Two years ago, my wife and I sold our house in downtown Austin, hitched an RV-trailer to our 4Runner, loaded up our toddler and camping gear, and moved to Alaska.

It sounds like an extreme thing to do, and perhaps it was. But it’s becoming more common. A growing number of Americans have been fleeing big cities across the country ever since the COVID pandemic prompted many of us to reevaluate why we live in urban areas—and question what we might be missing.

There’s a growing desire for something more authentic, tangible, and real—something that takes real work to accomplish.

In our particular case, we became persuaded that there’s something unnatural and even toxic about urban life in America. We began to think households should be places of production, not just consumption, and that the best place to raise a family is on a small farm or homestead: caring for animals, growing food, and working a piece of land that will be passed on to future generations.

Our move to Alaska was made somewhat easier because I’m from there. When my wife, daughter, and I made the 4,000-mile trek from Austin to Alaska, we were retracing a journey my family had taken when I was a toddler. My father was born in rural Alaska but his family was from Texas, and they moved back there when he was a teenager. My parents met and married in Austin, and after a few years, they decided to leave the city behind and head north. My brothers and I were raised in the woods, about 50 miles north of Anchorage, not far from where our family homestead is now, on a large, forested property that my parents first began to settle 20 years ago.

  Nicole Rogers

About six or seven years ago, when we were still deeply entrenched in urban life, my wife and I began talking about building a summer cabin on our family land, a place to stay when we visited for a couple of weeks, usually in August or September. We constructed a road back into the woods on a moraine ridge and chose a spot to build, surrounded by birch trees and a few white spruces. Eventually, we put in a well and ran power up there. By the time we decided to move for good, the basic infrastructure was in place.

Upon our arrival, we began building a log home, and last September we moved into the first floor (the kitchen and loft are still unfinished). Over the winter, we heated the place with a wood stove and firewood harvested from the surrounding forest. While we were building, we got to work homesteading. Collectively, our extended family is now raising a small herd of beef cattle, a couple of dairy goats, and fluctuating numbers of chickens for meat and eggs. A flock of sheep and a drove of pigs are on the horizon (maybe). We have several large vegetable gardens we’re constantly working to expand and improve. We clear trees, harvest timber and firewood, build fences and sheds and animal shelters, and work to put more of our land into production. It’s year-round, physically demanding work.

I don’t say this to brag. What we’re doing isn’t really all that original. This way of living is how most Americans fed themselves throughout most of our history. Farming and homesteading were the American cultural mainstream. From one end of the continent to the other, the vast majority of our forebears raised animals for food, tended gardens, lived on multigenerational farms, and worked to turn raw land into something productive and fruitful.

Of course, it’s not like that anymore, and there’s no question that abandoning the city and suburbs and choosing to homestead, in 2025, is straightforwardly countercultural. But joining the growing “homesteading movement” isn’t just an eccentric lifestyle choice or another subculture that gives deracinated Americans a sense of identity and something to do. It’s much more than that.

Whether it takes the form of moving to the country and working the land or converting a suburban yard into a garden with backyard chickens, homesteading is gaining popularity in America today because more people are realizing there’s something wrong with the way we live now. This realization has been a long time coming—although it was helped along immensely by the shock of COVID. For many Americans, it was COVID that revealed just how fragile our global supply chains are, how corrupt the pharmaceutical industry and medical establishment have become, and how the political class has long been complicit in the schemes of massive corporations that control our food supply, our news media, and much else.

Maybe families should produce things in their homes like we used to, and kids should be raised to know where their food comes from. Maybe the way forward is the way back.

From the election of Donald Trump in 2016 to the COVID lockdowns and censorship regime of 2020 and 2021, it’s hard to imagine a series of events better suited at convincing Americans that much of 21st-century life is a scam. If the news media and the deep state and Big Tech and Big Pharma are all lying to us, then what else about American life is a gigantic fraud? More Americans are now looking askance at the ingredients in their food. They’re asking themselves why so many people are on prescription drugs. They’re questioning the long-term effects of birth control, processed foods, plastics, and toxic industrial byproducts in their homes. Why are so many otherwise healthy Americans getting cancer—and at younger and younger ages? Why are so many young people anxious and depressed? Why is our society so obviously sick and unhappy?

The answer many of us have come to is that maybe we got some very big things wrong over the past century. Maybe outsourcing our food supply to giant multinational corporations was a bad idea. Maybe families should produce things in their homes like we used to, and kids should be raised to know where their food comes from. Maybe the way forward is the way back.

