Kirsten Lie-Nielsen - So You Want to Be a Modern Homesteader?

Praise for So You Want to Be a Modern Homesteader?

Three years ago, we moved from our small hobby farm in Virginia to the woods of Maine. While we considered ourselves ready, nothing could have prepared us for the rigors of heating our home with wood, maintaining acres of fields, gardening in chilly zone 5 or the threat of coyotes and bears to our livestock and pets, not to mention living more than 40 minutes from, well, anything. If only I had Kirstens book back then. Well-written and engaging, this book relates a lifelong Mainers experience restoring her farmstead, sprinkling questions throughout that the burgeoning homestead would do well to ask themselves before diving in to the self-sufficient lifestyle.

Lisa Steele, author of Fresh Eggs Daily and 101 Chicken Keeping Hacks

The pragmatic and practical idealism of Kristins book will bless many current and want to become homesteaders you will walk away with a realistic look at the joys and trials, benefits and challenges that a homestead life offers, along with a great deal of worked for wisdom that they share along the way.

John Moody, author of The Frugal Homesteader

In her book So You Want to be a Modern Homesteader? author Kirsten Lie-Nielsen offers a frank and beautifully honest framework for getting from where you are today to that place of pastoral self-reliance collectively known as homesteading. Is it going to be easy? No! Is it going to take planning and personal fortitude and resilience? Yes! Can you be a modern homesteader and still earn a living? Possibly! With a no-nonsense, yet delightful approach, Lie-Nielsen guides the reader through the thought exercises, property analyses, fundamental skillsets and virtually everything else you need to maximize your enjoyment and successes on any homesteading journey. The book is perfect for folks just beginning the journey, experienced old-timers like me and everyone in between because self-reliance is a journey, not a destination.

Hank Will, Editorial Director, Ogden Publications

The most valuable aspect of Kirstens book is her absolute honesty about the emotional aspects of homesteading, as well as her refusal to narrowly define a modern homesteader. I love that every chapter ends with a list of Questions Before You Leap for the reader to answer. This book is especially valuable for someone who is just starting to contemplate a homesteading lifestyle and wondering if they should jump in and how far.

Deborah Niemann, ThriftyHomesteader.com, author of Homegrown and Handmade and Raising Goats Naturally

Kirsten Lie-Nielsens new book brings a realism and humor to her stories and experiences of going rural. The book proves a helpful guideline to some of the pitfalls that folks dreaming of the idyllic countryside might not expect, while still embracing all that a lifestyle in the country has to offer. A perfect starting place for the would-be homesteader, this engaging book is a fun take on all things homesteading.

Diana Rodgers, The Sustainable Dish

Copyright 2019 by Kirsten Lie-Nielsen.

All rights reserved.

Cover design by Diane McIntosh.

Cover images: Main image Kirsten Lie-Nielsen;
wood background (bottom) iStock 637668596.
Interior images: chapter number icon sodesignby;
chapter end icon ERNEST / Adobe Stock.

Printed in Canada. First printing November 2018.

Inquiries regarding requests to reprint all or part of So You Want to Be a Modern Homesteader? should be addressed to New Society Publishers at the address below. To order directly from the publishers, please call toll-free (North America) 1-800-567-6772, or order online at www.newsociety.com

Any other inquiries can be directed by mail to:

New Society Publishers

P.O. Box 189, Gabriola Island, BC V0R 1X0, Canada

(250) 247-9737

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Lie-Nielsen, Kirsten, 1990, author

So you want to be a modern homesteader? : all the dirt on living the good life / Kirsten Lie-Nielsen.

Includes index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-0-86571-891-3 (softcover). ISBN 978-1-55092-684-2 (PDF). ISBN 978-1-77142-280-2 (EPUB)

1. Country life. 2. Self-reliant living. 3. Sustainable living. I. Title.

New Society Publishers mission is to publish books that contribute in fundamental ways to building an ecologically sustainable and just society, and to do so with the least possible impact on the environment, in a manner that models this vision.

As I wrote this book, I kept coming up against the same question over and over again: What exactly is a homesteader? The term is inexact and open to interpretation. People from all walks of life rally around this word. There are preppers and survivalists, looked at with skepticism by hippies and wellness mamas, and these groups might be warily judged by small family farmers. Yet all of them, in a pinch, would self-define as homesteaders.

It could be said that the only true homesteaders were those relocating under the 1862 Homestead Act. Signed by Abraham Lincoln, this act gifted 160 acres of land to anyone willing to relocate to the western territories. Thats when the term homesteader first started being used in the manner that we use it today, though the back-to-the-land movement is much older than that. It seems that over the history of civilization, there have always been people wanting to drop out of the mainstream to live a more agrarian lifestyle.

The most recent periods of rural migration in American history happened during the 1960s and 1970s when back-to-the-landers flooded into rural states, such as Maine, following the lead of proponents such as Helen and Scott Nearing. Before that, during the late 1800s, folks were settling out West, while back East transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau waxed lyrical about the simple life. But you can find homesteaders in the Roman era and throughout world history. For the most part when looking at history, I define a homesteader as someone like the Roman dictator Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who preferred life on his small farm to governing the young Roman Empire. These are people who had a choice and preferred living off the land, rather than taking jobs in the city. Of course, there were many yeoman farmers and laborers throughout history, but to begin to define the term homesteader, I would offer it is someone who makes a conscious choice to live close to the land.

While dictionary definitions and blog posts on homestead websites extoll what individual homesteaders do, self-reliance is always at the heart of this lifestyle choice. A goal for self-sufficiency is borne from a desire to control your own destiny, or, as Thoreau put it, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life. Negative experiences within society can make one feel more comfortable outside of the mainstream, or it can derive from a fear or rejection of a direction that culture seems to be heading, and a will to survive even if society collapses.