!  And here I thought poison ivy and kudzu were the worst botanical terrorists there could be.  

The Seed Act of 2004 mainly focuses on the selling of seeds, but there is also a concern about seeds that might be purposely or accidentally mislabeled, the growth of invasive plant species, cross-pollination, and poisonous plants.

The Department of Agriculture told the Pennsylvania library director that the library staff would need to test each seed packet for germination and other information if they were to continue to provide the seeds.  The library ended up discontinuing its seed library and, instead, sponsoring seed swapping days in order to avoid any legal ramifications of actually being responsible for the seeds themselves.

Practically the same thing happened with a library in Minnesota, except there, the seed officials showed up in person.  Library staff there were also told they had to discontinue their seed library.

But good news folks!  If you don’t live in Pennsylvania, or Minnesota, there are lots of places in other states that seem to be getting away with having their own seed libraries.  Just check your state and local laws.  During the time of the problems in Pennsylvania and Minnesota, there were already at least 300 across the U.S., so it never occurred to them that it would be a problem.  To learn about your state’s seed laws, visit the American Seed Trade Association website.  The site features a map of all states, and when you click on a state you can read its own individual seed law and whatever restrictions there may be.

So, With All This Drama, What’s the Point of a Seed Library?    

Many gardeners are already ordering seeds and planning for spring.  And still, others are alloecwing a few of their plants from each crop go to seed instead of picking the fruits or veggies from them, then saving those seeds for next year.  Why bother when it might be easier to simply buy more seeds in the spring?  Well, other than saving money and a trip to the store, many feel there is more guarantee that seeds collected from plants that they already have and know are healthy, will also be healthier, and seeds adapted to their soil and climate, not to mention local pests, will be even more robust.

Our local library has taken this idea one step further by helping patrons share those healthy acclimated seeds.  Now the “book” library also contains a seed library made up of heirloom seeds that can be “checked out” by anybody who has a library card and signs up.   

As a way of getting started and enticing participation, our library gained donations of heirloom seeds from such companies as Baker Creek, Seed Savers Exchange (SSE), and Southern Exposure Seed Exchange (SESE).  The library now has over 100 varieties of heirloom seeds for vegetables, herbs, and flowers.  There is no charge for the seeds, but it is hoped that people will gather seeds from their crops at the end of the summer and donate some back to the library in order to continue the tradition.

The focus is on heirloom seeds because seeds of crossbred plants will not “remain true”, meaning that they won’t turn out the same as the original plant, but seeds from heirloom plants can be gathered and used from year to year.

Thus, while the seeds checked out this season will be heirloom varieties, they won’t be as adapted for this area yet.  The ones donated in future years will become more and more and hardy.     
Other reasons for seed libraries are to preserve seeds that have not been genetically modified, since there is growing concern about what effect GMO foods might have on our health, in addition to fears about its effects on the environment.

NOTE: I am using words such as “concern,” “theory,” “idea,” etc. in this discussion because I don’t feel that I have explored both sides of this highly-debated science extensively enough to feel confident about taking a side.  I’m just putting these ideas out there for your consideration.

Many feel that GMO seeds will destroy the food chain because they often contain pest-control features which could result in the reduction of insects that are part of the food chain, thus diminishing that insect’s predators, and then the predator’s predators, and so on.  Then there is the fact that we rely on good insects, such as honey bees, to both fertilize our vegetables as well as produce honey; both are a part of our own food chain.

For some of us, money is the biggest factor.  Sometimes you don’t need all of those seeds they sell in those packets and the packets can be pretty expensive if you buy enough of them.  Why not share and share alike, so we all save a few pennies?

While genetically modified seeds are developed to yield the biggest and best fruits and vegetables, they are often hybrids, so the seeds of the plants they produce will often not remain true, meaning that your next crop won’t look the same as the previous one.  It will revert back to the original, lower-quality strain it was hybridized from.  There are also issues regarding the patents on the seeds.   
However, heirloom seeds saved at the end of each growing season and replanted the next year become acclimated to the same area year after year, and will become stronger and better each year.

Here is one more scary theory about GMOs.  Since most GMO crops are engineered to tolerate a certain type of herbicide, the weeds these are supposed to kill are building up a resistance to the herbicides and coming back bigger and stronger and then needing more toxic pesticides to kill them.  Wow, I guess when you think about how we develop vaccines for the flu each year and then have to create new versions because the disease mutates, it all makes sense.

Oh, the Stories We Hear at the Seed Library!   

Those who are interested in preserving heirloom seeds are often those who are interested in preserving history.  They may want to carry on their grandmother’s favorite rose or a treasured, old, apple tree from their parents’ homestead.  Maybe they feel those pumpkins grown from a specific strain of seeds are the secret ingredient to the wonderful pumpkin bread Mom made when they were young.

We’ve been hearing lots of stories from our patrons at the library who have brought seeds to share, and we’ve enjoyed their enthusiasm as they’ve told us how proud they are of the huge pumpkins they grow each year with their special, family seeds.  We’ve also been seeing a lot of young couples selecting seeds for their first home.  It is almost as if they are more than just seeds; they are hope and potential memories.

During the weeks following my father’s death, I spent a lot of time going through old framed pictures, documents, and photo albums at his house.  In one album, along with my grandmother’s passport from Hungary, which enabled her to enter the United States through Ellis Island in the early days, I also found a yellowed, letter-sized envelope labeled “Hungarian Paprika Seeds”, and within were folds of tissue paper with about a dozen dried seeds in each fold.

I imagined my grandmother coming to America to marry the man she had met when he visited his own relatives in Hungary a few months before.  Imagined her tucking envelopes of seeds into her suitcase so she could carry on her gardening tradition from the old country.  Then I wondered if those seeds would still be viable if they were really brought over in the 1920s.  Maybe they were sent over later.  Maybe she saved them from her own garden in America.  Nevertheless, as far as I could figure, they had to be at least 20 years old.

I decided to try putting a few in a wet paper towel and watching to see if they would germinate.  They did not.  But then I tossed some into several outdoor planters, and voila!  I started getting pretty, green plants that were quite healthy.  But I couldn’t stop asking myself, “Is it possible that seeds as old as 10 to 20 years would still grow?  Or did much fresher seeds somehow find themselves in an old photo album that hadn’t been looked through in years?”

My endless curiosity lead me to the internet in search of how old a seed can be and still be viable.  Apparently the oldest mature seed that has grown into a viable plant was a Judean date palm seed about 2,000 years old, recovered from excavations in Israel.  It was germinated in 2005.  Amazing!

Some seed companies that are capitalizing on the idea that we will eventually have some sort of apocalypse, either zombie or otherwise, sell “survival seeds” which they say can last up to ten years because they have been dried in a very precise way.  Drying methods do apparently make a difference.

Also, I found that germination is not an on/off state, as if all seeds in a pack go bad at once.  As seeds get older the percentage that germinate will start to drop off, and then at some point will fall to zero. 

Now that I think about it, I probably tossed a dozen of my grandmother’s paprika seeds into those pots and only got a few plants.

So, back to the companies selling seeds for the apocalypse.  These companies say that properly dried seeds still have a 50% germination rate after 15 years.  But then, how are you going to maintain a proper vegetable garden with zombies stomping through it all of the time?

The Science of Seed Saving 

According to information from a U.S. Department of Agriculture website, seed is best stored through the winter at 50 degrees and at 50 percent humidity.  A good way to store unused seed packets is to place them in a sealed jar with powdered milk or rice at the bottom to absorb moisture.  Store your seed jar in the refrigerator or a cool area such as a basement.

There is an excellent book on seed saving titled The Manual of Seed Saving: Harvesting, Storing and Sowing Techniques for Vegetables, Herbs and Fruits by Andrea Heistinger.  In it, she gives detailed collection and storage methods for seeds from different varieties of plants.

She explains how to set aside a few plants each year and let them go to seed, and then how to harvest the seeds.  How easy or hard it is to collect seeds depends on the particular plants you are collecting them from.  Some are as obvious as tearing a bean-like pod apart and skimming the seeds out, while others may require soaking until they ferment, or using a sifting device to separate them from the husks and hulls, or sometimes just a little breeze will do the job.

They separated wheat from the chaff in the early days by tossing it in the air so that the wheat seeds fell more heavily to the ground while the chaff (extra stuff), blew away in the wind.  This reminds me of a memorable scene in movie, but I can’t remember the name of the movie.  It was a beautiful scene: women wearing long skirts and white blouses with scarves on their heads, standing in front of a pretty red barn, tossing the wheat into the air, the chaff floating on the breeze, the sunset in the distance… What the heck was that movie?

But, seriously, seed libraries are awesome.  I’ve never felt like I could afford to buy very many packets of seeds, but now I can get them free and return a few at the end of the summer, though I’m not obligated to do so.  Everyone understands that it’s not always possible to save and return your seeds, especially in the first year. 

A Larger Seed Exchange 

In addition to small libraries like ours, where we might have 20-30 people borrowing and sharing seeds, there are also some very large, commercial-type seed-sharing businesses, like the ones that donated seeds for our library to get started.  Most of these offer opportunities to become involved in the saving and sharing process either through donations of money or seeds.  Others may purchase seeds from farmers, giving them an opportunity to make some extra money.

Southern Exposure Seed Exchange is able to operate on a larger scale without fear of government intervention because they store seeds in climate-controlled areas and they perform their own germination testing in order to ensure it meets both federal and Southern Exposure standards.  Test results are printed on the packet to help you determine planting density and quantity needed.

Southern Exposure is located on a 72-acre farm between Richmond and Charlottesville, Virginia, they work with over 50 small farms across the U.S. that provide the seeds, and they are always willing to take more.