  Nicole Rogers

This is not to say that everything was better in the past, or to indulge in a species of golden-age, nostalgic, wishful romanticism. It’s simply to acknowledge that our modern conveniences are starting to feel artificial. American life in the twenty-first century has, for many people, become too comfortable, sapping our vitality and leaving us unsatisfied. There’s a growing desire for something more authentic, tangible, and real—something that takes real work to accomplish. A young man in my parish, a husband and father of several small children, told me he moved to Alaska from Virginia specifically because he wanted life to be harder. He now splits firewood and heats his house with a wood stove through the long winters here.

That man and many others like him are onto something that can be hard to articulate, especially in an age that has forgotten how to talk about virtue. It turns out people don’t want a simulacrum of life, which is all our digital and on-demand culture has to offer. They want the real thing, and they correctly intuit that deep satisfaction only comes from real accomplishment, which requires temperance and fortitude, the ability to deny ourselves and endure hardships and discomfort.

This isn’t some fringe idea. Journalist Michael Easter published a best-selling book in 2021 called The Comfort Crisis, which argues explicitly that our soft way of life is the primary cause of rampant physical and mental problems in this country. To find peace and fulfillment, Easter says, we need to be challenged and tested, both mentally and physically. We need to embrace discomfort. “We are living progressively sheltered, sterile, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged, safety-netted lives,” writes Easter. “And it’s limiting the degree to which we experience our ‘one wild and precious life,’ as poet Mary Oliver put it.” He describes, among other travels recounted in his book, a grueling, month-long hunting expedition in the Alaskan Arctic to test this thesis, looking for a herd of migrating caribou.

Easter’s book is just one example of an emerging body of literature making the case that the secret of happiness isn’t comfort and convenience but overcoming challenges, enduring hardship, and persevering in the face of discomfort. This argument applies equally to adults and children. Recent books, such as Free Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy and 1000 Hours Outside by Ginny Yurich, exhort parents not just to get their kids away from screens and and urge them to go outdoors but to let them face challenges, endure “boredom,” and even take on greater risks. It’s the antithesis of helicopter parenting, and it goes hand in hand with raising kids on a homestead, where life is lived mostly outdoors by sheer necessity and there’s no end of tough, uncomfortable chores to do.

  Nicole Rogers

Indeed, the idea that life is better when it isn’t so comfortable is a recurring theme in homesteading literature, podcasts, periodicals, and online media, all of which should be distinguished from homesteading content on social media. If that stuff gets into your algorithm, your feed soon features a steady stream of baby goats frolicking in green pastures, beautiful children with ducks and chickens in front of perfect coops, foals and calves resting in gentle sunsets, and farmhouse tables overflowing with bright vegetables fresh from the harvest—all set to earnest guitar-picking or melancholic Appalachian strings.

It’s not that this stuff is totally unconnected to reality—these posts, for the most part, come from real homesteads that have, for better or worse, contentified their operations. But, as with all social media, it’s been heavily edited and sanitized, so it bears little resemblance to actual homesteading. That is to say, it’s not quite real, which sort of defeats the point of homesteading.

Jill Winger doesn’t do any of that, at least not anymore. Winger is the creator of the Prairie Homestead, a popular homesteading website, and the host of the Old-Fashioned on Purpose podcast, which shares the title of her 2023 book—a kind of homesteading manifesto on how to live a slower, more intentionally agrarian life. I spoke to Winger on the phone recently, and she told me she abandoned her YouTube channel because of the tension she felt between the actual work of running a homestead and the process of creating and posting content related to that work. “It felt cheapened, like I was faking it.”

Her story is a fine example of why more Americans with no farming background are being drawn to homesteading. When Winger and her husband bought their property in Wyoming in 2008, she had never even heard the term “homesteading.” Raised in a typical suburb in the 1990s, Winger moved to Wyoming to attend college and met her husband there, who’s from Cheyenne. They bought an old farm that had fallen into disuse, and Winger thought, “We’re going to make this place productive.” She had never gardened before and had no idea what it entailed.

Seventeen years later, Winger and her family not only have a massive online following but a productive livestock operation, raising grass-finished cattle on the Wyoming prairie and running a historical soda fountain in the nearby town of Chugwater. She tells me that to make her land productive, she basically had to reverse engineer what our great-grandparents and every earlier generation of Americans had received through inherited experience. And that meant adopting a radically different approach to life—one that embraced discomfort, hard work, and a countercultural mindset.

