What Is Homesteading?

If you ask the general public, “What is homesteading?” you’re going to get a mixed bag of answers.

To some people, homesteading means moving twenty miles from the nearest paved road, building a cabin, and living almost entirely off the land. To somebody else, it means a vegetable garden, six chickens, and a shelf full of homemade pickles in a perfectly normal suburban house.

I’d argue that both can be homesteading.

When people talk about “homesteading” or “the homesteading movement” today, they’re generally talking about a lifestyle built around increased self-sufficiency, especially when it comes to producing and preserving food. Gardening, raising livestock, baking bread, canning, hunting, foraging, beekeeping, composting, repairing things instead of replacing them, and learning old skills that most of us were never taught can all fall under that umbrella.

You don't have to do all of them.

You definitely don't need 160 acres.

Modern homesteading also tends to overlap with regenerative practices: managing soil, plants, animals, and water in ways that leave the land in better shape instead of simply taking from it. There’s often a slightly contrarian streak to the whole thing, too. Homesteaders tend to look at consumer culture and ask whether we really need to buy everything we're told we need to buy.

If we're honest? Most of the time the answer is no.

Salt & Soil Realty Group is a real estate brokerage, not a farm planner, attorney, or agricultural consultant. This post is educational. Confirm zoning, livestock, septic, and land-use questions with the county, municipality, and licensed professionals before you buy or build.

See why homesteading is popular again, how to start homesteading, and how much land you need.

Carroll Harrod with Salt & Soil Realty Group helps buyers looking for homestead-friendly land and rural homes in Jacksonville, NC, Onslow County, and Coastal North Carolina.

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Homesteading started with land

The modern homesteading movement looks very different from historical homesteading, but the word has deep roots in American history.

Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act into law in 1862. In simple terms, an adult citizen who had never taken up arms against the United States could file a claim for up to 160 acres of public land. They had to actually live on and improve the property, generally through cultivation, and after five years could prove up the claim and receive title to the land.

That's an oversimplification of a law that existed in different forms for more than a century, but the basic idea was remarkable:

Here is a piece of land.

Go make something out of it.

Millions of people tried.

The people who succeeded had to be resourceful. They built homes, broke new ground, planted crops, raised livestock, repaired what they owned, preserved food and found ways to survive when things went wrong.

And things went wrong.

Drought. Brutal winters. Fire. Crop failures. Livestock losses. Isolation. Insects. Bad soil. Bad luck.

There was no hardware store five minutes away, Amazon wasn't dropping a replacement part on the porch tomorrow, and calling somebody to come fix a problem wasn't much of an option.

That environment helped create the image we still associate with the old American homesteader: someone stubbornly self-reliant who could look at a problem and figure out some way to solve it.

You can't claim 160 acres anymore

For anybody who was getting excited about the free-land part, I have some bad news.

You can't walk onto a piece of federal land today, plant tomatoes and announce that it's yours.

The Homestead Act was repealed in 1976.

The legal version of homesteading ended.

The culture didn't.

In some ways, I think that's what makes the modern homesteading movement interesting. We kept the parts that were never really about a government land program in the first place.

The desire to grow something.

The satisfaction of making something yourself.

The security that comes from knowing how to feed yourself.

The instinct to waste less.

The willingness to learn practical skills.

And maybe most importantly, the idea that you can produce something instead of simply consuming things.

What does a modern homesteader actually look like?

Today, homesteaders can be quietly found just about anywhere.

If you've got a friend who brings sourdough to every potluck, sometimes gives away a dozen fresh eggs, and has oddly goat-like sounds coming from her backyard in the suburbs, there's a pretty good chance she's a homesteader.

The modern homestead doesn't necessarily look like Little House on the Prairie.

It might be 100 acres.

It might be five.

It might be a quarter-acre lot inside city limits.

The person on 100 acres may raise cattle, keep bees, hunt, grow a large garden and cut firewood.

The person on a quarter acre might have four laying hens, three raised beds and enough tomatoes every August to become a nuisance to everyone they know.

Neither one has to pass some kind of homesteading purity test.

That's one of the things I like about the movement.

Homesteading is less about reaching complete self-sufficiency and more about reducing reliance on mainstream supply chains.

Very few of us are actually self-sufficient. I don't mine iron and forge my own garden tools. I don't make gasoline. I'm typing this on a computer that I most certainly did not manufacture in the barn.

That's not the point.

The point is becoming a little less dependent where it makes sense and a little more capable where you can.

Maybe you grow vegetables instead of buying all of them.

Maybe you learn to pressure-can.

Maybe you raise chickens.

Maybe you bake your own bread.

Maybe you learn what plants are growing wild around your property instead of immediately reaching for herbicide because something appeared that you didn't plant.

And then, inevitably, one thing leads to another.

You start with tomatoes.

Then somebody gives you sourdough starter.

Then there are chickens.

Then you're standing in the backyard six months later trying to convince your spouse that two dairy goats really could fit in your back yard.

That's homesteading.

If you're shopping for a property that can grow with you, start with how much land you need to start and acreage in Onslow County.

Why I think homesteading matters

I'm a huge advocate for homesteading.

In fact, I think the modern homesteading movement is one of the greatest accomplishments of my generation.

We're living in an age when almost anything can arrive at our front door in a cardboard box within a couple of days, yet a growing number of people have decided we want to learn how to make things again.

We want to grow food.

Raise animals.

Bake bread.

Preserve a harvest.

Understand our soil.

Know where our meat came from.

Those things aren't revolutionary by historical standards. Our grandparents and great-grandparents would probably find it amusing that we've created an entire movement around many things they simply called life.

But we walked pretty far away from that knowledge.

Now people are deliberately walking back toward it.

And I think there's something good happening in the process.

Homesteading teaches you that soil isn't just dirt. Once you start growing food, you begin paying attention to what's happening beneath your feet. You notice organic matter, worms, moisture, roots and fungi. You start realizing that good soil is alive — and you actually get excited about it!

Keeping livestock changes your relationship with animals too.

You feed them when it's hot.

You feed them when it's freezing.

You care for them when they're sick.

You learn their personalities.

And sometimes those same animals eventually end up on your dinner table.

I don't think those two things contradict each other. If anything, caring for the animals we eat can create a much deeper respect for the food in front of us.

The same thing happens in the garden.

A tomato means something after you've planted the seed, watered it, fought the hornworms, watched the plant struggle through a week without rain and finally picked the fruit.

Food stops being an anonymous product that appeared on a grocery-store shelf.

You know it.

You were involved with it.

And because you were involved with it, you're thankful for it.

That's the part of homesteading I think matters most.

It isn't really about chickens or sourdough or mason jars. Those are just the visible parts.

It's an appreciation for a simpler and quieter life. It's becoming more capable. It's taking responsibility for a little piece of ground and trying to leave it better than you found it. It's understanding that convenience has value, but so does knowing how to do something for yourself.

You don't need 160 acres to start doing that.

You just need to start somewhere.