Homesteading at The End of The World

I’ve been watching homesteading videos on YouTube.

It’s been a strange experience.

Many of the homesteaders there love to walk you through their spacious basements filled with mason jars they bought from stores and filled with goods they grew using modern farming equipment. They post videos chronicling the construction of their root cellars, which they built with power tools and heavy machinery. They bring all their friends to help, or they even hire a crew. It’s fun to watch, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong about it, but…

There’s a certain notion circulating that somehow homesteading offers a sustainable future in the collapse of global industrial civilization, maybe even some degree of insulation from oncoming global famines, or at least food shortages. In hopes of liberating myself from that delusion, I’ve been reading into what homesteading looked like in the 19th century, starting with various blogs by history buffs and then working my way through books like Everyday Life in the 1800s and Ten Acres Enough, a guide written by an actual early homesteader named Edmund Morris, and of course watching the PBS series Frontier House. In my opinion, that preindustrial version offers a much more accurate snapshot of how things would go. Here’s an overview of what I’ve learned so far:

It was brutal.

Before we even get into the details, it’s worth pointing out that via pure mathematics, the planet can’t support a population of 8 billion if they all decided to quit their jobs and start homesteading. The world currently holds nearly 8 billion people and 5 billion hectares of arable farmland, with 38 percent of that devoted to crops, and 4.62 billion acres actually farmed. The average homestead requires 5-10 acres, although some homesteaders claim to need only 2-3 acres. Of course, almost every homesteader still relies on the grid since they consume electricity and fossil fuels, not to mention tools and machinery they can’t make themselves. Without electricity, one homestead would need a dozen acres of timber.

At scale, it’s not viable.

The original homesteaders didn’t have electricity. They didn’t have indoor plumbing. They didn’t have machinery. They wouldn’t have had time or energy to produce sleek videos showing off a full year’s crops, all neatly packed into jars and freezers. There was no grocery store offering a backup plan.

Homesteaders traveled to a small town once or twice a year, where they stocked up on raw goods and supplies. Half the time, the stores they bought from even tried to rip them off with flour that contained plaster, cornmeal mixed with sawdust, and coffee beans blended with pebbles.

Yep, pebbles.

Imagine yourself as a homesteader in the 1860s.

You didn’t have running water. You had a well. You dug and plastered the well yourself, with post diggers and shovels. It was dangerous. The well could cave in on you at any point. Many homesteaders injured or killed themselves. They had to dig straight into the ground up to 65 feet. Now, some homesteaders have to go 100 feet deep to get water, especially if they live near industrial farms that tap into the same ground to feed their crops.

Digging a well was an arduous process. You were climbing up and down ladders and hauling out dirt with a windlass.

(I had to look up what a windlass was.)

If you were smart, you cribbed as you went down to keep the well from falling in on you, nailing wooden planks together along the edge.

All that work generated a lot of sweat.

That was too bad.

Your family bathed once a week at best, from the same tub. You didn’t have a sink to wash your hands in after working all day.

You had a washing pan.

You didn’t waste a drop of water. You might wear the same pair of pants for weeks on end. You only washed clothes, by hand, when the grime made them unbearable. Then you used that water on your crops.

You fed your dishwater to your livestock.

You also didn’t have a freezer.

Or electricity.

So, you had to dig a root cellar. That was also dangerous. You had to know a little carpentry and masonry to make a good one.

Next, your house…

You had to chop down your own trees, cut them into logs, and chink them together. You cooked your food and kept warm with firewood or dried dung pellets. If you were using firewood, you had to chop ten cords, each cord being a stack of firewood eight square feet wide and four feet high. It takes an average person two weeks to cut that much wood, with a chainsaw.

You would be using an axe.

You also had to add a chimney and vents to make sure your fire and stove didn’t suffocate you by consuming all the oxygen. Every now and then, you might drop a live chicken down the chimney to beat out the soot.

I’m not sure the chicken made it.

You had a few different ways to preserve food. Sorry, no oven dehydrators. You could dry fruit by covering it in cheesecloth and leaving it under the sun until it shriveled up. You would probably do that on the roof of your cabin, and there wouldn’t be any HOAs around to complain. Then you would hang the stuff up in your cellar until you were ready to rehydrate it. As one historian said, “stewed fruit was often leathery and tasteless.” Alternatively, you could make jam.

