Farmsteading

Confessions of a Steward

By Guest Post on February 27, 2023

The Creator’s Pattern

In 1961 as our family looked out over this newly-acquired farm property with its rocks, gullies, and weeds, we needed a roadmap to healing. In our imagination, we could see fertile fields, filled-in gullies, and soil-covered rocks, but how to get there was intimidating. Our redemption project seemed impossible.

My dad contacted both private and public (government) agriculture experts to receive as broad a range of counsel as possible. Every advisor recommended borrowing more money, planting corn, building silos, grazing the woods, and feeding the soil chemical fertilizers.

Confessions of a Steward—Beginnings

Confessions of a Steward—Beginnings

By Guest Post on February 6, 2023

By Joel Salatin, Plain Values

Does God Care How I Farm? That question defines my life’s work and vision because it moves the visceral, practical decisions I make in my farming vocation to a place of sacredness and godly living. If God cares about physical and practical things in my life, then my theology and belief structure are more than academic pursuits.

They are not just discussion groups and conversations. If God cares how I farm, then I should enthusiastically embrace searching for techniques and protocols that please Him. After all, it’s all His stuff. The courthouse may say I own this land, but ultimately I don’t. Legally and culturally, I may advocate for property rights, but really it’s all God’s property. Does He care how it’s handled? Does He care how I leave it? Does He care what I do with it?

Lessons from Livestock, Part Three

Lessons from Livestock, Part Three

By Guest Post on January 21, 2023

When the Lion Lies Down with the Bug

by David Treebeard

Read Part One
Read Part Two

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.

Lessons from Livestock, Part Two

Lessons from Livestock, Part Two

By Guest Post on January 17, 2023

To Be or not to Bug

by David Treebeard

Read Part One
Read Part Three

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?

Lessons from Livestock, Part One

Lessons from Livestock, Part One

By Guest Post on January 6, 2023

The Living Scripture of Creation

by David Treebeard

Read Part Two
Read Part Three

Nature is under God’s control, and all the parts of nature are part of His symbolic language. This means that all of creation offers spiritual lessons. To farm, log, or fish is to interact with an animated parable of Christ, spoken by wordless creatures. A Christian culture needs this natural engagement, because if nobody stoops down and gets their hands dirty in the earth, then nobody can build cathedrals and gather together to pray heavenward.

Putting Down Roots: The XXIst Century Revival of the Catholic Land Movement

Putting Down Roots: The XXIst Century Revival of the Catholic Land Movement

By Guest Post on April 5, 2022

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.