“We’re always happy to talk to farmers who are interested in diversifying their income streams by growing seeds for us,” they state on their website.  “Despite working with many growers who come to us with little experience saving seed, we find that the seed we buy from them at the end of the season is more reliably true-to-type than the seed we buy wholesale.”

 Cha-ching! Sounds like opportunity knocking.

The post Check Out These Seeds! Grow Hardy Plants and Preserve the Food Chain with a Seed Library appeared first on Homestead.org.

The first things to understand before creating your giving plan are your spheres of influence. We all have them and they are all different. That is why each person must decide what their giving will be instead of simply giving to the same people and places their neighbors give to. By giving in your sphere of influence, you can be certain that you are giving to a legitimate cause.

Imagine a set of concentric circles, with the power to influence as the strongest, closest to the center. The circle closest to the center is your inner circle. Your inner circle includes yourself, your family, and your closest friends. This is where you have the most influence, and where you can see the good your giving does. The next circle is your personal community. Your personal community consists of your neighbors, peers, colleagues, and those who are members of the same clubs, groups, or place of worship as you. There is a tremendous amount of giving that can be done in this sphere, as you exert a good amount of influence here as well. The next sphere is your wider community and this includes strangers in your geographical area and your social media connections. The spheres continue to widen out until they encompass the globe, but for your personal giving plan, stick with your inner circle, your personal community, and your wider community. These are the spheres in which you can be more thoughtful in your giving and more aware of the good your giving has accomplished.

Grab a notebook that you will use for this project. You can add to it all year, as you become more attuned to the needs around you. You can also use it as a type of journal, jotting down notes on the changes you see related to your giving, as well as things you personally are grateful for.

Your Inner Circle

The person at the center of your inner circle is you. It may seem contradictory to consider your needs as you are creating your personal giving plan, but a dry well cannot offer water to anyone. Write your name at the top of the first page and make a list of the things you are good at. These are your personal strengths and you will be using them in order to create your giving plan. Next, fill the page with answers to the following questions. What is one thing you wanted to do last year that you did not make time for? What new project or hobby would you like to undertake this year? Are there any books you would like to read or any classes you would like to take? Are there any networking groups in your area that you would benefit from joining? What one bad habit do you want to give up this year and what good habit do you want to replace it with? Is there one thing you can do to improve your health? Can you save a larger percentage (even 1% more) of your income this year?

Once you have completed your page, create a page for your spouse or partner, your children, and your close friends. Of course, you cannot choose the bad habits they should give up or what they should do to improve their physical or financial health, but you are in a position to know some of the things they would like to work on in the upcoming year. Special projects, hobbies, books, classes, and community groups – these are the things you can help them start and support them in their efforts. If you are unsure of their hidden goals, ask them. Once you get a list, sit down together and decide which ones are truly doable. You don’t have to accomplish all of them, but everyone should have the opportunity to grow by trying new things.

Your Personal Community

The next set of people in your sphere of influence are those in your personal community. Dedicate a page in your giving notebook to each of your neighbors, peers, colleagues, customers, and people in the community groups with which you are involved. You don’t need a page for every single person. Write down the names of the people you know the best and focus on them. What are some of their unmet needs? Is there a neighbor who is unable to keep up the yard, shovel the sidewalk, or maintain the house? Are there children in your community who need help with homework? Maybe there is a child who could benefit (both financially, physically, and mentally) from working with you on your farm. And, perhaps the simplest thing for a homesteader to give is fresh food. Is there a family that may be struggling to make ends meet? A bag or two of groceries from your farm could really make a difference.

Don’t forget those who are sick or shut-in, as well as their caregivers. Make time for a visit, bring a meal, do a load of laundry or a sink of dishes, read to them or take them to an appointment. It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it consistently.

When it comes to your community groups, including your place of worship, what can you do for the organization? Showing up and giving your annual fee or tithe is a great start. But there is more you can do. Refer back to your list of personal strengths. The key to successful giving is to match your strength to their need. You can teach a class, organize a trip, offer bookkeeping services, throw a party, or run a fundraiser.

While it is not always easy to see what you can do for colleagues and customers, you can always expand on what you are doing now. Continue selling your farm products, but consider offering discounts in exchange for some work in the garden. Fresh produce is expensive and it is more feasible for some people to work for an hour than come up with that money. Farmers are able to accept SNAP (food stamps) and that is a huge benefit to the community. If you operate a CSA, offer your CSA participants a chance to give with a “Feed Your Neighbors” option. For just $5 more per box you commit to giving a food box to a struggling family (anonymous) in your area. If you don’t know a family who could use a box of groceries you can ask the principal at a local school.

Your Wider Community

As you get to your wider community, the opportunities to give become a little more impersonal. Even though your sphere of influence continues to widen to encompass the globe, the wider community is a good place to stop if you are worried about the legitimacy of faceless agencies. Of course, if there is a national or international agency that supports a cause you are passionate about, please give to them as well.

Your wider community includes strangers that live in your area. You can participate, even organize, a book, backpack, school supply, or coat drive. You can host a holiday meal. If you already operate a u-pick farm, host discount or free days for those who may not have the money to participate. You can coordinate with your local elementary school and do the same with a pumpkin patch. Contact your local homeschooling group and ask if there is a child who is interested in starting a farm project. Allow a child in 4-H to use your property and benefit from your expertise for a farm animal project. Teach a yoga, breadmaking, quilting, or canning class for free at a local community center or church. Be sure to advertise in the paper in order to reach the people who are not already on your Facebook feed. Look again at your list of personal strengths and understand there are people who want to know what you know.

Gratitude is one of the top characteristics of successful people and successful businesses. Giving back to your community is the best way to remain grateful. There are so many ways to give and so many people and places in need. The best thing about focusing your giving in your sphere of influence is that you end up benefiting as much or more than the people you are giving to. Carry your giving notebook with you at all times because once you start giving, you will start noticing more and more opportunities to give.

The post Giving Back To Your Community appeared first on Homestead.org.

Now, the hope to find like-minded friends is nothing unique, but having written for and read homesteading-type publications for decades, I’ve noticed that the chords of desire for it seem to be strummed pretty hard there.  From the 70’s-era Mother Earth News magazines chronicling nascent communes and collectives to the modern Youtube homesteaders sharing every step of their journey with a faceless Internet audience, it seems we just want to know that we’re not the only ones trying to grow our own food, build our own lives, and choose something different from the soul-deadening 9-5 life.

I had never really “fit in” in my original hometown.  So when we moved to a different state to homestead, I saw it as a chance to start over. I had read so many old books and magazines about how folks had moved to the country, struck up friendships with wise, kindly old neighbors, found others like themselves, shared cows and produce…the dream of finally being able to find my village was going to become a reality.  I would try my hardest to make it happen.

Once we relocated to the Ozarks, I set about meeting and befriending as many people as I could in my rural town.   I quickly learned that I couldn’t trust my closest neighbors when we had to retrieve stolen Amazon packages from them (awkward!), but I held on to the article’s assurances that “our people” were out there, and I was sure I’d find them if I just tried hard enough.  So I offered to use my former teaching experience to help fellow homeschooling parents, taught some folks how to make yogurt and whole-wheat sourdough, and even got invited to a few weddings.  I began to teach a few informal foraging classes, started up a seed-swap at my local library, and chatted with the vendors at the farmer’s market.

According to what I’d read, I was doing a great job building community.  Now, all the while, I knew that my personal beliefs and off-grid homesteading lifestyle weren’t shared by any of the people I’d met, but all that I’d read assured me that we could eventually connect through proximity and kindness.

I was wrong.

To make a painful story brief, a few years after I’d moved, I suddenly became the target of the most vicious gossip and accusations I have ever endured in my life.  All the folks that I had thought were my friends suddenly united against me.  It didn’t matter that I had lived and eaten with these people for years by this point—my character, intentions, and “weird” lifestyle and beliefs underwent attack from all sides.  Completely taken off guard and extremely hurt, I turned detective to try to salvage my “community” and get to the bottom of what caused the horrible misunderstanding.

I remembered that a few weeks before the “explosion,” I had been in conversation with an acquaintance.  We had shared much by this point—I had even brought some plants for her garden at the time of the visit!—so I wasn’t on my guard when she asked me if I supported certain political candidates—including one that I knew she followed with zealous fervor.  I not only said I didn’t support any of the candidates mentioned, but I foolishly went on to say why.

(Cue the “Naked Gun”-style group head-slap.)

Even though I had said nothing against her personally, I watched as three years’ worth of kindness was forgotten in an instant, and her eyes hardened.  I had made one of the classic blunders (though this one wasn’t a land war in Asia or a battle of wits with a Sicilian): I had been totally honest with someone I knew didn’t agree with me.  Since she was well-known in town and came from one of the influential local families, my reputation didn’t stand a chance as soon as she began to gossip about us.  As my investigation revealed that no one had defended us against her slander, I finally understood that my friendly overtures had not created a community at all, but more a fragile network of connections between tightly-knit locals and an “outsider” that were easy to blow apart.

The truth is—the truth that many publications do not mention because it goes against the well-indoctrinated notions of acceptance and tolerance—is that people want to be with people who are like themselves.  As a result, not everyone actually wants to be in a community with you, no matter how hard you try to connect.  And in our modern social environment, where social media has eroded humans’ abilities to communicate and where worldviews have become exceedingly extreme and diametrically opposed to each other, it is impossible to make a trusting community with people who don’t align with you.

For us homesteading-types, the list of folks that don’t align with us can be long.  You’ll find that pretty much every element of the homesteading life is offensive or off-puttingly weird to somebody.   Not only is “homesteading “ offensive, so is living off-grid, owning acres of land, hunting, butchering your own animals, homeschooling, owning a gun, homebirth, having a big family, moving to the country, or having a viewpoint that you won’t change in the face of direct opposition.  If you can believe it, I have even had people refuse to talk to me simply because I don’t have a smartphone.  And this isn’t even touching political or spiritual views (which, as you already know, are the most “offensive” of all).

