How to Become a Homesteader

Come and see how these families were able to become a homesteader when they started their own modern day homesteads.

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When you’re first looking into the homesteading lifestyle, one of the first questions you’re going to ask is “how to become a homesteader?”. There are many different paths to becoming a homesteader, each one unique and personalized to the person who will be walking it.

Come along as these modern day homesteaders share their stories, showing you that there are many different paths to building your own homestead and encouraging you to take the leap to start yours too.

What’s In This Post

• How to become a homesteader?
• What is modern day homesteading?
• Can you become a homesteader?
• Story #1: Our Journey on a Wisconsin Homestead
  • The first door opens
  • And then a door shuts…
  • Moving on with our homestead anyway
  • God is faithful.
  • Time to make big changes
  • And here we are
• Story #2: Kowalski Mountain
• Story #3: From Scratch Farmstead
• Story #4: Little House Simple Living
• You’ll want to save this post!
• Looking for more on homesteading?
• Have you learned more about how to become a homesteader?

How to become a homesteader?

The best way to become a homesteader is to form your mindset around creating as much food for your family as you can on the land that you own. Starting with a small garden, then adding more crops, and eventually animals, will lead you towards your own self-sufficiency.

Becoming a homesteader is truly a mindset that leads to a lifestyle choice. It’s a dedication to a different way of life than the one pushed by our modern society. If you really and truly want to become a homesteader, you’re going to need to do some serious soul searching to help you find out what is truly important (and what isn’t) in your life. In this post, I go over exactly how you should shape your mindset around what it means to homestead and strategies you can use to get your brain in the right place to get started.

To become a homesteader, you’ll need to know what modern day homesteading really is about. Let’s dive into that a bit more.

What is modern day homesteading?

The modern definition of homesteading is a bit different than the one you might see in history textbooks. I go into a great deal of detail on what it means to be a modern day homesteader here. But, to sum it up quickly, homesteading means to live a life as self-sufficiently as possible using the land that your home sits on. The goal is to provide as much as you can for yourself and your family using your own two hands, whether that means gathering eggs, milking a dairy cow, raising animals for meat, harvesting maple syrup, or growing a garden and preserving your food for winter.

Of course, this comes with a lot of labor and hard work. But it also roots you back to this earth and the fundamental principals for life and existence. It connects you to your food and the land in a way that is deep and powerful. That connection is something that cannot be bought in a store.

Can you become a homesteader?

That choice is up to you. If you’re on the path to learn how to become a homesteader, and you’re looking for inspiration in success stories, I have some to share with you! Seeing others create and build a homesteading dream is incredibly encouraging when you’re just starting out your own journey.

It’s important to know that homesteaders come in all shapes and sizes. They might live in rural homesteads with rolling acreage and livestock, or small urban homesteads with huge food growing potential. Whatever your path to becoming a homesteader may be, as long as you’re on your way towards meeting your goals, that is what’s important.

Story #1: Our Journey on a Wisconsin Homestead

For a long time, homesteading didn’t seem like a possibility for us. I didn’t know how to become a homesteader, yet I felt a deep yearning to go down that path.

I was a full-time teacher at a brick-and-mortar school and my husband was a contractor. Both of our jobs were a necessity to living our current lifestyle, which mainly revolved around getting up each morning, dropping our kids off at daycare, going to work all day, and repeat.

I loved my job as a teacher, but the truth was it was hard to leave my own kids everyday at daycare. I struggled with it, again and again, after each baby was born. I would often cry on the way to school each morning, wishing things could be different. Couldn’t there be a balance? I dreamed of a simpler world with less distractions. I envied the Amish and Mennonite communities, glorifying them for being able to make the choices to live simply in today’s modern world. I dreamed of living a life off the land, on a home in the country, living freely with my family away from everything in the world.

