Homesteading: Our Start

"Self-sufficiency is the greatest of all wealth"- Epicurus

(Above is a photo of Robert Malone - my partner in crime for almost 50 years)

By Jill Glasspool Malone

I am going to start with our story on how “we”, that is Robert and I, became “back-to-the-landers.” My British parents were born soon after WW1 ended; around 1920. They married in 1940 and lived through WWII with my mother in England - mostly in London. During the war, she was raising my two, very much older sisters. My father served as an officer in the RAF in India - where he helped to develop radar for the British military and intelligence. They immigrated to the USA in the late 1950s. My father, an engineer by training, was eventually able to buy a small farm in Santa Barbara county, where I grew up. I was born in 1960.

My parent’s values centered on family. They were the ultimate “do-it-your-selfers.” From gardening, food preparation and preservation, making do, fixing cars and machinery, sewing, mending and making clothing, knitting, to a small poultry flock –they lived a model of self-sufficiency.  Nothing in my life as child was wasted; nothing was disposable.  When something was no longer needed or it broke, that item was saved “for another day”- to be fixed, repaired, reused or repurposed.  Crafting and technical skills were a way of life in my family. Here is where my values of self-sufficiency were developed first. 

Robert and I worked on my father’s avocado and lemon farm starting when we were early teens.  This is where our shared love of the farm, the land, and the hard work that is entailed in farm work, really developed.

Growing food for ourselves is about the hope of the first apples, as they appear in the spring. It is always starts as an aspiration. Planning, preparation and hard work make it happen.

The “back to the earth” movement of the 1970s profoundly influenced the direction of my life.  Like so many of my generation, the desire to become self-sufficient and live on the open land propelled Robert and I, in our late teens, to seek rural life. We yearned for freedom, a return back to the land and a better world. Just like my parents, we truly were “back-to-the-landers”, and we sought out self-sufficiency.  As a young adult, Robert’s vision was to become a small-town doctor, to be able to serve a local community. We thought that vision would also allow us to build enough money to buy our own farm.

So, we invested in education, moving around the country to collect undergraduate and graduate degrees, all the while hanging on to our values centered around family, rural life and self-sufficiency. With each move, we found ways to grow our own food; from community garden plots, to backyard vegetable gardens and potted plants. For me, there was always a garden, at least two chickens and a dream.  We never stopped growing, harvesting, processing and planning for our next crop. As Robert’s plans for his career morphed from family doctor, to physician scientist, we just incorporated his career into our farming goals.  As one plans how to be self-sufficient, one must have a clear financial path on how to get there.

Finally, in our early forties, we had the opportunity to buy a run down and abandoned 55 acre farm in Frederick County, Maryland.  This is really the start of our own independent farming “careers”.  As we have always been horsemen, and have a deep love of history, we began by investing in draft horses. We experimented with making hay using a horse drawn team and generally had a great time learning about working a farm with horses. We developed an agro-tourism model, combined with a breeding draft horse farm. This was our first experiment with truly designing a farm.  We had a vegetable garden, planted fruit trees, and immersed ourselves in the community.  We bred and trained Australian Shepherds, kept chickens and ducks.  I learned the skills of being a stock dog handler, as we kept a small flock of sheep.  Our children flourished, we flourished, but much of the bills were paid by our “real” careers.  However, when it came time to sell, we made a profit.

Moving to Georgia for Robert’s work in 2007, we bought our next farm.  We continued to breed, train and show draft horses, have a large vegetable garden, chickens, turkeys and even a couple of mini jersey cows. We slowly began to make a profit on the horses and use the profit as a buffer for our consulting company’s finances, which tended to go up and down.  We then switched to breeding a rare horse, called the Lusitano, for which there is a growing and profitable market. The 2008- 2012 recession hit us hard, and it took a long time to recover from that blow. Our farm lost 2/3s of the value over night and we could not get sell when the firm Robert was working for closed shop.

Finally, we moved back up to the mid-Atlantic area, at first leasing a farm while rebuilding our financial situation. Then finally we saved enough money to buy a long abandoned farm as raw land (no house, well, power, septic, fences). It is an unusual piece of property with an old, long forgotten quarry, a stream the wraps around the property and lots of decent pasture and fantastic views. It is in a rural county, but located within an easy 1.5 hour driving distance from downtown Washington DC. 

For this farm, we are building another agro-tourism model, as well as having breeding horses.  Over time, our goals for our farm have expanded. Our nut and fruit tree orchard is now four years old and has over 50 trees planted. Our native botanical walking paths continue to mature. At one point, we thought we would be renting our extra house as an air-BNB, but visions change and now, that house often serves as a meeting point or a place to recluse for those in the sovereignty movement.

As usual, our vegetable garden supplies much of our produce, and we are expanding that also. I wish to include sycamore syrup and more wild harvests in future years. We don’t use chemicals on our farm, which means a lot of time is spent with the bush hog, weed eater and on our knees pulling out unwanted plants.

We have chickens and they supply the eggs necessary for us and our dog’s diet.   Being self-sufficient is a lesson in being an opportunist.  So, I make our own dog food as often as possible, make our bread - which I have taken to grinding our own flour for and I do a lot of cooking and food preservation.

We often search craigslist and Facebook to find local supplies.  We shop locally, and at farmer’s markets and an Amish market, buy local honey and barter as much as possible. As we have embraced a low-carb, more meat centered diet - we buy a quarter cow directly from local farmers. For this, local butchers butcher, package and freeze the meat - so our freezer is always stocked with grass fed beef. In the future, we plan to develop a micro herd of wagyu cattle or F1 wagyu-angus cows, so that we can raise and process our own beef. Life for us, on the farm anything but simple! I am constantly learning and learning from my mistakes!

It all “sounds” so romantic, but it is a life of grubbing in the mud, or fixing wells in the deep freeze or in 100-plus degree weather.  It is picking bugs off of crops and squashing them dead, frying in the sun to fix fencing, digging sun hardened dirt and manure, struggling to get the tractor started and stock-piling livestock food. It is treating injuries on animals that really don’t want to be treated.  Being self sufficient and raising horses means a fair number of injuries. The 13 different titanium rods, screws and braces throughout my body from past “accidents” speak to either my stupidity or my fearlessness - or maybe a mix of both. It is not an easy life, but it is an independent, amazingly complex life; that sometimes uses every ounce of intelligence and savvy we have.  It is a life well-lived - outside, surrounded by nature.

Self-sufficiency, or “back-to-the -land” philosophies are an ideal.  They are a dream.  None of us can really do it alone.  We still need to buy, to barter and pay taxes.  We still need to be a part of a community to thrive and be healthy. 

Calculus is the study of what happens when one works to get closer and closer to zero, until that distance is infinitesimally small. The thing about calculus is that it is impossible for those calculations to ever fully converge to that zero point.  Thus, the study of calculus is similar to the dream and the definition of self-sufficiency. Because we are human, we must always rely on other humans. Rather than reject that notion that we need each other, I choose to embrace it.  I encourage others to take what is good about the dream for you of a life of self-sufficiency, and disregard the rest.

Being responsible for one’s own actions in this modern world is an act of rebellion. Being a rebel is just how I am wired I guess.

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