Now, some people will be offended by you no matter what—there’s just some folks who can’t handle anyone different than them.  But I made some critical errors in my first few years in my rural town that allowed the gossip wheel to pick up speed and give me a good smoosh.  Learn from my mistakes.

If you move to the country and want to try to find a community… 

Don’t overshare.  Your worldview is important to you, but it should only be shared with folks who you know can understand.  You can be honest and authentic without saying absolutely everything that you think.  Especially when you’re a newcomer to a rural town, spend more time listening than talking.

Don’t force friendships.  I was so eager to forge new connections that I overlooked the obvious conflicts that could happen between folks and me down the road.  I always followed up with others, even if they didn’t follow up with me.  I probably came across as pretty desperate for friends, which put me in a prone, pitiable position socially.  I later learned that anyone who mentioned me in conversation always followed it up with that most disingenuous of country affectations, “bless her heart.”

All the true connections I have eventually begun to find in my area happened naturally and, most importantly, mutually.

Be discerning with who should be part of your life.  Saying my opinion on that acquaintance’s chosen candidate was stupid, but my pursuit of friendship with her was probably the most foolish choice of all.  As soon as I had met her and seen how religiously she pursued politics that conflicted with my own views, I should have left things at “friendly acquaintance.”  More often than not, you should trust your gut when it gives you a warning.

Don’t get discouraged.  Real friendships and real connections take time.  Lots of it.  They’re worth waiting for.

Treasure what you do have. If you have relocated to a rural area to start a new life on a homestead, you’ve embarked on a huge, difficult, worthy adventure.  But it’s hard work to forge a new life, and the truth is…not a lot of folks are going to understand it.  Remember, none of us chose this life to be popular—we chose it because we thought it was the right thing to do.  That’s something to value, even if it’s sometimes isolating.

After time passed, I started recovering from the social blow.  The folks I had initially met, however, never talked with me again, even after I tried to set things right.  But after seeing how quickly they decided to attack me based on hearsay, I realized that they weren’t the sort of folks I would have been able to trust in the long term.  Instead of seeking out people with dogged persistence, I started to follow the advice I just gave you.  I waited.  I listened.  I stopped over-sharing with strangers.  And I was thankful for the life I was building with my family, even if no one else understood at the time.

And at the end of the day, I did find someone who I aligned with in world-view, lifestyle, and work ethic, and who was like-minded in every way that mattered… I had married him!

The post You Can’t Just Make Community Happen: Finding Your Flock appeared first on Homestead.org.

Admittedly, when I hear the words the Bowery, it conjures an image of flop houses, back alley bars, and dangerous derelicts—a vespiary of seedy activity. I certainly don’t think of farming. Well, I didn’t use to. Live and learn.

A Brief History

The Bowery of New York has an infamous and storied past. This notorious district of southern Manhattan in New York City was synonymous with destitution and debauchery in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Rewind to an earlier time, however, and you’ll find rich farmland being cultivated by Dutch farmers beginning in the 17th century. During that period of history, that fertile expanse of land was called the Bouwerij, meaning farm, and the landscape was dotted with a great many of them. 

“Those Bowerijs are what fed the city and served as the inspiration for the creation of Bowery Farming and growing food for a better future.” –Irving Fain 

The Future Honors the Past 

Fast forward to the present day where an indoor hydroponics farm of the future has picked up the torch of those original Dutch groundbreakers and in an act of homage to their pioneering spirit, has adopted the Bowery name and their passion for farming, 21st-century style. I’m certain the original Dutch farmers would agree, dat is goed. The New Bowery

Bowery Farming in Kearny, New Jersey, is not only reshaping that old, negative image of the Bowery, but it is also changing the agricultural paradigm to reflect a more realistic approach to growing enough healthy food to feed a hungry and ever-increasing population. This forward-looking hydroponic smart-farm is a wonder-world of proprietary technology and a living illustration of the future of farming.

Within its closely guarded walls work an array of sleepless sensors, mini monitors, and all-seeing cameras that watch over and control every aspect of every plant throughout the growing process. The greens produced at this farming facility are setting a new standard of excellence in taste and nutrition. At the same time, secret technology works to reduce the facility’s environmental impact through advanced farming practices.

The Bowery website states their “post-organic produce” is the next evolution in farming. After interviewing Bowery’s Co-Founder and CEO, Irving Fain, this is to be believed.

Meet Irving Fain, the Man Behind the Plan 

Irving Fain is an innovative renaissance man of respectable note in both the digital and financial world and is now turning his enterprising eye toward agriculture. Irving is the visionary behind Bowery Farming, a high-tech hydroponics smart farm that grows greens of the highest quality and supplies them to local markets and restaurants within 24 hours of harvest.  He is on a mission to help feed a world that conventional agricultural practices simply cannot.

For a bit of background, it will be more efficient to merely bullet-point a few of his impressive accomplishments.

• A cutting-edge media entrepreneur, Co-founder and CEO of CrowdTwist, a multi-channel customer relationship and loyalty platform for marketers.

• Manager of Business Development and the Director of Digital Marketing and Content at iHeartMedia where he created iHeartRadio

• Analyst for The Private Equity Group which focuses on raising early-stage capital for burgeoning companies

• Board member and Adviser to Estimize, an open financial estimates platform

• Venture Capitalist: Money raiser and investor procured 7.5 million dollars to found Bowery

• CEO and Co-Founder of Bowery Farming Inc. The Modern Farming Company

Suffice it to say, Irving Fain is one brilliant and busy entrepreneur, yet, gracious enough to grant this interview.

First question: Please tell me about the Bowery facility. How large an area does it cover and what do you grow there?

IF:  While we don’t share information about size or output, we’re expanding quickly.  Our next farm, which opens this summer, will produce 30x more than our current operation.  

Bowery operates large-scale, commercial indoor farms that grow leafy greens and herbs, harvested and delivered locally within a day.  

Q: How many people are currently needed to run the farm in Kearny?

IF:  We currently have 38 people (and counting!) working at Bowery, ranging from modern farmers to engineers, software developers, and sales representatives. 

Q: Do you clone or is your food grown purely from seed and what’s the turnaround time from seed to harvest?

IF:  Bowery produce is grown from non-GMO seeds that are selected for flavor and quality.  Not only do we grow more than twice as fast as the field in many cases, but because we grow indoors, year-round, we also grow more crop cycles per year and are over100x more productive per square foot of land than traditional agriculture. 

Q: How about water usage, is the water cleaned and reused?

IF:  Our indoor growing methods save 95%+ of water over traditional farming because we use an automated irrigation system that can measure and maintain optimal levels of water to support plant growth.  This ensures that we give our plants what they need and nothing more, and we can recycle the water that’s left over. 

Q: I understand you just grow greens in Kearny, do you intend to expand the menu there to include melons, tomatoes or potatoes…and the like?

IF:  Right now we’re focused on delivering the highest quality and best tasting leafy greens possible but we’ve already started experimenting with other types of produce and plan to expand our offerings in the near future.  Because we grow indoors and are unaffected by seasonality, we’re able to test many different types of crops that are normally tricky to grow in the northeast. 

Q: As the produce is continuously monitored by an array of watchdog sensors, would you say your farm is an amalgamation of an IoT (Internet of Things) platform, M2M (Machine to Machine), and Vertical farming? Sort of an electronic Frankenfarm?

IF:  BoweryOS, our proprietary technology system, functions as the brains of the farm, monitoring plants and the variables that drive their growth 24/7, in addition to serving as a workflow management system. BoweryOS can automatically adjust environmental conditions to optimize plant growth, quality, yield, and flavor, while utilizing an extensive network of sensors and cameras to collect millions of data points in real-time. 

By capturing large amounts of data at each step, BoweryOS can constantly iterate on each environmental input in order to provide all crops with exactly what they need to thrive. For example, if BoweryOS detects signs of stress in a crop based on images from its vision system, it can automatically reduce the light that the crop receives in order to return the plant to optimal growth and quality. 

Q: With Bowery in absolute control over the entire growing process to include color, texture, and nutrition, do you believe this ‘creation to specification’ to be the wave of the future in indoor farming?

IF:  Yes, controlling the entire growing process from seed to store comes with so many benefits.  It means our produce is the purest available and food you can truly feel good about eating.  It also allows for us to grow with zero pesticides.  Because we grow in a completely closed environment, we also drastically minimize the risk of contamination from food-borne illness. 

We’re uniquely positioned to reduce food waste because BoweryOS precisely allocates the exact amount of resources that our plants need for optimal growth, and tells us when to harvest them at their peak to reduce spoilage.  Because we grow near the urban centers we serve, Bowery produce is in stores less than a day after harvest, reducing spoilage in transit and extending shelf-life.

Q: What will a Bowery Farm of the future be growing?

IF:  Right now, at our first farm in New Jersey, we’re focused on delivering the best leafy greens possible, but we’ve already started experimenting with other types of produce and plan to expand our offerings in the near future.  This summer we will open our next farm which will be the most technologically-sophisticated commercial indoor farm in the world.

Q: Would you agree hydroponics/vertical gardening is the future of sustainable farming?

IF:  Yes. The global population is projected to reach 9-10 billion people by 2050 (75-80% of which will live in and around cities).  In order to feed a population of that size, we’ll need 70% more food, meaning that more food will need to be produced in the next 4 decades than has been produced in the last 10,000 years.

Bowery is 100+ times more productive on the same footprint of land.  While vertical stacking is part of the increase in productivity, we are also able to grow many crops twice as fast as the field, with more crop cycles per year than the field, and more yield per crop cycle as well.  Also, by growing our plants indoors we are able to grow reliably, year-round using 95%+ less water.

