The do-it-yourself gateway drug

Here's an interesting article that appeared in the Los Angeles Times -- Los Angeles, no less! -- last March. Entitled "This homesteader’s dream shop comes outfitted with a sound-proofed grain mill," it discusses a small urban storefront that sells many homesteading do-it-yourself items, a "tiny shop outfitted like a survivalist’s root cellar."

The owner of the store, a fellow named Roe Sie, decided to take his urban homesteading hobby and turn it into a retail establishment to cater to other urbanites with the itch to do things for themselves, everything from making soap to grinding grain for homemade bread.

Apparently -- and this is the phrasing I found so amusing and accurate -- backyard chickens "were Roe’s DIY gateway drug."

Gateway drug. Yeah, I get it. I get it.

Homesteading -- even in urban areas -- can indeed become a fever in the veins, a longing to get away from modern conveniences and learn how to do things yourself.

Gateway drug. Guilty.

Chickens: The latest urban status symbol

I must admit, I love chickens. They're dumb, they're noisy, they're messy -- but I just love 'em. On warm evenings, it's a fairly common thing for me to take a glass of wine and a book and sit outside "communing with chickens," as I call it. Half the time I'm not reading my book; I'm watching the birds preen, peck, scratch, doze, or just sit, with a foolish and satisfied smile on my face.

Which is why I found it amusing to see this article from a few weeks ago entitled "The Silicon Valley elite’s latest status symbol: Chickens." The subheading read: "Their pampered birds wear diapers and have personal chefs — but lay the finest eggs tech money can buy."

Urban chickens have been rising in popularity for years, of course. It's now a "humblebrag" to say you have your little backyard flock of hens (roosters are discouraged in urban quarters for obvious reasons). I found it interesting that the high-powered tech gurus profiled in this article enjoy their birds for the same reason I enjoy ours.

Johan Land, a tech elite, enjoys "relaxing with a glass of wine in the back yard alongside his wife, kids and the family’s 13 chickens and three sheep. It’s mindless, he said, but far from banal. 'It's a fascinating thing to sit and watch the animals because instead of looking at a screen, you're looking at the life cycle,' Land said. 'It’s very different from the abstract work that I do.'"

Yep, chickens ground people. They're not abstract. Even rural folks enjoy them.

Of course, the article then illustrates where homestead chickens depart from urban chickens: Fancy living quarters.

In true Silicon Valley fashion, chicken owners approach their birds as any savvy venture capitalist might: By throwing lots of money at a promising flock (spending as much as $20,000 for high-tech coops). By charting their productivity (number and color of eggs). And by finding new ways to optimize their birds’ happiness — as well as their own.

Instead of cobbling together a plywood coop with materials from the local hardware store, the rare birds of Silicon Valley are hiring contractors to build $20,000 coops using reclaimed materials or pricey redwood that matches their human homes. Others opt for a Williams-Sonoma coop — chemical free and made from sustainable red pine — that has been called the “Range Rover of chicken cribs.” Coops are also outfitted with solar panels, automated doors and electrical lighting — as well as video cameras that allow owners to check on their beloved birds remotely.

Like any successful start-up, broods aren’t built so much as reverse engineered. Decisions about breed selection are resolved by using engineering matrices and spreadsheets that capture “YoY growth.” Some chicken owners talk about their increasingly extravagant birds like software updates, referring to them as “Gen 1,” “Gen 2,” “Gen 3” and so on. They keep the chicken brokers of the region busy finding ever more novel birds.

While the rest of the nation spends $15 on an ordinary chicken at their local feed store, Silicon Valley residents might spend more than $350 for one heritage breed, a designation for rare, nonindustrial birds with genetic lines that can be traced back generations. They are selecting for desirable personality traits (such as being affectionate and calm — the lap chickens that are gentle enough for a child to cuddle), rarity, beauty and the ability to produce highly coveted, colored eggs.

(Um, speaking as the "rest of the nation," who spends "$15 on an ordinary chicken" at the local feed store? For $15, it had better be something durned extraordinary. I know of no one -- at all -- who would drop that kind of money on a chicken. But I digress.)

The article continues: "All of it happens in cutting-edge coops, with exorbitant veterinarian bills and a steady diet of organic salmon, watermelon and steak." Some even employ personal chefs or outfit their birds with diapers so they can roam the house.

Okay, that's just silly.

And yet -- and yet, these tech gurus need to relax as much as anyone else. One so-called "chicken whisperer's" clients "are usually men in their 30s and 40s, with young families. After spending their days in front of computers, they long for a connection to nature. What they want most of all, she said, is a 'rainbow assortment' of beautiful, colored eggs in various shades of blue, olive green and speckled brown." -- due to the status symbol announcement that such eggs didn't come from Walmart. A hand-selected carton of beautiful eggs is supplanting a bottle of wine as a preferred hostess gift.