For vegetables, you pickled them by soaking them in salt and vinegar. Sometimes you added butter and wrapped them in leather…

Or pig bladder.

You wouldn’t have access to mason jars until the end of the 19th century. So if you were among the first homesteaders in the 1860s, you probably used clay jars, wax, cheesecloth, lard, and cork. Imagine the miracle of a glass jar you could just screw a lid onto in order to store your food.

What a luxury.

As a pioneer, you might have a few chickens and some other livestock, but you obtained a lot of your meat by hunting. You hunted everything from wild turkeys and pheasants to bears. Yep, you hunted bears. So, homesteaders often engaged in semi-nomadic practices to supplement their homestead. According to research in The National Geographic, one group of a hundred people needed at least 500 square miles for survival. That’s another reason why homesteaders needed so much land. They weren’t just growing crops.

They needed land for timber, hunting, and foraging.

You had a couple of hours to preserve the meat before it went bad. So you doused it in rock salt and brown sugar and then stuffed it into a barrel and filled it up with saltwater. If it smelled bad, you added more salt.

You could make jerky by smoking your meat.

It took all day.

Preserved meat could last for a couple of months. Homesteaders didn’t eat meat covered in salt. It would’ve killed them. When they got ready to eat that meat, it had to be “laboriously rinsed, scrubbed, and soaked before consumption.”

Cooking it wasn’t fun.

You cooked a lot of your food near your fireplace. You might put a Dutch oven in front of your fire. If you had a cook stove, it might fill your cabin up with ash and toxic fumes. By the way, you didn’t have a kitchen. You didn’t have a garage. You didn’t have a dining room. You had a bedroom and a common room. You probably shared a bed with at least one other person.

There was no privacy.

It was also possible to preserve grains, even long term. Before modern preppers started storing wheat berries and beans in mylar bags, farmers sealed them up in pots with cloth, clay, and wax, then stashed them in underground pits. Some of the grain did go bad, but it absorbed all the oxygen in the process and halted further bacteria growth along with germination. So when they opened up the jars, they just separated out the bad grain and used the rest.

Not pretty, but effective.

Most people know homesteaders didn’t have bathrooms. They had outhouses. Of course, you had to build that as well, and it sat over a simple hole six feet deep that eventually filled up, which meant you had to cover it up and move your outhouse to a new location. Meanwhile, your hole attracted flies. Those flies also frequently swarmed around and inside your house. They were a common nuisance. We’re not just talking about a few flies. We’re talking about hundreds, getting over everything, including you while you tried to sleep.

You didn’t have a hospital. If you were lucky, a doctor might live several hours away. You only called on them in true emergencies, because they were expensive. Most of the time, you treated your own wounds. You had knowledge of herbal medicines passed down from your parents.

You didn’t have books.

Or the internet.

Most homesteaders failed to stay on their land long enough to claim it from the government. Some of them died from exposure or starvation. Many almost did and had to quit, returning to towns bankrupt.

Some of them cheated, working seasonal jobs to make money and learn new skills while leaving their families on the homestead to satisfy the government’s continual residence requirement.

If you managed to succeed, it was because you liked roughing it. You could manage to endure the cold, the heat, the hunger, and the isolation.

If nothing else, it was a certain mix of character and luck that enabled homesteaders to survive or thrive. They didn’t glamorize it. They just preferred the endless work and the endless threats to what they probably considered the soul-crushing, barren future that awaited them in civilization.

In some areas, homesteaders were just trying to get by. In other areas, they were active participants in land theft and genocide.

Many homesteaders had no intention of roughing it for the rest of their lives. They saw it as a temporary condition, a price to pay for bigger dreams. They wanted to start major farms and sell crops. They wanted to open stores and establish towns. They weren’t trying to get away from civilization so much as they were trying to expand it westward. Some of them succeeded.

Most didn’t.

A lot of the preppers and homesteaders on YouTube turn all of this hard truth into a fantasy. Most Americans can’t last a week on their own. Throw them into the woods and tell them to build a cabin, they’d fall apart. Some preppers fill their homes with food buckets, and that’s it. Many of the products we see advertised as off-grid, including solar batteries, will eventually break down in a true collapse scenario. They only offer another form of dependency.