Q: Is this method of smart-farming something you could see being scaled down to a family-sized undertaking as in a backyard greenhouse or basement?

IF:  Our proprietary technology is meant for large-scale, commercial farming operations, but we’re really happy to see so much enthusiasm behind various farming methods, at-home and beyond. There’s a clear need to improve upon the traditional agriculture industry and we believe in producing food in a way that’s better for us and our environment.

Due to understandable time restraints, that was the last question and answer we were able to complete.

In Closing 

Finding ways to feed an exploding population is one of the greatest challenges facing farmers today and the agri-world of tomorrow. Producing enough food without exhausting the planet’s limited resources will remain a demanding and daunting task but thankfully, enterprises like Bowery Farming are taking up that challenge.

And while large-scale indoor farming is still in its infancy, smart farms like those being developed by Irving Fain, offer a sneak peek into what the future of farming might look like. The Bowery team’s dedication to discovering and employing vastly more efficient agricultural methods than current conventional means is inspirational. Their results, promising.

Changing the way we farm in an effort to better feed the world is a noble and demanding undertaking and Bowery is helping lead the way by growing more food more efficiently in an eco-friendly environment. It’s reassuring to know that big steps are being taken in food production while a smaller footprint is being left behind.

The post Bowery Farming: An Interview with Co-Founder and CEO Irving Fain appeared first on Homestead.org.

My father helped us out by buying us a chainsaw that my husband used to cut firewood for our wood stove, and he surprised me one day with a new typewriter. A lot of the teachers that my husband worked with were pursuing Master’s degrees. Since I had always been an ace in English composition, I put the word out and got jobs editing thesis papers. I worked while the kids napped or at night. Sometimes I got cash; other times I would trade for things like tax preparation, garden tilling, or babysitting (teenagers forced into it, but nonetheless welcomed!). Once I got a bushel of apples as payment. I canned several quarts of homemade applesauce, some of which I traded for other goods—who knew apples could be turned into dollars!

Times back then were definitely slower. My neighborhood was small, and I knew most of my neighbors. We chatted while waiting with our kids for the school bus or when we got together for cookouts, Little League, birthday parties, or church services. We engaged with each other; we were a community and pitched in to help each other when needed.

One year, on Thanksgiving, we got over 30 inches of snow in less than 48 hours. Because our community was somewhat rural and off the main drag, we were one of the last neighborhoods to be plowed. Needless to say, a trip to grandma’s wasn’t gonna happen that year… so we planned a neighborhood Thanksgiving feast! A kind neighbor volunteered to host us and everyone brought a dish. I think it was one of the most memorable Thanksgivings I’ve ever had.

So what does that have to do with bartering, you ask? Not a lot. But my point was that folks in our small community got to know each other pretty well. There was no internet back then. We had close connections with neighbors, connections that opened the door to bartering. Trading for things we needed seemed like the most normal thing in the world—bartering just kind of happened organically.

Bartering has been around longer than money as we know it. Since man first set foot on the world stage, humans have traded for food, tools, weapons, and other essentials for life. The history of bartering dates as far back as 6000 B.C. Introduced by Mesopotamian tribes, the practice of bartering was adopted by the Phoenicians. Babylonians also developed a bartering system where goods were exchanged for food, tea, weapons, and spices. Salt was another popular item exchanged—it was so valuable that Roman soldiers’ salaries were paid in salt, which they used as currency to obtain goods. In the Middle Ages, Europeans traveled around the globe to barter crafts and furs in exchange for silks and perfumes. Colonial Americans exchanged musket balls, deer skins, and wheat with Native American tribes. And, of course, today’s politicians barter all the time to get their pet projects through (“You vote for my bill and I’ll vote for yours”).

Due to a general lack of money during the Great Depression, bartering helped people through really hard times. But once economic stability was regained, and, especially with the advent of  “dual-earner couples,” bartering fell by the wayside.

The old adage, “A penny saved is a penny earned,” is still true today. With the rise in the cost of living since the pandemic, people can trim their budget by trading goods and services, often without any money changing hands. As a retiree with more time on my hands, I’m able to offer canned and baked goods and services like house sitting and pet sitting in exchange for odd jobs such as shoveling snow, carpentry, and dealing with computer issues (my nemesis)—jobs I don’t have the expertise, tools, energy, or patience to do.

Back when I bartered to stretch the family budget, trades were made mostly with friends, neighbors, and co-workers. Today, there are dozens of internet sites devoted entirely to bartering. BarterOnly.com,  eBay, and Barterquest give anyone who wants to barter access to a huge market. There are even specialized bartering sites devoted to a single product or service.  SharedEarth matches people looking for local gardening plots with landowners. Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist.org, and Nextdoor.com are primarily used for buying and selling, but also provide avenues for trading. Even sites that don’t include a section devoted to barter can still be used for this purpose; just post a “For Sale” listing and include the words “for trade” in the title.

If you’re interested in bartering, but don’t think you have anything to trade, here’s a list of suggested activities to give you ideas and help you get started.

Raise chickens.

You can grow chickens for meat or eggs or both. Chickens require little maintenance, and fresh eggs are perfect for swapping. I let my customers know that my hens free-range (lots of good insects!), and are fed the best organic layer feed money can buy. In addition to cash customers, I’ve traded for fresh-cut herbs, clothes alterations, and even a haircut.

Plant a garden.

Fresh food is a highly sought-after commodity for people looking to eat healthily. You can advertise your produce locally on Facebook Marketplace or Nextdoor.com, or set up at farmer’s markets and fairs. Be sure to mention that you are interested in making a trade, and include what you might be willing to trade for. My daughter runs a wedding and event venue on her farm in Maryland where she hosts a farmer’s market twice a year that brings in huge crowds. Vendors can sell anything “farm-related, handcrafted, homemade, or homegrown,” but the primary focus of her events is small livestock and agricultural produce. In addition to selling their wares, vendors can swap with other vendors

Learn to cook or bake.

People have to eat, and with their busy schedules, not everyone has the time to cook. Focus on one or two specialty dishes that you can market in your community to acquire things you need. While it might take a while to build a clientele, word of mouth will reward your efforts to provide a quality alternative to commercial takeout.

Learn a new skill.

Learning a new craft or skill will not only save your family money because you’ll be able to do it for yourself; it will also give you a service to barter. Years ago, I took an H&R Block income tax course, and instead of going to work for them, I created my own business doing basic tax returns and sometimes did trades with customers in lieu of payment.

Hone a skill you already have such as tree trimming, sewing, lawnmower repair, or basic carpentry. Passing out flyers in your community can help drum up business. Make it known on the flyer that you’re open to bartering.

Plant a flower garden.

There’s a growing market (pardon the pun) for fresh-cut flowers. I gave up buying expensive sympathy and “get well” cards years ago, realizing that a flower bouquet may not last as long as a card, but is just as uplifting, if not more so. My daughter has a beautiful flower garden that she opens up several times during the season to the public. She has a large network of local buyers who come to the farm and accepts trades, especially a good bottle of wine or homemade cheese!

Start a bartering club. A great way to save money and create connections with neighbors is to start a local bartering club. You and your neighbors can trade for things you need while creating a close-knit community and keeping more of your hard-earned money. Grassrootgrantmakers.org has some excellent advice on how to start and operate a neighborhood bartering club. Once you find a core of interested people, you can get together to discuss club rules and how it will work.

In times of high inflation and tight money, bartering can leave more cash in your wallet.

The post Keep More Cash in Your Wallet by Bartering appeared first on Homestead.org.

We’ve become accustomed to online groups and forget that there was a time in the not-so-distant past when there was no internet.  That’s right—books and other people were our sources of information and it worked well.  While I think online groups do have their advantages, they are best when used as a supplement for offline communities.

A community is simply a group of people with similar interests and values who work together to create something bigger than themselves which they could not create on their own.  It is important that interests and values be similar but, for a truly dynamic homestead community, you don’t want them to be identical.  People homestead for a variety of reasons: environmental concerns, food safety and security, greater autonomy, and freedom from the 9-5 are just a few of the reasons people are drawn to this lifestyle.  The reasons for homesteading influence the type of homesteading projects and the resulting expertise.  If you insist on only admitting people into your community who think and do exactly what you do, you will not learn anything.  And one of the main purposes of a homesteading community is to grow your skills and become a better homesteader.  You will want to be clear on your group’s overall mission.  Your group could focus on community service, teaching and learning new skills, or a simple social club.

The best communities are those that help their members achieve their personal goals.  A planning meeting held once or twice a year where each member talks about the big project they are undertaking is an excellent opportunity for members to understand the goals of their community and to offer and receive assistance.  The group could even schedule work days and work as a group to accomplish some of the bigger projects.

Your group will likely start out small and it may remain small depending on your location.  That is ideal.  If your group becomes too large, you may want to break it up into small-scale meeting groups.  It is difficult, logistically, to bring together a large number of people and run a successful meeting where everyone gets a chance to be heard.  Small groups are usually more tightly knit as each person feels a responsibility to care for the other people in the group.

Another key to successful community-building is to provide experiences rather than just meetings.  Having the same meeting format every time quickly becomes superficial and boring, and these are the types of groups where one or two dominant personalities can easily take over.  Shared experiences create and intensify bonds and allow everyone a turn to establish and share their expertise on a certain topic.

Equal participation is important.  That doesn’t mean everyone participates in the same way, but that everyone is able and encouraged to participate in the ways they are most comfortable with.  As an introvert, I don’t talk a lot even under ideal circumstances, so if I see others are being shut down or talked over, I won’t speak up although I have something useful to contribute.  Find a system to encourage and empower each member of your group.