Another family notes, "Watching the chickens is one of the family’s favorite activities. They call it: 'Hillbilly television.'"

See, I get this. I get this. That's what "communing with the chickens" is all about.

My conclusion is as follows: It's hard to bury Mother Nature. The desire to connect with food sources is innate and can only be suppressed for so long before it erupts in one form or another.

We may chuckle at the waste of money -- personal chefs and "gingerbread coops" and organic salmon diets -- but in the end what these wealthy high-tech gurus are doing is exactly what I like to do: mindlessly watch the chickens cluck.

More power to them.

Farm chic

When I was a teenager, I read a line in a book I've never forgotten: Most Americans would starve standing next to a cow in a field of ripe wheat. The implication, of course, is people have become so helpless and ignorant, so disconnected from our food sources, that we are incapable of knowing how to recognize and harvest food even when we’re literally standing in the midst of it.

I’m sure this line had an unconscious influence on my interest in homesteading, because here I am decades later milking cows and growing wheat. If there was one thing I was determined to master during my adult years, it was how not to starve while standing amidst abundance. And no, this had nothing to do with “prepping” – that wasn’t even on my radar when I was a teenager. I just didn’t like the idea of being totally dependent on someone else to supply me with the basics of life. I didn’t like the idea of being so ignorant of those basics that I couldn’t recognize food when it was all around me.


We’ve all heard the statistics about how something like 70% of Americans used to live on farms. Now those numbers are so skewed in the other direction that it’s almost comical: something like 2.5% of Americans now live on farms. Wow. It’s not just the implications of how so few can feed so many; it’s also the implications of how millions of people would starve in a field of ripe wheat because they’ve never seen food in its elemental form.

I’ve even heard stories about how children literally think milk is manufactured in the back rooms of grocery stores and who have no idea where eggs come from. (One story I heard was how a 20-something young woman never knew eggs came from chicken butts, and was so horrified at this information she thereafter refused to eat eggs.)

It used to be that being a farmer was something – well, almost shameful. To come from a farm meant you were lowly, uneducated, dull, suitable only for manual labor and not much else. Remember the sneers and snide comments Laura Ingalls got from Nellie Olsen? Nellie was a town girl and therefore superior. Laura was a farm girl and therefore a rube.



While I won’t say the attitude has totally turned around today – lots of people still consider farms to be nothing more than yucky places full of manure, and farmers are just too stupid to know they’re working knee-deep in cow poop – there has unquestionably been a resurgence of interest in farming, homesteading, and otherwise connecting once again with one’s food sources. There seems to be a deep-seated desire for humans to touch dirt. I think this is a good thing.

In other words, homesteading is now chic. Trendy. Cutting edge.



Imagine that. Growing food – something our ancestors have done since the dawn of agriculture – is now a novelty. If I ever have the opportunity to mingle at a cocktail party in New York City and mention I live on a farm, what do you suppose the reaction would be? Perhaps a few lifted lips, but probably a lot more astonishment and disbelief. “Wow! Can you DO that? Do people actually still live on farms?”

In fact – true story – recently I was in conversation with a sophisticated group of people and someone asked, “Do you really live on a farm?” I replied “Yes, of course.” – and there was a chorus of “ooohs” and “aaaahs.” Another time – another true story – I was at a writer’s conference when I was introduced to an author I admire. As we shook hands, she commented on my firm grip (I tend to crush people unless I’m careful). A little embarrassed, I snatched my hand away and said, “I’m sorry, I milk cows.” The author’s eyes widened and she said, “You milk cows??” She couldn't believe it.


Needless to say, with the economy in a tailspin there has been a huge awakening of how vulnerable we are to interruptions of the supply chain. The Japanese people learned the hard way that when a natural disaster strikes, even those unaffected by the immediate tragedy can be impacted in a BIG way when societal infrastructure is interrupted. That’s a lesson all of us should take to heart.

This is why I’m so pleased with the urban homesteading movement. Not everyone can move to twenty acres in the country; so they do what they can, where they are. I love it!

It looks like “farm chic”is here to stay. For awhile at least. More power to it!

Urban homestead

Urban homestead urban homestead urban homestead urban homestead urban homestead urban homestead urban homestead.

What the heck am I doing, you may ask? I'm trying to get a "cease and desist" letter, that's what.

I just stumbled across a controversy I had no idea was brewing. It seems an urban homesteading family actually trademarked the term "urban homestead," and they're in the process of sending cease and desist letters to any and all writers, bloggers, and libraries who dare to use the term.

Path to Freedom, Urban Homestead, Urban Homesteading, Grow the Future, Homegrown Revolution (and trowel/fist logo) are registered ® trademarks of Dervaes Institute, notes their website.

I found this hilarious to the point of absurd. Trademark terms and then harass anyone using them? Puh-lease.

So won't you join me? Urban homestead urban homestead urban homestead....