I started to find homesteading channels on Youtube and couldn’t believe that this was an actual lifestyle that was attainable. Soon, I became totally immersed in watching their lives, full of envy and trying to live through watching them in their videos. Each night, our family would take a walk after dinner, and every night, our conversation would turn towards moving out to the country to start our own homestead. And yet, every day, nothing changed and we continued our hamster wheel life. Until one day, an opportunity opened its door.

The first door opens

I was pregnant with my third baby, and already the thought of leaving another baby to return to work was breaking my heart. I prayed long and hard for God to open a door that would allow us to live the lifestyle we’d been dreaming of. I begged with Him, telling Him that I knew it would bring us closer to Him. Yet, I was totally prepared for disappointment. I wanted to give into His will and trust that He would bring us to where we needed to go, even if that wasn’t the same place that I saw our family going. Though my heart broke to think about it, I had come to terms to saying goodbye to our homesteading dream.

And then a piece of land came up for sale. It was about 4 miles from my parent’s house and 3 miles from my grandparent’s farm. My grandparent’s farm is our family’s original homestead, with my great-great-great grandparents settling there in the mid 1800s. The land it sits on has a deep history with our family, and the thought of being so close to those I loved while being able to begin our own homesteading dreams was starting to become a real possibility.

We really toiled over what to do. We prayed, we talked, we questioned. After long nights of conversation, we decided to buy the land.

We were now the proud owners of a 40 acre parcel, 15 acres of it a pasture field and the other 25 acres a forest. We now had a blank canvas.

And then a door shuts…

Our baby was born, and we now became a family of five. My heart continued to ache at the thought of leaving her, and again, I began my prayers. If only God would open up another door…was I being greedy? Was it too much to ask Him to do that for me too?

An opportunity arose to teach at a virtual school within our school district. I contemplated what to do…do I apply? Should I stay where I am? Would this be a better fit? It would allow me to be a bit more flexible to do those homesteading things I had dreamed about…But, I loved my job in a brick-and-mortar, would I love to teach virtually too? What about my children? A million questions ran through my head.

At 11:59 p.m., the day the application was due, I submitted my application to transfer. I followed up with an email to the principal with about 10 questions on the position, and he sensed my hesitancy. He told me he was going to interview the other applicants and dismissed my application saying, “I can see you’re unsure about teaching in this setting. When you’re ready to teach virtually, you’ll know.” I was devastated. Was this God’s sign to me that homesteading wasn’t the right path? Did this mean everything we’d dreamed about wasn’t God’s will? I allowed myself to sink into a deep hole of sadness, and found very little hope that our homesteading dreams would become a reality.

Moving on with our homestead anyway

Though it seemed like a homestead wouldn’t be a possibility with both of us working away from our land and at jobs away from home, we decided to take control of our dreams. Fully believing in God’s timing and regaining my hope and trust, we took our first steps towards homesteading. First, we added chickens to our city home. The first eggs we got were so exciting! We were so proud of the product we had raised from our own homestead. We started making maple syrup from the trees on our land next, and again we felt the pride of creating our own food.

Then, we took it further. We put in a huge garden on our land. Even if couldn’t be there everyday, we were determined to start growing our own food to feed our family. The garden was full of weeds and we made a lot of the almost 45 mile round trips there to water, but we were proud of what we had grown. That first year, I learned to can pickles and tomatoes. The kids loved getting to pick the fresh food. It was wonderful to see the journey starting.

Yet, there was still the elephant in the room of both of us working away from home. With the need for health insurance and D being self-employed, I was the one who held that responsibility for our family. Leaving my job, no matter how simply we lived, wasn’t an option.

God is faithful.

Then, about 4 weeks before the school year was to begin, God was faithful in his timing. A job at another virtual school I had prayed about and applied at called me to tell me they had an opening and wanted me to interview. The boss was kind and so welcoming (and a father of 10 children of his own!). He saw my skills and potential, and he hired me to work at the school. It was an opportunity to be able to still do what I love- teach- while staying home with my children and start a homestead. I couldn’t believe how it all began to fall into place.