When we think about experiences, we tend to think they need to cost a lot of money.  Not only is this not true, but it is antithetical to homesteading values.  In addition to community work days, some shared experiences could be a regular drop off of produce, eggs, honey, and homemade food to the local food pantry.  Your group could host seasonal farm-to-fork dinners for the community.  You could host a “homestead crawl,” much like the pub crawl.  You could teach specific courses (raising bees, shearing sheep, canning tomatoes), or have each member write a how-to guide and put them all together as a book.  The sky is the limit.

Closely related to shared experiences are rituals.  Rituals are considered the glue that holds groups together.  Again, they do not have to be elaborate or expensive.  To be a ritual they only need to be enjoyable and consistent.  We all know homesteading can feel lonely at times.  Having community rituals can lessen this sense of loneliness, create and strengthen relationships, and remind us that we’re all in this thing together.

An important aspect of any community group is community service.  Luckily, this is a value all homesteaders seem to share.  There are so many service opportunities and a lot of them are often overlooked because the more common service projects are the ones we all think of first.  Yes, donating food to a food pantry is wonderful, but did you know domestic violence shelters also take food donations? Another service possibility is to act as a host and mentor to a child who wants to participate in the FFA but doesn’t have access to animals.  Many elementary classrooms go on field trips to farms but a lot of the time the special needs classes aren’t allowed to come due to liability issues. If they can’t come to you, can your group find a way to go to them? If you pay close attention and keep your ears open, the hidden needs in your community will become visible and your group will be in a good position to creatively fill those needs.

Although this has been about offline groups, an online presence isn’t a bad thing.  If you want to provide easily accessed information regarding different events to the community, online is the way to go.  Do you have a writer in your group?  How about a photographer or an artist?  They might be interested in setting up a blog on the site.  It is simple to add an online store to your website and allow group members to sell their wares online.

Regardless of the structure or activities of the group, make sure people are relaxed and having fun.  We are too stressed out, too anxious, and too serious for our own good.  Have fun, give and get help, meet new people, and learn something new.  Even an introvert would have trouble passing that up!

The post Knowledge in Numbers: Starting a Homestead Community appeared first on Homestead.org.

Sometimes, though, there comes an urge to find more than just one… to find folks with a same mind, who want to live away from the hustle and bustle of the city, who want to grow tremendous amounts of food, who want to raise their own meat animals.  In my experience, this urge to find people happens when I’m looking for information on a specific topic, or for day labourers (beyond the few reliable and trustworthy friends we have) for building projects.

One of the joys of this modern age of computers and information travelling around the world in seconds, is that it’s not too hard to find those who also long to live off the land.  More to the point, it’s not too hard to find those who are already doing just that… and are willing to share how they are doing it.

From early on in our relationship, my hubby and I knew, one day, we’d be living in the country.  It was something we discussed on our second date.  He was a hunter living with his mom, brother, and uncles to help offset some bills; I was a gardener, stuck living in an apartment with a roommate, uncomfortable with so many people around me.  We saw kindred spirits in each other, in that longing to be outside of the city, living on land that was ours, being (in our minds) free.

It took us 14 years to get there, and that’s okay.  There was always something that derailed us from getting where we wanted to be, but the dream never truly died.

In the time between our initial moment of recognition of the desire to live off the land, and the moment we actually made the land purchase, I wanted to find the best local places from which to source food.  I had hoped that along the way, while purchasing directly from farms, that I could “pick the brains” of the people who were already doing the work that we wanted to be doing.  I wanted to build a support community, where we could turn for assistance, and in turn, would offer our help in exchange.

The first task that I set for myself, was finding a local source for eggs.  That might sound like it should be an easy task, but, it unfortunately wasn’t.  I spent countless hours online, looking for local farmers advertising their eggs for sale.  I knew I wanted farm fresh; I knew I wanted to be able to talk directly to the farmer; and, honestly, I was hoping to find someone who would let us come and see their operation.

Finding Community on the Homestead

The first place I checked was with the local Community Shared Agriculture (CSA) groups.  That led me to a directory of local (and some not quite so local) farms that were selling meats, produce, and some eggs.  However, what I was running into were programs that wanted to sell a share, or a half-share, of product for the summer time.  I wasn’t looking for vegetables.  In our yard in the city, I had a garden big enough, and planted intensely enough, that I could put up just about enough food for the winter and into the next growing season.  Buying into a CSA share program was not what I was looking for.

All this investigation on my part lead me to many Facebook pages of farms in the province.  And then, by sheer luck of the draw, I found the one farm that would eventually become my source for farm-fresh eggs… Ivy Hill Farm.  It was through their Facebook page that I “met” Farmer Sue.  For the next two years, I bought eggs from her weekly.  She invited us out to the farm to meet their animals and our families became friends.  I will admit, I was the annoying friend always asking questions about every little farm-related thing.  From chickens to cattle to horses to feeds, if I thought of it, I asked her about it.  Ahh, but Farmer Sue was patient with me, and answered every question she could, and redirected me to others when she couldn’t.

Then, I learned about Open Farm Day.  It’s an event put on by the provincial agricultural department, with a plethora of farms opening their operations up to consumers so they can see what goes into farming on a daily basis.  I felt like I hit the jackpot with this!  We made our lists, we planned our day and went off to the farms that were interesting to us.  That first year we were up early and went to 3 different farms: a dairy, a large bison operation, and a horse breeding/training farm.  At each one, we asked questions and learned everything we could in the time we had.

Even now, nearly four years into our farm-life journey, we still check out the brochure for Open Farm Day when it comes, and, if there’s a farm on the list working with something we’d love to try (eventually), we make sure we go.

This type of networking is invaluable, especially for anyone interested in getting into selling any extras, like meat and eggs.  For us, the emphasis has been on the care protocols for animals.  Selling of anything has been secondary, because we wanted to be sure any animals we raised for consumption were raised in the best possible way, for ourselves and for the animals.

For each of the farms we visited, I found their Facebook pages and followed them.  Then, I began to look at Facebook groups.  Did you know there are Facebook groups for just about anything?  I was happily surprised to see so many agricultural ones, including many that cater to female farmers.

I also found a few groups that catered to people in my local area.  This, I discovered, could be a double-edged sword.  Most of the people I met via the groups had been easy going, happy to share knowledge, or willing to host workshops for a small fee.  I have always thought that hosting a well-taught workshop for whatever skill one had was a great idea.  Ultimately, I wanted to be able to grow my homestead from a small hobby into a business that sustained itself through sales and teaching, with a hint of agri-tourism thrown in.

What I didn’t know was that there are some who are disdainful of anyone who dares to charge any sort of fee for teaching, and I felt the wrath of a few folks when I made mention of how we were hoping to teach a class in butchering chickens.

Reactions ranged from surprise that I would charge for knowledge easily found on YouTube, to downright nasty and threatening messages.

While unpleasant and surprising, the experience did teach me a few things:

1.  Not everyone is going to be happy with how you do things.

2.  Some people are happier when they are being nasty.

3.  This one is most important: when you run into folks like that, those are not the people you want in your community.  Weeding them out of your potential-homesteader garden early is critical.

Undeterred, I continued to explore the buy-and-sell groups for our area, and I have had some wonderful experiences.  We found our year-old laying hens in a local buy/sell group, as well as our piglets.  In fact, our piglets ended up coming from a neighbour that we hadn’t yet met.  This year, when we look to replace our layers, we’ll contact the same person, just because the experience with him was so positive.  There’s also the bonus of being able to take hens that were used in a commercial operation and give them a second chance at life on a small farm.  We’re like that here… we’re second-chance kinda people.

Our greatest place for finding community, though, has been with our neighbours, and our local horse-community.  Yes, horses on a homestead are luxuries, but, many of their needs are transferable to other livestock.  Quality feed, good vet care, and knowledgeable advisors are all things that are vital to having happy, healthy livestock.

Truth be told, the love of horses is what started us on our journey into homesteading and farm life.  Long before we bought our piece of land, our daughter was taking riding lessons, and the draw towards having our own horses, on our own land reignited our desire for living outside the city limits.

Ultimately, it was through the folks who own the stable that we found our hay supplier.   As everyone who has livestock knows, a reliable source for quality hay is worth its weight in gold.  Our first year with the horses, hay was a hit-or-miss situation.  That which wasn’t full of foxtail was great hay, but foxtail is a no-no for horses, and some of the bales were so full of it, there was no picking it out.  That year I burned about 10,000 pounds of hay.  It was sheer luck that my husband was chatting with the barn manager at the stable, and mentioned we had this issue.  She was sure their guy would have enough to be able to supply a hobby farm like ours, so she suggested we talk to the stable owner and get his number.  The rest is, as they say, history.  We are lucky to have a reliable source for great hay.  That’s an important thing to have in place when the homestead grows by a milking animal and steers for the freezer.  Similarly, we found our vet and our hoof care specialist via the local horse-community.

Our neighbours have been invaluable when it comes to help on the homestead.  Moving into a new community, we needed to find things like feed for our piglets and chickens, someone to pump the septic tank as needed (and, ultimately, repair septic system… but that’s a whole different story!), a source for building materials for fencing and shelters, plus a place to get gravel for the driveway and topsoil to rejuvenate the garden areas, before the horse manure had a chance to cook in the compost pile.  Being able to ask neighbours for ideas on who to use for these services has been, and continues to be, a great thing.  And, there is the added bonus of keeping the community economy strong by using local people and their products.

At the end of the day, we’ve been lucky to be able to find, and build, the supportive community that we have.  From neighbours around the old home in the city, to new neighbours of the Farm; from folks we’ve met online and have become real-life friends with, to those far away in cyberspace, but who share the same dreams and goals.  Not to mention the livestock communities, be they horse, pig, chicken, or cattle.

