Shortly after I arrived, Elliott started preparing breakfast. As she poached eggs taken from her coop and sizzled potatoes in fat rendered from ducks she’d slaughtered last fall, she recounted a recent trip to Los Angeles. She still seemed scarred by the experience. "I couldn’t bear it," she told me. "Everything smelled like Lysol and Febreze, and I was just like, ’Oh my gosh, the sound of the traffic!’ " That visit had admittedly been better than her previous one, when she ate "that kind of food"‐a restaurant salad prepared with conventionally grown ingredients‐and promptly threw up.
Elliott, who is 32 years old, "homesteads" not because it’s practical (it’s not) or because she grew up farming (she didn’t) but because, she says, modern technology "has stripped people of their purpose." In hopes of "drawing on and learning things of the past," she has for eight years rejected an increasing number of modern conveniences. Like the 19th-century homesteaders who traveled west in covered wagons, she churns butter, stocks her larder before winter, and treats illnesses with herbs. Unlike the pioneers, however, she enthusiastically broadcasts her life to an audience of Instagram followers, YouTube subscribers, book buyers, and 100,000 monthly readers of her blog, The Elliott Homestead. One of her chickens, Helen, has become a celebrity for antics like sneaking into the house to peck at butter. "You think these Instagram Stories are made up," Elliott said as a less famous chicken wandered through the front door. "Very much not."
Elliott belongs to a growing network of bloggers who have tapped into‐and fueled‐the growing homesteading movement, which encourages self-reliance through the embrace of traditional skills and subsistence farming. A homesteader seeks to "be a producer and not just a consumer," Elliott said. (She and others distinguish themselves from farmers in harvesting food solely for their own needs, not to sell.) The appeal of this retro-agrarian lifestyle transcends ideological differences, uniting farmwives and feminists, hippies and Christians, preppers and yuppies, from Brooklyn to rural Alaska. Despite its ostensible rejection of consumerism, the subculture has spawned a brisk trade in homesteading-themed TV shows, books, gear, and courses. Last year, the inaugural Homesteaders of America conference drew 1,500 attendees‐more than twice the expected turnout‐and organizers expect hundreds more this year.