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“I thought, well, why don’t I just quit? I’m an adult, I don’t have to ask permission,” says Jason Contreras, recalling the pivotal moment when he decided to quit his cushy architecture engineering job in Los Angeles. His wife, Lorraine, had already quit her job in the fashion industry to stay at home with their young daughter.
“My job was eating away at me. I was tired of sitting down in front of a computer all day.”
This was in 2016. But it wasn’t just the monotony of an office job that made Jason quit. Just six years earlier, he had been diagnosed with cancer at the age of 30. He was declared cancer free after six months of chemo.
Like with any major health scare, it caused him to re-evaluate his lifestyle.
“At my last oncology appointment I asked [the doctor what] I should be doing after remission… should I be taking more vitamins or seeing a psychiatrist? I mean, it was so traumatic. And she just said ‘no, just go back to how you were living, just go back to your normal life.’”
“And I was like ‘what?’ That didn’t make sense to us.”
So, Jason and Lorraine decided to figure out the lifestyle changes for themselves — they cut out fast food, soda, and “that was like the snowball effect of putting in the first tomato plant in the ground, [and building] a bunch of raised beds [to] try to grow our own food.”
The two city slickers who had never lived outside of the Los Angeles area turned their backyard into a huge garden.
“And then we started to joke around like, ‘it would be cool to find some more land and maybe we could grow our own meat, raise chickens or have our own eggs.’”
But just a few years later, they weren’t joking anymore. He quit, they sold their house, said goodbye to their family, and headed east to Asheville, North Carolina to become homesteaders.
“I felt like there was no Plan B, this was it. The plan was: we’ll figure it out.
Homesteading is a small but growing trend
Jason and Lorraine aren’t alone. In recent years a small but growing movement of millennials have been seeking a homesteading lifestyle. (It’s even become a popular social media niche).
Exactly how many are going back to the land is difficult to say because homesteading looks different to different people.
“Homesteading is a hard thing to define,” Dr. Jason Strange of Berea College and author of the book Shelter from the Machine: Homesteaders in the Age of Capitalism told Spectrum 1 News in Kentucky.
“It’s one of those things where there’s a whole range of folks that homestead. Some have a little backyard garden, and others built their own house and have a big garden and grow all their own food. There are people who have definitely engaged in homesteading even if they haven’t gone whole-hog into it. Some homesteaders would disagree; they think you have to really go for it. But the only definition I could come up with that made sense is one where it’s just sort of degrees of engagement.”
While the definition is a little squishy, one thing is clear: more people are moving into the exurbs.
The reality is that for the first time in several decades, rural America is picking up population.
Tom Halverson, chief executive officer of CoBank
The shift began last decade and hit a peak in 2021, according to The Brookings Institution, which was the first time the major metro areas registered negative annual growth since 1990. At the same time, non-metropolitan areas saw their highest annual growth in over a decade.
“The reality is that for the first time in several decades, rural America is picking up population,” Tom Halverson, chief executive officer of CoBank, a cooperative lender serving rural America, told Bloomberg.
Of course, not everyone who leaves the city becomes homesteaders. But, interestingly enough, Tractor Supply is betting that many of these urban immigrants will at least dream of homesteading. The farming supply chain store has seen an increase in their “hobby farmer” (a term often used to mean part-time homesteaders) clientele.
“Typically, they have some other way that they earn an income, and their passion is really in small farm and ranch, usually one to five acres. But we’re even finding now more and more that in the suburbs, you’ll see these farm and ranch customers,” Christi Korzekwa, Tractor Supply’s former senior vice president of marketing, told Forbes.
U.S. history is dotted with moments where mainstream America has renewed its interest in working the land.
The reasons that more millennials are seeking a homesteading lifestyle are nuanced, too.
Some are seeking it in hopes of finding a more meaningful life than what their former sedentary office jobs could give them. Or, at the very least visible proof of the day’s hard work.
“You can see the thing you accomplished – you weeded the bed,” Liz Whitehurst, a millennial urbanite turned homesteader told The Guardian.
“And in an office it’s like, ‘Oh I sent all those emails.’”
Others are seeking it because of a new-found desire to become more self-sufficient. After a pandemic, economic uncertainty, and a growing mistrust in government, the idea of ‘going back to the basics’ and providing for yourself and your family has a new allure.
And still others, like Jason and Lorraine, are primarily seeking a healthier lifestyle: they want to know where their food comes from and how it was grown or raised.