Time to make big changes

With the new job secured, we were ready to make the big changes we needed to make to start our homestead. We sold our house in town and a lot of our belongings and moved into a camper on my parent’s property. The chickens were loaded into the truck and driven to their new home on our land to frolic and play. We finished up the growing season near our land, visiting there everyday to tend to the plants and animals.

We started planning out our house plans, knowing that we wanted a smaller simple house. The house build began in February of 2021, and we moved in July 2021. In March of 2021, we added a family milk cow to our homestead (a Jersey named August), and she freshened to have her calf Dandelion. After realizing we had way too much milk for one family, we also added another calf, Rosie (a beef/Jersey cross). When spring came, we added meat birds to provide some of the meat for our family, and they were harvested in mid-summer.

The growth from where we came from is immeasurable. For so long, it felt like this lifestyle was only a dream. I didn’t truly believe that it could happen for us. But, after many tears, many hours of worry, and lots of hard work, here we are.

And here we are

It would be a lie to sugarcoat it and say that this journey was easy. Even when you’re doing something you know in your heart is right, it can still be hard to take that journey. We knew where we wanted to go, how we wanted to live. But on that first night in the camper, I really questioned if we had made the best choice. We were a homeless family of five (with a newborn), living in a camper in my parent’s yard. This wasn’t really the dream life I was hoping for. To be honest, it was hard to deal with at first.

But it was all part of the process and God’s timing. Living in the camper taught us a lot about what we needed and what we didn’t need. It taught us to live in a small space and without some of modern-day conveniences (like plumbing!). We learned to persevere through hard times, and trust that we’d be ok as long as we were following God’s will. We were, and we still are.

Today, our homestead is constantly evolving and changing. We still dream. There is still a lot to learn. But, there’s also a lot we have learned. We are also so, so excited about the future and what will come ahead for us.

If you’d like to read more about our journey, I detail our story in great depth here at our Diary Series.

Story #2: Kowalski Mountain

From Barbra-Sue, author at Kowalski Mountain: It’s easy to get caught up in our to-do list and get bogged down in how far we still have to go to reach a goal. Instead, we’re celebrating how far we’ve come! Join us as we reflect on our accomplishments since we purchased our homestead in 2016. We share with you the nitty gritty details of what we were looking for in a property and give some insight on where we are going.

You can check out her story here.

Story #3: From Scratch Farmstead

Joelle from From Scratch Farmstead shares their journey and how they were able to feed their family for an entire year on their new homestead here in this post. Here’s what she has to say: This past year was our first year on our 5-acre homestead and we dove deep into growing enough food to feed our family all year. We came a long way, supplying 80-90% of our own food with a basement full of storage crops, freezers full of meat and frozen fruit, and plenty of dried and canned produce foraged or from the garden to last us through the winter. In this post we pull back the veil sharing the how’s, why’s, and what’s next.

Story #4: Little House Simple Living

The homesteading movement is on the rise and Wendy believes it’s here to stay. Her family started years ago on 1 ½ acres raising chickens, pigs, a garden and more. They now live on 11 acres but you can homestead anywhere, even if you don’t have a lot of space. Grind your own flour, make salves and tinctures, buy in bulk, barter and trade with friends. Just start small and being more self-sufficient is so freeing. Join a community for support and let’s get back to our roots, just like our ancestors did. Read Wendy’s story here!

You’ll want to save this post!

Looking for more on homesteading?

Check out these posts!

• HOW GRATITUDE CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE | FINDING HAPPINESS WITH GRATITUDE
• WINTER IN WISCONSIN: OLD-FASHIONED WAYS TO PASS THE TIME
• WHAT TO ASK A SELLER WHEN BUYING A FAMILY MILK COW
• SHOULD YOU FREE RANGE CHICKENS ON YOUR HOMESTEAD?

Have you learned more about how to become a homesteader?

We’d love to hear from you! Are you homesteading? What has your journey been like? Share with us in the comments!