The main thing we’ve learned is that in order to find those with like minds, and to build any sort of community, it takes work.  Realistically, you get out of it what you put in—just like anything in life.  If you’re not willing to put in the time to find those of like mind, build a relationship, and offer a helping hand when and where you can, then, when you need a helping hand, chances are, you’re going to on your own.

Having those people who are willing to have your back when you need it is not something we can take for granted.  You never know when you might need a hand to chase down those ornery ponies who’ve escaped in the middle of the night because they imagined some crazy predator is going to eat them and made a run through the fence… but the predator turns out to be nothing more than a tarp flapping in the wind.

Not that I would know anything about having naughty ponies like that.  Not at all.  My horses are perfect darlings who would never, ever run from a perfectly mundane thing like a flapping tarp.

I’m just glad that when my neighbour called and said “Uh, I just saw your horses running past our living room window,” her next statement was “I’ll meet you outside.”  Thank goodness!

The post Finding Community on the Homestead: Your People are Out There. appeared first on Homestead.org.

The commonly agreed-upon idea of success is divisive.  It builds false walls between us by encouraging competition rather than cooperation.  It wants us to believe in the lie that there is a limited amount of success so we must, not only get what we want, but prevent others from getting what they want.  The truth is, there is enough for all of us.  Not only that, but as the prosperity of our community increases, ours does as well.  In order to fully understand how this works we have to seriously think about what success is.

Economic success does not need to be at odds with physical, mental, and spiritual principles of prosperity.  If I am successful at my job at the expense of my loved ones, I don’t consider that a success.  If I make a lot of money at a job I find meaningless, I am not living the good life.  If I have everything I need and want but am oblivious to, or worse, contributing to, the suffering of my neighbors, I am not prosperous.  Four things are required to be successful and prosperous.  First, personal relationships must take priority over possessions.  Second, you must have meaningful work that you feel passionate about.  Third, you must have access to opportunities.  And fourth, you must participate in a vibrant, thriving community.

As homesteaders, we have created a life that is personally satisfying.  Unfortunately, many in our communities feel trapped in a life that is difficult and unsatisfying.  We model an alternative simply by living our life on our terms, according to our values.  But there are other, more tangible, things we can do to help those in our communities create and live out their own definition of success.

You can call it the creative, the sharing, or the solidarity economy.  Whatever you call it, it accomplishes all four of the requirements for success.  It focuses on developing personal relationships over accumulating possessions.  It values work, both yours and the work of others.  It allows for limitless opportunities, and the means to act on them.  And a vibrant, thriving community is the natural result.

The first and most important thing we can do is get to know the people in our community.  It is easy to interact in the same small group you feel comfortable in but that is not nearly as fulfilling as having a wide, diverse group of friends.  Remember, the goal is to help your community flourish and prosper.  A community is only as prosperous as its least successful member.  Many of the following ideas will start out as something you do with your immediate neighbors but if you are consistent about spreading the word and being welcoming, more and more of the community will become involved.

Lend and Borrow; Trade and Barter

Lending and borrowing is something we all do naturally.  If a neighbor needs something and we have it, it is easy to share.  Trading and bartering is a little more difficult at first but it is an easily learned skill and usually appreciated by both parties.  The trick is not to become more willing to share what you have, but to start thinking of it as an economic choice.  When you realize that you are making a conscious decision to lend, trade, or barter instead of buy, you become that much more self-sufficient.  And you help your neighbors to do the same.

Time-Share

This is an expansion of the lending and trading principle.  Tools, toys, gardening equipment, expensive kitchenware, and even vehicles can be time-shared.  A group can pool money to make the initial purchase and charge a nominal usage fee to be used for maintenance.  This can be as relaxed or as structured as your community feels comfortable with.  TIME Magazine has called collective consumption one of the ten ideas that will change the world.  Be a part of it!

Support Local Businesses

We hear about the importance of supporting local businesses all the time and, in theory, we agree.  Sometimes it just seems so much more convenient to shop at Walmart where we can get everything on our list at one place.  This is short-term thinking.  In order to build a prosperous community, we need a long-range vision.  Local businesses are owned and operated by people you know or need to know.  They put everything they have into their business—financial resources, time, energy, and talent.  You are not going to find a better skill set, better customer service, or a like-minded friend in the cashier at a supercenter.  You may pay a little more, but you are always getting a better deal.

Research done by Puget Sound Sage has estimated a decrease of $13 million in economic output and a cost of approximately $14 million in lost wages in communities when a Walmart Supercenter opens its doors. Economic impact aside, when a supercenter puts local businesses out of business, the civic backbone of the community is weakened and there is the absence of strong leadership.  We need to shop at locally-owned businesses and advertise those businesses both in and outside of our community.

In addition to supporting local businesses, we also need to meet and value the experts in our area who do not operate a commercial business.  Many people have to go to a job that they hate but after-hours they have work that they love doing.  Seek them out for advice, new ideas, and help.  By valuing the work they find meaning in, you are supporting them and helping them place even more value in the work they love.  Will they eventually quit the job they hate to do the work they love full-time?  Who knows?  Will being sought out for their expertise get them excited and feeling like a valued member of the community? Of course—and that is what we are going for.

Timebanks

Timebanking is an alternative to a strictly monetary economic system.  It bases its value on units of time rather than an exchange of goods or cash.  It is similar to trading and bartering except you are paying with your time.  Every participating member is alloted a certain number of hours.  Every hour is of equal value.  When someone provides a product or a service to someone else they receive a credit to their account.  The recipient gets a debit.  The amount of hours charged is the actual number of hours it took to create the product or provide the service.  It is not based on market value.  Timebanks offer equal opportunity to get what you need, to participate in providing services and products to your community, and it places importance on types of work that have traditionally been devalued such as child or elder care, food preparation, and manual labor.

Community Gardens

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention have identified six ways community gardens improve physical- and mental-health benefits to those participating:

• eating healthy fruits and vegetables
• engage in physical activity and skill-building
• beautify vacant lots
• revitalize communities
• revive and beautify public parks
• decrease violence in some neighborhoods and strengthen social connections

Everyone has the right to eat fresh and nutritious food but not everyone has the space, time, equipment, or knowledge to grow their own produce.  A community garden solves this problem while giving people the opportunity to meet and work together on a regular basis for the common good.

There is a lot of information online about how to start and manage a community garden.  You can also contact your local extension office.

Community Kitchens

Much like a community garden, a community kitchen is a place where the workload is shared and advice is freely given.  To those who have never preserved foods, it seems like a dangerous and daunting task.  Canning food next to someone who has been doing it successfully for years makes you feel like you probably won’t give the gift of botulism to friends and family.  Likewise, preparing for a school or church bake-sale or hosting a holiday cookie-swap is a breeze when you are working with others.

Community kitchens are a great place to learn about new techniques and ingredients.  Local chefs are usually excited about promoting their restaurant by hosting a cooking class or series.  The foodies in your area will love to share what they know about the newest ingredients on the food scene.

Community centers are often willing to rent out their kitchen facilities for a small fee.  Local churches do the same, often waiving the fee for a community-sponsored event.

Education

Whether your children attend public, private, or are homeschooled, education is important for future success.  Every parent—as well as everyone in the extended family—is good at something.  Encourage the family members of each child attending to lead a workshop on something they are interested in and create a rotating list of classes.  Make sure classes are held when the maximum number of families can participate.

Locally-owned businesses are great places for educational field trips.  You will build stronger connections with your neighbors and their children.  You will not only learn where your community experts are but you will learn things you never thought you needed to know—but are glad you do!

Children aren’t the only ones who benefit from learning something new.  The OHSU Department of Neurology has reported two new findings about the adult brain.  First, the brain continues to develop and grow your entire life.  Second, outside stimuli is mainly responsible for the growth and development of the adult brain.  In order to improve brain function, OHSU suggests three things.  First, socialize with your old friends and make new friends.  Second, experience new things.  Your brain builds new pathways every time you learn something new.  Third, excel skills you already have and develop new ones.

Once again, take advantage of the experts and enthusiasts in your community.  You never know what you might gain.  Years ago, I took a knitting class with some women in my neighborhood.  Although I haven’t graduated from a basic scarf, I am still close friends with many of the women I met in that class.

We have been led to believe success is a cutthroat business.  The truth is, there is an alternative.  We can meet and care for our neighbors.  We can start working together.  We can cheer each other on and celebrate everyone’s successes.  We can learn to live with less and share what we have. We can make people more important than things.  We can make it easier for everyone to meet their basic needs and live in a dignified manner.  We can understand there is no greater success than living life one your terms.  Every choice we make about how we live our lives contributes or detracts from the success of our individual and community lives.  Let’s make good ones.

The post Prospering Together — Cooperation, Not Competition appeared first on Homestead.org.

Coming from the city, as we were, we had a preconceived romantic notion of the country and the presumably salt-of-the-earth people that made their homes there.  Country folk helped one another out.  You could always count on your neighbor.  You didn’t lock your doors.  All these, and other homilies, were the sum total of our experience with country neighbors.

Ours was a landlocked property and as the construction began on the road we soon met many country neighbors.  The term “neighbor” in the country is used much more loosely than that same term in the city.  In the city, it describes the four houses surrounding you, and perhaps if you’re feeling expansive, the houses next to them.  In a sea of people, the neighbors form very small islands beyond which the knowledge of the other people living are as blank as Terra Incognita on an old seafaring map.  In the country, we’ve come to find, it describes everyone on the mile of road you’re living on (up to 5 miles or so) and an approximately five-mile square around you.  The construction process is always an interesting one and in the first week of our being there we had met neighbors from the surrounding miles as they pulled up to greet us pleasantly and look around in frank curiosity.