U.S. history is dotted with moments where mainstream America has renewed its interest in working the land — from the pioneers of the 1800s to the back-to-the-land hippie movement of the 1960’s and ‘70s.
“When this pandemic started and economic problems started along with it, I immediately thought we’re going to have another wave of interest,” Strange told Spectrum.
“It’s an interesting thing people are gravitating toward. It’s always kind of all around us. There’s always people doing it. At times like this, you get these surges of interest and you get a wave of new people doing it, or especially in a place like Kentucky, you’ll get people that used to do it, or grew up doing it or grew up around people doing it and then they’ll turn to it. It’s kind of like going back to something they did earlier in their lives.”
Danger in romanticizing
This lifestyle sounds romantic — and for many people, like Jason, it can be. But what is not always shown on social media is the hard work and long hours that goes along with running a homestead, no matter how small it is.
For starters, homesteading requires a lot of upfront capital.
First you have to buy the land — many times you have to buy land in cash. And if you’re looking to do that today, good luck: buying land in rural America has never been so expensive. US farmland in the midwest jumped 20 percent in the last quarter of 2022, unlike the residential market which saw a downturn in prices, according to Bloomberg.
There’s also the equipment, animal feed, inevitable repairs and renovations.
While many hobby farmers are working with an acre or less and have kept their high-paying remote jobs, their debt tends to come in the form of time.
A thirty-something year old Sarah Silverman (no, not that Sarah Silverman) told The Guardian, that she and her husband bought a half-acre plot of land in Forestville, California. They had chickens, a dog, cat, and a big garden.
They were there less than 5 years.
Between all the repairs and working full time jobs, Sarah and her husband found little time to actually homestead.
“We were working to pay for our mortgage and still buying our produce at the grocery store but feeling really guilty about it because we had this big garden plot,” Silverman said in 2018.
“We felt like the city was calling us back and we were actually city people all along…We just needed this experience to teach us that.”
“Figure it out“
For Jason and his family, however, there is no going back. They’ve never been happier.
They live on a 14-acre farm and are making ends meet without a remote job. And maybe that’s been a big reason for his success: by cutting all financial ties with his old life, Jason has been forced to “figure it out.”
“That’s a huge motivator,” laughs Jason. But he certainly wasn’t without his moments of self-doubt in the early days.
“I used to think like there’s some secret thing that people are doing that I don’t know.”
The only secret, he discovered, is living minimally and having multiple jobs.
“I’ve always been told that you need one good job.” That was the first mindset that needed to go.
“It was just about saying yes to all these opportunities that would come my way. We would go to potlucks and meet people and they’d be like, ‘hey, I need a sink installed in my house, I don’t know how to do it, can I pay you?’”
Jason, who was never a handyman in LA, would say yes and then ““figure it out.” Soon, his list of odd jobs grew.
Then, he began woodworking and going to craft shows. He converted buses into tiny homes. He started a Youtube channel, Sow The Land. He and Lorraine sell merchandise through ETSY. They now run workshops on the farm, teaching city-slickers how to do farm things, like butcher a chicken.
“The workshops pay for our food, so we’re not necessarily making an income currently, but it’s paying for all the feed we have to buy, and our chickens.”
The family grows most of their own food.
“I think it’s impossible to be totally self-sufficient, that’s just the world we live in. Also I don’t think it’s healthy. It’s good to know your neighbors, like we don’t have a milk cow, but I know somebody who does. And maybe they don’t raise chickens, so I’ll barter or barter with them.”
This life has also created a strong family bond that Jason’s not sure they’d have if they were still in LA.
Every morning, from 7 to 9am the family does chores: Jason tends to the chickens and turkeys. His daughter, Penelope, now 11, collects the eggs. Lorraine tends to the garden. Then they come together for breakfast. After breakfast, they each have their respective jobs. Jason primarily works on repairs or building things around the farm as well as growing their Youtube and social media account. Lorraine homeschools Penelope and tends to the house. They come back and have lunch together; and they finish the day by having dinner together, too.
“You work 10 times more when you live this life,” says Jason. And most of the time, for far less money. But it’s the connection to nature and strong family bonds that make this worth it for the Contreras family.
“You have to really want it to live this lifestyle. You have to really want it. If you have a wife or significant other, you both have to want it because it won’t work otherwise.”
And if you really want it, Jason is adamant that you can figure it out.