Celebrating Interdependence With Our Extended Community

I hope you are having a good summer. My garden and I are very grateful for the rain we’ve had the past few days. We hadn’t had a good soaking rain for a few weeks and the ground was hard and dry.

This time of year, we like to acknowledge our interdependence with our extended community and also look for more ways we can work together. Sunday afternoon we had a discussion about interdependence. We talked about how we could grow and preserve more food, have fewer trips to town, and grow black soldier fly larvae for chicken and trout food. We also saw that we could do more to support Cooperate WNC, a nonprofit based at Earthaven that is promoting mutual aid in Western North Carolina.

After the discussion, Tricia Baehr, wrote and sent an article about interdependence for homesteaders. Tricia and her family live up the creek from Earthaven in a neighboring community. She participates in homesteading social media groups, bringing information and practices into the community.

Please enjoy the following article from Tricia.

While the US celebrates its independence from England many moons ago, perhaps it is fitting for those of us who subscribe to the homesteading lifestyle to celebrate something else, interdependence day.

Those of us who tend our hearths, homes, land, and animals know that it takes more than an independent spirit to accomplish the goals and tasks that are required to do what many consider the great work before us. I had heard the phrase regarding farmers and farming that looked to farmers “feeding the world,” but in my observations I feel like that puts a lot of pressure on farmers. What if we looked at it another way, that farmers and homesteaders’ first goal is to feed themselves and their families, then their direct neighbors, and then their communities? What might that look like? We’re all hearing about shortages in the food supplies, supply chain issues, and oddly, a barrage of destruction from fires and other curious destruction of food producing facilities.

Yet, we as homesteaders walk out into our gardens this time of year and experience overwhelm at the abundance that spews forth from the land. We struggle in the spring to get all of the plants and seeds into the ground. The longer days and shorter nights allow us time to deal with it all. How many of us find ourselves pressure canning late into summer nights attempting to save the harvest for the cold winter nights?

In my little valley nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, we like to celebrate Interdependence Day by naming all the ways in which we as neighbors and a community come together to feed each other. Whether it’s the woman with the small herd of cows that allows so many of our neighbors to have access to nutrient-rich ancestral foods, or the folks who grow a variety of vegetables with compost-rich soil that has been 20 years in the making, or the elder gentleman who organizes and manages our local trout pond, to the neighborhoods that manage cooperative gardens together, to the gaggle of women who gather in the summer time to can, pickle, ferment, dehydrate, and preserve all the abundance, to the folks who raise, tend, and slaughter together chicken broilers for their freezers, or the small groups that gather to kill a hog with reverence and appreciation, doing all the hard work of scalding and scraping, eviscerating, butchering, sausage making, curing, and smoking together.

We have come to realize that none of these tasks exist in a vacuum. We’re all dependent on one another for this way of life.

How do we retain our personal sovereignty from entities that would want us depending on handouts from sources like governments AND also be connected to folks living nearby with similar values and goals?

I believe that it starts with knowing and collaborating with our geographical neighbors. Communities thrived in the past with this concept, yet the 20th and 21st first centuries have separated us more and more. I frequently see in homesteading social media groups the contrast of some working collaboratively with their neighbors and communities and others struggling on their own devoid of connection because of all of the many things that are used to separate us as a society. Religion, politics, appearance, lifestyle choices, and more. Caesar’s playbook of divide and conquer is still being used against us, but as country folk who understand the value of being connected to a piece of land and all the abundance that can bring, there’s certainly something within us all that seeks the interdependence we all may need to make it through the future that appears to be headed in all of our directions.

I have helped many a neighbor on chicken processing day. Someone in my community taught me and my husband and now we share those skills with anyone who wants to learn. Currently, we are devising a way to build a small walk-in refrigeration unit so we can cure cheeses or hang an animal for further processing.

Will we use it all the time? No, yet we plan to make it available to our neighbors to use when they need it.

Our neighbor Andy owns a poultry plucker. Whenever we process birds, we borrow it from him. There’s no charge, but we generously give back to his family a bird or two, some bone broth, and anything else we have abundance of in exchange and in gratitude.

I am witnessing more and more skill sharing around farms and homesteads these days and I am seeing more and more folks flocking to land outside of densely populated areas. There’s something about being neighborly and cooperative that many of us long for, maybe because we know deep down in our hearts that with rural life—with being so connected to the seasons and land—that attempting to be self-sufficient isn’t completely done in a bubble. That our interdependence is key to thriving in the countryside.

I live in a holler—there’s not a ton of sun, it’s sloped and terraced, and we do the best with what we have. We can’t grow hay or straw for the things we might need it for (mulching, bedding, or livestock), so we depend on other sources, like the fellow down the road with hay fields and the equipment to harvest it. We prefer organic, glyphosate- and GMO-free feed for our poultry, so we find the closest source possible.

My friend whose neighborhood garden is prolific is a single mom. She works outside of her homestead, as do I. Each summer we gather at my place with the abundance of vegetables for processing. We get social connection and jars and jars of preserved food for our efforts. She gifts me with half of what we preserve. She grows and harvests and I help with washing, sorting, canning, dehydrating, cooking, etc. We use my space, tools, resources, and energy (propane and electric). It’s a win win.