The people who owned the quarter section to our west were an old, childless couple.  Living in a tiny house with no running water and a twenty-foot deep, thirty-year-old hand-dug well, they seemed pleasant if not a bit quaint.  We imagined they must possess cast-iron stomachs after having drunk such shallow water for years from a well so close to their sheepfold and runoff.  When we stopped in to introduce ourselves and were offered tea that we happily accepted yet hoped the water would be boiled for longer than it was.  We joked later that if we visited in the future we’d have to slip some iodine pills into the teapot.  The time was spent pleasantly and we left feeling happy to have decent country neighbors across the way.

To the north of us lay a large dairy farm.  With large green fields, a sea of black and white backs, red barns and neat rows of stacked round bales it was a joy to pass.  Having unfortunately just been burned in trusting a stranger in a livestock deal, I was jaded when I first met this neighbor.  He was selling donkeys and we needed one, so consequently, I was polite but not friendly.  We struck a deal to purchase a yearling jennet (whom we would name Clara) to be picked up in a month’s time when the fencing was complete.  When the time came for the exchange of money, because neither of us had thought to bring a receipt book (or indeed any paper as we were in a field), I got cold feet.  Not wanting to trust a stranger (although neighbor) with a large sum of money for an animal I wasn’t taking home for a month, I expressed my concerns.  He laughed, not insulted in the least, and said he’d keep the little jennet for me and I could pay when I picked her up.  Coming from the city, I was surprised at his trust of a stranger and then spent the rest of said month worrying that he would sell her out from under me as I’d left him no deposit to guarantee I would return for her.  A fear which turned out to be completely unfounded, and I cringe mentally when I think of how I initially mistrusted my finest country neighbor, a Paraguayan Mennonite named Ernesto.

Fast forward a month and with fencing completed, we had brought most of our animals home (including the jennet that Ernesto had kept for me, true to his word).  We were waiting for one small group of cows with calves at foot.  The day dawned on which these last few were to be delivered.  I spoke with the man delivering them and he promised he’d be there before lunch.  At 2:00, I phoned him again.  He said he was on his way.  At 4:00, I phoned again and the man, now sounding annoyed, said he’d be here shortly.  I reminded him that we had no lights out in the pasture as yet, and no corral (our own fault, but being new we didn’t realize how important an oversight this would prove to be) and I had wanted the animals delivered during daylight so they could see the fence line.  At 7:00 and dusk, I phoned him again to tell him not to bother delivering them as I didn’t want them delivered in the dark, but there was no answer.  At 9:00 P.M., he showed up, trailer in tow.  At that point, not feeling I could refuse delivery, we turned them out and watched as they jogged off into the darkness in a tight group.  I said a silent prayer they wouldn’t go through the fence and went back to the house and an uneasy sleep.

The next morning I went to walk about in the pasture in search of the new cows.  I saw our initial group of cows and Clara grazing calmly, but no sign of the others.  As the pasture was almost twenty acres in size and I walked around searching for the newbies, it was perfectly conceivable that they too were circling at the opposite end and we would miss each other almost indefinitely.  I went out three more times that day (cursing the fact I was on foot) and saw no signs of the new ones.  By that time I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach and started to walk the fence line.  Clara, having lost interest in grazing with her new herd, followed me and threatening to kick every now and then, just for added fun.  At the very farthest corner I saw where they had gone through.  Of five strands of barbed wire, only one lower one was broken, but the rest had been stretched out with staples having popped from the adjoining posts.  The whole group had hit it running and barely slowed and now there was no sign of them.  With Clara trying to bite me and then showing me her rump every time I waved her away, I managed to splice the broken wire back together and tie up the loose wires so it looked like the fence was intact.  The last thing I needed was for the remaining herd to escape.

Fuming at my own stupidity for not having a corral and at the farmer who delivered them in the dark (to this day I’m convinced they wouldn’t have gone through in the daylight), I began making phone calls to all the neighbors, putting out an A.P.B.  Most of my country neighbors had cattle and I expected my wayward bunch would turn up at someone’s place.  As well, it was October and most of the vegetation in the woods and ditches had died off already, so they’d be hungry and sure to follow their noses to food and their ears to someone’s herd.

Two days later, I was ecstatic when the old neighbor across the way showed up in his car to tell me he thought my cows were in his field.  Adam (my husband) and I followed immediately after pausing to grab a bucket of grain.  As we walked out to his field I saw my cows in the distance and was relieved (and surprised) none appeared to be injured and all were accounted for.  Calling happily and shaking the bucket I approached.  These cows, having only seen me for a total of four seconds when coming off the trailer days before, in the dark, obviously didn’t know me or The Pail.  They lifted their tails straight in the air and ran off bawling.  Every time I neared, they ran in a wide circle to escape me.  As it was a forty-acre field, there was no way I was going to lead them back and no way I could capture them myself on foot.

Walking back to where my neighbor and his wife awaited with scowls on their faces, I asked them if I could set up a few panels to bait for them.  This being October and the grasses dead, some nice green hay and a bit of grain would bring them into the makeshift corral in no time, from which we could load them.  Imagine my surprise when the man’s face and voice turned ugly and he spat out a sharp “NO!”.

“Pardon…?” I asked, bewildered.

“You’re not putting any panels up on my field, and you aren’t putting any hay down; you’ll bring in weeds.”

“But, how am I supposed to get them?”  I asked incredulously.

“Call them.”

“They don’t know me!  You saw, they don’t know the bucket and they won’t follow me, they aren’t dogs!  What if I brought some horses and a few ropers, or–” here he cut me off.

“You aren’t bringing any people onto my land, you can’t take a quad out there, I don’t want horses and you can’t bait.”

“So how am I supposed to get them?!”  I asked, getting angry.

“I don’t know, but if they aren’t off of my land in two days I’m shooting them all,” he scowled and grabbing his wife (who I imagined looked at me sheepishly from her downcast eyes) stomped back to their shack.

I couldn’t believe this was happening!  The first thing I did when I got home was to phone the RCMP (in Canada, the rural police) and asked if he could do as he threatened.  While the officer sympathized with me for my plight and said he would speak to the man and try and reason with him, he did confirm he was within his rights to shoot them all.  Despite the fact I wasn’t being allowed to retrieve them in any realistic way?!  To add insult to injury, I would have no access to MY beef lying dead in his field.  I couldn’t believe this was happening.

The next evening the old man pulled up and stood on our steps arguing with my husband.  I could hear snippets of abuse floating through the window.  “You’re no farmer,” the old man jeered.  He was right of course, but we were trying to be, and what had we ever done to him that he should behave so unreasonably?  Again he said he was shooting them tomorrow if we didn’t get them off his property, but he wouldn’t allow us anything but one person on foot to try.  As he stood on our steps facing up, one of our cats came along and began to climb his leg.  Jumping and swearing an oath he pushed the cat off.  Not to be deterred, the kitty tried again.  As I watched through the window (I didn’t trust myself to speak) I saw the determined cat jump up and grab the sagging seat of his pants.  He turned and stalked away apparently unaware he had a cat swinging from his behind.  The cat realized in his feline brain he’d be sat upon and dropped down, just before the man plopped into his car scratching his butt absently.

The execution day dawned bright and with red eyes and a sense of burning injustice I went out to try to reason with him one last time.  By Divine Intervention, before I left the driveway, Ernesto, my dairyman neighbor pulled in, coming to see how Clara was working out and how we were settling in.  Unable to help myself I burst into tears and explained what had happened and that the old man was going to kill half of my herd and there was nothing I could do about it.  Ernesto’s face hardened as I spilled out my story and after offering me a clean-looking bandana (gotta love those farmers) he said he was going over to talk to the old man.

“I tried, thank you, but he won’t listen to any reason!  I can’t believe it!”  I sobbed.

“Twenty years ago there was a fire that would’ve run through his land and I helped him plow a firebreak.  He owes me a favor,” Ernesto said with his jaw set.

“No, thank you, no, don’t use up a favor on my account,” I said sincerely, but a glimmer of hope began to burn.

“Sue,” he said, looking me square in the eyes with his honest gaze, “I’m gonna get your cows back”, and off he drove.

I waited, pacing around the farmyard until he pulled back in an hour later.

“He saw reason,” Ernesto said, smugly.

I was astounded and gaped like a fish out of water.  I asked what the plan was.  Ernesto explained that they would set up some panels, make a temporary corral and bait with good hay and grain.

“That’s what I wanted to do and he wouldn’t hear of it!  How did you convince him?” I asked in amazement, wishing I had been a fly on the wall for that conversation.

“It took some doing, but I shamed him.  A new neighbor comes in and this is how we welcome them?!  Everybody needs help sometimes.  This time it’s your turn, next time it could be his.  Shame on him for doing this to you,” he said straightforwardly.

“Ernesto, I just don’t even know how I can thank you,” I said astounded, remembering with uneasy shame how this had been the man I hadn’t been the friendliest to when I’d first met him, and hadn’t trusted him with a deposit without a receipt.

In the end, Ernesto took his own panels, feed, trailer, and a couple of his employees and caught my cows for me (it took only about 20 minutes, they were THAT hungry).  He brought them back home to the new corral we had built in the few days since their escape, and there the “Jailbreak Crew” as that bunch were ever-after called, stayed for a month until they knew me and The Pail.

In the years since, Ernesto’s family has helped mine more times than I care to admit, but always with a willing smile.  In return, we do whatever we can to help them (which isn’t much since they’re a “big fish” in the farming world and we’re a little homestead).  Mostly they profit by their association with us in the form of baking, BBQ’s, and good company, during which we always have the best time.  In them we have the true country neighbor we envisioned when we were still city jakes.

It takes all kinds, and most of them can be found out in the back roads of rural North America.  What kind do you have?  And what kind are you?

