What do the Amish, little ones with special needs, two nonprofits, four adoptions, two one-room schoolhouses from the 1800s, and a monthly print magazine have to do with homesteading in 2023? It is the story of our family, and it is a joy to share how the Lord has pieced it together over the last twenty years. My name is Marlin Miller, and here we go!
Posts published in “Homesteading”
When the Lion Lies Down with the Bug
The other day I was hauling a couple of cows to the slaughterhouse when a new-model truck with blacked-out windows blazed past me on the left. Big block letters on the rear window read: “LIONS NOT SHEEP.”
It was a nice truck, and I’d guess that the driver was an impressive guy — strong bench press, profitable business, maybe no exogenous mRNA in his bloodstream — but I’m also sure this truck bro is actually a particular type of sheep. A sheep in lion’s clothing, if you will, and I know that precisely because he considered himself to be a lion.
To Be or not to Bug
When animals become numbers, human numbers are not far behind. For the past several hundred years since the imaginations of Descartes and other enlighteners permeated our power structures, people have been treated as machines or numbers – abstract variables that can be subtly manipulated, to achieve certain goals. This is how the modern government exercises its power through an upside-down form of Christian “pastoral” leadership.
What if the way a culture treats livestock is an indication of how its political leaders will treat people?
by J.Pilgrim
I’m typing this out while I’m racked out in the back of my SUV in a Walmart parking lot in a college town, sipping a beer. I was attempting to spend New Year’s Day camping at the homestead, but my fan belt frayed out on the drive and ripped off the top of the dipstick. I assume that the fan belt is a delayed casualty of the sub-zero cold we had a couple of weeks ago, but I don’t know for sure. I do know I’m not going to risk driving home and having the belt completely fall apart.
The Art and Science of Watching your Animals
The squeak of the grass, as it’s pinched between tooth and gum, harmonizes with the slow, baritone hoof beats of the flock advancing across the shadowy hillside. Each individual navigates independently, but pulses forward in unison with the band, as if obeying a silent command to push on just past the next sunlit clearing, and then the next, and the next.
I am sitting up on a hillside in a camp chair on the land God has granted me. I am smelling one forest fire and gaze at the skeletons of trees from the last one. My hillside was burnt to the ground back in the 90s, and then again a few years later. Trees are made from nutrients pulled from the air, mostly, which is wild, and when they die and fall down, they make dirt. The opposed hillside in my valley is nothing but deadfall, there’s not even shrubbery. All of the dirt I see is essentially air turned into dead plants that turned into dirt.
IF YOU’RE READING THIS, you’re probably an American that eats meat. If that’s the case, your meat is probably too simple. Or rather, the system that produced your meat is too simple. And this oversimplification causes serious problems for your health and our country’s soils.
Want to enjoy truly healthy meat? Embrace the simple complexity of pasture husbandry.
This may sound counterintuitive. Scripture tells us to live simply. The Righteous Job was a “simple” God-fearing, upright man, the type that the book of Proverbs exhorts us to be. So simplicity is good. Indeed, in all of Steadfast Provisions’ pemmican products, we aim for simplicity. Simple ingredients, processed in simple, traditional ways. But here’s the paradox: to live simply, we must embrace the complexity of God’s creation. Otherwise, things get very complicated, very fast.
There is a quiet storm wreaking havoc in the world of food and farming. Processing plants, warehouses, and refineries are burning down at suspicious rates. Two of the world’s largest producers of wheat (and fertilizer) are currently in a war with no end in sight. Countries like China are hoarding all the grain they can get, while western governments use environmental regulations to throttle farm production and raise prices.
At a time like this, we need prayerful repentance, first of all. Second, we need to cultivate our local networks of capable food producers. And third, we need to obtain truly mighty food. Food that’s ready for anything. This article is a quest to answer an ancient, but ever-relevant question:
What is the one food to rule them all?
As Christians, we know that “climate change” is obviously real. It’s so real that it can devastate entire nations in the span of a week. And the realest part of all is that climate change is anthropogenic: human-caused. But we also know that climate change has nothing to do with carbon dioxide.
In fact, climate change is not at all what the UN’s “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” says it is. It isn’t caused by overpopulation, it isn’t caused by a “Greenhouse Effect,” and it doesn’t threaten humanity with extinction. We can tell that the entire mainstream narrative of climate change is demonic, because of its purpose: it is designed to trigger anxiety and fear. This narrative is in direct opposition to the Lord’s command to “Let not your hearts be troubled nor fearful.” (John 14:27)
– Opportunities for the Parallel Economy
by Jesse Dustin, of Heartland Goats
If anything has become clear over the last few years it is that certain points of view have become censored, banished, and wiped from our society and our online sphere. While the woke crowd can be as extreme as it wants, without any fear of reprisal, God-fearing Americans have been bloodied in the streets and tossed in jails for simply expressing a different opinion. This brings about a need for those who have been alienated. An urgent need to provide these folks with a life net or even just a basic means of survival. Folks’ abilities to earn a living, or even provide necessities for their own families have been hindered by a media and government that wants them destroyed.
“And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord will set His hand again the second time to recover the remnant of His people”
Isaiah 11:11
by Maggie Zapp | Synergy Central FL Homestead
When Fr. McNabb published The Catholic Land Movement pamphlet in 1932, I have no doubt he had some inkling that something wicked this way comes. The Luddite riots first established a formal resistance to the inevitable march of technological progress and in many ways, Fr. McNabb picks up that flag once more in the Catholic Land Movement.
While the Luddites feared technological progress would ultimately take their jobs (and in the final outcome they are not wrong – automated robotics have taken over significant portions of the manufacturing process), our modern-day Luddism is founded on a resistance to both the overweening ambitions of globalist corporate oligarchs, combined with increased instances of poor health and autoimmune disease.