By toiling to make the land fruitful and tending to the animals that feed us, we are participating, in a small and perhaps grubby way, in that original mission of mankind in Eden.

Not that she set out to be countercultural. It was subconscious at first, she says, but as she got further into homesteading, she realized that this is how we’re meant to live. The ease and comfort of modern society, she says, go “directly against what we are wired to need as humans. I truly believe we need meaningful struggle.” For Winger, the initial benefits were the dopamine rush she got from producing her own food. That, and not discomfort for its own sake, is why she thinks more people are adopting a homesteading lifestyle. “People are starting to realize that it feels good to create, compared to just consuming.”

That’s one of the main reasons we’re homesteading in Alaska. But I can tell you from experience, it isn’t easy. And often, contrary to what homesteading content on social media suggests, it isn’t pretty.

Most of our egg-laying chickens have been killed by dogs and hawks. Only one survived from our first flock. We call her “broody hen” because she went broody on us twice. We said we’d butcher her if she did it a third time, but since she was the only survivor, we feel an obligation to keep her alive whether she goes broody again or not.

  Nicole Rogers

A goshawk decimated our second flock. The northern goshawk lives and hunts in the forest, and right now our chicken coop is tucked into a stand of mature birch trees. My wife and daughter went out to feed the chickens one morning, and there was the goshawk on the ground, ripping into a hen outside the coop. The coop is still splattered with blood.

We managed to keep our meat chickens safe from predators last summer, but only because we moved them into the cow pasture once they were big enough to live outside. We put them in a pair of PVC chicken tractors so we could move them to a fresh patch of pasture every day. The chickens seemed to fascinate the cows. We would catch them sometimes gathered around the chickens, staring at them. One evening last June, we went to check on them and found a silver fox loping along the fence line in the fading light. To our amazement, the cows started chasing the fox—huge, lumbering, black Angus beef cattle sprinting after a little fox, which soon gave up trying to get to the chickens and darted back into the woods.

Our goats are in far less danger on a day-to-day basis than the chickens, but they are far more work for us. Before we got them, I had no idea how stubborn and finicky goats can be. We got a pair of does after learning that a single goat can die of loneliness. They hate being wet, and the only way to train them not to headbutt you is to spray them with a bottle of water, to which they react like you’re spraying them with acid, throwing their head back dramatically. If our goats are out of their enclosure and I’m trying to work on something around the house, they will invariably get right up into whatever I’m doing, right in my face, and nibble on my sleeve or collar.

For all that, they’re quite affectionate and, like the cows and chickens, a source of comic relief. I tell people our goats are our dogs. They’re just like dogs, except they don’t really care what you want, and you can’t really train them to obey commands. Both of them are kidding this summer, after which we’ll launch into new homesteading territory, milking them twice a day and dealing with God knows how many baby goats running around.

Whether you have goats or cows or chickens, one of the things you quickly realize when raising animals on a small farm or homestead is that if you’re not careful, they will all die—from predators or disease or exposure to the elements. To keep them alive and healthy, you must tend to them every day, sometimes multiple times a day, regardless of the weather or your mood. The husbanding of animals soon becomes not just a chore but a way of life. It sets the rhythm of your day and, after a while, you find that you think of your animals often, that you have a vested interest in their well-being, and don’t mind the work involved. They’re your responsibility, after all. “I dislike the thought,” wrote Wendell Berry in one of his many books, “that some animal has been made miserable to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on a bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade.”

This symbiotic relationship between livestock and the land must be what God meant by charging Adam with caring for the garden and naming the animals. Adam sinned and the world fell, but echoes of his original task remain. By toiling to make land fruitful and tending to the animals that feed us, we are participating in a small and perhaps grubby way, in that original mission of mankind in Eden. Before they ate of the tree, after all, Adam and Eve’s destiny was to make the entire earth like the Garden of Eden, to be what J. R. R. Tolkien called “sub-creators” in cooperation with God.

If undertaken in the right spirit, homesteading, even in its humblest forms, can give us a faint glimmer of that original work and a taste of what our ultimate destiny might be, working in the garden of the Lord. Maybe that’s why, amid the ruin of modern life, it’s catching on. l

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. Over a twenty-year career in journalism, he has written widely for national publications including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Guardian, the New York Post, the Claremont Review of Books, and First Things. He has also been a regular guest on many podcasts and radio and television shows, including Tucker Carlson Tonight, Glenn Beck, The Ingraham Angle, Fox and Friends, NPR, the BBC, and the Megyn Kelly Show. A Texan for many years, he now lives with his family in Alaska.