The post The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Country Neighbors appeared first on Homestead.org.

It’s been theorized that people can’t be very neighborly unless their own basic needs are met, that generosity and caring for others is a high order concept that doesn’t kick in until we’re sure supper will be on the table and the roof won’t leak.  In the 1940s, psychologist Abraham Maslow devised a “hierarchy of needs”—a lot of us learned about this, always illustrated by a pyramid, in high school or college, even though it has been somewhat discredited by later studies.  Maslow believed that only if a person’s survival needs are met—food, clothing, and shelter—could s/he begin to reach out to others, respect community, contemplate higher values.

One of the reasons that Maslow’s theories were later all but tossed had to do with ethnocentricity.  The folks he chose to analyze were highly motivated, educated Euro-American (aka Western) people.  Later it became clear that other kinds of cultures don’t follow Maslow’s rules.  It’s perfectly possible to be poor and struggling and still worry about your neighbors and your community, still be religious, philosophical and contemplative while your roof is caving in.  Someone who, because of a catastrophe, suddenly becomes poor can still retain the ability to think outside the “box” of the house and family.

One good example are the Native Americans in early settlement days; as a tribal society, they would not have fit on Maslow’s pyramid of need.  Despite having few possessions or land, and having to struggle constantly for physical survival, they were more charitable, at first, then “we” were.  Their initial approaches to us often involved the sharing of food and seed.  Sadly, we soon taught them the error of their generous ways.

But nevertheless, the early settlers were people who needed people, even if it wasn’t native people they believed they needed.  Even in the earliest days of American settlement, people relied on one another.  Yes, they would live alone in isolated family units in the forest; but they needed help to get the cabin built.  Tradition, recounted by Appalachian people as late as the mid-twentieth century, indicates that neighbors, if any, assisted in putting up the logs: “At least ten men working together were needed to lift logs into place.  If fewer men were working, levers were cleverly used to lift the logs.  When the walls had reached shoulder height, skids were brought in, which were cut out of stout poles or small trees.  These skids would rest on the last log to be laid up, while the next log was pulled or pushed into place.  Ropes or chains were then attached to the logs and pulled up by horses or oxen, while the men guided the logs into position…To build a single-story cabin, it generally took a total of nine logs per side, or thirty-six logs total.” (From Log Cabin Pioneers by Wayne Erbsen)

It was not uncommon for these cabin raisings to include fiddle tunes, dancing on the new floor, and the consumption of local produce including liquid corn.  Such customs (minus the white lightning) persist in a few cohesive farming-based groups like the Amish, nowadays.  But how many of us even build our own structures?  And if we do, how often do neighbors pitch in?  And if they wanted to, would we let them?

In the 1950s-60s it was considered rational and profitable to plan environments for people instead of letting people design their own, a scheme known as “urban renewal” dreamed up by “social engineers.” One result was acre after acre of our nation’s largest cities converted into giant plots of tiny identical apartment boxes stuck inside huge identical multi-story towers that overlooked geometrically designed streets and “gardens” that consisted of two or three trees to fill in the corners.  These looming four-winged blocks, usually in a sort of swastika shape as seen from above, replaced not only the old run-down buildings, but centuries of street culture: Jewish garment sellers, Italian street violinists, German greengrocers, Ukrainian tailors, Polish bakers, mothers, babies, children playing stickball, all on the stoops and in the shop front doors of a vital bustling streetscape.

Urban renewal changed forever our perceptions about city life, making it seem cold and inorganic, not to mention alienating and unsafe, a sad contrast to the days when people were crowded together.  Once, neighbors were constantly policing their territory and everyone knew everyone.  Jane Jacobs, a pioneering architect of the 1960s, wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities decrying the social vacuums created by vast apartment blocks and large, basically empty parks, none of them planned for the dwellers, but based instead the schemes of the planners for how people ought to want to live.

But in mourning the death of culture in the cities we have to acknowledge that life in the country may be just as spare of neighborly graces.  How often do we engage in the nearly lost street art of barter (haggling to lower the price) for something new we want to own (with a real person, not on eBay!)?  (I have a friend who picks out slightly bruised peaches at the local mega-store, and haggles with the manager to get a reduced price—and mostly, she gets her way.)  Have you knocked on your neighbor’s door recently and sat with her, listening to her trivia and her troubles?  (I do this occasionally even though it can be trying—but sometimes hearing about how bad it is right across the street makes me appreciate the blessedness of my safe happy home.)  Have you ever taken a slice of the cobbler to the shut-in around the corner?  A jar of pickles to the immigrant family across the street, the ones who hardly speak any English?  (I mention that example because it’s something my mother used to do whenever she made a batch of watermelon-rind pickles—her pickles were highly appreciated by our Ukrainian neighbors.)  Such trivial occurrences of individual charity and contact used to be part of our culture, whether we lived in an urban brownstone or a country cottage.

In moving away from the crime-ridden, aggression-obsessed, unfriendly, zoning-restrictive, unnatural, inorganic monster cities and tacky faceless suburbs created by the social planners, we shouldn’t move away from each other.

Our own “social plan” should include ways to reconnect not just with plants but also with people.  Those people may not live next door—land ownership is a complicated system and by following its imperatives, you can’t always choose your neighbors or even have many.  Maybe, as happened with my friends who homesteaded in the Ozarks in the 1970s, the children will take up the land-loving life and its sense of closeness and communalism; often, I think, large tracts of land are purchased with that kind of “family neighboring” in mind.  A friend told me she once got an urgent phone call from her “wife-in-law” (aka her current husband’s ex-wife) asking if she and hubby wanted any land on the parcel the wife-in-law was purchasing in Utah to hide out “until the end of the world comes.”  So by that wacky model, even extended and estranged family can be included when we think of what kind of folks we want for neighbors!  This is reminiscent of the way that people once established little townships in the country and named them for the clan—sometimes you see the remnants of such family colonies in farmsteads that include the proud old house with its big trees, a later brick one-story off to the side and a couple of recently purchased trailers on a new-cut driveway.

Even if we choose to live apart from the ills of standard society, we can gradually bring the people we value into the world we have chosen and build neighborhoods that span physical limitations.  We can be neighbors to the world.

Many, I hope the majority, of homesteaders are driven by an impulse to simplify (and beautify) their lives by a higher drive to share resources.  Trading goods for services is becoming increasingly popular, even essential, among intentional homesteaders (or shall we call them “non-indigenous farmsteaders”).  Homesteaders often seek a return to older ideals of natural connection to community in which like-minded people find each other and gather to socialize, share work and reap the benefits of the work.  Even home-schooling, a rather recent trend that is growing apace even in urban areas, is not as individualistic as the name implies.  It is enhanced by sharing, with selected home-school parents taking turns planning field trips or teaching subjects in their own area of expertise.

So we can see a picture forming of a re-invention of neighborhoods that does not exclude those who live near us, but may include people farther away, even people we’ve never met.  Homesteading “neighborhoods,” when intentionally planned, reach beyond the people next door, may even skip over the people next door, to include the people we respect and want our kids to be like.

In other words, neighbors don’t necessarily live in the ‘hood anymore.  As a society now thoroughly embroiled in a love affair with the Internet, we have progressed beyond the need to define our neighbors solely by where they or we live.  I am not so delusional as to think that we can always find good neighbors on social media, nor am I blind to the benefits of reaching across space via the web—but the problem is, you can’t send a cup of sugar through cyberspace.  Yet.

Some of the reasons for the changes in the social makeup of stick, mortar and crabgrass neighborhoods are: employment (having to move to a strange place just for work), education (less likelihood that you can learn what you need close to home) and the ease of travel (a good thing when it comes to taking a vacation, but a factor that contributes to alienation when it’s done at the expense of actually seeing things along the way).  These factors can make it seem like just too much trouble to develop relationships with the “nearbys,” since the friendships we make in one place may not endure a move, or two, or three.

If reaching out seems hard now, think what it would have been like in the pioneer and homesteading days when people often lived hundreds of acres away from the nearest other human.  Yet for warmth, contact, and, let’s face it, procreation, barn dances, harvest festivals, and religious customs were organized to bring folks closer.  It is well known that one of the biggest challenges that settlers faced was pure out-and-out loneliness.  You can’t claim 400 acres and expect to be able to holler across the back fence when you want company.  Women were especially afflicted with this problem, as it was often the men who went away to the far off towns for a little social pollination.  Women and children might be alone on the vastness of the howling prairie or the darkness of the forests for weeks at a time.  Towns were formed just to decrease the perils of being alone too much. Despite the difficulties, people found ways to get together.  But someone had to take the first step.

The significant difference for us moderns is that we can, by choosing to live differently, also make a choice of whom we want for neighbors.

Even given the rather discouraging messages about alienation that have been around in American culture since the mid-20th century, there are signs of hope and change (to borrow a pleasant phrase).  Some of us are going back to the land and re-inventing natural lifestyles because of a consciousness of simpler values that includes the reliance on faraway “neighbors” and occasionally, nearby others.  This interdependence can reveal itself in small but important ways.  Taken as a whole, migrating to where the land is often means loss of physical neighborhoods, and that gives us a chance to reinvent the neighboring concept.

My “rurban” homestead includes this neighborly outreach: mustard greens for all!  My husband and I planted them down by the street.  In three rows, about 20 feet in all, there is an abundance that exceeds our poor power to consume.  Our neighbors can pluck at will.  One naïve harvester wiped out, so it seemed, a half row of plants by harvesting every leaf on about six plants.  We began to rethink our green generosity since this one anonymous picker obviously had no idea how to harvest greens—until we saw that by this means, the plants had experienced a sudden startling regrowth and are now twice as productive as before.  Lesson learned.

The post Redefining Neighborhoods Back on the Land appeared first on Homestead.org.