Most homesteaders aren’t really preparing for collapse. So they’re not all that concerned about developing hardcore off-grid capacity. Not every prepper homesteads, and not every homesteader preps.

Collapse will require both.

The original homesteaders didn’t have a choice. If they couldn’t make it themselves, they didn’t have it. They spent every minute of their day working. They didn’t have spare time to hash out conspiracy theories or complain about big government, and they certainly weren’t stockpiling assault weapons.

They lived in an altogether different world.

When you truly understand homesteading, you see it for what it is. These people lived on nearly a hundred acres, isolated from civilization. They didn’t have to worry about their hungry neighbors showing up, and yet they still sometimes got into arguments and disputes over land or livestock.

Today, homesteading won’t work for millions of people eager to escape collapse. In some ways, it was sustainable. In other ways, it consumed enormous amounts of resources. You aren’t going to last long hunting for survival if thousands of others are trying to do the same thing in a single area.

For the most part, homesteading has become a kind of privilege for those who inherited land or bought it before the 2020s. Many Youtubers strike me as a relatively affluent class who want to enjoy it both ways. They want to be off-grid in the sense of storing spacious pantries and cellars with food they grew on acres of property they can afford, but they want to be on-grid in the sense that they all use appliances and benefit from living near stores and hospitals.

If you accept that the grid is going to give out eventually, then it doesn’t make sense to invest in a version of homesteading that relies on conveniences and technologies that are going to vanish.

Another challenge:

The original homesteaders had the time they needed to do all of their chores. That’s often the only thing they had.

For us, it’s the opposite.

It’s hard to ease into homesteading when you work 50 hours a week just to pay your bills. You don’t have time to wash your clothes by hand. You don’t have time to grow and can your own food, assuming you even have the space to do it. Some of these homesteaders have storage rooms as big as the studio apartment I used to live in. To make matters worse, the rich oral and family traditions that conveyed the knowledge we need have been severed. My dad grew up on a farm, but he spent his entire life working in a factory. For many of us, those traditions never existed in the first place. Imagine the irony of relying on the internet to learn about how to live without… the internet. Imagine trying to learn about homesteading from families that rent excavators to dig their root cellars.

If the grid collapses for real, our toilets will become geysers of toxic waste. But until then, how many of us can take a weekend to build an outhouse and invest in a ball valve to shut us off from the sewer lines?

Who can build a root cellar in their yard to preserve their food, or themselves during a heat wave? Who could get that past their HOA?

Who has a backyard?

Even if you somehow managed to build a dream homestead while the grid around you fell apart, it would increasingly attract attention from those who never had the same opportunity. You would need an army to defend it, and you’d have to keep them happy. Your fellow citizens wouldn’t be entirely unjustified for turning on you. After all, most homesteaders still benefit from the grid. Imagine running a homestead that relies on electricity, running water, roads, public infrastructure, software and hardware to make their videos, and an internet with a large audience, and then thinking they don’t owe the world anything. Are they for real?

As some preppers say, the best way to get ready for collapse is to start giving up your conveniences now on your own terms at your own pace, instead of being forced to by deteriorating circumstances later on.

That’s real prepping, not expending resources in a misguided effort to cling to privileges you’ll eventually lose anyway. Those privileges include most of your appliances, as well as your air conditioning. Once again, it’s kind of hard to do that when you’re working multiple jobs.

Also, it’s worth pointing out that maybe we wouldn’t have to give all of this up if we could figure out a way to live together, sustainably, with a moderate amount of technology so we don’t have to live like the original homesteaders. Because that doesn’t sound like much fun.

Even successful homesteaders wore out their bodies. They developed chronic tendinitis and arthritis in their 40s and 50s. If they lived long enough, they reached a point of functional exhaustion by their 60s. Their retirement plan consisted of big families to take care of them in their twilight.

Some of the tools and skill sets that homesteaders developed can work well in a ruggedized future, but homesteading itself, as a mode of living, is hardly something most of us will be able to pull off.

So, that’s homesteading. It’s fun to learn about.

For most of us, it won’t work.