Homesteading: A Way to Health and Happiness

When you ask parents what they wish for their children, they’ll say they want their kids to be healthy and happy. As parents, we may have dreams of our kids growing up to be doctors, baseball stars, or start-up billionaires. But deep down, we just want our kids to be healthy and happy adults.

So, what do we know about adults who are happy and healthy? What habits help kids become happy, healthy adults?

The top habits that happy health adults have are:

(1) Don’t smoke

(2) Drink alcohol in moderation. [Avoid other drugs or substance]

(3) Make movement and physical activity part of your day

(4) Eat a generally healthy diet

(5) Never stop learning

(6) Live life with a purpose

(7) Have friends and belong to a community

Homesteading may not be able to help with the first two habits on this list, but it However, it effortlessly promotes the others.

Gardening and caring for animals naturally inserts bursts of activity throughout the day. Putting in a fence, cleaning out coops, transporting hay, and mulching trees all add purposeful physical activity. This type of physical activity is not a chore. It isn’t scheduled. It does not require a gym membership. This takes us back to how our bodies were meant to move throughout our day. Bursts of activity which involves strength and cardiovascular movement to get the job done.

Cooking food from scratch and eating food out of the garden is a generally healthy diet. Avoiding foods that come with a label attached is a healthier way to eat. Eating real food is more satisfying and avoids excess calories, dyes, and other ingredients found in processed foods. Have you ever noticed how 1000 calories of fast food is not fully satiating? Foods that come straight from the garden are more nutritious and tastier. They allow for eating foods before they’ve traveled 1000 miles, been refrigerated, or sprayed down with chemicals. Food made with real ingredients (butter, cheese, meat, vegetables) inevitably is better. (More about obesity and from-scratch cooking in another post.) Once you make the switch to real ingredients, the benefits will make it hard to go back.

The most significant surprise I found with homesteading is the constant learning it requires. Need to build a coop? You need to learn to use power tools. Need to bake bread? You need to learn the chemistry behind yeast, gluten, and salt. Need to hatch your own chickens? You need to learn the science behind chicken embryology. There are endless, meaningful opportunities to keep your mind active. This is not just abstract learning. This is information used directly, every day in the field. It is practical. It is important. It is immediate. Success depends on it. It is satisfying.

The purposeful life is everywhere on the homestead. The garden won’t weed itself. The animals won’t feed themselves. But the purposeful life is deeper on the homestead. A homestead brings agency back. It allows for less dependence on others and increase self- reliance. I raised that chicken. I cleaned that chicken. I cooked that chicken. Now, when I eat that chicken, I know how I played a central role in providing from me and my family.n Homesteading brings us closer to the incredible world we inhabit. It is filled with experiences such as watching the first flicker of a heart beating inside an egg, watching beans sprout and grow miraculously overnight, and watching earthworms turn trash into dirt. These experience fill us with a sense of awe, a sense of transcendence. The more awe and transcendence in our lives, the happier and more peaceful we become.

Community can grow in many places, and homesteading is just one of them. Personally, I have met and interacted with some increadible folks in my journey to Fig Vine Springs. I have been blown away by the generosity of the homesteading community in supporting others on the same journey. I will not claim that this is unique to homesteading, but I will say that it does exist. For generations, farm communities have dependent on neighbors to share resources, and homesteading brings us back to that pace of life.

Homesteading is obviously not a choice for everyone. However, I would argue that learning from homesteading can be beneficial for anyone. For children facing all the inadequacies of modern living, homesteading can be an avenue to establish habits of healthy and happy living.